> Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
All that matters is the original comment: "Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order."
Where reality is Spotify became available in 7 countries before attempting to expand in the US.
Which is, funnily, what you literally wrote in your edit:
> That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
> Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order.
Which is verifiably false.
Spotify launched in 2006, and expanded into the US in 2011. You truly believe that it never expanded in the EU in the intervening 5 years? How then did it launch in the UK in 2009? Or how did it have a million paying customers in the EU by the time they launched in the US?
> The only counterexample I can think of is Spotify as they seem to have never really focused on just one country.
Spotify was only available in Sweden for the initial 3 years, and after that they launched in the UK as well. 5 years after the local launch, they expanded into the US.
>> "- 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).
> 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.
> Whereas my entire music collection is available any time.
You carry your “easily accessible cloud storage” everywhere with you?
> I also heavily dispute that Spotify, Apple, etc lead to better search or discovery.
You don’t “dispute”. You “firmly believe”. As others already pointed out: I’d never have discovered as much music within my music tastes as I’ve done with Spotify.
There’s no chance in hell I could’ve stumbled on some indie band that is US-only while leaving in Sweden.
There are Swedish bands which are suddenly popular in Brasil and they go there on tours, which they never would’ve done without Spotify.
>, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€
Assuming you meant to write, "Spotify could have been as streaming service _and_ an MP3 shop" ...
No, Spotify didn't have the leverage in negotiations with Big Record Labels to offer streaming plus DRM-free mp3 files for 0.5€.
Apple is more powerful than Spotify and they eventually relented to Big Labels demands and added a more expensive tier of songs at $1.29 instead of all songs being just $0.99 pricing.
Too generalize... to consider the realism of any hypothetical alternative business models for Spotify to have, you also have to consider whether the Big Labels would have even made those ideas possible when Spotify was negotiating the licenses.
I feel like Spotify’s value is mainly to the big 3 music publishers to gain negotiating power against Apple/Alphabet/Amazon. It has existed since 2006, and still losing money. And lots of it.
> 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.
>A Spotify Premium user isn't the average music fan.
Disagree I consider myself the average music fan and the reason I like this service is that I have all my music with me where ever I go, even if its not my device. Other people I know who use Spotify are mostly average the other half isnt.
Spotify has converted me from a pirate in my younger days to a paid music subscriber.
>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...
> Find an average (non tech) IOS user, and try to get them to switch to these apps
You do know that Spotify has 600 million users? And that it got those users without practices like pushing its app in phone setup, account setup, settings, home screen, default music app, default music app in carplay etc.?
> As an aside, the source of this complaint being Spotify is interesting. I would love to know from artist who pays better between the two (because I dont think its spottify)
Neither pays artists directly. They pay money to rights holders. Why no one ever questions the rights holders is beyond my comprehension at this point.
> In MEA and North America we see the highest preponderance of desktop Spotify listening, on 46%, with MEA also reporting the lowest mobile listening figure of 56% (compared to North America’s 61%).
> Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually.
Clearly this was my intent, and I'm glad you appreciate the intelligence of my remarks.
The substance of my argument isn't to point out that WinAmp should have a 50 billion dollar market cap instead of Spotify. It's an observation that the trends in our industry are disappointing because they favor lock-in, simple interfaces for non-power users, monopoly, and consolidation.
You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad.
A hypothetical "good" company could provide much more than what Spotify does and in the same breath not monopolize all the podcasters or prevent data export. But why do that when you can capture 90% of the market, hold them completely captive, and not do these things which take effort or risk your stranglehold?
I dislike the future we found ourselves in. There was a lot of promise, I suppose wholly imagined, that never panned out.
I'm angry because I imagine better. This shit sucks.
All that matters is the original comment: "Which is why Spotify became available in Sweden, the US, and the rest of the EU in that order."
Where reality is Spotify became available in 7 countries before attempting to expand in the US.
Which is, funnily, what you literally wrote in your edit:
> That means Spotify launched for 222 million europeans, expanded to 300 million US-americans, before becoming available for the remaining 281 europeans.
Edit Where by "expanded to the US" is literally "failed to capture any significant market for a long time"
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