I think it has probably been already said, but Spotify are going after the truly mass market, they want to be the worlds largest music platform/ecosystem, the Netflix of music.
You don’t win that battle simply by offering improved formats (you can bet they have market tested this to death) or pricing alone (again they know their pricing model inside out), which are trivial for your competitors to implement and compete with you on.
You go for convenience and ubiquity ie. having Spotify Connect built into as many of the worlds devices as possible, make your mobile/desktop app work seamlessly, gain new users in anyway possible even if your losing money on them, make it trivial to share playlists with your friends, make your end of year roundup email a cultural event.
Secondly content. Spotify are starting here with Podcasts, but you only need to look at how Netflix was a physical DVD rental business few years aback and are now a major content producer to see how that can quickly change. I suspect we’ll see radio stations followed by a few models where artists can list their albums or podcasts exclusively on Spotify in return for a higher payment. It may take a while for them to get those models right but I expect that is where it is heading. I could even see them buying out someone like Bandcamp in a few years to gain a new user base of creators and then slowly merging parts of it into the main Spotify app.
For so many of my friends ‘Streaming == Spotify’ and to be fair, for most people who don’t need management of a local library or care about the very last word in quality, why would you need anything else.
Certainly, Spotify is driving a pure growth strategy, not a profitability strategy. It is sometimes overlooked that the money spent on EchoNest and the like many years ago is now only being written off as book losses. For the financial managers, it is not the profit or net income that is important, but whether cash flow is generated or lost operationally.
In the meantime, Spotify generates cash flow despite book losses because it continues to invest heavily and depreciate. Some quarters even reach the break-even point due to special effects.
However, the whole topic is complex and can only be understood by studying finance and accounting techniques.
Nevertheless, I believe that the archilles heel for Spotify will not be Apple or Amazon, but Google. There, all the knowledge is hosted in the cloud and the engineers there learn just as quickly as their clients. Every link belongs to both and there are also synergies if the MP3/OGG data pool should merge for cost reasons.
Well said. I suspect the biggest long term challenge Spotify has to contend with is the fact that music streaming is a loss leader for both Apple and Amazon. Both use music as just another lever to keep people locked into their ecosystems.
Jeff Bezos famously once said Amazon Prime Video only exists to sell more tennis shoes. What he meant, of course, is that Prime Video was created to keep people locked into Prime, which naturally leads to more sales of all sorts of other products. The same holds true for Apple, with the primary motivation there being iPhone sales.
I’d agree with you to some degree, but Google’s history of producing well polished desktop/mobile apps (ie. not web-based) is extremely poor. Not sure why, maybe it’s a cultural / structural thing inside Google that web based apps get more attention.
Google business also tend to be (outside of cloud and SoHo email/office services) based around an advertising rather than a subscription based models. Obviously you could still offer a music service on an advertising based model, that’s what the free tier on Spotify is (although I suspect that’s more about gaining users) and commercial radio has relied heavily on advertising for the last century. But most people I know soon get fed up with listening to adverts on Spotify, unless it’s just for daytime background listening.
Google already has a huge creator base on YouTube which they have cultivated and invested in heavily, so they could (and indeed already have) try to branch YouTube further out into music. In fact out of my friends who don’t subscribe to a streaming service YouTube is the obvious go-to for listening to a particular music track, so it’s not ridiculous to think they could grow that market / platform further.
Without wanting to get too philosophical, music also takes many forms and it may be that new models emerge and the old album centric model (at least for new music; people will always want to listen to old music) becomes less dominant. That might seem hard to believe and is unlikely to happen while the existing models still make the record companies large sums of money. But you only need to look at film to see how a lot can change in a very short time. Amazon and Netflix are now two of the worlds biggest producers and distributors of film and ‘TV’ content.
BD, or Business Development, can be just as terrible at their jobs as anyone else.
My guess here is someone got massive support for lossless as a “disruptor” and they threw gobs of money at it (marketing, network build-out, licensing agreement, etc.). It was probably sold internally as the one thing that would drive subscriptions towards the end of the year and through 2022. It was probably pitched as “hard” and therefore would take others a year+ to catch-up.
Then everyone else simply flipped the lossless switch and whoever at Spotify sold these incorrect “disruptor” initiatives had to immediately tail between legs and back into the hedges. So, guess what? Not disruptive. Not worth a massive marketing investment. Maybe not even worth a network investment. I’m sure it took them 6 months just to figure out WhyTFrankfurter lossless was important to begin with and, in my experience, when you’re this far off the mark convincing an entire executive teams of something that isn’t… that itself takes months to unwind.
They will do lossless. They are just now in a tailspin to figure out what that means and, based on timeline and silence, they may still not have any clear path to what lossless means at Spotify even today.
All speculation though. I look forward to it when it’s released.
You don’t think Amazon learns about their customers? Maybe I am missing your point. I don’t get the feeling either Amazon or Google are going strongly after music, but if i was to pick one it would be Amazon? Maybe I am not seeing what Google is doing?
Amazon is trying to push Apple out of second place, and Google is currently growing the fastest, according to the latest market analyses I know of.
Every song we listen to on Spotify comes from the Google cloud. If you think they don’t learn what Spotify does, trade up. They suck up the world’s knowledge faster than any other company. It could well be that they also want a place on the winners’ rostrum of music services.
Google may not, and probably does not, know what is happening at this layer. The way most of these services work is the application requests a track and the service returns a URL. This is generally encrypted between you and the service layer returning the URL reference for that track. Only you and the service provider will know what was requested and where to go get it. That URL can be randomized per play with no reference between the service request to play a track and the request to download the track.
In fact, Spotify’s data on what you play / don’t play has value so I’d assume protecting that data is a very high priority to them… Again, the cloud provider just knows you requested a file out of an object storage service. They have no idea what that thing is. This is also why millions and billions of tracks are duplicated all over the Internet every time a new region or service provider comes online. There is no “central repository of music” although a few people are trying to sort that.
Does Spotify need to go lossless? Maybe not, because Ogg Vorbis q9 (302kbps) can be decoded to generate pcm 44.1/16, which is of cd quality, for playback.
Also, as far as Google Music numbers… Those numbers can’t be trusted and are a bit of a mess. IIRC they were, at one point and maybe still, where…
If I send you a link to a song on YouTube and you played it they would count you as a Google Music free sub because the song was played through that license agreement. That’s sneaky in my book and skews their actual subscriber numbers.
Ogg Vorbis is lossy. That’s the point. Take the input and compress it by throwing away samples or reshaping the waveform in a way that, ultimately, you have less bits to store. On decode, yes, you end-up with LPCM at 16/44.1 but the file / stream you used to decode has not 44.1 of resolution. It has to be reconstructed. You’re computing the loss bits instead of reading them directly. And, any computation on these missing bits has errors.
FLAC compresses the file without throwing away any resolution. Like a zip file. The bits going into a FLAC file on compress are the same bits that come out on decompression. This is why FLAC is lossless. Notice I said nothing of resolution.
When you send bits into a compression / encode algorithm and then you get different bits when you decompress / decode it’s lossy. Again I’m not describing bit depth or resolution. You can encode any bit depth and resolution and decode to any bit depth and resolution (via upsampling the decode). Does’t make the process lossless.
Rob based on estimated numbers, YouTube premium is going gangbusters and though way behind Spotify and Apple for paid uses they supposedly added 50 million customers in the last year.
I pay for this but almost never listen to YouTube music after they dropped Google Play Music which was my favourite service
Yes indeed, I got that. The point that I am saying is at q9 level, the SQ is or as good as CD quality, I am sometimes hard pressed to hear some audible differences, so do most non-audiophiles out there.
Since the Spotify Connect technology fully controls the Spotify musci stream and how it is encoded / decoded, I think it may be better for Spotify to come up with something better than Ogg Vorbis for lossless streaming.
This is the same mp3 and AAC argument. Doesn’t matter what you can hear. Give me my bits
When talking lossless I want true lossless. Give me the stream in the same bit-depth and resolution the studio gave it to you and, if they are a good studio, that would match the master.
If a service says they are “lossless” that should be an objective definition. The service doesn’t say “sounds lossless” it says “lossless”.
It does to me, however, matching the master is the ideal solution and I don’t care how it is done.
It is interesting if Spotify finally implement lossless streaming, if they really want to do it, right now they are backtracking what they announced earlier in Feb this year.
Neither Amazon nor Google give a rat’s ass about music or the people that really enjoy it. Apple doesn’t either, unless you’re 18 and listening on dreadful wireless headphones. Spotify will end up in top position among that lot because they sold the others a dummy by announcing lossless, thereby forcing Apple to rush a totally substandard product to market, and will continue to win on price. Tidal will do just fine for the niche market, but Qobuz will die because they are not present in enough countries.
Music is Art, it’s not numbers on a stream, more numbers being better. The test is, as you listen, does it move you? Does it bring back the memories? make you want to dance? make you admire the musicianship? lose yourself in a melody? Does is give you goosebumps?
The article is a bit older. It still talks about 248 million users. Two years later, there are already almost 400 million, and we will see the figures at the end of the year. Without question, Spotify has also benefited greatly from the collaboration that began in 2016. But they had to share a lot of knowledge and technology to do so. Those who host know more details than any stranger who doesn’t know these data, links and retrievals. The data preparation and the preparation of this data is practically done by Google today, just as you put the world’s knowledge at our feet. Google search and Google data preparation is thus also the key to Spotify’s success. Technologies and ideas have been connected over 100 teams in such a way that Spotify still believes to be “ruler of their music world”. That dream will soon fade. Machine learning no longer takes place in the Spotify data center! Google can take over, build better competitor systems, has a strong YouTube base that was also started for free and there are many viewpoints why many competitors here are not giving up yet, even though the margins are still poor for the technology leaders. This is a self-imposed fate to build the market. Low margins can only be tolerated by Google, Apple, Amazon when the money is made elsewhere. Google is in the best starting position. Spotify has already outsourced its brain and now Google and Spotify are thinking together into the future. This should create better positioning than Microsoft, Apple, Facebook or Amazon, who also collect user data, but lack the technological specialization in this market.
