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Spotify Stops Making Dash-Mounted 'Car Thing' Just Five Months After Launch
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Is anyone really surprised? This was one of the stupidest devices to ever be made. And the market for such a device is probably so incredibly small. I'm sure all two of the people that bought one are happy they did when they did.
“This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings…”
🙄 FFS, the corporate BS language here is utterly ludicrous.
🙄 FFS, the corporate BS language here is utterly ludicrous.
I wouldn’t buy a car without CarPlay at this point - and that’s why this product failed.
I'd give them some credit. At least they made an effort to spend R&D in-house rather than copy.
Most other companies, especially the Chinese manufacturers, simply copy someone else's design and then re-label it as their own invention.
$32 million is a LOT (for a device like this).... but not surprising given that Spotify has never been a hardware company, so they were starting from scratch, with zero experience to go with, etc. And maybe the lesson here is.... they should stick to (music) streaming content, and simply forget their hardware aspirations.
Gosh, I wonder if investing a fraction of that money to finally make their app fully compatible with Siri and HomePod could have helped their margins by preventing some user churn?
A few years ago I was thinking that someone could make a device that could sync songs onto local storage in a vehicle, and be able to play that content while the user was driving. The user could choose what they wanted to listen to, and the sync software would alter the content of the local storage to better appeal to the users preferences. It would be kind of like turning the car into a rolling iPod, of sorts. *shrug* There are lots of ways for companies to develop technology for vehicles that would allow people to carry their musical choices with them. Something like that wouldn't nesessarily need any more of a connection but wifi from the user in their garage or carport. But I was one that wanted to install a striped down Mac Mini in my car to allow it to 'serve' music and perhaps other content.
Well did you buy one? You said it’s a bummer and you would’ve been the target market but if you didn’t buy one then there’s a reason why it’s being discontinued.
As to why I think they didn’t advertise this thing. I kind of remember hearing something about it a long time ago but I wasn’t really aware of it
I don’t think so. There’s a lot of people out there they don’t have CarPlay in their car. Not everyone drives a newer car.
CarPlay didn’t come out till 2018 and it wasn’t very common at first. The average age of cars in the USA is over 12 years and it’s increasing. That means the average age car in the USA does not have CarPlay. I’m not sure about other countries but I suspect they’re still quite a few older cars everywhere.
What killed this thing is lack of marketing to specify a use case. You have to show people how this thing is going to make what they’re doing better. How is this different than just plugging in an aux cable to the radio and putting the phone in the phone holder. Especially for that price. It looks like they tried to copy the design of an XM radio perhaps thinking that would make customers interested but no that was a terrible idea. People who have not had an XM radio won’t know about that and people who have probably don’t have one anymore for a reason.
You really have to wonder what Spotify's long term plan is to finally be profitable. At some point, continuing to blame Apple's 30% cut will no longer be able to mask the fact that their business model was simply never sustainable in the first place. Not to mention that this is lowered to 15% in the 2nd year anyways, and given that they also have users on android and other platforms who are presumably able to subscribe without having to pay those platforms their cut.
I feel it's only a matter of time before Spotify either merges with another company or gets acquired by one of the major platforms (I am guessing Microsoft) who has the capital to keep subsidising the service indefinitely.
I feel it's only a matter of time before Spotify either merges with another company or gets acquired by one of the major platforms (I am guessing Microsoft) who has the capital to keep subsidising the service indefinitely.
Wiki says CarPlay came out in 2014, my wife’s 2017 Hyundai has it.
Average car age might be increasing but the key factor is what age of car do Spotifys users use? I don’t think this device was going to win new users over really at this point.
I’d say most people have a smartphone so the age of the average Spotify user would be the same. With the economy getting worse people are keeping cars longer.
Spotify has a new theme song:
Car Thing...
You make my heart sting,
You cost me EVERY-THING... groovy...
Car Thing
Car Thing
I think I hate you
Car Thing...
You make my heart sting,
You cost me EVERY-THING... groovy...
Car Thing
Car Thing
I think I hate you
It's just a Bluetooth remote for your phone,
so if you can't connect your phone to the car then this wouldn't solve much.
Even if that’s true the installed base for CarPlay is getting ever larger. 8 years is a long time at this point.
I wouldn’t buy a car without it and I know a lot of others are the same.
I agree it's in most newer cars but I just don't think many people have newer cars. My current car is a 2014 so it doesn't have it but if I got a new one I would want it.
Because supply chain issues have driven component costs through the roof. This cuts into Spotify's margins, especially if sales volume is low.
This launched only 5 months ago. The supply chain issues esp for semiconductors was much worse a year ago than it is now.