Will Apple Music kill off Pandora and Spotify?

[TheColtr]

You were under the right impression; iTunes catalog does have more music (which is 42M), however only 30M will be streamable.

Actually I believe 37M will be streamable. So they will have a larger catalogue than any other service. Also think about all the exclusives iTunes gets. More than likely those will be on Apple Music before any other service.

 

[afallnstar]

I plan to switch from Pandora ONE to Apple Music. After a while, Pandora's small catalogue becomes pretty repetitive.

 

[Samtb]

The problem is that the free users are a drag on Spotify's profits, as they lose money on them. As said already here, all Apple has to do is start taking over a good portion of the people willing to pay, and Spotify will go out of business.

We currently subscribe to both Spotify and Beats. I prefer the Beats UI and recommendation system, so I hope that they keep all that's good about the current system and improve it in the (many) ways necessary. If that happens, I'll just have to convince my wife to switch from Spotify to the Apple Music family plan. Either way though, a $5/month savings isn't going to make or break us!

I think all getting rid of free streaming will do is make people go back to p2p or torrenting.
im sure Apple music will be popular but I don't think it will kill off other services or even dominate the market. There's just too much competition.

 

[zhenya]

I think all getting rid of free streaming will do is make people go back to p2p or torrenting.
im sure Apple music will be popular but I don't think it will kill off other services or even dominate the market. There's just too much competition.

For the wide market, p2p and torrenting is done for music delivery. It's an awful lot of work to search for, download, verify, and import an album when libraries 30 million tracks strong can be had at your fingertips for the cost of a couple of coffees a month. The music industry did pretty well with mp3's once a good store and delivery system was put in place. Inexpensive streaming isn't going to send people back to doing it manually in any large numbers.

Who knows what will happen with Apple Music. It may flop, it may turn out to be a big deal. One thing is that despite their commitment to making it cross-platform, they won't have the advantage of being pre-installed on Android, so they will have to convince an awful lot of those folks to change. Not sure how successful that will be...

 

[Samtb]

For the wide market, p2p and torrenting is done for music delivery. It's an awful lot of work to search for, download, verify, and import an album when libraries 30 million tracks strong can be had at your fingertips for the cost of a couple of coffees a month. The music industry did pretty well with mp3's once a good store and delivery system was put in place. Inexpensive streaming isn't going to send people back to doing it manually in any large numbers.

Who knows what will happen with Apple Music. It may flop, it may turn out to be a big deal. One thing is that despite their commitment to making it cross-platform, they won't have the advantage of being pre-installed on Android, so they will have to convince an awful lot of those folks to change. Not sure how successful that will be...

I think many people still prefer not paying.

 

[zhenya]

I think many people still prefer not paying.

I'm sure they do. But if the economics of free streaming eventually drive the companies offering it out of business, there won't be any free streaming to choose from. In that case the choice is between paying a nominal fee to have access to everything, or going back to pirating music which is significantly less convenient than streaming. What has been shown over and over for the last decade with digital media is that people are not averse to paying a fair price, but if the content is not made available to them in a format that is convenient to use, then even people who would like to pay will pirate the content. Since streaming is extremely convenient with only minor usage restrictions, I can't see people turning to pirating over paying a nominal amount.