Its recommendations engine, while much improved, still isn’t a patch on Spotify and I will miss my Discover Weekly playlist. And that’s before we get to Spotify’s comparatively poor record when it comes to sound quality and artist payouts… Why Apple Music?Īpple’s music streaming service is by no means a shiny disco ball of perfection. Simple menus, like finding an album, are now buried under a pile of recommendations and sponsored promos. Not to mention blood-sucking schemes like Discovery Mode, where artists can exchange lower royalties for greater exposure. My main issue with Spotify’s new direction isn’t just the spread of video – after all, I grew up with MTV – but everything else it’s shoehorning in, like podcasts and audiobooks, to create one attention-grabbing glob of ‘content’.
In other words, railing against the Instagram-ification of music streaming apps just makes you sound like a 21st-century equivalent of The Buggles (opens in new tab).īut while there is an element of Principal Skinner’s “it’s the children who are wrong” to my Spotify exit, that isn’t the whole story. “If you think about it, in the music industry, when we went from having a radio to MTV, it was a hell of a lot better, and it allowed totally different artists to get a new way of communicating” he added. “It’s about looking to younger consumers for inspiration,” Ek explained.
This hit me when reading Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s interview with Billboard (opens in new tab), when he was asked to explain video-themed features like Canvas (the eight-second video loops you see in the background when playing a song) and the even longer Spotify Clips. That’s a bit different from going to Pitchblack Playback (opens in new tab) to listen to an album in complete darkness. Most Spotify users are aged 34 and under (opens in new tab) – and its youngest fans are more interested in visual music discovery. An alternative explanation for my desire to leave the new Spotify, other than it being objectively bad, is that I’m simply too old for it.
0 kommentar(er)
