Anecdotally speaking, Spotify has become a sort of cultural default for a bunch of people.
If you're in a DM or a group chat, you may not hear "You should listen to X by Y" but rather "Check this out: https://open.spotify.com/blah"
At my current workplace and a previous one, both had Slack channels for sharing music and they were 99% Spotify links.
Partly because of genuine Spotify usage but even not using Spotify at the time, I would find the Spotify equivalent for my own recommendations (to reduce friction for the majority so they'd be more likely to actually listen to the recommendation)
Presumably for those few users not using Spotify, rather than having to find the equivalent song via text search, which may or may not contain a result for Provider Z, this service straight up just converts the Spotify link you've been given into all of the other provider equivalents.
Do the spotify links not just open the song in some kind of web app if you dont have spotify installed?
I always thought giving a straight link to the thing was better for all. If they had Spotify it would open there and without ads if they had the subscription and if they had neither it would still open the web app and let them listen to it with ads and stuff.
That’s absolutely still true. I just disabled Spotify app link handling, and then Spotify opens in Firefox on my phone. And on Desktop it works the same way.
edit: misread parts of grandparent. Yeah, the 30s previews are gone, didn’t even realize anyone used those.
At least for me in the Netherlands, for the past month if I click a link to a specific song, I get redirected to a page to start a radio based on the artist and encouraged to upgrade to Premium.
I've had to get friends to share the titles manually, before I found Odesli to be able to convert them.
Right, but before it just loaded the page of the album/playlist and told you to sign in to your account. It has never allowed you to play songs without a sign in.
Yeah, the generated preview (depending on what application the link is shared in) can play a 30 second sample, but if you want to listen to the whole song you need to have an account, and if you don't have a subscription you'll likely get an ad first.
It's why I often share a youtube link instead, it plays inline a lot of the time and when it plays inline it often doesn't have ads. But that may also be because I have an effective ad blocker (for now).
I’m in a dedicated music discord, about 70% of links are Bandcamp, 20% Spotify, 10% Tidal. BC percentage could be higher, but good enough, most of the time it’s only for those weird bands that don’t sell on BC anyway ;)
That said, I do miss Songwhip. It was a website where you could search for a release, and then generate all links for it, including streaming services and bandcamp.
I miss Songwhip as well. We used to have a bot in our music sharing Discord channel that looks for links to any streaming platform and convert them to Songwhip links via the Songwhip API. The good thing about Tidal is that, like Songwhip, it provides you with a list of links to various streaming platforms when you're not logged in.
Wish it had been open sourced, it worked so well. Or even better, if Bandcamp offered an API, so sites likes SW wouldn’t need to (probably) scrape that information.
> The good thing about Tidal
Can’t confirm, it’s worse than spotify for me, as I get an unclosable modal that asks me to sign up or login.
It was such a beautiful ui and ux , elegant really. It’s a shame yet I wonder how could it have been profitable. There’s really not a whole lot to monetize unless I’m missing something.
Songwhip allowed artists to claim and customize their page for a fee. Back then I looked into why Songwhip closed but couldn't find a definitive answer. I found a Reddit post where the original creator shared their site many years ago, so it looks like Songwhip started as a personal project. When it closed down though that decision was made by Sony. So it seems like the original creator got bought out by Sony and then Sony decided to close the service. Just speculation though.
That's quite the extrapolation from your anecdotal experience. Technically, it would be more accurate to say, "for those few users using Spotify."
What you've noticed is that Spotify has the biggest market share, but that doesn't mean that the number of users not using it are "few". According to https://explodingtopics.com/blog/music-streaming-stats, Spotify has a 30% market share. That implies that up to 70% of streaming music users aren't regular Spotify users.
From what I could tell when choosing AM over Spotify, the latter has a lot of playlists for discovery and I would never use my streaming service for discovery as it encourages the service to promote music it is paid to promote.
Of course AM is annoying too because 3 out of 5 navigation icons along the bottom of the UI are for discovery. But AM has Siri integration, which works some of the time… :-/
Apple Music has been utterly awful on desktop for years, with virtually zero positive progress. I made this angry video [1] 4 years ago, and have tried using Apple Music multiple times since then, and it never failed to disappoint.
Does Apple care though? It seems that Apple's main focus these days is on mobile "lifestyle" devices and services: iPhone, Siri, and Apple Music fits right into that. How many Apple users actually care about listening to AM on their desktop (presumably a Mac)?
Of course, Apple still pushes its overpriced Macs, but the focus there seems to be on developers (for the more expensive stuff--big monitors, workstations, etc.) or people (probably corporate workers, developers, etc.) using MacBooks. In both cases, the focus seems to be on machines used for doing work. I'm just guessing, but I would guess that most MacOS users who want to listen to (Apple) music would do so on their personal device, i.e. their iPhone, rather than their MacOS device which is probably owned and managed by their employer.
You are spot on. Apple does one thing very good: MacOS + Macs. But I don’t like Apple software. Too limited, too crippled, too unpredictable. And they don’t listen to users, you cannot reach out to someone and hope your feedback will change something.
The new "Apple Music (Preview)" app on Windows (exclusively 11 IIRC) absolutely destroys anything they had in the past. And anything they have on macOS right now. It is absolutely stellar, and yet another example of the weird "let's make out apps on opposing systems better than our native ones" trend.
Oh my god you made this video? I have sent it to so many people to explain my feelings for it. Thank you so much for saying what I wanted to but so much better!
You're welcome. I made that channel with the intention of making more videos about other apps and products, but so far could only muster Apple Music :)
I used to use Apple Music but when my Credit Card expired I missed two months payment and Apple happily deleted all of my playlists and library. I don’t think they realise how bad this is, but I will never use it or subscribe ever again.
I had to pause my subscription for a few months for personal reasons and my collection is gone too.
This is crazy.
Not sure how they expect anyone to keep using their service with such attitude.
Perhaps it is a lock-in strategy: don’t leave or you lose months or even years of your music habits.
At the same time, both Spotify and YouTube Music keep all the data to this day.
One might argue that they free plans, so they have to keep it. And I would say “I don’t care”. If I can’t rely on your service to keep a list of songs - I am not using it.
Damn, they could utilize my iCloud account. Or allow me to export a text file with that data, so I could import it back later. But no. No money - you are screwed.
I don't understand why AM doesn't use iCloud to store playlists. You have the storage anyway and a good chunk of people pay for an additional increase too.
You missed two months of payment and you are angry that a company closed the account? Boy do I have to tell you a story about what you can lose by not paying your AWS bill for two months… I am curious how you handle customers that do not pay and continue to not pay instead of just ending their subscription.
AWS has to pay a relatively big money for keeping user data. It is understandable why they would want to delete it.
Playlists are basically zero cost to store. You would spend more $ on delete processing than keeping them around for eternity. So it's just not well thought use-case, implemented without attempt to view the whole picture.
In many places I worked we would keep a user's history on the app for a long while in case they decided to resubscribe. It doesn't cost much to have a 6-12 months leeway before complete deletion.
Erasing a music app data after just a couple of months is idiotic, even more for a company with such deep pockets like Apple.
What do you lose if you don’t pay to AWS for two months?
My account is still there. I can still use it. I am pretty sure it has some historic data there as well. Probably my old lambdas are still laying around.
I've had songs I uploaded later disappear due to their changing agreements with music providers. A google take-out contained the missing files so I was able to recover them, but I'll never again rely on such an integration.
Could it be hidden behind the "Uploads" section? I have a lot of songs that I've uploaded that aren't available on YouTube, but they don't show up unless you go out of your way to find them in their dedicated section.
Not really. Spotify's "add your music" feature has always been an afterthought, it's clunky and inconvenient. It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
>It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
Perhaps things have changed, but 10 or so years ago I "uploaded" my music to Spotify and it didn't actually upload anything, nor did it play my local music.
Rather, spotify used whatever it had in its database with the same name/artist, which wasn't always the same recording or even the same song.
And then there were the ads. No thanks.
I have my own library of more than 22,000 tracks and use Winamp, Jellyfin and VLC to play them wherever I happen to be. No muss, no fuss, and most importantly, no ads.
Spotify doesn't require you to create an account to hear a song from what I recall, so why wouldn't someone send you a link? That's what the web is for.
That said once you have heard it on Spotify, yeah you might want it on your service provider of choice so as to add it to whatever equivalent of playlists there are.
The previous comment was already absurdly america-centric. But with this response, the cake is taken. I have never been sent a spotify link, nor do people really over here, because you need an account.
sorry, it's been so long since I didn't have an account so I went and checked and I guess I was wrong they do require you to create a free account to hear the link you've been sent.
You'd think my comment assuming you didn't need an account was already absurdly wrong but with your response the cake was taken, because I'm not from America either.
If you're in a DM or a group chat, you may not hear "You should listen to X by Y" but rather "Check this out: https://open.spotify.com/blah"
At my current workplace and a previous one, both had Slack channels for sharing music and they were 99% Spotify links.
Partly because of genuine Spotify usage but even not using Spotify at the time, I would find the Spotify equivalent for my own recommendations (to reduce friction for the majority so they'd be more likely to actually listen to the recommendation)
Presumably for those few users not using Spotify, rather than having to find the equivalent song via text search, which may or may not contain a result for Provider Z, this service straight up just converts the Spotify link you've been given into all of the other provider equivalents.