Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.
> I think Spotify might actually do better by creative innovative new engineering features and improvements
If the problem is user acquisition, you don't get there with engineering improvements. Only exception is if those tech/product improvements are for increasing virality.
Yes they'll probably spend the money on marketing / PR, which makes sense since that's likely where the bottleneck (or foreseeable bottleneck given the other players in the industry) in their business is now.
> 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.
>No, they are NOT successful for the reasons you state. Apple Music does that.
Which is neither here nor there. Apple music came later, and Spotify already had a headstart, a good UI, a good selection, and a good free plan.
Spotify, Pandora caught on because they were the first good streaming solutions, at the time bandwidth, mobile phones, etc, were in place and ripe for streaming. Not because of their recommendations...
>Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Not try to stay competitive
That's a reductionist way of looking at it, but an alternative way would have been what Daniel said on that letter; They were "more productive and less efficient and they needed to be both".
From my ivory tower I do see some things that could have been done differently, such as adding only one new offering (maybe just podcasting), or rely more in contractors than employees and set the temporary expectation of the roles up front.
> happy to pay Spotify for their collection, new music discoverability, and availability, while also hating their podcast junk
Spotify is fast entering that size of product where users who use it most all use different subsets of features. I’m there for the music and just thinking of Spotify as a podcast player feels weird. Yet I have friends who use it for nothing but podcasts.
>I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.
> Spotify should definitely allow users to shift self created playlists
If their ultimate goal was to make a universally beloved product, they should absolutely do this. But their ultimate goal is presumably to make money, so I don’t expect them to make it easier for their customers to leave unless they’re forced to by regulation or an improbable level of churn over this particular issue. I’m not arguing that it’s morally right (or wrong, for that matter), but it’s exactly what I’d expect them to do given their incentives.
> a tech company that gives absolutely no fucks for the preferences of their paying customers.
I suspect that end-user subscriptions contribute a relatively small amount to total revenue. Their most valuable customers would be ad reps.
That said, I think Spotify does a pretty good job making the end-user experience very nice. It's fast, reliable, relatively bug-free, has great integrations (it's a better sonos controller than the real sonos controller,) and the best catalog going. Criticizing the finer points is a useful exercise, but, personally, I'm not seeing any dealbreakers.
"So with that being the case, couldn't this problem be solved? All it will take is a push for bands to stay away from huge labels and for listeners to find that music. That's where Spotify should come in.
What's interesting about this entire thing is that a long tail company like Spotify is potentially able to shift the power from the shit that most major labels produce to better and more meaningful music. If Spotify can find a way to direct people's tastes away from most major label garbage, they might be able to solve this issue."
In response to this there was an older article posted here about some of the numbers behind Spotify: http://pansentient.com/2011/04/spotify-technology-some-stats...
One quote in particular speaks to your point, interestingly in a section called "The Short Tail?":
"During a week-long analysis of all music played via Spotify:
88% of track accesses were for the most popular 12% of all tracks on Spotify.
79% of server requests were for the most popular 21% of all tracks on Spotify."
While it might be a nice idea that Spotify could somehow shift user taste towards more independent artists, the numbers here seem to say that people go to Spotify for mainly popular, culturally relevant tracks. I think a company attempting more of what you're saying is the YC company Earbits with their model focusing on discovery of smaller artists. Personally I'd rather listen to popular music I know on Spotify, and I think most people feel the same way. I just wish there was a viable business model there. Music is a very tough vertical.
The future has got to hold more ways to relate to music than the main apps of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., which push music in a very specific, generic way. Mostly around top 40, opaque personalizations, algorithms and “algotorial”.
We’re never getting back to a place where your identity is defined by which record store you go to.
But shouldn’t 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener?
> Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience.
Which is particularly surprising since they have multiple teams of highly compensated product people who are supposed to be guiding the overall product direction and preventing just that kind of incoherence.
Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.
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