Apple Music surpasses Spotify in the U.S.

[ryao]

1 hour ago, poochyena said:

Like I said in my post, I only spent around $100 or so on my ~800 songs. So you can have 1500 songs without having to have paid $1 or $1.29 for each one. Unless you just really like the latest mainstream pop music and buying singles instead of whole albums, and you aren't able to take advantage of any discounts like amazon prime users get.

These companies count on the fact that not everyone has the sense that you have.

[lewdicrous]

3 hours ago, 21rkosta said:

I don't get why people don't do youtube red/google music more often. Its cheaper than most of these services and also offers youtube red not just music

It's not available everywhere iirc. (YouTube red that is)

I think Spotify isn't available in my country (at least it wasn't last time I checked), but Apple music is.

Also, I like the Apple music UI more than the Google music UI and the student membership in AM is reasonable (don't know about Google music and Spotify)

[ryao]

It occurs to me that it would be more economical if music lovers pooled their money together to fund the development of accurate open source synthesizers. Then everyone could have all of the music that they could ever want for free.

[lewdicrous]

6 minutes ago, ryao said:

It occurs to me that it would be more economical if music lovers pooled their money together to fund the development of accurate open source synthesizers. Then everyone could have all of the music that they could ever want for free.

What about the royalty fees and whatnot?

Quote

Then everyone could have all of the music that they could ever want for free.

That's basically YouTube with adblocker

[ryao]

21 minutes ago, lewdicrous said:

What about the royalty fees and whatnot?

If you play some music on your own instrument for yourself, you do not need to pay royalty fees. Those only occur for things like movies, games and TV shows and only for recent work. Everything sufficiently old is in the public domain.

[lewdicrous]

1 minute ago, ryao said:

If you play some music on your own instrument, you do not need to pay royalty fees.

If it's your own music, then sure

[ryao]

3 minutes ago, lewdicrous said:

If it's your own music, then sure

If I figure out how to play John Williams’ latest work on a piano, I am not paying him royalty fees. That would be ridiculous. You do not need to own copyright on music to play it on an instrument. A synthesizer is a type of instrument.

 

By the way, I say figure out how to play rather than play because I would need to learn to play the piano first. A synthesizer would eliminate the need.

[abazigal]

6 hours ago, poochyena said:

I don't understand the appeal of music streaming sites. Its $120 a year is a huge amount of money for music you don't even own. You could buy around 100 songs for that cost. Not to mention it using up data and not being able to listen to music without internet access (which is common for me when driving in rural areas).

To people who prefer to stream than to buy; why?

It's a little less for Apple Music. They have a deal for $99 a year, which you can pay using iTunes cards, which tend to go on discount every now and then. 

 

But to the main point, I guess that I am not so much paying for music, as I am paying for the convenience of being able to stream any sort of music I want at any time. It also saves me the hassle of managing a music library, or keeping them locally on my smartphone. 

 

You are right in that I do tend to listen to the same songs over and over again, and maybe it's cheaper if I purchased all these songs individually, but then algorithm-generated playlists such as top 40 or chill mix wouldn't be possible if they were only allowed to use songs that I own, because I am never going to discover and purchase individual songs on my own. I am not the sort of person who will carefully follow up on every new song release, try them out and curate my own playlist. I tend to just spam whatever the top 40 list or easy hits are, often as background noise for whatever task I am doing at the moment, it's just easier to me to leave it to the AI to decide what song to play next rather than consciously decide what that will be. 

[poochyena]

10 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

do you not use any video streaming platforms (Netflix, Prime, etc)

yes. Videos are just something I want to watch once in my life. Music is something you can put on in the background and listen to. Not so much for videos unless you are ok with having no idea whats going on.

[Commodus]

13 hours ago, poochyena said:

I don't understand the appeal of music streaming sites. Its $120 a year is a huge amount of money for music you don't even own. You could buy around 100 songs for that cost. Not to mention it using up data and not being able to listen to music without internet access (which is common for me when driving in rural areas).

To people who prefer to stream than to buy; why?

A couple of clarifications: you can pay $100 for a year's worth of music up front, and you can in fact listen to music offline (you can save songs, albums and playlists to an offline library).

 

As for why you'd stream music?  It allows for a curiosity and exploration that simply aren't realistic if you buy downloads.

 

I'm a dance music fan.  That means lots of singles, EPs and compilations.  If I wanted to listen to all the hot new releases that came out, I'd probably be spending dozens of dollars a month on top of everything else I'd want to listen to.   That's not the worst cost in the world, but it'd add up, especially since those downloads could eventually consume quite a bit of space.

 

With streaming, if there's a new EP or remix I just... listen to it.  There's no hemming and hawing or whether or not it's worth buying, no anxiously reading multiple reviews or waiting until there's some buzz.  You get to experience the full breadth of a music scene without having to spend a small fortune on it every year.  Yeah, if I stop subscribing I lose access, but I'll have saved so much money if and when that happens that I can justify buying the must-have music.

[Teddy07]

15 hours ago, poochyena said:

Its $120 a year is a huge amount of money for music you don't even own.

 

Agreed! People didn't spend that much on music before streaming services

[Quadriplegic]

Meh, Spotify and Amazon Music should just die already:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-and-amazon-sue-songwriters-in-appeal-against-royalty-rise-in-the-united-states/?fbclid=IwAR2X_F3tWhWE6JCjntOQw7jSfmE4vjO90SIUXiiY5MT0VjiGB3StGaVjqpk

(no idea if they retracted their appeal)

[ryao]

16 minutes ago, Quadriplegic said:

Meh, Spotify and Amazon Music should just die already:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-and-amazon-sue-songwriters-in-appeal-against-royalty-rise-in-the-united-states/?fbclid=IwAR2X_F3tWhWE6JCjntOQw7jSfmE4vjO90SIUXiiY5MT0VjiGB3StGaVjqpk

(no idea if they retracted their appeal)

Those increases are going to eventually come out of people’s pockets. I am not sure why you would be upset with them for trying to keep prices down.

[Quadriplegic]

37 minutes ago, ryao said:

Those increases are going to eventually come out of people’s pockets. I am not sure why you would be upset with them for trying to keep prices down.

WHAT?????????????????????

They are not trying to keep prices down, they are trying to pocket more money for themselves. Hell, keeping prices low is bad for their business. 

[ryao]

4 minutes ago, Quadriplegic said:

WHAT?????????????????????

They are not trying to keep prices down, they are trying to pocket more money for themselves. Hell, keeping prices low is bad for their business. 

Their pockets will have roughly the same amount of money given that they will pass on unexpected costs to their customers. There might be a time delay, but it will happen. That is how things work.

[Andreas Lilja]

ITT: fanboys whose e-pen depend on market share.

 

ITT2: people who find $10 a month expensive.

[williamcll]

I just go to vevo on YouTube and click on the music I want to listen to. 

[Guest]

20 hours ago, ryao said:

If you play some music on your own instrument for yourself, you do not need to pay royalty fees. Those only occur for things like movies, games and TV shows and only for recent work. Everything sufficiently old is in the public domain.

We like to listen to real artists.

[kirashi]

On 4/5/2019 at 6:33 PM, 21rkosta said:

I don't get why people don't do youtube red/google music more often. Its cheaper than most of these services and also offers youtube red not just music

Well, you see comrade, YT Premium was not available in Canada at launch, and Spotify has been around since Fall 2008, starting in Europe before expanding rapidly to other countries. Apple Music, Hulu, Pandora radio, YT Premium, and other services are either a) relatively new, or b) straight up not available outside of the us, or available in limited function or with limited content.

 

As someone who's had a Spotify account since Fall 2008, I'd lose my listening history, musical tastes, and sets of playlists if I were to switch to any other streaming service, not to mention be unable to use Apple Music on Linux based devices, or devices where I am not allowed to install iTunes. Don't get me wrong; I welcome competition, but it makes little sense to switch when you're already invested in a platform.

[suits]

You've gotta give it to their marketing department. I've always found apple music ui and functionality to either be trash, or annoying to use.

That being said all of these players these days are trash. Really wish companies would go back to sleek and stream lines. Easy control. Apples first "music" app is orders of magnitude better than their current. And it's just sad. 

[Mihle]

On 4/6/2019 at 4:11 AM, poochyena said:

I don't understand the appeal of music streaming sites. Its $120 a year is a huge amount of money for music you don't even own. You could buy around 100 songs for that cost. Not to mention it using up data and not being able to listen to music without internet access (which is common for me when driving in rural areas).

To people who prefer to stream than to buy; why?

For me, it's because streaming services is a great way to discover new albums. I use Spotify Radio or let Spotify suggest music to me all the time and it works quite good.

 

Also, I don't really listen to lot of songs from the same album. It's more like two songs there, one there, another there and so on.

 

I personally don't pay tho, it's my dad that pays for family subscription.

 

I actually buy blu rays tho, and don't have Netflix or hbo Nordic or whatever, mostly because of the big quality differece. And you don't buy movies or series in albums anyway. Don't have the same benefit to discovery either as I personally just look through top 100 sites one time a year.

(Unless it's some If those that I can get for free via the national channel streaming that I pay nothing for.)

 

[ne0tic]

On 4/6/2019 at 4:11 AM, poochyena said:

I don't understand the appeal of music streaming sites. Its $120 a year is a huge amount of money for music you don't even own. You could buy around 100 songs for that cost. Not to mention it using up data and not being able to listen to music without internet access (which is common for me when driving in rural areas).

To people who prefer to stream than to buy; why?

It would be too expensive to buy all the music that I listen to. For example one of my playlist got more than 850 songs and that would be so so much money to buy all of them! Also, you can just download the songs so you can listen to them without an internet connection! I have about 1000 songs downloaded in the highest quality possible and that takes only about 10GB of storage  

[Mihle]

I would never switch from Spotify to either Google, Apple, or especially just YouTube.

 

Spotify have better sound quality, by a a very noticeable margin. The noticeable margin from Spotify to Tidal or CDs are much smaller than it.

 

I also love the integration with Spotify between devices, it's better than any of the others. I currently use Spotify quite a bit on my computer and would not want to do it through a browser...

[Andreas Lilja]

Lel @ people and their 120 songs.

 

*cries in 500+ GB of 320kbps and thousands upon thousands of dollars*

[Teddy07]

33 minutes ago, Raskolnikov said:

Lel @ people and their 120 songs.

 

*cries in 500+ GB of 320kbps and thousands upon thousands of dollars*

What is the point of so many songs? You can only listen to a fraction