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Spotify Wants More Paid Subscribers, So It Has Launched a New App To Give Away More Music For Free (recode.net)
Spotify on Tuesday announced a new redesigned app for free customers, its first major change to the free tier in four years, as it attempts to lure more customers into buying its subscription service. Free listeners will now get on-demand access to 15 playlists; they can play any song they want in those playlists and are no longer stuck in a world of shuffled playback. From a report: The idea: If people get more stuff without paying, they are more likely to end up paying in the long run. The new mobile app gives free users the ability to play more songs on demand, from 15 pre-populated playlists -- some of which are personalized for individual users, like its popular "Discover Weekly" feature. Spotify has always let users listen to on-demand music for free via an ad-supported option -- it's the main thing that set the company apart from other streaming services in the past. But it has limited full, free access to its library of songs to desktop users, and limited what free users could get to on its mobile app. Today's move doesn't remove those limits entirely, but gives users more opportunity to sample. Paid users get full access to Spotify's entire catalog, on-demand, without ads. The new app also offers users the ability to stream songs with lower data usage. The company says users can save up to 75% of mobile data with data saver mode while streaming on 3G.
when I upended Xubuntu 18.4 Software and there was a huge banner for Spotify http://i68.tinypic.com/mbn3pk....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
During the week, I rarely use spotify. On the weekends, though, when I'm out driving, I use it a lot. How about a pay-as-you-go option, along with a monthly option or something.
Shelving, for the moment, the concept that I'm not going to pay forever to listen to music (because I grew up in a world where music was always entirely free to listen, and paying for it meant owning it forever), offering free music won't get more people to pay for it.
What it will do is get more companies to compete by offering their own free music. Leaving us with a system whereby ten companies each offer 15 playlists for free -- leaving me with 150 playlists for free -- which is plenty to never think about paying for more.
Add that I'm going to record those free playlists for later listening forever for free, and that they'll change the 15 from time to time, and I'll just say thanks for the free music again, sorry no one's paying your for something that really has zero value to 90% of your "customers".
I happily pay for live performances -- I pay people to work for me. I'm not going to pay for delivery of a digital product. And I'm not going to pay for you to use my purchased speakers to play your music. We're in a world with millions of songs, if I don't get your new song today, I'll survive until it's free five years from now.
Except you'll put it onto youtube for free almost immediately, where, once again, it's recordable forever.
I'm glad you're happy with your business model. Like my mother always said, and her mother before her, "if they have to wait for me to pay them, they'll starve to death first".
What would be your proper price point for a subscription that gives you unlimited access to music?
Would that change if the current Spotify price happened to be $30 instead of $10?
So often, people's desires happen to be "whatever the current thing is, only half". I definitely had this opinion before I took a step back, calculated what I would be have been spending otherwise on music (my substitute would be about an album a month), and decided that the $15 spotify family plan was actually a pretty good deal for me. Maybe you and other people have already done this analysis.
Not hard, you require the developer to register for API access and you give them the DRM key. As part of the sign on API, they ahve to return you an application ID (which you use to identify which key to encrypt the stream with).
Developer is responsible for keeping they key protected (in the software). and for obeying the rules. If the developer fails, the key is cancelled (so all apps using that key are blocked) and you can choose to pursue legal action.
Would make open-source software somewhat tricky to develop with, but that'a a different problem.
If you have allowed yourself to get hooked on so-called 'streaming' music services then you are a SUCKER and will get what you deserve: PAY, PAY, PAY, forever, when you could have purchased music and listened to it for free thereafter.
Don't even BOTHER to give me all your dumb arguments about how it's so much better, knows what you like, blah blah blah it's just Broadcast Radio 2.0 but you're PAYING for it one way or the other, either with ads you're subjected to or a perpetual subscription fee. Wouldn't you be better off at least buying physical copies of things you know you like? Or have you drunk so much of the streaming-service Kool-Aid that it doesn't even occur to you anymore? Think about it.
let's see...
Pandora subscription is $36 per year for the phone app.
Pandora One Subscription is $48 per year.
Spotify annual is $99 per year.
Yes, I know that they offer different types of service, primarily in specific list building, but 9.99 a month or 99 for yearly is over the price point I'll pay to stream music.
So the most I could see paying would be around $48 per year.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
I used to work in the streaming video space, and if the streaming music space is anything like it is with streaming movies and TV shows, then the hurdles to this sort of thing aren't technical. It's all about contracts and rights negotiations - usually the streaming provider has to jump through all sorts of hoops to convince the rights holder to license them the content and that they (the provider) will keep it "safe".
In some cases, the rights holders have already bought in to the sales story of various DRM providers, such that their licensing terms require that you use a specific DRM. In other cases, there's a lot of CYA going on (similar to the old adage of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), so even if they don't dictate a specific DRM, it's hard to get them to go along with some new DRM scheme unless lots of others are already using it. So to introduce a new DRM scheme you have to get some outside security experts to audit it, get a few key rights holders and providers to buy into it, and then finally be in a position to get others to adopt it too. This takes a lot of time and money and the difficulty is compounded significantly by the fact that rights holders of high-value content will demand that some aspects of the DRM be implemented in hardware, so any new scheme has to either leverage that or work with hardware vendors to introduce new stuff, which takes even longer.
Also, this specific example (developer-specific DRM key) could work on a technical level, but even assuming you overcame the above issues, it doesn't really mitigate the risk to Spotify or the actual content owners. To them, the content is worth billions of dollars, so they'd look at it as giving Joe Random Developer a DRM key with the possibility of a sliver of more revenue vs the risk of lawsuits and lost contracts and probably say, "not a chance!".
Pandora One is $48 per year. I have no qualms about paying that and I do. Spotify asks $99 per year and I won't pay that.
That's pretty close to half. I can do the math and be more precise but I feel that "should cost half" is a fair enough approximation.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
The fees demanded by the copyright holders are unreasonably high.
That's pretty much the size of things.
So don't watch or listen to it.
That's pretty much the size of things.
Cheap as fucking hell they are. I pay 15 a month for the family play. I have 5 people on my account. So basically we are paying $3 for each stream with unlimited access.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I have to agree with the GP that $10/mo is too high. And it has nothing to do with being cheap.
I'm not a heavy music listener. When I leave my door, I don't generally bother taking my earphones with me. In the car I listen to news and information. I'm married with a young daughter who is still into Wheels on the Bus. I'm lucky if I have the opportunity to just sit and listen to music for an hour or two a week. Combine that with having racked up a pretty good collection of legally purchased music over the years, and $10/mo really isn't that great of a deal.
If they had a $4/mo plan I'd pull the trigger. And $10/mo might seem like a great deal if I was spending 4 - 6 hours a day listening to music, but I don't. As it is, I have an Amazon Prime membership and can access their streaming library -- which while not as comprehensive as Spotify does give me significant value as it comes with free 2-day shipping and Prime Video, all for less per month than what Spotify charges.
It costs too much for what it is, and for how much value I'd be able to extract for it. That may be different for you, but not everyone is you.
Yaz