"Muso, a research firm that studies piracy, concluded that the high prices of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are pushing people back towards illegal downloads. Spotify raised its prices by one dollar last year to $10.99 a month, the same price as Apple Music. Instead of coughing up $132 a year, more consumers are using websites that rip audio straight out of YouTube videos, and convert them into downloadable MP3 or .wav files.
Roughly 40% of the music piracy Muso tracked was from these “YouTube-to-MP3” sites. The original YouTube-to-MP3 site died from a record label lawsuit, but other copycats do the same thing. A simple Google search yields dozens of blue links to these sites, and they’re, by far, the largest form of audio piracy on the internet."
The problem isn’t price. People just don’t want to pay for a bad experience. What Apple Music and Spotify have in common is that their software is bloated with useless shit and endlessly annoying user-hostile design. Plus Steve Jobs himself said it back in 2007: “people want to own their music.” Having it, organizing it, curating it is half the fun. Not fun is pressing play one day and finding a big chunk of your carefully constructed playlist is “no longer in your library.” Screw that.
I have a slightly different suggestion.
Inflation is crap and the first thing to go are subscriptions that raise their prices when people are already hurting. If you want retention, keep your prices locked when users are having bad times and you’re raking in record profits.
I think curation is great too, but I also think age plays a lot into individual views. A bunch of the younger guys at work were saying how they didn’t want playlists and they didn’t want to listen to an album, they just wanted to hit a button that knew their tastes musically and would give them a mix of familiar likes and new discoveries. The proceeded to describe a radio station to me, sans commercials. They were hot on all the music streaming and though I was crazy for wanting to spend time sorting through music.
Looking at a Spotify by age graph, the boomers dig it (because it’s easy?), Gen-Z and the Younger Millennials dig it, Gen X has less than half the uptake of the other groups.
We were mixing our own tapes in our tweens and teens. We wired ourselves to find music, copy it and play it in the specific order we want.
or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.