Spotify is trapped financially because music streaming is largely a commoditized business where consumers will choose largely based on price so it can't raise prices to make a profit. It's big competitors have other revenue streams so they can bundle it, or subsidize it (Amazon music being "free."). Spotify's investors, venture capitalists, knew this, but they have been willing to lose money in the hopes that they would make their money back on an IPO, (didn't work) or get bought out.
Now strategy is simply to pump numbers, and they are willing to keep hemorrhaging money in the hopes that the numbers will be high enough that someone will buy them out. Again, problem is that music streaming is commoditized so there is a limited value to their music streaming business as there are a plethora of streaming businesses to buy if a big player wants to add streaming music to their business. Remember, they are all essentially offering the same licensed music, so anyone can enter game and then its "simply" a matter of marketing. Best hope for them is major player wants to monetize the 180 million users in some other way. Their worst fear is that Apple is about to bundle music with other services that will make AM even better proposition, or that their losses will continue to be huge and stock value plummets.
As the IPO gets released I’m hoping and betting Apple will do the following:
- Offer AM free trial with Mac purchase (I think this is slowly beginning to happen; prior to back to school I saw something like this from Apple).
- overhaul IOS iTunes and MacOS iTunes for more efficient navigation.
- Apple combines END user karaoke like future (better than Smule) to limited tracks at first.
- musicians and singers offering some form of musical lesson - not unlike what GarageBand does for playing instruments!!
- for the global win: Apple users will be allowed to upload their own created songs: complete with sample detection (to not violate rights), some form of statistics, and Apple offering replies from distributors or the big music players to offer you contracts with clear wording. The end user can choose to go independent (Apple will route funds similar to developers and App Store), allowing analytics similar to what developers now recently get since the beginning of this year.
Yup this last one will KILL Spotify.
Been using Spotify for over a year. Recently signed up for 4 month trial of AM. So far, every time (and I mean every time) I've asked Siri to play something, she gets it wrong. My family laughs. I just shake my head and go back to Spotify.
Just getting my personal (owned) music into my Apple Music library was a slow, painful exercise. I just don't see why people love AM so much?
I’m so Very PISSED with this! I signed up for AM last month directly on my SE.
- iOS does NOT back up your own music into iCloud! Grrrrrr!!
- some songs I have that where a unique version (ex The Bomb by Bucketheads a club remix of over 7mins) was replaced by a radio mix of under 4mins!! I’m SUPER F’ ING PISSSED as I noticed this in the very first bar and messsd up my workout from AW3
- there needs to be a very defined and clear cut way to disable songs being replaced (multiple selection/all). Even though I was asked to KEEP or REPLACE songs and chose keep after restoring from iCloud (some music remained).
Works most of time for me on iPhone and I can't remember HomePod getting it wrong. Maybe you have strange accent?
In 2018 the accent of a person should not really affect an AI too much. This highlights Siri limitation vs AM.
