Yes I noticed the sound was on Apple Music streaming was better than my cd collection. I’ve bought from HD tracks as well. My main wish would be that iTunes sold lossless tracks but doesn’t look like that will happen.. even though I doubt it would disrupt their streaming business
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Spotify Raises Prices for Second Time in 12 Months, Now More Expensive Than Apple Music
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I own 100%. The distribution company takes a small cut, not nearly enough to account for that amount. Many of my streams are now coming from Facebook (a recent phenomenon for me), which has one of the lowest payouts for streaming services.
My point was that Spotify should pay at least the same as Apple to artists before raising prices or at least the price increase should pay more to artists.
The fact that they're raising prices more than Apple Music, the fact that there's no indication that this price increase is increasing pay to artists, the fact that they have a larger paid subscriber marketshare all tell me Spotify is being greedy, inefficient, or made terrible deals (perhaps they need to pay Joe Rogan).
How much exactly the artist should get or how much I'm willing to pay per stream is largely irrelevant to the point I'm making.
Fair enough. I agree they are probably inefficient and/or the ad revenue is not matching subscription income. Apple Music doesn’t suffer from a substantial “free” user base that leans on the ad revenue to pay the bills with.
I don't listen to enough music to consider paying for it.
Spotify will sometimes give me 30 minutes commercial free if I listen to an ad.
Like there's a choice. That does not happen with playlists only albums.
I get to listen to most of an old LP without commercials.
My favorite playlist is the American Graffiti soundtrack.
A few songs then a few commercials and they are the same ones over and over.
I rarely listen to YouTube Music but never seem to get commercials.
If Apple Music had a free version with ads, I'd use it.
My favorite service is AccuRadio which doesn't have an ad free upgrade.
They pick the music which I prefer.
Spotify will sometimes give me 30 minutes commercial free if I listen to an ad.
Like there's a choice. That does not happen with playlists only albums.
I get to listen to most of an old LP without commercials.
My favorite playlist is the American Graffiti soundtrack.
A few songs then a few commercials and they are the same ones over and over.
I rarely listen to YouTube Music but never seem to get commercials.
If Apple Music had a free version with ads, I'd use it.
My favorite service is AccuRadio which doesn't have an ad free upgrade.
They pick the music which I prefer.
I have seen no scientific evidence that anyone can hear the difference in quality between CD audio and higher than CD audio quality, no matter the quality of their gear (With a stereo track).
Most/All of the difference comes from the fact that CDs are at 44.1Khz and external DACs operate at multiples of 48 e.g. 96Khz. That upscaling that has to be done introduces aliasing artefacts which at least for me is very noticeable.
Especially for most people 30 years and older. If you wear glasses chances are high your hearing is also maybe just 98 or 95% of what it was when you were 18. If you are 40 or 50 you can't convince me you hear a difference between different copression music services.
This gave me the opportunity to switch from Spotify Family to Apple One Premier (was already paying for the 2TB iCloud subscription a month anyway). Plus with kids, they can now use Apple Arcade which is a benefit and offsets some cost differences between the two.
It sounds par the course for any subscription-based product - which is that it makes sense for people who use the service heavily, but less so for lighter users.
Right now, Apple Music costs $11 a month, while a single on iTunes is $1.48 (in Singaporean local currency), which works out to about 7.5 singles a month, or 90 singles a year. Barring me blasting random playlists in the background while I commute to work or do my work at my desk, I find myself maintaining about 4 playlists that I play intermittently, and which probably costs me about $30-40 to recreate, and those songs stick around even if I stop paying for Apple Music (albeit in a somewhat lower quality format).
It also reminds me of how, when I was collecting Magic: The Gathering cards a while back, I quickly realised that it made more financial sense to simply buy the cards I needed to create my deck individually, then purchase tons of booster packs in the hopes of scoring some expensive rare.
So what I see happening is that as the prices of streaming services continue to rise, the people who stick around are those "power users" who are constantly streaming and discovering new content 24/7, while the lighter users decide it's no longer worth their money, and start looking for alternatives such as buying their music Ala-carte or even resorting to piracy. Apple still has their Apple One bundle; Spotify is just one app / service.
Anybody familiar with Spotify's business model understands that they are pretty well backed into a corner financially. They are consistently losing money despite growing revenues. This price increase was done somewhat out of desperation. Better normalize it now before they can no longer sell the profitability story to investors.
I thought the CEO said content was free? Why would they be raising prices on "free" content?
To me, $9.99 seems like a decent price. $9 might actually make me think about subscribing
Then again, I can't get over the fact that Spotify rakes in billions but pays artists almost nothing. And yet they have the money to pay $250,000,000 to a podcaster
Then again, I can't get over the fact that Spotify rakes in billions but pays artists almost nothing. And yet they have the money to pay $250,000,000 to a podcaster
$250,000,000 would have made a lot of struggling musicians happy.
Seems the needs of 1 outweighed the needs of the many.
And doing it failed to attract new listeners willing to pay...
I lost 70 lbs with a cheapo planet fitness membership years ago. Best money i ever spent
Well, the double standard exists because forum discussion is typically based on a combination of convenience, personal preference, aspiration, ignorance, or more often then not just “I don’t care”.
I mean, you're not advocating that a system rigged against musicans / artists should be kept inplace, right? You’d agree that nasty businesses exploit musicians by monopolizing the distribution and airing of it.
Like just how easy is it to criticize how horrible is it that Apple gets away with the monopoly of their own mobile products with the App store! But, the rush to the defense of Goggle when they *actually* were being anti-competitive by selectively offering specific developers 0% cut / tax because if they refused to list in Google Play and made their own app store or exclusively listed in some else's that would harm Google Play.
This isn't to say that Apple is good and noble and can do nothing wrong, but convenience of “argument” is at play here.
For 20 dollars per month, you might want to just buy each month an album or two and own your music again; this entire renting concept is nonsense.
It’s not that you can’t buy albums. Or listen to podcasts for free. Or, torrent your collection. But, if renting was entirely nonsensical it wouldn’t sell. Or would be a fraction of the sales of digital and/or physical albums or individual song sales.
Nothing stops you from also purchasing along side the “rental” if the advantage of a subscription dissipates. Generally though, few pop songs maintain their interest over the years. So, I’m not gonna be “rekt” if I cancel my sub, myself.
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As someone with a 1000 or so CDs, its just easier to have streaming access.
With Apple Music, I get CD or better quality and not have to be where the CD is to listen to it.
I can also broaden my listening to other albums I dont own.
Or get recommendations on what might suit my taste.
I have discovered quite a lot of new tracks and artists from curated playlists.
While nothing matches liner notes and CD booklets, AM often displays Artist info as well on my Apple TV and lyrics.
And videos sometimes.
All in all, it's worth the sub fee.
Occasionally there are CDs that arent available on streaming.
Sometimes artist choice. Sometimes band politics. A few times there are only rerecordings available when banc member disputes stop all forms of original recordings be able to purchase or listen to. In those cases I'm glad I have physical media still (or someone shared on torrent sites).
Ok, so lets work this out, based on 2 things we know:
- You are willing to pay $9 a month, or .30 cents a day for a streaming service.
- A streaming service cannot or will not lose money and needs to make money on top of what it is paying to artists.
Days = 24 hours
Hours = 60 minutes
60 minutes * 24 hours = 1440 Minutes in a day
1440 daily minutes * 30 days = 43200 minutes in a month
Guessing an average song is 3.5 minutes (I have no idea but its a start)
43,200 / 3.5 = 12,342 songs per month
12,342 songs /30 days = 411 songs a day
If you listened to 411 songs in a day your sub could only pay the artist .0007 cents a song AND the streaming service would get nothing. Imagine a 24 hour retail location that uses a streaming service for background music.
Ok, listening 24/7 isn't representative of an average customer so lets assume you listen to streaming music an average of 4 hours a day.
4 hours * 60 minutes/hour = 240 minutes
240 minutes a day * 30 days = 7200 minutes
7200 minutes / 3.5 minute average song = 2057 songs a month
2057 songs a month / 30 days = ~68 songs a day
From above your subscription of $9/mo is .30 a day
If you listened to 68 songs a day your sub could only pay the artist .0044 per stream AND the streaming service gets nothing.
NOW... many people think the artist should get paid more but doesn't want to pay high sub costs, this dog won't hunt. If we factor in .01 per stream for artists or copyright holders:
@ 4 hours a day you will listen to 68 songs, costing the service .68 /day in artist fees.
.68 * 30 days = $20.40/month for the streaming service to break even.
Lets say the streaming service needs a 50% margin to operate = $ 40.80 a month subscription.
Are you willing to pay $ 40.80 a month so that artists can get .01 per stream? Didn't think so.
If we apply this math to 24/7 which a streaming company must consider a percentage of its customers do:
@ 24 hours a day you will listen to 411 songs per day, costing the service $4.11 /day in artist fees.
4.11 * 30 days = $123.30/month for the streaming service to break even. This is the maximum amount you could cost a steaming service per month.
Again, figuring in a 50% margin for the streaming service that is $246.60 a month to pay artists .01 per stream, will you pay that subscription cost? Didn't think so.
Unless my math is wrong, and please check it, quit complaining about artist compensation unless you are willing to buck up!
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It's hard to fact-check calculations that are based off assumptions. For example, I subscribed to Apple Music right from day 1, but I will consider myself a fairly infrequent listener of music. There are times when I went days without listening to any music, because I had such a long podcast queue to work through, or I am just that busy. Certain days, I play a short playlist while walking to work or performing some chores, averaging maybe half an hour a day?
So for every one "power listener" who streams all day simply because he can, there is probably other "sleeping subscriber" like myself who is still paying out of inertia and is considered "pure profit" by the streaming service because he is not incurring any costs. I don't know what percentage of subscribers fall into each category (do we have numbers as to the average listening time per user?), so right away, I would question the figure of 4 hours per day per subscriber quoted by you.
Second, you have also demonstrated why music streaming is an inherently wasteful business model - because the money is skimmed by so many layers until only scraps are left behind for the musicians at the end of the day. The problem isn't that people aren't willing to pay more; the problem is that most of that extra money they pay will not be going to the creators anyways. If Apple Music decided to charge me $10 more per month tomorrow, but they are able to guarantee that every extra cent paid will go towards artistes, I have no qualms about agreeing to the higher monthly price there and then. But if you tell me that out of that $10, maybe only about 50 cents will be left for them at the end of the day, then there are probably more efficient ways of supporting the artistes that I do care about, even if it's donating towards a charity they care about.
What this just proves is that music streaming is not a sustainable business model, and maybe we should never have supported Spotify getting into this market and conditioning users to expect an all-you-can-eat buffet of access to music for just $10 a month. Maybe the best thing that can happen is for Spotify to go belly up, though it does nothing for the streaming services currently owned by tech giants, who have the resources to keep propping it up indefinitely.
Since we all care about app developers and are very concerned about them being able to keep all but perhaps the 3% credit card payment charge, perhaps as you state, the ire that is being directed at Spotify or Apple Music, etc be directed a the other parasitic drain(s). The way i see it, effectively the musicians have to “sideload” their music through tours so they get to keep all the proceeds minus roadie and venue pay. Should be an option, but not the only solution.