Is Spotify superior than Apple Music?
I simply want to get this out of the way: Spotify wins hands down in terms of accessibility and incentive to listen to music.
Spotify just received a patent that would allow them to track their users in unprecedented ways. The patent is for a device called “Identification of taste qualities from an audio signal, which aims to measure listeners’ psychological response, sexuality, maturity, or language in order to offer new, exciting music. Reading this is both exhilarating and disturbing.
The article goes on to say that Spotify won’t be having consumers go through the “laborious” process of supplying this information voluntarily. Why is the organization attempting to create anything out of these random characteristics — notably an audience’s emotional situation and language — for an app that does such a good job of giving a platform to find new music? How might it determine a listener’s musical preferences based on individual preferences?
At best, it’s deceptive. They’ve placed people in this amazing condition of constant and individualized music consumption, but now they’re going to take use of it.
From the perspective of an artist, Spotify is arguably worse than Apple Music when it comes time to pay a fair amount to its artists. They earn $3.18 per 1000 streams after 336,842 monthly plays, compared to $5.60 per 1000 streams for Apple Music after 200,272 monthly plays. The present music business is horribly constructed, with streaming at the center; it will take a lot of reform for revenues to be beneficial to all artists in the first place, but Apple Music is already leagues ahead.
Spotify also wants to suggest improving the artist’s algorithm placement to reduce licensing fees. If that doesn’t suggest that art is much less valuable than technology, I don’t know what it does. Spotify is the worst and Apple Music is fair, but I’ve never heard of Apple Music’s dark plans to dominate listening to music.
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