this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 258 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Sometimes, I see some of the takes on here, and it's hardly surprising that the fediverse isn't particularly popular.

Spotify are somewhat responsible for their current position. They hired too many people, extended into markets they didn't need to enter, and have a CEO that has blown money in places that didn't need it. Let's not forget that Spotify spent $300m on sponsoring FC Barcelona, which could have allowed Spotify to employ ALL of the employees it laid off for 1-2 years. Spotify had no need to give $200m to Joe Rogan, either! That's half a billion spunked up the wall on decisions that have done nothing for the company but cause grief. Instead, they could have focused their efforts on paying more out to smaller artists that provide the long tail for their service, while also making deals to promote merch and tour dates where possible.

With that being said, if you think that Spotify didn't play a huge part in making music streaming accessible you're just being contrarian for no reason. They provided (at the time) a solid application, good connectivity with services like last.fm, and had the social connection sorted from the start. Once phones took off, Spotify removed the need for mp3's for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes. Spotify was the winner of the music streaming wars.

Frankly, a lot of people were praising Spotify for their "good" severance package, but IMO shareholders should be livid, and should be calling for a new person at the helm.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (2 children)

removed the need for.mp3s

Im not sure this was a win

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It didn't buy the format and then cancelled it, it did it purely by providing a more convenient way of listening to music than downloading mp3s, so yes, it's a win

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I personally think mp3's are more convinient. I don't have to use multiple subscriptions to access to platforms exclusivities , i don't need to worry about songs becoming unavailable. I have a big playlist on spotify with a lot of grayed out songs. Also, local music players are a lot better than any streaming service player.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, people often forget about the gray ones, even on yt music my music playlist that works fine on the video app, has some songs greyed out when I tried to listen to it inside yt music.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Also it hasn't, because having your actual collection on a streaming service is leagues less convenient than a bunch of mp3s on a hard drive.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Completely agreed. If they focused on their core business they would've already been in much better shape.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I doubt Joe Rogan and Barcelona has only caused grief. There’s a reason huge companies throw absurd amounts of money on advertising and right deals. It’s often lucrative and worth it.

As we don’t have the numbers we can only speculate in what return they got on those deals. But it was most definitely not 0.

Tour deals, merch and independent artists are great, but you do not reach critical mass when it comes to a general audience that way. It’s basically like trying to advertise on the Fediverse versus advertising on Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Marketing like that doesn't have solid numbers. Did sponsoring FC Barcelona cause people to signup to Spotify? How many? How much revenue did they get from each one?

Even when people fill in the "where did you hear about us?" option during signup, the data there is murky, at best. You can try to do tracking like "we saw a 20% increase in signups during and immediately after FC Barcelona games", but that's still just a proxy measure. Maybe it isn't 20%, but more like 2%, and that could easily be noise.

These deals tend to have an amorphous "increase in brand awareness" that has little hard data to back it up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I can take your word for it, or I can consider the fact that basically every major company in the world does it. Somehow I don’t think it’s totally useless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that dude's take reads just like climate science denial and flat earth conspiracies.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

People who are good at marketing have convinced people with money to do it, yes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah spotify did wind up how most people listen to music, and podcasts. They had what people wanted and made it cheap. Then they also made a lot of decisions that wasted money. Dont know for certain but i doubt the exe there stopped geting big bonuses or pay cuts over those decisions

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

In it's whole history, Spotify only made profits in two quarters and if I'm not wrong the other streaming services aren't profitable either so it doesn't looks to me that the problem is just over hiring but the nature of streaming business itself You also underestimate the power of sponsorship especially sponsoring sport. I'm sure a lot of people are using Spotify just for that. Investing in podcast make sense because it's more profitable than music, Spotify need to diversify it's revenues. You said that Spotify have good connectivity with lastfm but that's not true. Most of issues lastfm users have with lastfm is related to Spotify.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Spotify has a lot of Blockbuster energy, but with a mixture of something far worse, since they did indeed stand by Rogen and profit off him.