5/22/2023 0 Comments Open spotifySpotify Premium: Music libraryįor the most part, both free and paying users have the same access to Spotify’s library of “over 80 million” songs and podcast titles. PCs, smartphones, connected devices, Smart TVs, PS3 & PS4, Android Auto, Spotify Car Thing, Apple CarplayĪd-free listening Offline listening Unlimited Skips Mobile Streaming Over 80 million songs, plus 2.6 million podcasts Premium comparison will help you choose by running through what features you get on each tier. We've put the streaming service head-to-head with its biggest rivals, so don't forget to check out these face-offs: Apple Music vs. Or, if it's better to keep a Spotify Free account but spend music streaming money towards a different service. If you don’t already have a Spotify Premium subscription, you might be wondering if it’s worth paying the monthly $9.99. In early 2022 it became apparent that Spotify's lossless streaming tier was hit by delays, although it now looks as though Spotify HiFi could be back on the agenda after all. Spotify's second Stream On event has been set for March 8, 2023, where we'll hopefully be able to find out more about whether a Spotify hi-fi tier is ever likely to be rolled out. Spotify's closest rival Apple Music already offers lossless and spatial audio, and the popular music streaming service is beginning to looking like it's falling behind in terms of high-quality music streaming. Those open systems prevent lock-in, they prevent silos, and (perhaps most notably) they keep the ecosystem more open and free for everyone, so that a single company can’t come in and twist the system solely to their own advantages.Choosing between Spotify Free and Premium is a little more complicated given some of the recent upgrades rival music steaming services have received. There’s a reason that I keep pushing for protocol-based solutions over proprietary platforms. Spotify has still built up a big audience that now listens to podcasts (including actual podcasts alongside Spotify’s proprietary audio programing), but it’s increasingly looking like its plan to move open podcasts into a silo that you can only get through Spotify and in a proprietary format are fizzling. Notably, the bets by those other companies have (mostly) been on retaining more open podcasts, though some of them (Amazon for one) offer early access to podcasts for Prime subscribers. Spotify’s pivot has more in common with the recent cuts to Hollywood’s spending on streaming television. But rivals from tech giants Amazon and Apple to the radio company iHeart have found better returns on more cautious bets. Its drastic cuts have triggered a podcast winter, as the small studios it helped support consolidate and lavish narrative productions wane. Spotify was a one-company podcast bubble. “So we are shifting to focus on tightening our spend and becoming more efficient.” “In hindsight, I probably got a little carried away and overinvested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market,” Ek said on an earnings call in January. Of course, there’s a pretty long history of companies trying to do this, and sometimes succeeding, but (thankfully) it sounds like Spotify’s big bet has been an even bigger bust. And, we highlighted that the open internet stood to lose a lot if we allowed this kind of colonization of the open protocol podcasts into locked silos of proprietary audio. It’s why we kept noting that every time Spotify paid some famous podcaster to only release their audio through Spotify that we should stop calling them podcasts, since they were now proprietary audio. We worried about this back when Spotify purchased Gimlet, fearing that it was a warning sign of an attempt to wall off the open podcast market. While it was, perhaps, an understandable move driven by the economics of our totally broken copyright systems which made it impossible to be truly profitable with just music, Spotify’s decision to go after the podcast market, shelling out massive dollars for podcast-focused companies like Gimlet Media and the Ringer, was all about taking a system based on open protocols - mainly mp3s and RSS - and trying to lock it up behind a proprietary moat. We wrote a few times about the problems of Spotify’s attempt to colonize the podcast market. Fri, Feb 24th 2023 12:49pm - Mike Masnick
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |