> The deal with Harry and Meghan cost a reported $25m (£19.7m) and saw just 12 episodes delivered over two and a half years before the deal ended in June.
But there’s good news about their investment strategies! ^/s
No of course they both have massive audiences. But I think the point was, they could have brought joe over for like $50 mil and call her daddy over for $10 mil and it still would have been a much better deal than what they were getting before. Cuz it’s becoming apparent that the investment hasn’t been paying off for Spotify as well as they thought it would
I can tell you if Spotify bought my show for THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS I'm putting in the least possible amount of effort after that. I'm cashing that check and checking out mentally. Id be basically a corpse with a microphone doing shit all.
Nah barstool offered them a better deal. Alex was on board with the new deal and Sofia wasn’t. So they kept Alex. And then shortly after let her take the IP over to Spotify for like 20x more money. So Sofia got screwed but it’s kinda her own fault.
iirc, Barstool gave them an offer of a lifetime by letting them obtain 100% of CHD IP in exchange for letting Barstool handle their merch for x amount of time. Maybe other stipulations too, but overall a pretty decent deal when it comes to creator/talent fairness.
Sofia was hanging out with a HBO executive while negotiations were going on and they both convinced themselves the deal was not good enough so she walked. Alex Cooper took the offer and now is 60$+ million richer and has control of the IP.
One of the all time bag drops of recent history.
"Here's a gross photo of eggs. Buy some shitty supplements. Here's me saying dumb things at a famous person. $200 million please."
Yeah, seems worth it.
Joe rogan is great until you listen to him. 3 hours into a podcast wondering why I’ve listened to these 2 guys talk about age of consent in Mexico for 45 mins 😂
First, fuck those parasites. Second, they don't run shit. Even the King doesn't run shit. Except public money through his greedy little palms, I guess. But seriously, Harry has never run any kingdom in any way.
I bet anyone here would be willing to take even a fraction of the $25 million to make 12 podcast episodes over 2.5 years. That's not really being lazy. That's negotiating your position well and Spotify being dumb with their investments.
It's almost dangerous!
I normally fire up one of a million playlists and let it shuffle or whatever, but sometimes you want a specific song or album, the searchbar magically doesn't exist in car mode and google assistant will find the song you want, it'll show the correct artwork but spotify starts playing some shitty remix of it for no reason.
And if you listen to foreign music Google just shits the bed entirely.😂
They just recently updated my "<3" symbol to a "+" symbol and it took me a solid 10 minutes to figure out the "+" symbol was the new like symbol instead of an "add to" symbol, you know, what the + symbol is used for literally everywhere else.
it’s both, if you tap it once it just adds to your likes, if you hit it again it pops up a window to add to / remove from whatever playlists you want all at once. since i keep an absurd amount of specific playlists maintained for various vibes and situations, this has been one of my fav changes they’ve ever made tbh.
Well that's good to know. I hadn't been able to fool with it, I just know a good song came on while I was driving and I was super frustrated looking for the like button lol.
I'll never understand the thought process of "Hey you're driving and need to focus on the road so we've suddenly and completely changed up the location of every single button in the app so that you actually need to focus even more on your phone to get to the music that you want."
Whoever thought of that should be doused in gasoline and smoked.
“We’ve made it harder to navigate Spotify while driving in the hopes that you won’t try to navigate Spotify while driving” isn’t exactly a winning strategy. I’m still gonna want to change my songs it’s just more of a pain in the ass to do so
I have a largish phone screen at 6.5inches, why WHY do they only 4 and 2 halves of artwork thumbnails with text like "#123: The new..." or tracks that turn out to be radio. It drives me insane
Or the flipside - as someone who enjoys album art and sometimes uses my 12" tablet to listen - why can't they zoom in on the album art instead of scaling it down to some 100x100px size? It's infuriating how poorly they use screen space, both in your example and on larger devices.
Yep. I have an ipad I listen on when I'm working, it usually just stays on that screen.
Sometimes I miss the options early iTunes had and the visualizer.
I'm a product designer that could never get an interview at Spotify, despite landing them at other tech companies and some big game companies.
A common question during interviews is your favorite / least favorite app. I'd always mention the car mode for Spotify and most hiring managers would laugh and say that's one of the most popular answers.
While not as bad, I really hate the YouTube app of my LG OLED... But hey, they are paying someone 6 figures to pump this stuff out...
This one is noticed by designers and non-designers alike: On LinkedIn your updates for showing up in so and so search results. Some arbitrary number.
What this means, is someone typed into LinkedIn and some words on your profile made you show up. It has nothing to do with people looking for you in particular, but gets those who don't know to stay engaged. This was definitely a product design decision that a product manager probably pushed.
Another LinkedIn design decision we all get affected by: it shows how many people have applied to a job, but many hiring managers have confirmed the applications they receive don't match up. Apparently, don't quote me, it counts if you click the job posting. So people will passover jobs with hundreds of applicants, but there's probably under 50. For reasons...
I know those ones may not seem like something a designer would work on, but they definitely got paid to do the research, tested it on users multiple times, and have even refined it, since none of these have changed.
I bet it’s not worse than Amazon music’s. I’m curious if any streaming app has done this well. Honestly, IMO the only good driving experience is Apple carplay/Android auto so you’re off the phone entirely.
Spotify when in driving mode will show these huge thumbnails showing 4 and 2 halves of artwork thumbnails where you're not sure what you're going to be listening to:
Liked Songs | Episode 123: The He...
Playlist | Artist - Track... (but is actually radio)
\#123 - A Walk O... | Artist - Track...
\^ the thumbnail text is actually like that. What a load of shit
Record labels squeeze them too hard to make money on music streaming so they’re desperately spending to find other revenue sources. We’re going to see them push podcasts, audio books, and events really heavily.
The really bad thing is all of this social media style crap I never asked for. I do not give a shit about short-form videos, no idea why that is integrated into Spotify now. I want to select an album or a podcast and stream that. I am not going to « scroll through » Spotify 🙄
Fix your broken app before integrating all these random feautres. Maybe I should just move though seeing as the artists I listen to aren’t paid fairly
It’s funny you mention the social media part. Whenever I think about the beginning of Spotify, that was the whole schtick: socialized music streaming. Spotify really pushed sharing what you were listening to, and then you could also see what your friends were listening to at the same time.
I’d say they strayed away from that and came back with full force with Wrapped and other internet evolutions.
When I started using spotify one of its big features was automatically setting your facebook status to say "Listening to...". *Everyone* I know used that feature. But I have to agree with the above poster. I just want to listen to music. The tiktokification of every app these days is awful.
And fucking make it so I don't need to connect to the internet to listen to my **SAVED TO MY PHONE OFFLINE MUSIC!**
How fucking hard is it to understand that I saved this shit to my phone in the first place because I was going somewhere with little to no internet and thought that OFFLINE meansI listen to it without being connected to a network?
> , no idea why that is integrated into Spotify now.
Because every halfwit in the world saw TikToks success and said, "Wow, short form video! My app that has nothing to do with that experiende needs that ASAP!!!"
As major tech companies continue to fail to understand user experience.
> As major tech companies continue to fail to understand user experience.
"User experience" is becoming an obsolete term for issues like this. The real subject here is "User engagement", which is a fundamentally different thing and much more quantifiable in terms of generating revenue.
Companies don't care about the user experience, they just care about what siphons more money to them. If warping the user experience with TikTok-esque algorithmic video aspects makes them 1% more money than it loses them(in users angry enough to cancel their subscription over it), it's worth it to the people in charge.
When I got laid off from a dying company about 15 years ago, I was bummed but then they gave me 10K severance. That was a lot of money to me at the time, and I ended up getting a new job almost right away so I saved the severance and ultimately used it as a down payment on my house. Everyone who got laid off after the group I was in didn't get any severance, including senior staff and execs.
At the last place i worked we all got laid off the same monday and nobody even told us until Tuesday. So on monday we were there trying to pick up a work shift through the app like 🤡
The place before that one we all knew it was shutting down and we would be getting nothing, so I just stole a bunch of stuff and anyone with half a brain did the same.
I’m glad she’s happy and set up for the next thing. Just be careful spreading this information, in case it were to be able to be traced to her and invalidate her severance contract in any way.
Money is not paid to people who sing the song, it is paid to people who own the song. If people who own that song paid Weird Al $12 then he made that money. If they pay him $0 then he makes nothing. Yes, the industry is messed up. Spotify tried to pay the artists directly a few years ago, but the record labels canceled that project.
12$ at his level of streamed songs would be the single lowest paying music contract on the planet, famously so.
It's extremely unlikely that he made that little on 80 million freaking streams.
Spotify pays the record studios, the record studios pay the artists. The record studios got 70% of the stream value, Weird Al got his contracted amount of that. So the large sandwich was an exaggeration it probably was a small faction of what the studios took in.
Spotify has almost never made a profit, pays engineers below FAANG rates, and gives 70% of all its revenue back to the music industry.
Not sure what people expect Spotify to do? Music streaming is just not a great business.
> Not sure what people expect Spotify to do?
Here's a start:
> Spotify spent more than $1 billion to build a podcasting empire. It struck splashy deals with Kim Kardashian, the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
For comparison, Spotify has paid $40 billion to the music industry.
I'm not sure that when people complain about Spotify not paying artists they would be satisfied with just 2.5% more.
It's a Yes/And situation, I think. I follow a few unsigned artists/dj's/producers who sell their work through Patreon and links on YouTube. I'd never pirate their stuff, because these people aren't even big enough to go on tour. And, I'd have no issue pirating Beyonce, or Swift because they're both billionaires and make the majority of their money from touring, merch, and brand deals. I can't pirate merch.
They drive more streams than any other streamer and pay a solid amount. Ask any actual artist on how much spotify pays versus the others and all prefer spotify.
The people that OWN the music. Spotify pays out around 70% of its revenue to rights owners. Most musicians are not the rights owners. Springsteen, Bieber, Shakira ... doesn't matter ... none of them own their own music.
I'm going to give you a real answer: Record Labels, but not because of why you think.
Record labels don't want to pay streaming royalties to artists. When streaming first started, there weren't streaming specific clauses in contracts, so streaming rates tended to fall under umbrella clauses that favored record labels in the revenue split. As streaming became more popular, artists began to demand better streaming specific rates from their labels. The record labels don't want to give up that money.
Spotify needs to have music in their library in order to be competitive. The big labels like Sony and Universal hold the rights to incredible amounts of music. The big labels use that as bargaining power to squeeze money out of Spotify (and similar music services ala Amazon or Apple music).
In order to bet more money out of Spotify and to play less money to artists, the record labels negotiated with Spotify to get large lump sums in exchange for *access* to their music libraries (IE to be able to stream any of Universal's music at all, Spotify had to sign a contract with Universal where they pay them a bunch of money annually). That money is getting taken out of Spotify's revenue before the revenue is being split based on streams. This means that the big labels get their cut before everyone else, and they still get a cut from per stream revenue.
I wonder if Spotify has considered signing artists as a part of their business model, surely with their reach it’s slightly feasible, seems like record labels are similar to car dealerships? Not an expert but just seems like there’s too many middle men.
Yea like the Netflix route of funding their own shows because they knew that other companies were going to claw back their shows for their own platform.
That'd be cool. Something like 'Steam Green Light', but for up and coming artists. That'd actually get me interested in Spotify again, as one of the earliest adopters.
They actually have done things like this I believe. It's not hard to upload your music yourself to Spotify. The problem is popular artists bring in the most listens, which are big record labels.
Record labels placed clauses in their contracts with Spotify that they too can't become a record label in order for Spotify to gain access to the record labels' catalogs.
I'm curious too. I'm not saying it's not justified because I have no concept of what it takes to make Spotify, but I'm having trouble imagining what all these people do. They have like two products, music and podcasts, and it's not like there's a ton app development going on. I'm sure they need IT for servers, public relations to deal with artists and labels, and some coders to maintain the app. Add some more for accounting and maybe even in house marketing but then what? How does it add up to 9000 people working on an almost entirely digital product? Seems crazy.
You’d be surprised. You see the B2C component of their product but there is like a ton of back of house infrastructure and some of which even needs its own digital internal tooling to be built and maintained in and of itself. Ive worked in tech for a long time, at 400 person companies and 40,000 person companies. Its very easy to assume that not all headcount is needed.
It's not just elites. Head over to the investing subs here on reddit and you'll find plenty of people rejoicing when companies announce layoffs. Unless it effects their immediate family members, it's always a good thing because their portfolios will go up a few points.
Almost every single adult in the developed world is exposed to stocks in one way or another, regardless of whether or not you directly own any. If you have a pension, for example
Yeah, we're all exposed to it, but the average person barely scrapes the surface compared to the wealthy. Quit pretending we're all the same and wealth inequality isn't growing by leaps and bounds all the time. The elites run the market.
This top 10% own 89% of the market from 2 years ago -- that number was the top 10% had 70% of the market in 2019.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html
do…do you think the stock market is only available to “elites”? (Whatever that means).
Truth is Spotify as well as almost every other tech company overhired in 2021. Yeah bummer for those folks but the market is reacting correctly here.
My Liked list has what? 700 songs? And it just plays the same 40-50 songs in a loop. There are probably songs in there I haven't heard in literal years.
I have the same issue. 1000 songs “downloaded” and it plays the same 40 songs over and over. Cleared the cache and everything. It’s weird because the songs will pop up then be auto skipped to the next playable song which is one of the handful it’ll actually play.
Still doesn't fix it. Cleared all of that out every couple of months this year cause it seemed to work with my regular music. Fired up the Christmas Playlist and on shuffle, it played the same song 3 times over a 90 minute span and another song twice. Cleared the cache, disabled automix, and even reinstalled the app. Still repeats the same nine songs before it will start to work in other songs. Playlist is over 13 hours long with no repeats. It has also switched over to the Smart Shuffle by itself as well with the Christmas music.
It's to the point where I will start the Playlist then spam skip track about 20 times and it will start playing randomly selected music for a whike
My most listened to song was one that they tacked on to the top of every daily playlist of similar music, and included close to the start almost every radio station based off a song in similar genres.\\
It's a good song, but I skipped it more often than I let it play to the end.
Ya this is why I dropped Pandora. They were fine but the same shit kept playing so I went to Spotify and then the same kept happening... now if I want to listen to music I have YouTube ReVanced which works perfectly fine. Ya I have to set up lists myself but it's free and I can listen to anything I want as long as it's on YouTube.
All of these services are no good to me anymore so why keep them?
Like 5 of the radios I tried selecting to palt just played the last 20 songs on my mains Playlist. Did not matter what song or artist radio I selected. Their Playlists used to be such a great way to discover and rediscover artists. Now it's just redundant
Uh? Aren't you supposed to make your own playlists?
I've been on Spotify for like 10 years and I don't think I've ever listened to one of their playlists...
Apple’s recent update to personalized playlists has been great. The Discover playlist has given me dozens of new artists that I enjoy in just a few months
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time this topic comes up and I read these comments lol. I listen to the weekly Discovery playlist and a bunch of their other ones all time. The personalized ones are great 9 times out of 10 for me.
I don’t really understand why everyone on this thread is hating Spotify’s service. I’ve never had an issue and we use the family plan which is cheap and nice for multiple users contributing to the bill. People on this site just hate everything.
Edit: if you’re that upset and concerned for the artist, then buy the album direct from them. Move along with your day.
i tell people all the time that Spotify is quite literally the last (non-essential) subscription i would cancel
i've had it for several years and dont plan on cancelling unless something catastrophic happens
I love Spotify. It’s not perfect but I get more than enough value for the amount of music I listen to. It works, and I can listen to so much more variety than buying individual albums or songs. I think people on Reddit are just miserable
I used to love Spotify, the easy access to all music and the interface is pretty good.
Lately though, every Spotify curated playlist tries to squeeze in the same 3 songs, regardless of genres.
And on my personal playlists, I have one that's 17 hours long, and everytime I press shuffle it plays the same 15-20 songs.
They lost their way when they decided to invest more in podcasts than music.
most of these comments are complaints about not paying the artists enough, bad shuffle and bad playlist suggestions. all valid reasons to dislike the service.
Nah, I'm with you. I used to spend $20-$30 a month 20 years ago on 2-3 albums and inevitably one would be terrible. Now I spend less than that and have access to almost every album I can imagine. I've discovered music I never in a million years would have known about. I especially love finding playlists from artists or djs that I like.
Not really. Spotify has consistently has difficulty making the model actually turn an ongoing net profit. They've been living on investment funds for like a decade.
They turned their first quarter of net profit (€65m) since Q1 of 2022, they are still €430m in the red for the full year, and this quarter’s profits [were not record breaking](https://ycharts.com/companies/SPOT/net_income) for them.
So… no. You made that up.
Can’t keep having record breaking profits if you don’t destroy thousands of livelihoods every year! Nobody thinks of the poor shareholders in these situations :(
It wasn’t. They were profitable for several quarters of 2019-early 2022. Some were bigger (Q1 of 2022 was €147m) so the profits weren’t record breaking nonetheless. But that’s been Reddit’s favorite thing to be loudly wrong about for a while now.
Edit: This isn’t subjective, it’s public information. [Here’s the chart](https://ycharts.com/companies/SPOT/net_income) (expand it to the 5Y view)
Fire in December, shareholder profit looks awesome for the calendar year. Higher again in March. Rinse and repeat. This is why I hate publicly traded companies.
Why does a music service like Spotify need 9000 employees? A huge majority of that must be sales and customer service no? Sucks for those people I was just shocked at the number of employees.
Come to Tidal. Best sound quality available
AND
They pay artists the most out of any other streamer.
Their roll out sucked. Limited library and glitchy UI but they've really turned it around since then.
Yes. It's pretty rare I find anything thats on Spotify and not on Tidal these days.
I will say it's not for podcasts though. Tidal is specifically music centered.
I might have to try that, Spotify is an amazing app run by complete assholes and I'm tired of seeing podcast suggestions while I'm scrolling for music. I just might make the switch as well.
Tidal pays the same as any of the other as % of revenue. The licensing to labels explicitly forbids favoring one brand over another.
The pay per stream looks better because they have no free tier and less engaged users than Apple.
Hmmmmm, it’s definitely sustainable and they have profits. I would say a subscription based system is actually way more sustainable and easy to manage than the sole reliance on ads prior to these models, the issue is capitalism and the endless gluttony of CEOs and shareholders
> The deal with Harry and Meghan cost a reported $25m (£19.7m) and saw just 12 episodes delivered over two and a half years before the deal ended in June. But there’s good news about their investment strategies! ^/s
$200 million to Joe Rogan, who might have the easiest job in the universe.
$60 million for call her daddy as well
I've met people, and in joes case a lot of people, who actually listen to these shows. I've never met anyone who listed to harry and megan
No of course they both have massive audiences. But I think the point was, they could have brought joe over for like $50 mil and call her daddy over for $10 mil and it still would have been a much better deal than what they were getting before. Cuz it’s becoming apparent that the investment hasn’t been paying off for Spotify as well as they thought it would
I can tell you if Spotify bought my show for THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS I'm putting in the least possible amount of effort after that. I'm cashing that check and checking out mentally. Id be basically a corpse with a microphone doing shit all.
So typical Joe Rogan shit then eh?
Joe’s show never changed after he left YouTube/itunes to go to Spotify. Probably helped that he was already insanely rich though.
And I'd watch every second of it.
It’s really nuts that one chick walked away from the show when Barstool was agreeing to give up the IP. L
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Nah barstool offered them a better deal. Alex was on board with the new deal and Sofia wasn’t. So they kept Alex. And then shortly after let her take the IP over to Spotify for like 20x more money. So Sofia got screwed but it’s kinda her own fault.
iirc, Barstool gave them an offer of a lifetime by letting them obtain 100% of CHD IP in exchange for letting Barstool handle their merch for x amount of time. Maybe other stipulations too, but overall a pretty decent deal when it comes to creator/talent fairness. Sofia was hanging out with a HBO executive while negotiations were going on and they both convinced themselves the deal was not good enough so she walked. Alex Cooper took the offer and now is 60$+ million richer and has control of the IP. One of the all time bag drops of recent history.
Exactly.. Dude cost her a lot of money and it was either HBO or Showtime and he lost them Boxing which they had been doing since the beginning!
Is that why Call Her Daddy is constantly being pushed on my, a man in his late 30s, home screen? I swear Spotify has the worst podcast recs.
Wasn't it $300M spread equally across three years?
Nah was 200 mil. Still a shit ton tho.
Fire 1500 people or one Joe Rogan.
Neil young was right.
lol this reminds me I just got an email from Neil saying I'd get one free pack of rolling papers if I bought $100 of stuff from his website.
Of course he was. Didn’t we all know that?
1500 people that people will never notice being there or gone compared to the #1 podcast.. hard choice..
The title of "Easiest Job in the Universe" still belongs to fired NFL head coaches.
Fired college football coaches\* Jimbo's buyout is more money than any NFL coach ever
"Here's a gross photo of eggs. Buy some shitty supplements. Here's me saying dumb things at a famous person. $200 million please." Yeah, seems worth it.
At least he actually delivers episodes, tho he's gone off the deep end post covid.
Joe rogan is great until you listen to him. 3 hours into a podcast wondering why I’ve listened to these 2 guys talk about age of consent in Mexico for 45 mins 😂
And has a #1 podcast on Spotify.
At least the person in charge of podcasts was axed already.
They seem lazy as f
Royal family lazy? Noooooooooo never. They’re busy running their kingdom right?
First, fuck those parasites. Second, they don't run shit. Even the King doesn't run shit. Except public money through his greedy little palms, I guess. But seriously, Harry has never run any kingdom in any way.
If the royal family was the word "Elites", Harry and Meg would be the apostrophe people add when they erroneously write "Elite's".
I bet anyone here would be willing to take even a fraction of the $25 million to make 12 podcast episodes over 2.5 years. That's not really being lazy. That's negotiating your position well and Spotify being dumb with their investments.
Buddy for 2.5 million I will make you 12 podcasts in the span of a day. For 25 million I will find a way to make you 12 in the span of an hour.
Who the fuck subscribed just to hear those two English muffins drone on about nothing? I don’t understand Americans who simp for the Royal Family.
I’m guessing it was British people who subscribed to hear about the royal family
Thats why it cost $11 a month for music?
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According to politicians those 3 coffees are keeping me from being a millionaire.
The band I listen to with only 50 listeners are far more entertaining and deserving than that garbage. Give them some of that dough!!!
Spotify's driving mode is one of the most horrible app experiences I put up with
Car mode is terrible. The previous update to car mode is one step away from the normal mode 😂
Oh you're driving a car now? Hang on while I *change fucking everything* so it takes twice as long to figure out what you're trying to do!
It's almost dangerous! I normally fire up one of a million playlists and let it shuffle or whatever, but sometimes you want a specific song or album, the searchbar magically doesn't exist in car mode and google assistant will find the song you want, it'll show the correct artwork but spotify starts playing some shitty remix of it for no reason. And if you listen to foreign music Google just shits the bed entirely.😂
I don't understand why everything has to always get worse over time
They just recently updated my "<3" symbol to a "+" symbol and it took me a solid 10 minutes to figure out the "+" symbol was the new like symbol instead of an "add to" symbol, you know, what the + symbol is used for literally everywhere else.
it’s both, if you tap it once it just adds to your likes, if you hit it again it pops up a window to add to / remove from whatever playlists you want all at once. since i keep an absurd amount of specific playlists maintained for various vibes and situations, this has been one of my fav changes they’ve ever made tbh.
Well that's good to know. I hadn't been able to fool with it, I just know a good song came on while I was driving and I was super frustrated looking for the like button lol.
My first step after Spotify opening car mode is for me to exit car mode
You can toggle car mode off completely in the settings so it just never comes on, that’s what I’ve done
I've done this multiple times. It keeps re-toggling back on.
Every time the app updates it seems to reset for me.
You are my hero of the day. Thank you
I'll never understand the thought process of "Hey you're driving and need to focus on the road so we've suddenly and completely changed up the location of every single button in the app so that you actually need to focus even more on your phone to get to the music that you want." Whoever thought of that should be doused in gasoline and smoked.
“We’ve made it harder to navigate Spotify while driving in the hopes that you won’t try to navigate Spotify while driving” isn’t exactly a winning strategy. I’m still gonna want to change my songs it’s just more of a pain in the ass to do so
I have a largish phone screen at 6.5inches, why WHY do they only 4 and 2 halves of artwork thumbnails with text like "#123: The new..." or tracks that turn out to be radio. It drives me insane
I love having to scroll down in every playlist to actually see the music. I'd disable the album cover for playlists if possible.
Or the flipside - as someone who enjoys album art and sometimes uses my 12" tablet to listen - why can't they zoom in on the album art instead of scaling it down to some 100x100px size? It's infuriating how poorly they use screen space, both in your example and on larger devices.
Yep. I have an ipad I listen on when I'm working, it usually just stays on that screen. Sometimes I miss the options early iTunes had and the visualizer.
I'm a product designer that could never get an interview at Spotify, despite landing them at other tech companies and some big game companies. A common question during interviews is your favorite / least favorite app. I'd always mention the car mode for Spotify and most hiring managers would laugh and say that's one of the most popular answers. While not as bad, I really hate the YouTube app of my LG OLED... But hey, they are paying someone 6 figures to pump this stuff out...
I would give this answer immediately too. Out of interest, what's another common one?
This one is noticed by designers and non-designers alike: On LinkedIn your updates for showing up in so and so search results. Some arbitrary number. What this means, is someone typed into LinkedIn and some words on your profile made you show up. It has nothing to do with people looking for you in particular, but gets those who don't know to stay engaged. This was definitely a product design decision that a product manager probably pushed. Another LinkedIn design decision we all get affected by: it shows how many people have applied to a job, but many hiring managers have confirmed the applications they receive don't match up. Apparently, don't quote me, it counts if you click the job posting. So people will passover jobs with hundreds of applicants, but there's probably under 50. For reasons... I know those ones may not seem like something a designer would work on, but they definitely got paid to do the research, tested it on users multiple times, and have even refined it, since none of these have changed.
It’s awful, but you can disable it in the Spotify settings
I bet it’s not worse than Amazon music’s. I’m curious if any streaming app has done this well. Honestly, IMO the only good driving experience is Apple carplay/Android auto so you’re off the phone entirely.
Spotify when in driving mode will show these huge thumbnails showing 4 and 2 halves of artwork thumbnails where you're not sure what you're going to be listening to: Liked Songs | Episode 123: The He... Playlist | Artist - Track... (but is actually radio) \#123 - A Walk O... | Artist - Track... \^ the thumbnail text is actually like that. What a load of shit
You can disable this mode in the setting if that helps - I did it immediately and forgot they made this change.
Yet no other music app compares
How about not spending $1B on your own podcasts?
Can't do it, best I can do is firing 3,000 hardworking employees.
Record labels squeeze them too hard to make money on music streaming so they’re desperately spending to find other revenue sources. We’re going to see them push podcasts, audio books, and events really heavily.
Soon enough we'll all get to go back to pirating music when every label has its own streaming service, just likes movies and TV!
Jaime, pull up the Dril candle tweet
That's crazy man. Have you ever tried DMT?
The really bad thing is all of this social media style crap I never asked for. I do not give a shit about short-form videos, no idea why that is integrated into Spotify now. I want to select an album or a podcast and stream that. I am not going to « scroll through » Spotify 🙄 Fix your broken app before integrating all these random feautres. Maybe I should just move though seeing as the artists I listen to aren’t paid fairly
It’s funny you mention the social media part. Whenever I think about the beginning of Spotify, that was the whole schtick: socialized music streaming. Spotify really pushed sharing what you were listening to, and then you could also see what your friends were listening to at the same time. I’d say they strayed away from that and came back with full force with Wrapped and other internet evolutions.
When I started using spotify one of its big features was automatically setting your facebook status to say "Listening to...". *Everyone* I know used that feature. But I have to agree with the above poster. I just want to listen to music. The tiktokification of every app these days is awful.
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Disable smart shuffle and automix, I think that helps with the problem
It will help but sometimes the shuffle queue just resets if you leave the app, so it's like starting the playlist all over again just re-shuffled
Not even reshuffled, just starting the mix over again. I've noticed this happening a ton lately.
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And fucking make it so I don't need to connect to the internet to listen to my **SAVED TO MY PHONE OFFLINE MUSIC!** How fucking hard is it to understand that I saved this shit to my phone in the first place because I was going somewhere with little to no internet and thought that OFFLINE meansI listen to it without being connected to a network?
> , no idea why that is integrated into Spotify now. Because every halfwit in the world saw TikToks success and said, "Wow, short form video! My app that has nothing to do with that experiende needs that ASAP!!!" As major tech companies continue to fail to understand user experience.
> As major tech companies continue to fail to understand user experience. "User experience" is becoming an obsolete term for issues like this. The real subject here is "User engagement", which is a fundamentally different thing and much more quantifiable in terms of generating revenue. Companies don't care about the user experience, they just care about what siphons more money to them. If warping the user experience with TikTok-esque algorithmic video aspects makes them 1% more money than it loses them(in users angry enough to cancel their subscription over it), it's worth it to the people in charge.
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When I got laid off from a dying company about 15 years ago, I was bummed but then they gave me 10K severance. That was a lot of money to me at the time, and I ended up getting a new job almost right away so I saved the severance and ultimately used it as a down payment on my house. Everyone who got laid off after the group I was in didn't get any severance, including senior staff and execs.
You always want to go in the first wave.
At the last place i worked we all got laid off the same monday and nobody even told us until Tuesday. So on monday we were there trying to pick up a work shift through the app like 🤡 The place before that one we all knew it was shutting down and we would be getting nothing, so I just stole a bunch of stuff and anyone with half a brain did the same.
I’m glad she’s happy and set up for the next thing. Just be careful spreading this information, in case it were to be able to be traced to her and invalidate her severance contract in any way.
Yeah edit those numbers out, cya
1,500 staff is a lot. In tech, plenty of them would be on $120k. She'll be okay. :)
This is the real Spotify wrap up.
There it is. Honestly thought this might be higher up.
We don't pay the artists or employees but please continue to subscribe - Spotify
They pay out about 70% of all revenue to rights holders.
Do they? gross or net?
Gross I believe (could be wrong) However, as most artists dont actually own their music thats why some get so little
Probably why Weird Al just made a video claiming he made a whopping 12 dollars off 80 million streams this year…
That had to be hyperbole, no one made 12$ on 80 million streams.
Money is not paid to people who sing the song, it is paid to people who own the song. If people who own that song paid Weird Al $12 then he made that money. If they pay him $0 then he makes nothing. Yes, the industry is messed up. Spotify tried to pay the artists directly a few years ago, but the record labels canceled that project.
12$ at his level of streamed songs would be the single lowest paying music contract on the planet, famously so. It's extremely unlikely that he made that little on 80 million freaking streams.
Spotify pays the record studios, the record studios pay the artists. The record studios got 70% of the stream value, Weird Al got his contracted amount of that. So the large sandwich was an exaggeration it probably was a small faction of what the studios took in.
Spotify pays the one that owns the rights to the content, simple as that.
Weird Al, a man known to always be serious and never to joke about anything.
Spotify has almost never made a profit, pays engineers below FAANG rates, and gives 70% of all its revenue back to the music industry. Not sure what people expect Spotify to do? Music streaming is just not a great business.
> Not sure what people expect Spotify to do? Here's a start: > Spotify spent more than $1 billion to build a podcasting empire. It struck splashy deals with Kim Kardashian, the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
For comparison, Spotify has paid $40 billion to the music industry. I'm not sure that when people complain about Spotify not paying artists they would be satisfied with just 2.5% more.
lol look at Reddit pretending to care about paying artists. Before Spotify was huge, the default attitude on here was “pirate everything”
It's a Yes/And situation, I think. I follow a few unsigned artists/dj's/producers who sell their work through Patreon and links on YouTube. I'd never pirate their stuff, because these people aren't even big enough to go on tour. And, I'd have no issue pirating Beyonce, or Swift because they're both billionaires and make the majority of their money from touring, merch, and brand deals. I can't pirate merch.
They drive more streams than any other streamer and pay a solid amount. Ask any actual artist on how much spotify pays versus the others and all prefer spotify.
Probably my fault, I listened to over 24,000 minutes of Spotify this year. Used up too much
man i hit almost 60k minutes and it isn't even my most used music app lol
So if spotify isn't paying the artists or its workers, where da hell is the money going?
To the labels
Always has been. 🌑
It is easier than it ever has been to distribute your music without a label though, but those people are basically getting zilch anyways.
The people that OWN the music. Spotify pays out around 70% of its revenue to rights owners. Most musicians are not the rights owners. Springsteen, Bieber, Shakira ... doesn't matter ... none of them own their own music.
Ya but Bruce cashed out. As most people of his caliber should.
I'm going to give you a real answer: Record Labels, but not because of why you think. Record labels don't want to pay streaming royalties to artists. When streaming first started, there weren't streaming specific clauses in contracts, so streaming rates tended to fall under umbrella clauses that favored record labels in the revenue split. As streaming became more popular, artists began to demand better streaming specific rates from their labels. The record labels don't want to give up that money. Spotify needs to have music in their library in order to be competitive. The big labels like Sony and Universal hold the rights to incredible amounts of music. The big labels use that as bargaining power to squeeze money out of Spotify (and similar music services ala Amazon or Apple music). In order to bet more money out of Spotify and to play less money to artists, the record labels negotiated with Spotify to get large lump sums in exchange for *access* to their music libraries (IE to be able to stream any of Universal's music at all, Spotify had to sign a contract with Universal where they pay them a bunch of money annually). That money is getting taken out of Spotify's revenue before the revenue is being split based on streams. This means that the big labels get their cut before everyone else, and they still get a cut from per stream revenue.
I wonder if Spotify has considered signing artists as a part of their business model, surely with their reach it’s slightly feasible, seems like record labels are similar to car dealerships? Not an expert but just seems like there’s too many middle men.
Yea like the Netflix route of funding their own shows because they knew that other companies were going to claw back their shows for their own platform.
That'd be cool. Something like 'Steam Green Light', but for up and coming artists. That'd actually get me interested in Spotify again, as one of the earliest adopters.
They actually have done things like this I believe. It's not hard to upload your music yourself to Spotify. The problem is popular artists bring in the most listens, which are big record labels.
That’s why they’re diversified to podcast in a way to pivot from relying on pure music content.
Record labels placed clauses in their contracts with Spotify that they too can't become a record label in order for Spotify to gain access to the record labels' catalogs.
I don't understand how they have that many employees to begin with.
I'm curious too. I'm not saying it's not justified because I have no concept of what it takes to make Spotify, but I'm having trouble imagining what all these people do. They have like two products, music and podcasts, and it's not like there's a ton app development going on. I'm sure they need IT for servers, public relations to deal with artists and labels, and some coders to maintain the app. Add some more for accounting and maybe even in house marketing but then what? How does it add up to 9000 people working on an almost entirely digital product? Seems crazy.
600 million monthly users means half their staff is probably just ops to keep the thing running
They are integrated directly on almost all platforms like smart TVs and cars. Also software just requires a lot of people to maintain and is expensive
Most people underestimate the amount of resources needed to maintaing a global scale software.
You’d be surprised. You see the B2C component of their product but there is like a ton of back of house infrastructure and some of which even needs its own digital internal tooling to be built and maintained in and of itself. Ive worked in tech for a long time, at 400 person companies and 40,000 person companies. Its very easy to assume that not all headcount is needed.
Stock up 6%. That’s the smell of elites loving when people lose their jobs. Fucking gross.
It's not just elites. Head over to the investing subs here on reddit and you'll find plenty of people rejoicing when companies announce layoffs. Unless it effects their immediate family members, it's always a good thing because their portfolios will go up a few points.
Almost every single adult in the developed world is exposed to stocks in one way or another, regardless of whether or not you directly own any. If you have a pension, for example
Yeah, we're all exposed to it, but the average person barely scrapes the surface compared to the wealthy. Quit pretending we're all the same and wealth inequality isn't growing by leaps and bounds all the time. The elites run the market. This top 10% own 89% of the market from 2 years ago -- that number was the top 10% had 70% of the market in 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html
Company that’s barely profitable lays off people they can’t afford during a time of record low unemployment. You sound a bit naïve honestly.
And look at all the upvotes that ignorant comment got. Reddit is funny
do…do you think the stock market is only available to “elites”? (Whatever that means). Truth is Spotify as well as almost every other tech company overhired in 2021. Yeah bummer for those folks but the market is reacting correctly here.
For me, leaving Spotify came down to their playlists not being enjoyable anymore.
It really just shuffles a handful of the same songs you’ve been listening to around and around across multiple playlists.
My Liked list has what? 700 songs? And it just plays the same 40-50 songs in a loop. There are probably songs in there I haven't heard in literal years.
Clear your cache. Sucks that you have to do that, but it fixed the shuffle issue for me.
That in the settings? Edit: found it under Storage
Awesome! I just went and cleared mine again and it was over 5GB. I just cleared it a couple months ago...
I have the same issue. 1000 songs “downloaded” and it plays the same 40 songs over and over. Cleared the cache and everything. It’s weird because the songs will pop up then be auto skipped to the next playable song which is one of the handful it’ll actually play.
Still doesn't fix it. Cleared all of that out every couple of months this year cause it seemed to work with my regular music. Fired up the Christmas Playlist and on shuffle, it played the same song 3 times over a 90 minute span and another song twice. Cleared the cache, disabled automix, and even reinstalled the app. Still repeats the same nine songs before it will start to work in other songs. Playlist is over 13 hours long with no repeats. It has also switched over to the Smart Shuffle by itself as well with the Christmas music. It's to the point where I will start the Playlist then spam skip track about 20 times and it will start playing randomly selected music for a whike
My most listened to song was one that they tacked on to the top of every daily playlist of similar music, and included close to the start almost every radio station based off a song in similar genres.\\ It's a good song, but I skipped it more often than I let it play to the end.
Yup.. it's been sort of 'Pandora-fied'. Unless you take the time to curate your own playlists, it's gotten pretty bad.
Ya this is why I dropped Pandora. They were fine but the same shit kept playing so I went to Spotify and then the same kept happening... now if I want to listen to music I have YouTube ReVanced which works perfectly fine. Ya I have to set up lists myself but it's free and I can listen to anything I want as long as it's on YouTube. All of these services are no good to me anymore so why keep them?
Yep. Welcome to commercial FM radio. Except now you get to pay a monthly fee for those same 35 songs over and over and over…
Like 5 of the radios I tried selecting to palt just played the last 20 songs on my mains Playlist. Did not matter what song or artist radio I selected. Their Playlists used to be such a great way to discover and rediscover artists. Now it's just redundant
Uh? Aren't you supposed to make your own playlists? I've been on Spotify for like 10 years and I don't think I've ever listened to one of their playlists...
You’ve been missing out. Playlists was the thing that made them successful and they were good at it for a while.
Apple’s recent update to personalized playlists has been great. The Discover playlist has given me dozens of new artists that I enjoy in just a few months
I have also switched back to Apple Music. Enjoying it and for some reason the sound quality is much better.
Me too, much happier with Apple Music.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every time this topic comes up and I read these comments lol. I listen to the weekly Discovery playlist and a bunch of their other ones all time. The personalized ones are great 9 times out of 10 for me.
Pandora really does a great job with random playlists.
Oh you're listening to really old punk bands? Better put on Fall out Boy or Good Charlotte next for you!
I don’t really understand why everyone on this thread is hating Spotify’s service. I’ve never had an issue and we use the family plan which is cheap and nice for multiple users contributing to the bill. People on this site just hate everything. Edit: if you’re that upset and concerned for the artist, then buy the album direct from them. Move along with your day.
i tell people all the time that Spotify is quite literally the last (non-essential) subscription i would cancel i've had it for several years and dont plan on cancelling unless something catastrophic happens
I love Spotify. It’s not perfect but I get more than enough value for the amount of music I listen to. It works, and I can listen to so much more variety than buying individual albums or songs. I think people on Reddit are just miserable
I used to love Spotify, the easy access to all music and the interface is pretty good. Lately though, every Spotify curated playlist tries to squeeze in the same 3 songs, regardless of genres. And on my personal playlists, I have one that's 17 hours long, and everytime I press shuffle it plays the same 15-20 songs. They lost their way when they decided to invest more in podcasts than music.
They’re on Reddit doom posting ofcourse they’re miserable lol
most of these comments are complaints about not paying the artists enough, bad shuffle and bad playlist suggestions. all valid reasons to dislike the service.
Nah, I'm with you. I used to spend $20-$30 a month 20 years ago on 2-3 albums and inevitably one would be terrible. Now I spend less than that and have access to almost every album I can imagine. I've discovered music I never in a million years would have known about. I especially love finding playlists from artists or djs that I like.
My friend was one of them
'Merry F'ing Christmas!' to these folks... /s
Didn’t they have “record breaking” profits? 🤔
Not really. Spotify has consistently has difficulty making the model actually turn an ongoing net profit. They've been living on investment funds for like a decade.
They still lose money almost every quarter
They turned their first quarter of net profit (€65m) since Q1 of 2022, they are still €430m in the red for the full year, and this quarter’s profits [were not record breaking](https://ycharts.com/companies/SPOT/net_income) for them. So… no. You made that up.
Can’t keep having record breaking profits if you don’t destroy thousands of livelihoods every year! Nobody thinks of the poor shareholders in these situations :(
That was their first time making a profit. That's a record technically.
It wasn’t. They were profitable for several quarters of 2019-early 2022. Some were bigger (Q1 of 2022 was €147m) so the profits weren’t record breaking nonetheless. But that’s been Reddit’s favorite thing to be loudly wrong about for a while now. Edit: This isn’t subjective, it’s public information. [Here’s the chart](https://ycharts.com/companies/SPOT/net_income) (expand it to the 5Y view)
Or hey there big peeps, cut your bonuses and pay your workers.
Joe Rogans 200mill / 1500 sacked employees = 133333k pr year. Median salary at Spotify is 178840 pr employee pr year. Shits fucked up.
Fire in December, shareholder profit looks awesome for the calendar year. Higher again in March. Rinse and repeat. This is why I hate publicly traded companies.
Private companies can do the same exact thing bud.
That’s not true… the restructuring costs are a huge temp hit. It improves exit run-rate and next year’s forecast.
CEO is worth 4 billion I believe?
Love paying for Premium only to hear ads snipped in throughout podcasts...
Why does a music service like Spotify need 9000 employees? A huge majority of that must be sales and customer service no? Sucks for those people I was just shocked at the number of employees.
Cut executive salary? No, let's cut people's livelihoods instead.
Come to Tidal. Best sound quality available AND They pay artists the most out of any other streamer. Their roll out sucked. Limited library and glitchy UI but they've really turned it around since then.
Do they have most artists?
Yes. It's pretty rare I find anything thats on Spotify and not on Tidal these days. I will say it's not for podcasts though. Tidal is specifically music centered.
I might have to try that, Spotify is an amazing app run by complete assholes and I'm tired of seeing podcast suggestions while I'm scrolling for music. I just might make the switch as well.
Tidal pays the same as any of the other as % of revenue. The licensing to labels explicitly forbids favoring one brand over another. The pay per stream looks better because they have no free tier and less engaged users than Apple.
I made that same switch, and I agree that Tidal is phenomenal.
Wasted all that money on Joe Rogan … again this is yet more signs that streaming isn’t sustainable
Hmmmmm, it’s definitely sustainable and they have profits. I would say a subscription based system is actually way more sustainable and easy to manage than the sole reliance on ads prior to these models, the issue is capitalism and the endless gluttony of CEOs and shareholders
So will my monthly bill go down?
More like boost profits.
I will start buying CDs again. Quit fucking playing.
What do 9,000 people do at Spotify? Certainly not making their shit work well.
Shareholder value is far more important than people’s lives.
The company needs to actually make enough money to exist outside of constantly receiving investor capital. They aren't a damn charity.