> I'm not quite clear on why people are choosing spotify over google play music
Simple answer: I'm a tech literate person (I read HN and a dozen other sites) and I hadn't even heard of "google play music" until now.
So that's one reason.
The other is likely that Spotify is pretty aggressive with marketing here (Sweden). E.g. get a phone contract and you get a year of spotify etc.
But the most important reason is probably that after manty years on a product you get some lock-in. Now I wouldn't switch if the product was 10% better or if the price was 10% lower unless many of my friends switched and I could also port all playlists etc.
>> "- Spotify gives me limitless account (with ads) for free, this one not."
I'm happy about this. Maybe they can convince people music is worth paying money for and instead of wasting time selling ads they can spend time and money building a good product.
>> "- Spotify is even available as a web app,and desktop client which i use most. This one???"
>> - "The item you've requested is not currently available in the Swedish Store, but it is available in the U.S. Store."
Like most music/video services it's launching in one location (US) and planning to expand to others soon. e.g. iTunes Radio is still US only. Spotify took years to branch out of Europe.
>> What are the advantages I will gain if I switch from Spotify?
After a few hours of use the main benefit seems to be playlists. I've described how they work in another post on this thread so won't repeat but they seem infinitely more useful to me on this than playlists on Spotify (which I've been using for around 5 years).
> I payed for Google Music for a bit a while ago and I hated it and switch to Spotify.
It's always so interesting how people can have similar experiences but come out with completely different perspectives. For me, the Google Play Radio feature is the most important thing they have. It's like a Pandora that doesn't play you the same three songs over and over. When I would try and use the radio feature on Spotify it would play music that was not even close to the original other than it maybe being in the "alternative" category.
> For the average person not educated in monopolies or tech regulation, is there any incentive for them to switch to paying Spotify instead?
If it's 30% cheaper, that may be enough of an incentive. Though I don't know if that's the case here or if Spotify just eats the fee when you pay through Google.
> I think people severely overlook Google Play Music when they talk about online streaming services.
I just mentioned this above. It always seems to be Spotify this or Apple Music that. Play Music works great, and is even better that I'm grandfathered in at $7.99/month beta price.
> So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?
Aside from amount of content (which wasn't an issue earlier), I suspect the primary reason is that Pandora isn't available in Europe. I loved it so much (>5 years ago?) that I used as VPN, but this didn't quite work on my phone and ended up being too much of a bother.
Spotify's big advantage, like most monopoly-focused 'startups' is their monopoly. Not actually providing the best to their customers.
I can use Spotify without a VPN, it has a lot of stuff Pandora doesn't have, and I can share stuff with friends because everyone else also uses Spotify. It's difficult to compete with that.
> So because Google Play Music is worse at X, that means Spotify's X can't be bad?
It could be that, in most cases, we only think of the options as ones that we've been introduced to.
We're way too busy with daily life to really think in-depth about everything in hypothetical possibilities, such as "here's a way in which a music app that doesn't exist could do it better." Instead, (unless we're very passionate about music), we tend to only think about the options that have been presented to us.
> Before it there was no real competition to Spotify.
What about Google Music (or is it Google Play Music or just Play Music or just Play under a music category? ugh)? They were earlier and have been really good especially lately. Their initial iOS app was awful but I heard it has improved. There is also Groove music (which I guess is now XBox music?) but the Apps are awful for it. I got a Groove music subscription for the heavily discounted black friday sale and stopped using it after a few weeks simply because the apps are all absolutely horrific.
>Spotify objectively sucks compared to plenty of other services. Is it possible you haven't tried those other services?
It's just your personal experience that is different. Same for the other guy, same for me.
I've been on a paid accounts for Apple Music, Google Music, Yandex Music and even Youtube's adhoc solution for music. At least 1 year each (almost for entire time since the launch of Yandex music).
Spotify beats them all. Both recommendations and content (though we have to agree that content part can vary based on your location). Never had a chance to try Rhapsody.
>that when I pick some electro swing band it recommends death metal
That's how Google Music worked for me though, not Spotify.
Yandex had best UI but worst recommendation system (and lack of content).
Apple's recommendations are about as bad as Google's. Better UI but again - did not have music I wanted.
> Spotify vs Google Play Music is the perfect showcase for this. They both get the job done but Spotify is better in so many small ways. Meanwhile, instead of being improved, GPM is in the process of being abandoned for the new shiny thing, Youtube Music.
What degredation have you noticed that makes you think it is being abandoned?
> I think a lot of people would probably look at my distaste of Spotify and recommend another, more suitable, streaming platform like Apple music or Pandora
Just go to YTM?
I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much).
Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now.
I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.
> Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea.
I would say that Spotify does not compete with traditional media players, it competes with radio.
If i want to listen to my favorite songs, there is no reason to use Spotify for that. But if i want something different-but-similar and i do not really know what, because i am not very interested in music, then discoverability of new music by Spotify is game-changing.
> and there really isn't much of a difference except for the curated lists.
I recently switched to Play Music, because they seem to be much friendlier to my battery life than Spotify. I also prefer their algorithmic discovery features to Spotify's primarily human-curated approach (which inherently favours what's mainstream over what I like).
Only really exists on mobile. Spotify exists everywhere (hardware, all mobile platforms, all gaming consoles, etc.).
Google does not give a shit about their software past the barebones experience. Nobody in my family picks up Google software unless I or my brother push them to. It's just too confusing and badly supported in general.
I started using it when it was launched or shortly after, before most of the alternatives (including Youtube Music) even existed. It was great ~10 years ago.
I still use it because I'm invested into it: we have our premium family account, with all smart speakers configured to play songs using it, we have playlists, out of the music I like I know what's available and what's missing and I have acquired what's missing by other means (but switching to another service would mean different songs/artists would be missing, etc.)
Compound that with lack of time (work, parenting, etc.) and while the Spotify UX has really gone downhill, it would have to get really, really bad for me to switch...
> What surprises me most about your post is that someone actually worked on Google Play Music for multiple years. Doing what?
GPM has been offered as a service for nearly a decade and has numerous dramatic changes and improvements over the years. Google Play Music is not even its original name and it did not even originally offer a subscription. It was created as a service for streaming music you owned from the cloud.
> but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.
Worse, for which usecase?
I as a musician like to listen to full albums (as opposed to single songs) I like to manually read up on music and then listen to that specific music from that specific world region and era. Spotify can be neat to discover some starting points for that search, but it is arguably shit at the listening experience I am looking for. For people who don't care so much about what is playing in the background it is certainly doing a good job tho.
I need to listen a lot to mixes and recordings as well, and an MP3 player certainly has an easier UX for that, than the typical phone - plug it in and copy over. How would you do that on spotify? I use a nextcloud sync setup, which works — but setting that up to work flawlessly with your audio-player app (e.g. poweramp) can be a bit tricky at times.
So yeah, Spotify ftw. if you convinced yourself of that peculiar diet, to use your words.
Your experience does sound demoralizing. I am not sure I have had Spotify crash on me thus far and certainly not with any regularity. I think it's safe to assume that you have an untypically bad experience, because if what you described was true for most people, Spotify would have no users.
Which begs the question, why do you stick to it? There are competing services. How could they possibly do a worse job, in light of what you are describing?
Simple answer: I'm a tech literate person (I read HN and a dozen other sites) and I hadn't even heard of "google play music" until now.
So that's one reason.
The other is likely that Spotify is pretty aggressive with marketing here (Sweden). E.g. get a phone contract and you get a year of spotify etc. But the most important reason is probably that after manty years on a product you get some lock-in. Now I wouldn't switch if the product was 10% better or if the price was 10% lower unless many of my friends switched and I could also port all playlists etc.
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