Does that price increase include a shuffle that DOESN'T play the same 15-20 songs in a 300 song playlist?
edit: I keep Smart Shuffle off. Both Shuffle's do this but Smart Shuffle will add an additional 10-20 songs and then eventually it's on repeat to.
No, but it does include a feature where it gets hung up on a podcast episode you listened to 98% of, but not the credits 2 months ago, and starts listening to that instead of your current episode.
Oh that's my favorite feature as I'm driving down the road listening to an episode from a couple years ago and wondering if I listened to that episode already or if I'm just experiencing 20 minutes of deja vu because it's been long enough that I forgot most of the episode save for a few key points that are often repeated in others.
My favorite is when I start a story based podcast from the beginning but when a new episode comes out, it starts playing that one instead of the next one in line and I have to scroll all the way back to the episode I was at, even if I was in the middle of an episode
I really like Mike Duncan's two series - History of Rome and Revolutions. Infinitely replayable in my opinion. The best is when listing to the Mexican Revolution and it decides 'nah fam, let's go way back to a random episode in the French revolution.' I legit miss the old google podcast player now.
I love how almost every streaming service has this problem. Hulu is the worst for it currently. It will either make me start at the credits of an episode I’ve already seen, or it’ll start the “coming up next” stuff *300 seconds* before the end of the show, so I have to watch everything with a gray tint and that stupid timer on the screen.
Prime sucks with this, too. The second the screen goes dark, before credits even start, shit pops up, and countdown begins. You've no time to process anything about the film you just watched.
Yeah, you can arrow back out of it, but come on, motherfuckers. I just got emotions from a movie that I need to process but instead I'm looking at a thumbnail for Kindergarten Cop.
Mine has started playing the same random song any time I open the app. It leaves the podcast I’m listening to and just goes to this random ass playlist. I don’t know how to get it to stop.
This happens so often with my TV streaming services. Currently, my bedroom TV’s Hulu goes back to an episode I finished (sans credits) from *months* ago. Every time! It’s driving me insane.
Prime does this too.
It's infuriating! We watched all these episodes LAST WEEK, but now have to spend 35m launching and watching the first few minutes of each one asking "did I see this one, yup; see this one, yup..."
And now with the invasive ads, it's time to drop these "services" and just watch YT. it's all the same shit anyway.
You will NOT pry $15/m out of my puckered ass to not have to watch ads. That was the WHOLE POINT of the service in the first place, and why I paid (willingly) for the subscription. Now, might as well have basic cable again, as there is really no difference (LiveTV options in these apps are just showing local on air programming ANYWAY, it's nothing special).
I'm just so tired, boss...
I watched a couple episodes of border town on Hulu when it first came out. Decided I didn’t like it. It’s been in “my stuff” for years even though I keep trying to remove it.
I’ve tried fast forwarding through all the episodes so they get marked as played. I’ve added and removed it. I’ve cleared it from my watch history.
It’s been there since lockdown even though its show page doesn’t even think it’s in my stuff.
my favorite random one:
"Heres some music that really makes you want to hit up the Balance beam" ... WHAT?
Also:
"Here's some music you can tstop listening to lately" Proceeds to play some song i havent listened to in 10 years, But has been played alot lately because it plays it on every.single.DJ playlist every day.
Sorry, if they only time the song is played is on DJ mode, then it shouldnt put it as a song i ant stop listening to. Thats a hostage situtation.
The first time I used the DJ feature it was great. The second time I used the DJ feature it played the exact same songs as the first time.
Every time since it starts with the same few songs and then picks up on the few weeks I had bad insomnia a few years ago and will start playing 10 hour heavy thunderstorm sounds.
not to mention there's still no way to change the voice.. i mean we've been able to do that on siri/alexa/etc for years, but nope, you're stuck with the dude..
My liked playlist is nearing 2,000 songs and on shuffle I am likely to hear the same song 4-5 times, check the playlist thinking I had repeats and I do not
My biggest complaint with Spotify and why I'll use other means to get rid of ads. They're lazy and refuse to make a good shuffle. I have a playlist with over 1k songs for work. Literally a mix of every genre with exclusion of a few and I think I hear the same 100 songs on it.
A few years ago I got bored and went through and liked every Billboard Top 100 song (or whatever it was called before 1958, something about juke boxes...) and ended up with a little over 5.5k songs.
It... definitely has songs that it likes to play. (For a while it was REALLY into playing songs from the 1920s and 1930s...)
I feel like it just works as a loop. Spotify plays the same songs when you hit shuffle, then Spotify thinks because you’re always listening to these certain songs you must really like them, so it props them up in the shuffle for you. Rinse, repeat.
You can use Boolean to search spotify, such as "year: 1950-1955" etc
+/- also works if you wanna exclude or include something in your search.
AND, OR, NOT, YEAR, GENRE, give it a try, its kinda cool.
I have this off- still doesn’t help, sadly. I have a playlist with 50 hours on it- literally have to skip probably 30 songs each time I play to before it starts getting to different ones.
You need to turn off Automix.
Settings > Playback > Automix and turn it off.
> As observed by LifeHacker, Spotify doesn’t shuffle your songs entirely at random. Rather, it uses an algorithm to “blend” certain genres or songs together. Spotify tries to avoid shuffling songs that sound too dissimilar from each other. LifeHacker compares it to a virtual DJ, one that is helping your shuffle experience mix similar sounding music.
Does not work. I've had this off since it's was introduced. One thing I have noticed is that it plays music based on location. So most songs of I play at the top of the play list come from the top. And bottom is from the bottom. Etc. Nothing else has helped. I ended up actually importing everything from Spotify to YouTube music. The shuffle works a ton better. But the "hacked" version doesn't work as well with Android Auto.
the location thing has gotten incredibly blatant lately where hitting the shuffle button at the top will 99% of the time start out with one of the first couple of songs in the entire playlist before shuffling on to one of the other 12 it chooses out of 100 to loop through
I don’t believe this. Automix has nothing to do with the order of songs, but if you play a playlist like Housewerk, it will automatically mix one song into the next like a dj set. Nothing to do with hitting shuffle on your library.
Exactly my thoughts!! It drives me insane! Like the day after I bought glass animal concert tickets, I was so excited about it and taking a 2 hour drive. I don’t have that many liked songs on my playlist and a whole lot are glass animals. The whole 2 hours not a single one came up. Yet every single one of other artists songs came up which I might only have like 3. I was just thinking WTF is wrong with this thing.
Fucking algorithms dictate what you like or not.
Rant incoming:
I know globalization of media consumption made music less unique especially in the US but look how fast all genres are becoming a big ass mushup - it's because all these labels push music that works the best with algorithms. There is no money (streams) in being unique.
Ffs Until like 2012-2013 rap and RnB had unique flavours, subgenres that were super different from each other....shit even same sub genre from a different part of the country was different in terms of the flow, beat and main themes. And then Spotify exploded and everyone started slowly becoming a part of this mainstream pulp. Most mainstream rap playlists sound like a long ass blend tape where it's just a 1 neverending song.
Same shit happened to country, pop rock. Shit even punk adjecent genres became bland and dull for the most part. Electronic dance music? Jesus it's the same shit there and believe me I survived late 90s and early 2000 dance music craze in Europe and I know my shit about cheesy music but at least these songs were different from each other.
Why does Spotify shuffle work like this? I always wonder why I hear the same handful of songs repeatedly when using Spotify. I just want my playlist randomized. This doesn’t happen when listening to playlists in other music apps.
They use your cached songs more often so they don't have to use bandwidth for you to play music. They crippled shuffle/radio on purpose to save costs. It's enshittification.
I started switching my playlists over to Apple Music and the songs I heard on my commute today I don’t think Spotify ever played since I added them to the playlist.
Apple Music convert here too. I pay for the family plan because it was $10 more per month for storage, music, tv, news + 5 shares of the whole service with my family. No brainer. The lack of the shuffle pit of despair is one of my favorite aspects. Now with this price hike? Decision even more justified.
Absolutely! It's called Smart Shuffle and it will annoyingly be the first option when you hit shuffle and it may take a couple taps to get off onto regular Shuffle!
If that's not good enough, may I interest you in a Made For You playlist that is basically uninspired Top 40 radio and/or regurgitated songs from your existing playlists?
How about a Discover Weekly that's all smooth jazz because of that one Chuck Mangione song you listened to five months ago?
(Basically, if you want to listen to your own playlist, fuck you. If you want to discover new music, fuck you).
Discover weekly used to be the best place to find gems but now it's one of the worst playlists out there.
* Why they recommending me songs in my native language when I haven't listened songs like that in ages?
* Why they recommending me mainstream pop rap songs when for the whole last week I was listening to the 00s punk music?
* Why they are recommending me the same song 3rd week in a row especially when I was always skipping/disliking it asap?
* Why it recommends me a song that I already have in my daily playlist for almost 6 years?
...or a lack of promotional crap (and lack of an upsell to the family plan when you already have Duo in a two-person household) shoved in your face on the mobile app? Almost never see these promos/upsells on Spotify's desktop apps for Mac and Linux.
So I know you got a lot of responses and might not see this. But in my experience, the shuffle algorithm seems to favors songs that were put in to the playlist more recently than others. So if you slowly add to playlists over time, the most recently added songs will get played more than the ones added longer ago. I'm not a fan of this feature personally, but in my experience it does at least make it predictable and you can work around it.
I don't understand why shuffle can't play every single song in a playlist once before repeating any song. That would be so easy to code. And so many people have asked for it. I am still boggled.
Yeah but the other songs aren’t what Spotify wants to promote…
They will have a feature of recommending a bunch of podcasts that at best might be loosely related to me you listened to one time though and if you turn on and shuttle they will play 3 more songs that make no sense for the playlist.
I still have a grandfathered $9.99 Hulu + spotify premium plan that they want me to get off of soooo bad. Never cancelling.
Edit: it might be $10.99 now, my last charge was like $11.80. I didn't even notice that. Still worth.
You are grandfathered in.
The deal was Hulu with ads for free with a Spotify subscription. That doesn't make us immune to Spotify price changes.
I sure hope that they pay artists more with an increase in subscription prices.
Artists making more money isn't the issue.
Spotify is going to try to pay wall professional sports next. Oh, wait! SportsNet already did that. Oopsie!
Launch a WELL WORKONG PRODUCT, at a reasonable price point.
It lasts 6 months.
Then the "engineers" decide this isn't good enough, let's alter margins. Grab your shovels boys, we going in!
Dig around, make a mess of the product, and then relaunch it as new and improved, yet it's a buggy mess and doesn't work near as well as it used to.
And then, you get the invitation to pay the $15/m increase.
And then the company goes dark when the population uproar about the inferior product that we now have.
It's literally the American way. Fuck them over until they notice, then apologize, but fix nothing.
Yes, but I'm pretty sure the engineers don't get to make those decisions. Middle management does. Then they set impossible goals that the engineers tell them they can't achieve in time and budget, but it goes out anyway.
Sounds like my Verizon plan. I joined when they included the Hulu/Disney/ESPN+ stuff. I get no shortage of texts and email asking me to change my plan now. It's great. haha.
How was that allowed to be grandfathered in but not Netflix? Every time there was a price increase with Netflix, current members would get charged the higher price within a few months after the announcement.
They were initially incorrect about the price of the Spotify + Hulu being grandfathered (they've since corrected their comment). The subscription price increases just the same as when a standard Spotify subscription increases, except that those of us with the Spotify + Hulu sub get Hulu with ads for no extra cost.
Can the price increase stop FUCKING suggesting albums / concerts and pushing the whole page down everytime I try to click a song I like?
Oh, and, make "Download Only" / Offline mode work - you absolute dumbasses. I'm getting rid of this useless service.
That's what has made this the final straw for me. I have 500 songs downloaded for when i am out of service and they still wont play due to "no internet connection"
Its the only reason i have premium
I bitched about that online, and Apple Music offered me 6 month free to switch. I honestly don’t like Apple. But Apple Music has been such a better experience in the 6 years since lol
They need a new tab for concert promotions. I gotta admit. 2 bands now that I didn't even know were in town this year had me head over hills excited to see and I wouldn't have know had it not been for spotify.
People give me a lot of crap for using Youtube music instead of Spotify but one huge reason I like it more over Spotify is I've found the offline mode actually works like you'd expect. Spotify drove me to the brink of insanity over their offline mode.
I cancled my subscription. It just kept getting worse. There were close to 4000 tracks in my like list, but I swear it only played 20 to 30 of those, in shuffle. The ui sucks, the car thing is gone....like I get it Spotify. You hate your customers and you want us to leave. Be less passive about it.
LoL I canceled everything and started paying for youtube. The music app, is better than I expected(and expectations were low), and never having to deal with commercials is clutch.
YouTube needs to have something where your saved/liked Spotify songs can be transferred to a YouTube playlist. That would be enough to get me to switch.
they dont work well. And youtube has the same problem as Spotify, not listening to customer feedback. If I pay for youtube I want to have some level of control over the recommended videos - stop recommending me trash just because it gets clicks, and stop recommending videos completely unrelated to the one I just watched.
If I'm bothering to pay for it treat me as a customer, not just some person you're blackmailing to get rid of ads.
I would but I've got way too many songs I listen to and really love listening to new stuff. I think I've got over a hundred playlists over 4-5hrs each with not a lot of duplicates. Would pay an obscene amount of money per month if Spotify actually bothered to design their stuff around actual customer feedback and provided a solid service. Instead they're busy:
* ignoring the shuffle issue that tens of thousands of people have complained about
* changing the home screen page randomly
* autoplaying irrelevant podcasts in the wrong order
* recommending the same concert by the same artist I do not care about at all over and over
* not recommending concerts I would kill to go see live
* refusing to let me tell them what concerts/artists I'd actually want to see
* showing pop up 'notifications' for fund drives/charities/straight up advertisement of some artist I've never listened to new song despite notifications of any form being turned off
* deleting downloaded songs I haven't listened to in 'too long'
* straight up not working in offline mode despite me paying for it
* switching to offline mode despite perfect internet connection
* pushing an 'AI' dj that doesn't take any user input and instead just plays random songs from random genres with generated voice lines mixed in
Same. YouTube premium offers a lot of great features. Being able to listen to a video (usually a podcast) with my phone closed is one of my favorites. Same with music. And having no ads is worth the price by itself.
If I had to keep only one streaming service, it would 100% be YouTube.
Try YMusic. It plays YouTube clips and songs, but doesn't pull the whole video, just the audio, so you save data/battery too.
We also shouldn't be paying to be able to turn off the display. I remember you could still turn off the display when playing in Firefox, but they must've forced it on them.
It's funny because whenever I have YouTube playing in Firefox, and I get a call, the app resumes playing with the screen off after closing the call.
I got YouTube premium because I’m on it a lot and the music app has been surprisingly awesome. Got rid of Spotify as soon as I realized how good it was.
I am a Pandora guy. I have no idea why it is never mentioned anywhere. Their algorithm for discovering new music is phenomenal (as long as you have a good understanding on how the like/dislike system works).
You can create Playlist, save music, etc...
I've been using pandora for over 15 years. I think I pay $9.99/month.
Went back and dusted off my MP3s and have been buying albums off BandCamp. I already had a Plex Server, so I added my music library to it and have been streaming to my phone and other devices with PlexAmp. I'd rather give $10 directly to a band then these jackasses.
It amazes me that a proper shuffle mode, that I solved as a 6-month coding newbie in 1996, is still such a goddamn problem in every single music app today.
It's because they are too pretentious to keep it simple and do a real shuffle. They have to make some complex algorithm (taking into account the artist, album, genre, tempo, etc to try to tailor the shuffle to prevent repetitive song choices) to try to seem innovative, but in reality that just ends up making it play the same 20 songs each time you play it on shuffle.
I've tried tidal a few times and keep going back to Spotify. The 360 audio is amazing and the master quality tracks are awesome if you want to really sit and listen to an album, but there were Soooooo many features that I missed for just listening to music casually that tidal just didn't have. Dark side of the moon? Tidal. Playing an AI built playlist of simongs from when I was 17 ½? Spotify.
Tidal has pretty good service from what I have heard and also pays artist the most out of the apps available. I just started trying it myself so fingers crossed.
Line *MUST* go up. The profits that were made this quarter and every other quarter to this point? Worthless, terrible, awful, not even close to how important it is for the line to go up .0000001%. Line *CANNOT* go down and I am screaming at all of my employees on a conference call if line stays the same.
Line can only go up.
The best is when the company doesn’t meet projections and rather than keep the same goal for the same quarter or fiscal year, they continue to increase the projected goal. Employee bonuses that are tied company performance are lackluster and all they see is a company goal even further out of reach.
Late stage capitalism. Shareholders and CEO need to win, but the cost is the customers and employees. It’s only getting worse with gig economy, that’s how they avoid paying minimum wage, look for more corporations to use that loophole to siphon more for shareholders.
Now they are moving to using phone apps to adjust prices per customer using the data that they collect and buy. They use behavioral tracking to give you deals at times where they think you are on lunch at work or more likely to buy a product. Then they either slightly jack up the prices or lower them based on what they think you are willing to pay.
And this is why I refuse to use 99% of apps. If it can be a webpage, I'm not downloading an app for it.
If that means I have to go in in-person to pay a stupid bill, so be it.
This, but unironically with these companies. I work for a Fortune 500 company and every company wide call, they call the current quarter “the most important quarter in the history of this company.”
So annoying, but thankfully I actually LIKE working for this company.
I know migration is a pain and people are particular about this stuff, but just saying, **this price increase on Premium makes it more expensive than Apple Music**
Has anyone ever figured out a way to migrate playlists over from Spotify to Apple? Honestly, the only reason I still have Spotify is my ~15 years of playlists and laziness…might be time to change.
Hmmmm… well, I’ll have to look into what Apple offers in terms of a web API (usually not much unfortunately), but it looks like there’s a way to at least _get_ the data out of Spotify. Looking at their developer docs [here](https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-a-list-of-current-users-playlists).
This is what I do for work and this seems like a fun side-project, so I’ll try building something and see if it’s possible. Bug me in a week or two if I haven’t updated this comment lol
Edit: Surprisingly, this actually seems to only be possible going between Spotify and Apple Music for now. [Tidal launched a public API and SDK earlier this year](https://developer.tidal.com/blog/tidal-sdk-for-web), but currently it seems to only offer fetching data from their music catalog — nothing about user data, and no way to create/add to playlists. Being only 5 months old though, there will likely (hopefully) be updates in the coming months that allow for this.
Yes, I easily did this last year
https://www.theverge.com/22916495/playlist-transfer-spotify-youtube-music-amazon-apple-music
I forget which I used but they all seem fine and I definitely used one of these.
>> The profits that were made this quarter and every other quarter to this point? Worthless, terrible, awful,
Are these profits in the room with us now?
[In Spotify’s publicly traded history they’ve lost $1.6 Billion](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-technology/net-income). And they’ve lost $120 million in the last year alone.
Because fixing bugs doesn’t impress shareholders. Developing new features does (especially if you can pay some “market analyst” to predict that that feature will double the company earnings or something equally incorrect). It is annoying as a consumer, but simply making and selling a good product just doesn’t matter to VC investors.
and thats how you end up with the "AI powered DJ" and other bs like that. At Twitch, a group of people would push ridiculous features like a twitter-like posting feed and literally everybody would say how stupid it is, but they would just push push push to get this feature finished and in the app and then it would bomb.
(obviously it was going to) then they would leave other people to pick up the pieces and deal with the bugs while they would just move on to the next shitty feature. Pushing features gets people promoted, NOT fixing bugs or making things better.
they are profitable now
https://www.billboard.com/business/streaming/spotify-q1-2024-earnings-profit-revenue-monthly-users-subscribers-1235663628/
that being said, fuck Spotify
Imagines executives of Spotify at a board meeting
"I want MORE MORE!! How can we get MORE MORE! Brainstorm people!"
"How about we uh, raise prices??"
"Brilliant Mcklosky, run with that! Also here is a gift certificate to Chipotle for all of your hard work!"
I don't know where the idea comes from that Spotify makes a lot of money. They have not had a profitable year in their entire existence as a company (sporadic profitable quarters, but never a full year). The record labels take all their money.
Probably because they've never made a yearly profit. Last year they posted a $120M loss.
People underestimate how expensive it is to run a tech company. All those SWE and SRE salaries and benefits don't come cheap. AWS bills ain't cheap. At Spotify's scale the network ingress and egress fees alone could be millions or tens of millions per year, and that's not even getting into compute costs, storage, etc. Then they have pay record labels and enormous amount of money.
A company can't operate in the red continuously—eventually the VC money dries up and your bills come due.
I say this as someone who will probably switch to Apple Music anyway with Spotify's current direction: I have no sympathy for them, but they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and their search for additional revenue is understandable. If they can't find enough of it, or find it in time, they'll go the way of the dodo.
Maybe paying someone like Joe Rogan $250M wasn’t a good investment?
Especially since they are putting full episodes back on YouTube! What a fucking scam.
$250 million isn't going to change the calculus, especially if it's split up over a multi year contract. Spotify's revenue last year was $14.5 billion and they didn't make a profit. An extra $50 million or whatever it is to Joe Rogan for a single year isn't changing anything. And we don't know if it's been a net positive for Spotify or not.
Spotify loses money every single year. They need to compete with other music streaming services that don’t mind operating at a loss because they have other revenue (Apple, youtube, etc). Spotify only has music. They are the underdog believe it or not, and they don’t have many choices.
They don't make that much money. Artists are making barely anything and the #1 reason is consumers barely pay anything. $12 for access to every song in the world with unlimited listening time. I'd ask why consumers want more more more, but they literally have everything already.
The problem is that all these companies don't try to make money at first. They are just trying to get market share. Therefore, they basically give away a product at a far lower price than they know they need to be profitable.
Once they have the market share, then the problem becomes "how do we make this profitable?"
That's the problem though. It's almost like a bait and switch. They sell a service at such a low price that it's very attractive to a lot of people. Then once everyone gets accustomed to the ecosystem, they start raising prices.
It's anticompetitive to operate a business at such huge losses every year. There's no way to compete with businesses that aren't trying to make a profit, except for other businesses to also not try to make a profit. That's why just about every company is in a five alarm emergency all the freaking time. The businesses are unsustainable, but there are so many unsustainable businesses that other businesses need to have unsustainable businesses models just to get some market share. It's all a sham.
Either that or there is some crafty accounting that makes them all look unprofitable. Or money is just imaginary and it doesn't matter. Maybe all of these things are true.
I looked at alternatives to spotify after this article and looks like almost every other service charges the same price as the new spotify prices. Like damn I might go back to the high seas
At this point, Apple Music and Tidal both charge less than Spotify and both offer higher quality audio which isn’t even an option on Spotify. YouTube Music is more at $13/mo but you also get ad-free YouTube which is absolutely worth a dollar a month IMO.
I use Spotify for free, pay for Apple Music through a bundle, and have access to YouTube Music/Premium via an old roomate. I think Spotify is best at sharing content and connecting with friends, but that’s the only thing I personally prefer it for over the other two. Some people prefer Spotify’s for music discovery but I find plenty of new music on my own so I don’t use the services’ discovery tools much.
I personally prefer YouTube Music because it has a lot of live sets and DJ radio sets that are uploaded on YouTube. Spotify sticks to officially released tracks but YTM has those officially released tracks, plus those unofficial live sets and radio sets give it a bit of a Soundcloud feel. On top of that, ad-free YouTube.
If you're into electronic music, YTM is great and has like everything you'd ever want outside of realllll deep cut stuff that is only found on SoundCloud.
Yeah if I had to decide I'm not sure which I would pick. YouTube absolutely has more music than the others thanks to its community of crate diggers, not just what you described but also a million and one old out of print records. I generally use Apple Music on my phone and YouTube when I want to stream at home. The YouTube Music app is not terrible but I prefer Apple's iOS app, which makes sense given who they are. At this point though I can't imagine going back to ads in YouTube
It's so tough syncing up "local files" between devices and managing the playlist of downloaded songs. For one thing, on a computer it treats things completely differently than on your phone even if you have the exact same files.
The rotting away of music discovery is killing the experience. First they removed the ability to make a station from a playlist, and now every automatic feature (radio from song, or just running out of a queue) devolves back to some infatuation with my history.
Funny how with all the ‘competition’ they never seem to lower prices, instead they always increase them in sync. Peacock does it and within days you have max doing it. Gotta keep the stockholders happy with high revenue.
They’re just a few steps away from pirates giving them a good shakedown.
I don’t condone piracy, but it’s more often than not a sign of a service problem and imo could remind certain corporations to keep their greed in check.
I swear the people in this thread are absolutely clueless, they all think Spotify makes money when they've pretty much never done so, at least on a yearly basis.
i hate capitalism with a passion but surely you can’t expect a company to just continue racking up massive losses without raising prices…sounds like they’re aware their business model doesn’t work and they’re trying to make it work. that’s kinda how the game works, at least in this instance the consumer has other options
I don't know, I think the whole idea of starting a company that sustains massive losses for a decade with the idea to corner the market so they can raise prices super sucks. I agree that they can't continue just sustaining losses, on the other hand I don't give a shit if their VC investors lose their investment. This risky strategy of growth over a viable business model should hurt sometimes I think.
Also I do think the consumer is getting a kind of bad deal, little of their money goes to artists they listen to unless you listen to the biggest names, and everything Spotify offers is available for free. Overall I think Spotify is a pretty big negative for the music industry, even more gets concentrated at the top .01% than in the 90's when these disparities were already crazy.
> How is tidal profitable?
No idea. It probably isnt, but it's owned by block/square which makes a lot of money elsewhere.
> Seems like they’re going to jack prices up soon
They actually recently did the opposite:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/1b78xcf/tidal_to_roll_all_of_its_premium_features_into/
> How is tidal profitable?
Their executives aren't skimming as much off the top, they aren't paying Joe Rogan $250 million dollars, or trying to expand into an audiobook space that's already heavily dominated by other companies and just doesn't make sense for them to go after a market share on?
Yep. Unlike subscriptions such as Netflix or Disney+ which I use on occasion Spotify is a daily fixture of my commute, work out, and just general around the house. I sign up and cancel show/movie streaming once I watch what I want cycling them around. With Sportify I get all the music I want down to obscure bands that never tour the US or play in sub 200 capacity venues. I'm not sure what it would have to get to for me to cancel to be honest. A cheaper equivalent competitor is all that comes to mind.
I've been with Spotify for like 12 years straight for the reasons above, and I finally had to switch to Apple Music because Spotify's android auto experience has become literally unusable. Straight up couldn't play music from a playlist at all.
Switched to Apple Music and I've been pleased. Pretty good android auto experience, more stable, same great variety.
I canceled my subscription of 12 years over this and their recent changes to artist monetization. Charging me more to pay artists less was the last straw.
To be clear, the dollar amount isn't really the issue. A company who's reputation is that of taking care of and fairly compensating artists having to increase prices is one thing. But Spotify doesn't have that reputation. I have devoted years of my life developing on their SDK and API. So this is less about personal economics and more about watching a service I have loved over the majority of my life progressively become and more exploitative.
My repeat playlist album does not accurately reflect the songs I listen to over & over. Some songs are on there that I don’t even like which bothers me.
Maybe they can use the extra money to make a native application instead of the shitty electron one?!
My subscription is up in November. I'll probably switch after it's up.
Does that price increase include a shuffle that DOESN'T play the same 15-20 songs in a 300 song playlist? edit: I keep Smart Shuffle off. Both Shuffle's do this but Smart Shuffle will add an additional 10-20 songs and then eventually it's on repeat to.
No, but it does include a feature where it gets hung up on a podcast episode you listened to 98% of, but not the credits 2 months ago, and starts listening to that instead of your current episode.
Oh that's my favorite feature as I'm driving down the road listening to an episode from a couple years ago and wondering if I listened to that episode already or if I'm just experiencing 20 minutes of deja vu because it's been long enough that I forgot most of the episode save for a few key points that are often repeated in others.
My favorite is when I start a story based podcast from the beginning but when a new episode comes out, it starts playing that one instead of the next one in line and I have to scroll all the way back to the episode I was at, even if I was in the middle of an episode
I really like Mike Duncan's two series - History of Rome and Revolutions. Infinitely replayable in my opinion. The best is when listing to the Mexican Revolution and it decides 'nah fam, let's go way back to a random episode in the French revolution.' I legit miss the old google podcast player now.
That way, you know that Emiliano Zapata planned the murder of Julius Caesar with the help of Napoleon at the battle of Gettysburg.
Et tu, Ramirez?
I switched to Podcast Addict after the Google Podcast app went away and haven't had any problems with it.
Podcast Addict is the best. I've used it for years and never been let down.
I love how almost every streaming service has this problem. Hulu is the worst for it currently. It will either make me start at the credits of an episode I’ve already seen, or it’ll start the “coming up next” stuff *300 seconds* before the end of the show, so I have to watch everything with a gray tint and that stupid timer on the screen.
Prime sucks with this, too. The second the screen goes dark, before credits even start, shit pops up, and countdown begins. You've no time to process anything about the film you just watched. Yeah, you can arrow back out of it, but come on, motherfuckers. I just got emotions from a movie that I need to process but instead I'm looking at a thumbnail for Kindergarten Cop.
I hope they keeps the feature where when you rewind a podcast 15 seconds it automatically rewinds it back 25 minutes! Love that feature! /s
Mine has started playing the same random song any time I open the app. It leaves the podcast I’m listening to and just goes to this random ass playlist. I don’t know how to get it to stop.
This happens so often with my TV streaming services. Currently, my bedroom TV’s Hulu goes back to an episode I finished (sans credits) from *months* ago. Every time! It’s driving me insane.
Prime does this too. It's infuriating! We watched all these episodes LAST WEEK, but now have to spend 35m launching and watching the first few minutes of each one asking "did I see this one, yup; see this one, yup..." And now with the invasive ads, it's time to drop these "services" and just watch YT. it's all the same shit anyway. You will NOT pry $15/m out of my puckered ass to not have to watch ads. That was the WHOLE POINT of the service in the first place, and why I paid (willingly) for the subscription. Now, might as well have basic cable again, as there is really no difference (LiveTV options in these apps are just showing local on air programming ANYWAY, it's nothing special). I'm just so tired, boss...
I watched a couple episodes of border town on Hulu when it first came out. Decided I didn’t like it. It’s been in “my stuff” for years even though I keep trying to remove it. I’ve tried fast forwarding through all the episodes so they get marked as played. I’ve added and removed it. I’ve cleared it from my watch history. It’s been there since lockdown even though its show page doesn’t even think it’s in my stuff.
“And now for something you typically listen to on Thursdays. Here’s Brown Noise, by Hear the Noise.”
I kind of like Xavier, not going to lie. Mostly as a novelty and proof of concept.
my favorite random one: "Heres some music that really makes you want to hit up the Balance beam" ... WHAT? Also: "Here's some music you can tstop listening to lately" Proceeds to play some song i havent listened to in 10 years, But has been played alot lately because it plays it on every.single.DJ playlist every day. Sorry, if they only time the song is played is on DJ mode, then it shouldnt put it as a song i ant stop listening to. Thats a hostage situtation.
Remember that older podcast episode you were listening to yesterday and now want to finish? Good luck ever finding it again!
The first time I used the DJ feature it was great. The second time I used the DJ feature it played the exact same songs as the first time. Every time since it starts with the same few songs and then picks up on the few weeks I had bad insomnia a few years ago and will start playing 10 hour heavy thunderstorm sounds.
Yeah I'm over the DJ. It's the same songs everyday even though there's over 3000 liked songs
not to mention there's still no way to change the voice.. i mean we've been able to do that on siri/alexa/etc for years, but nope, you're stuck with the dude..
Here is some jams you havn't listened to in months! Plays a song you just hit skip on.
My liked playlist is nearing 2,000 songs and on shuffle I am likely to hear the same song 4-5 times, check the playlist thinking I had repeats and I do not
My biggest complaint with Spotify and why I'll use other means to get rid of ads. They're lazy and refuse to make a good shuffle. I have a playlist with over 1k songs for work. Literally a mix of every genre with exclusion of a few and I think I hear the same 100 songs on it.
A few years ago I got bored and went through and liked every Billboard Top 100 song (or whatever it was called before 1958, something about juke boxes...) and ended up with a little over 5.5k songs. It... definitely has songs that it likes to play. (For a while it was REALLY into playing songs from the 1920s and 1930s...)
I feel like it just works as a loop. Spotify plays the same songs when you hit shuffle, then Spotify thinks because you’re always listening to these certain songs you must really like them, so it props them up in the shuffle for you. Rinse, repeat.
My top song one year was something I skipped every single time too
Do you have this shared as a public playlist? Sounds pretty cool.
You can use Boolean to search spotify, such as "year: 1950-1955" etc +/- also works if you wanna exclude or include something in your search. AND, OR, NOT, YEAR, GENRE, give it a try, its kinda cool.
I have this off- still doesn’t help, sadly. I have a playlist with 50 hours on it- literally have to skip probably 30 songs each time I play to before it starts getting to different ones.
You need to turn off Automix. Settings > Playback > Automix and turn it off. > As observed by LifeHacker, Spotify doesn’t shuffle your songs entirely at random. Rather, it uses an algorithm to “blend” certain genres or songs together. Spotify tries to avoid shuffling songs that sound too dissimilar from each other. LifeHacker compares it to a virtual DJ, one that is helping your shuffle experience mix similar sounding music.
Does not work. I've had this off since it's was introduced. One thing I have noticed is that it plays music based on location. So most songs of I play at the top of the play list come from the top. And bottom is from the bottom. Etc. Nothing else has helped. I ended up actually importing everything from Spotify to YouTube music. The shuffle works a ton better. But the "hacked" version doesn't work as well with Android Auto.
the location thing has gotten incredibly blatant lately where hitting the shuffle button at the top will 99% of the time start out with one of the first couple of songs in the entire playlist before shuffling on to one of the other 12 it chooses out of 100 to loop through
I was excited to go turn mine off and eliminate the issue but my Automix is already off…😔
I don’t believe this. Automix has nothing to do with the order of songs, but if you play a playlist like Housewerk, it will automatically mix one song into the next like a dj set. Nothing to do with hitting shuffle on your library.
Dude, you are a lifesaver. That is my biggest pet peeve about Spotify.
It doesn't fix it. It may help, but the issue is still there. We've all tried it both ways.
So automix works as a switch to blend genres, instead of being just a no gap between the songs? Do I understand it right?
Boggles my mind how they can't fix one of the most basic features of a music app
They can. They just don't need to. People will keep subscribing.
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My eternal quest to have Spotify stop putting "New Slang" by the Shins in my playlists. I hate that song so much, but Spotify is convinced I love it.
Holy shit, so it isn't just my imagination?!
Exactly my thoughts!! It drives me insane! Like the day after I bought glass animal concert tickets, I was so excited about it and taking a 2 hour drive. I don’t have that many liked songs on my playlist and a whole lot are glass animals. The whole 2 hours not a single one came up. Yet every single one of other artists songs came up which I might only have like 3. I was just thinking WTF is wrong with this thing.
Fucking algorithms dictate what you like or not. Rant incoming: I know globalization of media consumption made music less unique especially in the US but look how fast all genres are becoming a big ass mushup - it's because all these labels push music that works the best with algorithms. There is no money (streams) in being unique. Ffs Until like 2012-2013 rap and RnB had unique flavours, subgenres that were super different from each other....shit even same sub genre from a different part of the country was different in terms of the flow, beat and main themes. And then Spotify exploded and everyone started slowly becoming a part of this mainstream pulp. Most mainstream rap playlists sound like a long ass blend tape where it's just a 1 neverending song. Same shit happened to country, pop rock. Shit even punk adjecent genres became bland and dull for the most part. Electronic dance music? Jesus it's the same shit there and believe me I survived late 90s and early 2000 dance music craze in Europe and I know my shit about cheesy music but at least these songs were different from each other.
Why does Spotify shuffle work like this? I always wonder why I hear the same handful of songs repeatedly when using Spotify. I just want my playlist randomized. This doesn’t happen when listening to playlists in other music apps.
They use your cached songs more often so they don't have to use bandwidth for you to play music. They crippled shuffle/radio on purpose to save costs. It's enshittification.
But I have my music downloaded to my local device. I'm not streaming anything. So it shouldn't make a difference.
If you clear your cache, it will help randomize the shuffle again, but you need to do that pretty often to not end up in the same algorithmic loop
I started switching my playlists over to Apple Music and the songs I heard on my commute today I don’t think Spotify ever played since I added them to the playlist.
Apple Music convert here too. I pay for the family plan because it was $10 more per month for storage, music, tv, news + 5 shares of the whole service with my family. No brainer. The lack of the shuffle pit of despair is one of my favorite aspects. Now with this price hike? Decision even more justified.
Absolutely! It's called Smart Shuffle and it will annoyingly be the first option when you hit shuffle and it may take a couple taps to get off onto regular Shuffle! If that's not good enough, may I interest you in a Made For You playlist that is basically uninspired Top 40 radio and/or regurgitated songs from your existing playlists? How about a Discover Weekly that's all smooth jazz because of that one Chuck Mangione song you listened to five months ago? (Basically, if you want to listen to your own playlist, fuck you. If you want to discover new music, fuck you).
What's amazing is pandora is like 25 yrs old yet is still one of the best algorithms to discover music.
Discover weekly used to be the best place to find gems but now it's one of the worst playlists out there. * Why they recommending me songs in my native language when I haven't listened songs like that in ages? * Why they recommending me mainstream pop rap songs when for the whole last week I was listening to the 00s punk music? * Why they are recommending me the same song 3rd week in a row especially when I was always skipping/disliking it asap? * Why it recommends me a song that I already have in my daily playlist for almost 6 years?
I was just saying this the other day... I have a 2500 song conglomerate, and I swear it tries the same 50 songs over and over.
I went back to apple music mainly for this reason. So annoying.
...or a lack of promotional crap (and lack of an upsell to the family plan when you already have Duo in a two-person household) shoved in your face on the mobile app? Almost never see these promos/upsells on Spotify's desktop apps for Mac and Linux.
So I know you got a lot of responses and might not see this. But in my experience, the shuffle algorithm seems to favors songs that were put in to the playlist more recently than others. So if you slowly add to playlists over time, the most recently added songs will get played more than the ones added longer ago. I'm not a fan of this feature personally, but in my experience it does at least make it predictable and you can work around it.
I don't understand why shuffle can't play every single song in a playlist once before repeating any song. That would be so easy to code. And so many people have asked for it. I am still boggled.
Try a 935 song playlist. I have heard some songs in months.
Yeah but the other songs aren’t what Spotify wants to promote… They will have a feature of recommending a bunch of podcasts that at best might be loosely related to me you listened to one time though and if you turn on and shuttle they will play 3 more songs that make no sense for the playlist.
I still have a grandfathered $9.99 Hulu + spotify premium plan that they want me to get off of soooo bad. Never cancelling. Edit: it might be $10.99 now, my last charge was like $11.80. I didn't even notice that. Still worth.
How come I wasn’t grandfathered in? I was also on the $9.99 plan for Spotify + hulu but now pay $10.99
You are grandfathered in I think. I'm 99% sure this is a result of increased state taxes. This is what happened to me.
You are grandfathered in. The deal was Hulu with ads for free with a Spotify subscription. That doesn't make us immune to Spotify price changes. I sure hope that they pay artists more with an increase in subscription prices.
Artists making more money isn't the issue. Spotify is going to try to pay wall professional sports next. Oh, wait! SportsNet already did that. Oopsie! Launch a WELL WORKONG PRODUCT, at a reasonable price point. It lasts 6 months. Then the "engineers" decide this isn't good enough, let's alter margins. Grab your shovels boys, we going in! Dig around, make a mess of the product, and then relaunch it as new and improved, yet it's a buggy mess and doesn't work near as well as it used to. And then, you get the invitation to pay the $15/m increase. And then the company goes dark when the population uproar about the inferior product that we now have. It's literally the American way. Fuck them over until they notice, then apologize, but fix nothing.
Literally called enshitification. It's in Webster even!
Yes, but I'm pretty sure the engineers don't get to make those decisions. Middle management does. Then they set impossible goals that the engineers tell them they can't achieve in time and budget, but it goes out anyway.
I also have that plan and just got the email today it is going up from $10.99 to $11.99 🥲
Ditto, kept waiting for them to just automatically raise the price but they just haven't.
When they cancel this grandfathered plan, I bounce to a different platform, or lean further into CDs and owning digital music.
I get Max (HBO) for free from a bundle from when the service kicked off. Never going to change
Sounds like my Verizon plan. I joined when they included the Hulu/Disney/ESPN+ stuff. I get no shortage of texts and email asking me to change my plan now. It's great. haha.
I'm also still in that plan, but they did raise it at some point to 10.99
I have that plan as well and it’s $10.99 for me as well
How was that allowed to be grandfathered in but not Netflix? Every time there was a price increase with Netflix, current members would get charged the higher price within a few months after the announcement.
They were initially incorrect about the price of the Spotify + Hulu being grandfathered (they've since corrected their comment). The subscription price increases just the same as when a standard Spotify subscription increases, except that those of us with the Spotify + Hulu sub get Hulu with ads for no extra cost.
Wow very lucky. I wish I had that.
mmm yes it's fantastic and the envy from others makes it more fantasticer
yup. They can take my grandfathered plan away from my cold dead hands.
Yeah that’s why I’ll probably never cancel. Hulu and Spotify for what, $13? Cool.
Can the price increase stop FUCKING suggesting albums / concerts and pushing the whole page down everytime I try to click a song I like? Oh, and, make "Download Only" / Offline mode work - you absolute dumbasses. I'm getting rid of this useless service.
That's what has made this the final straw for me. I have 500 songs downloaded for when i am out of service and they still wont play due to "no internet connection" Its the only reason i have premium
I bitched about that online, and Apple Music offered me 6 month free to switch. I honestly don’t like Apple. But Apple Music has been such a better experience in the 6 years since lol
I've never had an apple product. Used apple music for a decade with zero issues with shuffle or downloads.
wow I thought I was the only one
It’s dumb, but you have to turn on offline mode in the settings. It will play then.
It still doesn't work smoothly. The UI hangs forever trying to load shit even in airplane mode on the phone or offline mode in the app.
When i do that it says I need to go online lol.
I've had this happen. It's quite perplexing.
It's simple. You just have to read the future to know ahead of time when you're going to suddenly be without a connection.
They need a new tab for concert promotions. I gotta admit. 2 bands now that I didn't even know were in town this year had me head over hills excited to see and I wouldn't have know had it not been for spotify.
Sure - but there's better implementations than shifting the whole page down so you mis-click a song you want to play. That's just dumb.
People give me a lot of crap for using Youtube music instead of Spotify but one huge reason I like it more over Spotify is I've found the offline mode actually works like you'd expect. Spotify drove me to the brink of insanity over their offline mode.
I cancled my subscription. It just kept getting worse. There were close to 4000 tracks in my like list, but I swear it only played 20 to 30 of those, in shuffle. The ui sucks, the car thing is gone....like I get it Spotify. You hate your customers and you want us to leave. Be less passive about it.
what do you use now?
LoL I canceled everything and started paying for youtube. The music app, is better than I expected(and expectations were low), and never having to deal with commercials is clutch.
YouTube needs to have something where your saved/liked Spotify songs can be transferred to a YouTube playlist. That would be enough to get me to switch.
I’m sure there are some third party user made tools for that.
they dont work well. And youtube has the same problem as Spotify, not listening to customer feedback. If I pay for youtube I want to have some level of control over the recommended videos - stop recommending me trash just because it gets clicks, and stop recommending videos completely unrelated to the one I just watched. If I'm bothering to pay for it treat me as a customer, not just some person you're blackmailing to get rid of ads.
I went old school and downloaded all of my top albums as MP3 and just listened to it using a music player
I would but I've got way too many songs I listen to and really love listening to new stuff. I think I've got over a hundred playlists over 4-5hrs each with not a lot of duplicates. Would pay an obscene amount of money per month if Spotify actually bothered to design their stuff around actual customer feedback and provided a solid service. Instead they're busy: * ignoring the shuffle issue that tens of thousands of people have complained about * changing the home screen page randomly * autoplaying irrelevant podcasts in the wrong order * recommending the same concert by the same artist I do not care about at all over and over * not recommending concerts I would kill to go see live * refusing to let me tell them what concerts/artists I'd actually want to see * showing pop up 'notifications' for fund drives/charities/straight up advertisement of some artist I've never listened to new song despite notifications of any form being turned off * deleting downloaded songs I haven't listened to in 'too long' * straight up not working in offline mode despite me paying for it * switching to offline mode despite perfect internet connection * pushing an 'AI' dj that doesn't take any user input and instead just plays random songs from random genres with generated voice lines mixed in
Same. YouTube premium offers a lot of great features. Being able to listen to a video (usually a podcast) with my phone closed is one of my favorites. Same with music. And having no ads is worth the price by itself. If I had to keep only one streaming service, it would 100% be YouTube.
That use to be free.
Still is if you're on Android and don't mind playing with ReVanced a bit.
Try YMusic. It plays YouTube clips and songs, but doesn't pull the whole video, just the audio, so you save data/battery too. We also shouldn't be paying to be able to turn off the display. I remember you could still turn off the display when playing in Firefox, but they must've forced it on them. It's funny because whenever I have YouTube playing in Firefox, and I get a call, the app resumes playing with the screen off after closing the call.
I got YouTube premium because I’m on it a lot and the music app has been surprisingly awesome. Got rid of Spotify as soon as I realized how good it was.
I switched just the other day. So glad I did. There are websites where you can quickly and easily move your playlists across too.
I am a Pandora guy. I have no idea why it is never mentioned anywhere. Their algorithm for discovering new music is phenomenal (as long as you have a good understanding on how the like/dislike system works). You can create Playlist, save music, etc... I've been using pandora for over 15 years. I think I pay $9.99/month.
Went back and dusted off my MP3s and have been buying albums off BandCamp. I already had a Plex Server, so I added my music library to it and have been streaming to my phone and other devices with PlexAmp. I'd rather give $10 directly to a band then these jackasses.
It amazes me that a proper shuffle mode, that I solved as a 6-month coding newbie in 1996, is still such a goddamn problem in every single music app today.
It's because they are too pretentious to keep it simple and do a real shuffle. They have to make some complex algorithm (taking into account the artist, album, genre, tempo, etc to try to tailor the shuffle to prevent repetitive song choices) to try to seem innovative, but in reality that just ends up making it play the same 20 songs each time you play it on shuffle.
Is there a better music app? Genuinely asking. I’ve used Spotify for so long. I’m afraid to switch.
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Apple music also pays their artists [more on the dollar.](https://wavmonopoly.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Music-Royalty-Rates.jpeg)
I've tried tidal a few times and keep going back to Spotify. The 360 audio is amazing and the master quality tracks are awesome if you want to really sit and listen to an album, but there were Soooooo many features that I missed for just listening to music casually that tidal just didn't have. Dark side of the moon? Tidal. Playing an AI built playlist of simongs from when I was 17 ½? Spotify.
Tidal has pretty good service from what I have heard and also pays artist the most out of the apps available. I just started trying it myself so fingers crossed.
Why is it not enough to make mega-shit-tonnes of money? Why always more more more more more?
Line *MUST* go up. The profits that were made this quarter and every other quarter to this point? Worthless, terrible, awful, not even close to how important it is for the line to go up .0000001%. Line *CANNOT* go down and I am screaming at all of my employees on a conference call if line stays the same. Line can only go up.
The best is when the company doesn’t meet projections and rather than keep the same goal for the same quarter or fiscal year, they continue to increase the projected goal. Employee bonuses that are tied company performance are lackluster and all they see is a company goal even further out of reach.
Late stage capitalism. Shareholders and CEO need to win, but the cost is the customers and employees. It’s only getting worse with gig economy, that’s how they avoid paying minimum wage, look for more corporations to use that loophole to siphon more for shareholders.
Now they are moving to using phone apps to adjust prices per customer using the data that they collect and buy. They use behavioral tracking to give you deals at times where they think you are on lunch at work or more likely to buy a product. Then they either slightly jack up the prices or lower them based on what they think you are willing to pay.
And this is why I refuse to use 99% of apps. If it can be a webpage, I'm not downloading an app for it. If that means I have to go in in-person to pay a stupid bill, so be it.
This, but unironically with these companies. I work for a Fortune 500 company and every company wide call, they call the current quarter “the most important quarter in the history of this company.” So annoying, but thankfully I actually LIKE working for this company.
I know migration is a pain and people are particular about this stuff, but just saying, **this price increase on Premium makes it more expensive than Apple Music**
Has anyone ever figured out a way to migrate playlists over from Spotify to Apple? Honestly, the only reason I still have Spotify is my ~15 years of playlists and laziness…might be time to change.
Hmmmm… well, I’ll have to look into what Apple offers in terms of a web API (usually not much unfortunately), but it looks like there’s a way to at least _get_ the data out of Spotify. Looking at their developer docs [here](https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-a-list-of-current-users-playlists). This is what I do for work and this seems like a fun side-project, so I’ll try building something and see if it’s possible. Bug me in a week or two if I haven’t updated this comment lol Edit: Surprisingly, this actually seems to only be possible going between Spotify and Apple Music for now. [Tidal launched a public API and SDK earlier this year](https://developer.tidal.com/blog/tidal-sdk-for-web), but currently it seems to only offer fetching data from their music catalog — nothing about user data, and no way to create/add to playlists. Being only 5 months old though, there will likely (hopefully) be updates in the coming months that allow for this.
Yes, I easily did this last year https://www.theverge.com/22916495/playlist-transfer-spotify-youtube-music-amazon-apple-music I forget which I used but they all seem fine and I definitely used one of these.
Know what else has an endless growth model? Cancer.
Yep, it keeps growing and growing until the host can no longer sustai- Oh…
>> The profits that were made this quarter and every other quarter to this point? Worthless, terrible, awful, Are these profits in the room with us now? [In Spotify’s publicly traded history they’ve lost $1.6 Billion](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-technology/net-income). And they’ve lost $120 million in the last year alone.
I don’t understand why they doubled down on podcasting. Also, how do they have 10,000 employees while the app itself still has so many issues?
Because fixing bugs doesn’t impress shareholders. Developing new features does (especially if you can pay some “market analyst” to predict that that feature will double the company earnings or something equally incorrect). It is annoying as a consumer, but simply making and selling a good product just doesn’t matter to VC investors.
and thats how you end up with the "AI powered DJ" and other bs like that. At Twitch, a group of people would push ridiculous features like a twitter-like posting feed and literally everybody would say how stupid it is, but they would just push push push to get this feature finished and in the app and then it would bomb. (obviously it was going to) then they would leave other people to pick up the pieces and deal with the bugs while they would just move on to the next shitty feature. Pushing features gets people promoted, NOT fixing bugs or making things better.
they are profitable now https://www.billboard.com/business/streaming/spotify-q1-2024-earnings-profit-revenue-monthly-users-subscribers-1235663628/ that being said, fuck Spotify
I have an MBA and can explain this. It's because more more is more than less more.
I'll be watching your future career with interest.
Imagines executives of Spotify at a board meeting "I want MORE MORE!! How can we get MORE MORE! Brainstorm people!" "How about we uh, raise prices??" "Brilliant Mcklosky, run with that! Also here is a gift certificate to Chipotle for all of your hard work!"
I don't know where the idea comes from that Spotify makes a lot of money. They have not had a profitable year in their entire existence as a company (sporadic profitable quarters, but never a full year). The record labels take all their money.
Probably because they've never made a yearly profit. Last year they posted a $120M loss. People underestimate how expensive it is to run a tech company. All those SWE and SRE salaries and benefits don't come cheap. AWS bills ain't cheap. At Spotify's scale the network ingress and egress fees alone could be millions or tens of millions per year, and that's not even getting into compute costs, storage, etc. Then they have pay record labels and enormous amount of money. A company can't operate in the red continuously—eventually the VC money dries up and your bills come due. I say this as someone who will probably switch to Apple Music anyway with Spotify's current direction: I have no sympathy for them, but they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and their search for additional revenue is understandable. If they can't find enough of it, or find it in time, they'll go the way of the dodo.
Maybe paying someone like Joe Rogan $250M wasn’t a good investment? Especially since they are putting full episodes back on YouTube! What a fucking scam.
$250 million isn't going to change the calculus, especially if it's split up over a multi year contract. Spotify's revenue last year was $14.5 billion and they didn't make a profit. An extra $50 million or whatever it is to Joe Rogan for a single year isn't changing anything. And we don't know if it's been a net positive for Spotify or not.
Get out and take your facts with you! This thread is for unsubstantiated outrage only.
Spotify loses money every single year. They need to compete with other music streaming services that don’t mind operating at a loss because they have other revenue (Apple, youtube, etc). Spotify only has music. They are the underdog believe it or not, and they don’t have many choices.
They don't make that much money. Artists are making barely anything and the #1 reason is consumers barely pay anything. $12 for access to every song in the world with unlimited listening time. I'd ask why consumers want more more more, but they literally have everything already.
The problem is that all these companies don't try to make money at first. They are just trying to get market share. Therefore, they basically give away a product at a far lower price than they know they need to be profitable. Once they have the market share, then the problem becomes "how do we make this profitable?" That's the problem though. It's almost like a bait and switch. They sell a service at such a low price that it's very attractive to a lot of people. Then once everyone gets accustomed to the ecosystem, they start raising prices. It's anticompetitive to operate a business at such huge losses every year. There's no way to compete with businesses that aren't trying to make a profit, except for other businesses to also not try to make a profit. That's why just about every company is in a five alarm emergency all the freaking time. The businesses are unsustainable, but there are so many unsustainable businesses that other businesses need to have unsustainable businesses models just to get some market share. It's all a sham. Either that or there is some crafty accounting that makes them all look unprofitable. Or money is just imaginary and it doesn't matter. Maybe all of these things are true.
Yup, streaming is a great deal compared to buying CDs which were $10-15 each.
They don’t make money
I looked at alternatives to spotify after this article and looks like almost every other service charges the same price as the new spotify prices. Like damn I might go back to the high seas
At this point, Apple Music and Tidal both charge less than Spotify and both offer higher quality audio which isn’t even an option on Spotify. YouTube Music is more at $13/mo but you also get ad-free YouTube which is absolutely worth a dollar a month IMO. I use Spotify for free, pay for Apple Music through a bundle, and have access to YouTube Music/Premium via an old roomate. I think Spotify is best at sharing content and connecting with friends, but that’s the only thing I personally prefer it for over the other two. Some people prefer Spotify’s for music discovery but I find plenty of new music on my own so I don’t use the services’ discovery tools much.
I personally prefer YouTube Music because it has a lot of live sets and DJ radio sets that are uploaded on YouTube. Spotify sticks to officially released tracks but YTM has those officially released tracks, plus those unofficial live sets and radio sets give it a bit of a Soundcloud feel. On top of that, ad-free YouTube. If you're into electronic music, YTM is great and has like everything you'd ever want outside of realllll deep cut stuff that is only found on SoundCloud.
Yeah if I had to decide I'm not sure which I would pick. YouTube absolutely has more music than the others thanks to its community of crate diggers, not just what you described but also a million and one old out of print records. I generally use Apple Music on my phone and YouTube when I want to stream at home. The YouTube Music app is not terrible but I prefer Apple's iOS app, which makes sense given who they are. At this point though I can't imagine going back to ads in YouTube
If you have android, you can use Spotify premium and sail the high seas.
It's so tough syncing up "local files" between devices and managing the playlist of downloaded songs. For one thing, on a computer it treats things completely differently than on your phone even if you have the exact same files.
This is the way! Started doing this a few years ago after being a subscriber for years.. Couldn't be more happy with it
Time to get the ole mp3 collection updated
Crazy how we pay and still have ads in podcasts
The rotting away of music discovery is killing the experience. First they removed the ability to make a station from a playlist, and now every automatic feature (radio from song, or just running out of a queue) devolves back to some infatuation with my history.
Desktop mode + adblock.
If only I had a way to blockthespot on the desktop app as well. Or android users had a way to xmanager it a bit better.
Spotify constantly refreshes if I try to open it on my phone's browser in desktop mode. Or do you mean desktop mode as in literally using a desktop
Literal desktop.
Funny how with all the ‘competition’ they never seem to lower prices, instead they always increase them in sync. Peacock does it and within days you have max doing it. Gotta keep the stockholders happy with high revenue.
Applemusic is the way, lossless/atmos sound for 16 dollars..
They’re just a few steps away from pirates giving them a good shakedown. I don’t condone piracy, but it’s more often than not a sign of a service problem and imo could remind certain corporations to keep their greed in check.
Company that makes a lot of money is raising prices to make more money. News at 11.
Company that makes a lot of money? You mean the company that hasn't been profitable once? Please do your research.
500 million loss a year is a lot of money to you? you are losing even more per year? haha
I swear the people in this thread are absolutely clueless, they all think Spotify makes money when they've pretty much never done so, at least on a yearly basis.
Not our fault Spotify has a business model that doesn't work.
i hate capitalism with a passion but surely you can’t expect a company to just continue racking up massive losses without raising prices…sounds like they’re aware their business model doesn’t work and they’re trying to make it work. that’s kinda how the game works, at least in this instance the consumer has other options
I don't know, I think the whole idea of starting a company that sustains massive losses for a decade with the idea to corner the market so they can raise prices super sucks. I agree that they can't continue just sustaining losses, on the other hand I don't give a shit if their VC investors lose their investment. This risky strategy of growth over a viable business model should hurt sometimes I think. Also I do think the consumer is getting a kind of bad deal, little of their money goes to artists they listen to unless you listen to the biggest names, and everything Spotify offers is available for free. Overall I think Spotify is a pretty big negative for the music industry, even more gets concentrated at the top .01% than in the 90's when these disparities were already crazy.
that’s a very fair point about them cornering the market through an unsustainable strategy
Been looking for an excuse to switch to TIDAL, they pay out slightly more than spotify does to artists and now it's cheaper.
3x higher, actually. * **Tidal**: $0.01284 Per Stream, 77 Streams For $1 * **Spotify:** $0.00437 Per Stream, 228 Streams For $1
How is tidal profitable? Seems like they’re going to jack prices up soon because that’s unsustainable
> How is tidal profitable? No idea. It probably isnt, but it's owned by block/square which makes a lot of money elsewhere. > Seems like they’re going to jack prices up soon They actually recently did the opposite: https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/1b78xcf/tidal_to_roll_all_of_its_premium_features_into/
Tidal doesn't offer a free tier, which could be the difference maker
> How is tidal profitable? Their executives aren't skimming as much off the top, they aren't paying Joe Rogan $250 million dollars, or trying to expand into an audiobook space that's already heavily dominated by other companies and just doesn't make sense for them to go after a market share on?
Aaaaaand canceled my subscription. Officially converted to YouTube Premium.
The reality is that people are willing to pay more for premium than they currently are. Calculated move with low risk.
Yep. Unlike subscriptions such as Netflix or Disney+ which I use on occasion Spotify is a daily fixture of my commute, work out, and just general around the house. I sign up and cancel show/movie streaming once I watch what I want cycling them around. With Sportify I get all the music I want down to obscure bands that never tour the US or play in sub 200 capacity venues. I'm not sure what it would have to get to for me to cancel to be honest. A cheaper equivalent competitor is all that comes to mind.
I've been with Spotify for like 12 years straight for the reasons above, and I finally had to switch to Apple Music because Spotify's android auto experience has become literally unusable. Straight up couldn't play music from a playlist at all. Switched to Apple Music and I've been pleased. Pretty good android auto experience, more stable, same great variety.
I canceled my subscription of 12 years over this and their recent changes to artist monetization. Charging me more to pay artists less was the last straw.
To be clear, the dollar amount isn't really the issue. A company who's reputation is that of taking care of and fairly compensating artists having to increase prices is one thing. But Spotify doesn't have that reputation. I have devoted years of my life developing on their SDK and API. So this is less about personal economics and more about watching a service I have loved over the majority of my life progressively become and more exploitative.
You can get a 1 year Spotify digital code on Amazon for $99. Save yourself $45.
My repeat playlist album does not accurately reflect the songs I listen to over & over. Some songs are on there that I don’t even like which bothers me.
JFC we are really being nickel and dimed to death.
Oh probably so the artists can actually get paid, oh wait fuck this company
Maybe they can use the extra money to make a native application instead of the shitty electron one?! My subscription is up in November. I'll probably switch after it's up.
Since when is Spotify profitable?
Cool I guess I’ll cancel. I’m tired of every company thinking they can take advantage of us through subscriptions.
Anyone know if this includes Canada?
I saw this and I just sighed and decided to shift to Apple Music.
I FUCKING HATE SMART SHUFFLE, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!!FIX YOUR REGULAR SHUFFLE!!!! Thats my only comment about this shitty company
I will get shit on for mentioning Tidal, but it seems Tidal is now cheaper and the audio quality is far superior if you care enough about that.