Can't even seek through songs.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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It's still not a good justification for making the free version completely useless. Those limitations are just ridiculous; I miss the days where paying for a product only meant getting rid of ads and gaining some exclusive features. Maybe they should also reduce the label share instead of always making the customers pay more. I refuse to pay a subscription for non-trivial things like music; they can still make money off me with ads when I use the free version. They can increase their profits with other features like they are already doing by allowing people to buy merch from Spotify.
Those days were built on the backs of venture capital. They were never sustainable. Now you're on the other end, and it's either deal with more ads and more restrictions, or pay up and get rid of all of that (or use something else).
I pay for albums i can afford by buying them and pirate the rest
I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I doubt major labels can live without Spotify as much as Spotify need major labels. They can push users to pay for Spotify by adding more cool features for payed users instead of removing fundamental features of the free version. Forcing people to pay is never the right solution
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don't have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.
Ok, forget about reducing the labels share. I think the other points i made about finding new ways to generate more profits are still valid and better than making the free version almost useless. If spotify wasn't profiting from free users too they would shut down the free version completely
Spotify isn't profiting at all; that's the entire problem.
It's banking on the hope that offering a limited free tier will encourage some amount of users to become paid subscribers, while offsetting the cost of operating that at least a little bit by serving ads. It's unfortunate that you can't make sufficient revenue by just operating a free tier that's truly sufficient, but those numbers quite clearly do not work.
I mean, are you saying that you would be complaining less if Spotify simply killed the free tier? I rather doubt that.
You said that spotify isn't profiting at all then explained how they profit a bit for it. I'm sure they would make more profits by finding alternative way to make money like artist subscriptions than from pushing people to subscribe by making the free version almost useless and yes I would complain less if Spotify killed the free version. I only use spotify on desktop to support artists by playing a playlist of artists I want to support on repeat with almost inaudible volume. All music I really listen to is locally either from music i bought or pirated music
What a waste or resources. It is doing stuff like this that forces the companies to put restrictions on the users. Please stop playing music you are not listening to, for everyone's sake.
I'm not wasting nothing, it running on the background why i do other stuffs
It takes ads to bandwidth and server costs for Spotify. The ads on Spotify are worth less than before, because the ads have less reach. That means Spotify will have to play more ads to cover cost, and because the revenue per ad will go down. Maybe your little action has an insignificant effect, but if millions did what you did, it would have a drastic result.
Never mind that doing this will give your favorite artist a few more pennies at the cost of a different artist that didn't get his numbers inflated. You aren't doing some great good to save the planet.
Okay, I'm not convinced you understand the difference between profit and revenue, so, with respect, I'm gonna move on here.
I undersand the difference but how are they going to be profitable if they are not increasing the revenues
I think what he means is that even though they're offsetting the costs, they still aren't profiting. Let's say it costs Spotify $30 per free user per month, some of whom become premium subscribers for $10 per user per month. That means for premium users, it still costs $20 per user per month. The free users are still costing $30/month though, so they show ads to reduce that cost to $25/month, which is less of a money sink, but still not outfit