Thanks for this suggestion, I’ll try it. I have also been frustrated with Spotify for replaying the same stuff over and over. I tried their new AI playlist feature and prompted it for “tracks with fewer than 10,000 plays”; it correctly named the playlist something with “underground” in the title but failed at delivering on the premise. That’s really what I want - stuff that is similar to what I’m into in terms of genre, but obscure and fresh. There have to be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of tracks it could try out on me, but it seems to recycle the same 100 or so tracks over and over again.
I live in Spain, so it suggests Spanish podcasts to me, even though I only listen to podcasts in English or Catalan.
Music the same, I mostly listen to music in either Catalan or English, with a couple of Spanish songs in my lists. But lots of his suggestions are for music in Spanish. Heck, I just see that one of his recommendations is new things in Flamenco, even though it's a musical genre I haven't listened a single song of (nothing against it per se, only that I don't like it).
As I'm using it more to listen to podcasts now I find it hard to listen to music, because if I leave a podcast mid reproduction and play some music I have to remember which podcast it was, search for it, and then I can listen to the rest. Two separate modes, one for music, one for podcasts, would be good. Maybe a mixed one for people who do both mixed.
I will not add on how most of the music it suggests (when not suggesting things that I like) are things I already have in my lists, not good things that I could add to them.
It always seems to be the large tech companies that think they are so clever tying the language to your IP location rather than your language preferences.
Google, Spotify, PayPal and others all seem convinced, no matter what I do, that because my IP address is in Japan that I should be shown Japanese language.
On the web you can for directions at least, select the "Options" button next to the "Leave Now" time selection, it has a distance units to switch between Automatic / Miles / km. To switch the little scale in the bottom right, just click it.
On the iOS app it's "User"->Settings->Distance Units (I assume Android is similar).
(And if you want to adjust Apple Maps in metric, it is a bit more cryptic, it follows the general system settings app, in General->Language & Region->Measurement System, with a choice of Metric / US / UK).
I find it so frustrating when software and web pages don’t default to using the locale info I’ve set in my system settings. Add an app-specific option if you must, but I’d love if these things just worked by default.
The primary issue is that Spotify can only group things into very coarse categories.
If you have a Spanish emo rock band and want similar Spanish emo rock bands then you are mostly out of luck unless there are so many of those that Spotify considers them their own category. Most likely you are going to get just Spanish popular artists if the category is small enough.
I think their embedding vector for musical styles is just way, way too small.
I've started to wonder how much Spotify is gaming the system. For example, by playing tracks lower royalties over tracks with higher ones. There could be some backdoor payola and we would never know.
One would think Spotify’s potential is capped by their expenses (in the hands of the music owners - Universal/Warner/Sony), and the pricing of their competitors, with the deepest pockets in the world (Apple/Alphabet/Amazon).
That chart shows a profit in 2024, and new investors don’t necessarily care about long term history. Tech monopolies have history been so valuable it’s not an unreasonable bet.
A biased algorithm gives them increasing power over time.
Music streaming is not and will not be a monopoly. Spotify has near zero pricing power, with a floor at what their vendors charge them and a ceiling at what their multiple competitors charge. It’s a pretty fungible service.
They have a profit for first three quarters of 2024, and maybe they will continue to eke out a small profit margin, but I’m not seeing what the play is for its current market cap.
It’s based on the potential for significant growth in streaming, and price increases. The major labels and Spotify agree that the price should be increased regularly - after no uplift for a decade - and as more countries begin to adopt streaming the labels and Spotify see significant potential for growth.
The CEO of Warner Music Group - the smallest of the three majors - Robert Kyncl, ex-YouTube exec, said on the company’s most recent earnings call that he believes the penetration of cable TV and SVOD is a good indicator of streaming’s potential, and currently subscription music streaming is lagging behind.
There is explosive growth in some countries that were until recently delivering little: for example something like 95% of Brazil’s recorded music revenue comes from streaming. That’s happened in a pretty short period of time.
There are currently fewer than 1 billion paying streaming subscribers across all platforms globally, but 1 billion is close. It will have taken around 18 years to reach 1 billion paying subscribers; I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit 2 billion in a third of that time. So by 2030 or shortly afterward there may be 2 billion paying subscribers and it’s likely that Spotify will continue to have the lion’s share of those.
It has deep relationships with the major labels and can use high value subscribers in developed territories to subsidise adoption in developing makers.
According to Daniel Ek, Spotify’s CEO, in the US and some major European markets the company has significantly pulled back on marketing spend, but that hasn’t really harmed acquisition - plus a lot of consumers are going from account creation to paid subscription without converting through ad-supported.
Penetration in the biggest markets is still well under 50% of the population - around 30% to 35% - compared to 50% penetration for cable TV and SVOD.
I agree that the valuation seems detached from reality - but the last three quarters have helped build people’s expectations, and the share price has gone from around $170 a year ago to $450+ more recently.
Whether it can sustain that remains to be seen, it’s a crazy multiple, but the relationships Spotify has with the major labels give it a most that makes it hard for new regional competitors to launch, and its overall offering - and marketing clout - makes it hard for established regional competitors to compete effectively.
> Music streaming is not and will not be a monopoly.
People disagree. Spotify more than twice as many subscribers as the next most popular service. That’s not some stable equilibrium.
That “small” profit is already 1b/year and the quarterly profit has been increasing rapidly. Suggesting it’s only possible that that number will maintain exactly the same or less is just an assumption on your part. The market disagrees.
A lot of the profit has come via a price increase and radical downsizing plus big costs cuts. So whether it can be sustained long term will be interesting.
Apple does not need to lose money on anything. They might choose to sell music at 1% profit margin, because they're earning 40% profit margin on iCloud backup and iPhones.
I doubt Spotify investors will be happy with 1% profit margins.
Hasn't this been the main goal of their optimization of recent years, understandably to be honest because the percentage the major labels get of their income is massive, they're giving away what like 70% to labels/distributors?
Dunno how you can be expected to build a business that surfaces the objective best content when your hands are tied giving away that much.
Similarly I have fond memories of the last.fm era, discovering new music via people with similar tastes who I might often end up chatting to. Wasn't it also around this time that Pandora (using the Music Genome project) was also more readily available, seem to remember that was also a good way to discover new music.
But then I'm old enough, pre internet, to also remember the days when people used to send each other mixtapes or you'd go round someone's house with a small selection of vinyl you'd play to each other.
And then there was the more recent (pre lockdown) era of going to see live bands and discovering new bands via the bands that were supporting or via conversations with other people at those gigs, who if you saw them enough times became your mates etc.
Nowadays I can spin up a program to generate a playlist of everyone playing the Great Escape or Glastonbury (assuming they haven't boycotted spotify) and listen to all of them before I even get there and because of the number of acts, given slightly different tastes, unless I make an effort I might not even see my mates....
I'm old enough to remember 4 record stores in my provincial city and they were all selling the same CDs.
I think that secretly most people don't want to discover new music they want to listen to what other people are listening. That's why labels are still in business.
Most people subconsciously don't want to discover new music, they want to listen to songs that remind them of the world and feelings of freedom and discovery and experience they had in their late teens.
They want nostalgia. They don't want cognitive load, they want enjoyment with no strings and no effort.
This is partially a business issue; there’s a lot of money exchanging hands to push specific artists and the major labels are obviously the primary beneficiaries. This affects everything from playlist placement, recommendations, search results, etc.
