so long story

what do you people think about Spotify....please discuss the pros & cons of it, the business side of it and everything else...do you think it's an app for the long run or just another "trend" or something which will disappear sometime soon?
what about it's popularity? what do you think of that?

let me know, share like comment thank you

 

Last edited: Aug 8, 2020

I really like having my music on Computer. It gives me a better feeling somehow

 

My wife loves Spotfiy, especially when she is doing the dishes. She just wants background noise, and doesn't care what plays next.

Myself, I prefer a physical collection of music and be in absolute control over what I listen to

 

Last edited by a moderator: Aug 8, 2020

Yeah right.
So you aren't going to accuse women doing the washing up as sexist? (Which is OBVIOUSLY what I was implying you would do, with my comment!)
Amazing!

 

Actually, my wife and I have a mutual agreement. I'll cook and she will do the dishes, it works. My comment was bordering on baiting I'll give you that

 

Spotify has the younger generations in the bag. They dont know what an MP3 is.. If its not stored in an iCloud automatically, they dont know where to store it. Spotify was a groundbreaking game changer. Its DEFINATELY not a fad. Mp3's on tiny media player (ala the iPod) were the fad.. CD's were the fad.. Cassette tapes and walkmens, Sirius, etc.... all of those were just getting us closer to the King of Music playback.. All the On-Demand music you can want, all stored in the cloud, that streams instantly in high quality, on a device EVERYONE has on them 24/7.. Can be played in your car, on your headphones, on your home stereo system.. on your Game Console, computer, phone...

I love spotify personally. I have found MANY new artists that I would have never found without Spotify's AI finding songs and "Enhancing" my playlists. 95% of those songs I dont like.. but 1 in 100 songs is a gem, and I find a new band, more music.

I either listen to one of my own playlists I have built, or I let spotify recommend me songs based on my playlist, and hit next 100 times before finding a good song, going to that bands page, listening to their top ten, etc..

 

I've always been been paranoid about a digital blackout, a systemwide Internet shutdown, for which I've been saving the bests songs and movies for years in mp4, mp3 formats. I've just forgotten all about it in recent years. I suspect those discs will die off sooner than the Internet fails, or maybe a new computing paradigm will turn them obsolete.

Back to reality, I used to love Spotify.

I've ditched it because for a few cents less I pay YouTube (I know, pay Google, me moron). The thing is I get YouTube music and no ads in any platform I use for less than the price of Spotify. There's one thing I've discovered: YouTube music is better than Spotify in one important regard: It doesn't have an agenda to push payola-sponsored artists in playlists. In Spotify, you choose and artist, listen to them and then Spotify pushes music you've never heard of before. You Tube music learns your preferences and feeds you the music you want, not someone else's you didn't sign up for. When it makes suggestions, they bring up related songs that are like "wow, I'd forgotten all about that song." Of course, I'm an old fart. If you are young and in search of new musical experiences, maybe this feature isn't that cool, or maybe it is if you listen to top 40.

 

spotify is shit

maybe the worst stream service

you can actively search and not wait for people to choose for you. You could search music blogs/news/magazines/etc.

I have a lot of CDs from de 90s that still looks good, plays good and none of them has any kind of problem.
I trully ask myself what people to do fuck their media. In fact I still have diskets with msdos6.22, win3.11, dos games from 80s. All of them still works. I have an old pentium 100 just for fun

 

Streaming = Not yours
Streaming = cheap content

Music downloaded on pen drive to the car.
Films downloaded on pen drive to tv.

Spotify is like radio. I never discovered any artist on streaming services. They tent to show comercial white non harming content.
Do you want to curate your music? You have to take a listen, 3 sec is enough to select what could interest me. I have a wide taste, but not to cover all the shit is published now on streaming services.

 

I think the key word here is "curate". I worked for a while in the 90s as a recording engineer/producer, and routinely was hired by Capitol Records in Hollywood to help them develop & record new artists that their A&R departments had discovered. Many went on to become famous and many didn't.

During that time, I saw the inside of the industry that I didn't like. The concept of "units" (ie. records sold) and what they thought was their role in artist career development. Like this was a job, or some financial transactional thing. It wasn't, at least not to me (and I think this was shared by most of my musician clients). The music was above all of that - like the artist transcended the world of business, etc. by creating something that was authentic to them. But the industry just wanted to move more units.

Today we don't make records like we used to. The records are now some digital file of ones and zeros. We convert that into sound that we enjoy. But the process has a lower cost of entry, and lower cost of distribution. The record labels are like some endangered species now. For many, this is a great endpoint. But for the average listener, although flawed humans used to act as gatekeepers to being heard, now it is algorithms and we've deferred all the human touch of curation to AI & bots.

Spotify are the greatest beneficiaries of this. They don't pay the salary of A&R reps, or talent scouts, or recording engineers, producers, etc. They don't pay the salaries of marketing staff, publishing, etc. They just let the data center do the work. It is lazy, and unfulfilling. We try and make our technology act more "human", even trying to create artificial and synthetic versions of ourselves. In truth, the transactional economy will benefit because they won't have to pay humans to do anything. But the musician just wants their authentic story to be told and heard.

I like the idea of "ownership" but it is fleeting. I could have a massive record collection, but at some point it appears sad. Like a shelf of dusty trophies of the past. I get that the burden of storing it falls on all of us, but at the same time I also feel that when I spend countless hours these days as a recording engineer, taking the hopes & dreams of my clients (musicians) and trying to produce something that sounds incredible, I am doing it because I feel there is a need for persistence - that their creation should live on beyond them. And if the endpoint is to load up a file to a data center and hope that it will be there in 20 years time, I've got my doubts. And they are furthered by the fact that if the barrier to entry is so low that 90,000 songs per day are uploaded to Spotify, Spotify becomes the landfill of hopes & dreams - where music goes to die.

And that is sad. I don't know the answer - I just know the problems.

 

it's a great app.

 

Spotify has huge variety, great personalization, and easy access across devices, but it struggles with low payouts for artists and lower sound quality compared to other services. From a business perspective, it’s not yet consistently profitable but continues to grow, especially with podcasts. Its popularity remains strong, particularly among younger users, and it’s shaping the music industry. It’s likely here for the long run, not just a trend.

 

As a musician - I find it abhorrent. Like DJs. Although, DJs are people too, I wish them well despite the destruction they've wreaked on us musicians.

As regards the business side of it, I just took two screenshots: these are the Biggest Companies in the World by Market Cap.



As you can see, Spotify is currently the 87th most valued company in the world at $168 Billion. Please look at the companies below carefully: Spotify has a higher valuation than Adobe, Blackstone, Charles Schwabb, Shell and Sony. Those are not small corporations. Shell is a major oil company. If we go further down, there's HSBC and Mitsubishi, Allianz, and oh yeah: Boeing, Airbus, and CitiGroup.

Let that sink in: Spotify is worth more than Boeing or Airbus - without which planes the global economy would screech to a halt.



Spotify is an abomination for musicians, just as Amazon has been an abomination for booksellers and brick and mortar stores (the Mall, essentially), but it's not going anywhere - whatever the trends. Trends don't spring out of thin air anymore than entire countries or peoples converted to this or that religion, or spontaneously started speaking English, French or Spanish. Lots of stuff had to go down to lay the groundwork for this and that to happen.

My point: when Wall Street says your company is worth $168B, you've the means, the business intelligence, to direct the trends - not just stay on top of them. A few companies have floundered or gone entirely, out of stubbornness (Kodak, Polaroid, Nokia and Blackberry come to mind, and closer to this topic: Blockbuster Video), but we're never ever going back to the iPod, or Walkman, or turntable again.

 

I sold all my old vinyl to a Japanese collector recently. I was really happy with the amount of money I got. I've kept my collection of around 600 CDs but I don't tend to play them. I have all my music (around 40,000 tracks) on hard drives in lossless FLAC format. I use Spotify every day for listening to my playlists whilst doing non sexist washing up, gardening, cooking, decorating etc. I find it great for discovering new bands and artists. I find Spotify's suggestions brilliant. This year alone I've discovered at least 50 new artists that I really love.

 

I digitized my entire record collection via Spotify. It was very quick. Now, with just one click, you can listen to multiple digitized LPs one after the other. Depending on how you save them and label the folders, it saves a lot of time and is really very convenient.

With the "dBpoweramp" tool, you can see the format, bitrate, encoder, etc. of any MP3 track by hovering over it with your mouse. I'd say that compared to the 80s and 90s, when you would listen to a record all the way through while looking out the window with the cover in your hand, those days are over; life, or rather, we, have actually gotten a bit faster.

 

Never ending greed? Pure evil? Crimes against humanity? The crime of the century? ... do some research on this company, the companies it owns, the multi-billionaire owners and all their unprecedented shady tactics. The bottom line is this, if you put your music there or use it in way shape or form, you are funding the destruction of the independent arts, as well as complicate in the actual real world extermination of human beings through Spotify's alter ego company in the weapons manufacturing business. The old saying that "people are stupid", never rang more true. Seriously, you just cant make this shit up. But hey, so long as you "get yours!"