The moment Richard compared the application they presented, Spotify, with YouTube, I was really hoping to discuss this topic for my application critique!I used to pirate music (just a few dozen tracks) and am currently a "YouTube sucker"; the two terms were mentioned in the presentation to contrast with the active users of Spotify. Allow me to clarify at this point that I did use Spotify before, and that the genre of music I often listen to is Mandarin pop.
Music content availability
It is important to compare Spotify to other music platforms when talking about the range and availability of the content each offers, as they serve the needs of different users in different regions. For example, KKBox is a prominent music service in Asian markets, while SoundCloud is probably the best choice should one choose to listen to independent musicians.Spotify, like many typical music services, only offer tracks found in albums that have been released. While this is the mainstream way of consuming music nowadays, there are a lot of quality content out there which will never be played on Spotify. Use my listening preferences as an example: I like to listen to a particular Chinese song, and I would love to hear the live, cover and instrumental renders of it, and if possible listen to it as part of a medley or as a remix. So far, the only platform able to satisfy my request is YouTube.
Thus, the image of the bookshelf in Group 1's presentation slides is very appropriate, since it actually showed gaps without books, akin to Spotify not reaching a potential full catalogue of music.
There is a lesson one can learn here that is relevant to application development: even though the market you are entering is already saturated with existing solutions, just tweak your idea and product a little bit and you may be able to find a niche group of users who will prefer your solution.
Advertisements
I concur that advertisements on Spotify are less obnoxious than on YouTube. From my own experience, on the free version of Spotify, advertisements are simply about music, and typically do not last for over a minute. YouTube advertisements on the other hand range from short and sweet videos to very lengthy irrelevant videos that fortunately can be skipped.However, anyone intending to use YouTube as their music player should probably install an ad-blocker of some sort anyway. With such means, the free version of Spotify is effectively the application laded with advertisements instead of YouTube.
In any case, advertisements in the free version of Spotify allow the users to discover new and upcoming content. As such, it is not necessarily a bad thing, until you repeatedly hear the same advertisement being played after every few tracks... During the time of my usage, I was nearly hypnotized to be "▶ up all night to get lucky".
Social integration
Spotify has sub-par social integration indeed. But in a way, I am thankful that Spotify activities only appear on the news ticker of my Facebook and not the news feed.
Someone commented during the Q&A that the tastes of your Spotify friends may not be the same as yours. This will be true to some extent given the number of different genres out there. Perhaps the intent of Spotify is not for you to follow just your friends, but mainly to follow artists you like and maybe curators whose playlists suit you.
It is observable that the Spotify interface is not exactly conducive for social activities, since their primary purpose is to supply the artists' and music labels' content to the users. I say keep the social elements secondary, as I doubt anyone has a compelling need to share all 15 songs they have listened to in an hour.
To each his own
 |
| plug.dj |
Keeping to the theme of this post on Spotify, regardless of how robust it seems, I will stick to YouTube as my daily driver for music. More specifically, I am actually actively using this online social music service called plug.dj. It allows users from over the world to play and listen to music together at the same time, and relies on YouTube and SoundCloud. With a wide range of music content from indie artists to record labels, text-only advertisements (on Firefox without ad-block), and social aspects done right, it has become my go-to music application.
Spotify is an ideal music provider as evidenced by their vast number of users. However, as discussed, similar to how people have different musical genre tastes, they also have different opinions on their music service preferences.
In my opinion, Spotify is on the right track, but I will skip it. ▶▶
Did not do the presentation, but as a heavy user of Spotify I'd like to raise some more points which motivated me to switch from Youtube which I believe the group did not raise.
ReplyDelete1) Youtube often has music videos which are not the audio track themselves (i.e with conversations, backstory etc) which annoys me.
2) The autogenerated playlists on Youtube are pretty bad - its hard to find one which is consistent with my taste. Spotify's creation is much better.
But yeah, agree with your points on different renderings and covers. Guess it is like you put it - to each his own. Will give plug.dj a spin, it might be a better fit for my needs.
Hey Jishnu, I fully agree with the first point you made that extra elements in the videos are kind of annoying. Also agree with point two, although I never had high hopes for their generated playlists, heh.
DeleteRecently, it was reported that YouTube is going to release a new music service, perhaps that will shake things up a bit.
For me, the only thing I'm using Spotify for is music discovery (and also because they offer my genre of music). In my opinion, Spotify should actually work on this advantage they have over other music streaming services, instead on focusing on the social element (if they are).
ReplyDeleteSecondly, as a for another reason why I am not using Spotify to listen to music is because free users listen to a lower quality version of the song. This might not matter to most users, but for the avid audiophiles out there, this might well be a big turn off for them. Plus, listening to high quality music via streaming isn't a good idea also even if anyone subscribes to Spotify's service. For me, I'll rather download music and listen to them at high quality without any interruptions.
Feels like I should use Spotify to discover new music then, and then try to find the music videos of the new songs on YouTube.
DeleteI agree that streaming high quality music can be costly; when I used Spotify during this review, it actually had to buffer even though I am on the free version.
Nice luck getting spotify.
ReplyDeleteWell, I also tried out spotify - it seems my tastes and their tastes don't nearly line up (some kinds of Jpop, orchestral, video game music). Either that or they failed to get licenses. In that sense, youtube is better - infringe first, DMCA later.
You also mentioned music covers. Yeah, I don't think covers will ever become big enough for them to license it. For example, I absolutely hate Vocaloid music - its nothing to do with the composers. Its mainly the limitations of the Vocaloid software. The synthesized voice sounds terrible on high end headphones. However, the covers of vocaloid music by independent people are really great. During my time that i did use it, i did find some nice niche stuff though. Remixes of existing game soundtracks. Wonder how they got it.
I think their social integration is fail because they missed out on a certain aspect of social - the key part of social media is the feel good effect. Their use of social media is well, as an advertisement. Oh hai, pls tell people what i'm listening to. That was only cool on MSN messenger.
If you wanted to use social media, generally it should allow a) some kind of user investment, b) some kind of reward. User investment could be something as simple as typing a message (twitter) to creating a video (youtube) to writing tons of code (open source software). The reward should be some kind of acknowledgement of the user. This can be as inane as a "like", reshare, comments or in the case of OSS - download numbers and pull requests.
The only thing in Spotify that could classify as a user investment is well, the playlist creation. I suppose people could like that playlist on facebook, but the barrier is pretty high. Think about it, first they need to listen to it, then REMEMBER that you shared it with them, find the post, then actually go back to like it. Its not like videos on YouTube. I watched it, its awesome, yay, instant feedback. If i wanted to comment, I could immediately do so.
Indeed, user investment and reward in terms of social media is limited in Spotify.
DeleteYou mentioned Jpop as part of your tastes. I have heard from my Jpop listening friends that the music labels in Japan hardly reaches out to other parts of the world. How are you consuming your music?
There are some rooms in plug.dj that may suit your tastes, it has great social elements to it too... although I think you only listen to music on mobile devices?
I think that one of the benefits of using Spotify over other services such as youtube or soundcloud is the ability to save your playlist offline, although this is only available for Spotify premium. Not only do you get high quality sound, if you have saved the playlist on your mobile device, you do not have to worry about incurring data charges from streaming music on the go. This is one of the features of Spotify that I really like during the 2 months of Spotify premium trial. But all good things come to an end, so for users like me who wants free and high quality music, torrent is still the way to go.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your support for Spotify and its premium features.
DeleteThough personally I am not a fan of listening to music on the go, so I have no real need to store music offline. Although I am sure there are a lot more users who only listens to music on the go, so they require that feature.
Torrents have been a troublesome experience, I do not feel that it is worth the effort. Since I only listen to music on the computers, streaming from YouTube is fine and largely preferable.
Another point to add on. Something that really bugs me when I use Spotify as well as the reason why I stopped using it is that for Chinese songs, they do not actually recognise the name of the artist. Let's say I want to listen to music from Jay Chou. I would choose the radio option to play music from him. What happens when the song ends is that a randomly chosen song from the entirety of their library is played instead of intelligently choosing another song from Jay Chou.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, this was my gripe as well when I used Spotify a long while ago. Not only did I encounter what you encountered, their Mandopop music library was not as updated either. When I last checked Spotify during this review, the situation seems to have improved though, as they now have proper artist metadata, I think.
DeleteHi Sun!
ReplyDeleteSorry I'm late to the party ya?
First off, I agree very much with your first point in that any market is hardly ever saturated. There are always problems out there needing to be solved and even if there is already a competitor is already there and taking out part of the market share, it doesn't mean that is saturated. Or, even if it is, remember the talk we heard at techfest yesterday by Zopim? There can always be change! Especially if the product that was last built has already been stagnating for like 10 years or so :P
It's true thought, right? The advertisements on YouTube can be super annoying at times (yay to adblock! fellow youtube sucker :D). But I didn't find Spotify's ad to be fully about music as it was told by the presenters... I actually had ads on KFC chicken NOOOO MY DIET ITS OVER!!! I can only hope that Spotify does not go down the road of annoying advertisements :)
Lastly, I'd agree that Spotify is on the right track but I think that the market for music has only just started getting off. There's still a huge room for improvement and a huge audience that has been left untapped by the many music companies. Plus, the next few billions that are coming online in the other parts of the world are certainly untapped, but I don't see how any of the current apps on music actually cater to their genre or taste for music.
That's all for now, thanks for the insightful review!
Hello my fellow YouTube sucker!
DeleteI left early during techfest, so I did not manage to hear what Zopim had to say, could you please tell me?
Seems like Spotify does not just play music related advertisements then, so my point about their advertisements being acceptable is somewhat moot.
Have you heard about the new YouTube Music Key? Your last point seems to be encouraging others to come up with a creative music service or application.
Yes! plug.dj all the way! It's awesome!
ReplyDeleteI think that while Spotify's services seem like they can easily be eclipsed by Youtube, the selling point between Spotify and Youtube are fundamentally different. Spotify probably does not try to be a social platform the way Youtube or plug.dj is, nor is it a platform for indie artists like SoundCloud (but it can be).
As Group 1 has put it, I think Spotify is more of a platform to discover new music. In that sense, I agree that they should expand their genres to cater to more niche artists as well. In the same vein, if it is just to discover new music, then Spotify wouldn't have to completely satisfy the audiophiles, either. They just have to ensure that the quality of the music is not so low that it is jarring, and if the users like the music, then they can buy supremely high-quality music elsewhere...but at the cost of convenience. Why navigate to, say, the iTunes store, when you can listen to high quality music by paying the subscription for Spotify?
I had no idea you use plug.dj too! Being able to meet someone who actively uses a new, relatively unknown service sure speaks volume about the features plug.dj provide.
DeleteYour point about "not having to completely satisfy the audiophiles" makes sense, although I am not sure if they would really opt to use Spotify as a platform to discover new music... as audiophiles I suppose they probably have better alternatives.
I think your post here has made a couple of people in CS3216 switch to plug.dj, haha.
DeleteI'm not an audiophile myself, so I can't speak much about whether they actually have better alternatives to find new music. Personally speaking, though, when it comes to discovering new stuff, I always welcome new channels of input 8D
I decide to move from Spotify to plug.dj after you introduced this website to me. One thing plug.dj wins is that I can listen music and interact with my friends in the same time. It is super cool to enjoy music together with my friends, and Spotify fails to fulfill this demand.
ReplyDeleteHowever, plud.dj also has its shortage. It relies heavily on YouTube. As you known, sometimes I just grab a music from YouTube, and it cannot be played due to copyright problem. In contrast, Spotify does not have this kind of problem.
Moreover, plug.dj can improve its UI. I don't know how to skip a music until you showed it to me. Furthermore, it requires several clicks to create a community, which is quite troublesome. Thus, this website can be further improved to win more users.
Yeah! Managed to convert someone from the Spotify group to plug.dj!
DeleteSpotify will definitely not run into copyright problems because they have to acquire the rights before playing and distributing the music.
Something Spotify has that plug.dj and YouTube do not: automatic generation of good playlists. Ultimately, it depends on what the user wants before he opts for the music service of his choice.
Well, I have used spotify for more than half year already and I have bough spotify premium before. But now I am switching to plug.dj!!! haha.
ReplyDeleteI did not use youtube to listen music because the music quality in youtube is not really good (I do not mean the bit rate, but youtube music got some ads or something). The quality in spotify is granted and I can always get high quality music with a few clicks.
The advantage of youtube is that it certainly contains much more music than spotify. It contains many music not from any album, some of them I really like but cannot get it in spotify. Most importantly, the problem with youtube has been solved, we have plugdj to manage your youtube music!!! and you can even listen with your friends!! It is really fascinating. Everyone should give it a try~
Pan Long
Yeah! Another plug.dj converter, welcome!
DeleteOn the flip side, some songs from the albums cannot be found on YouTube unless there is a music video produced for it, or they are uploaded illegally by other users.
Anyway, I speculate that all the songs uploaded to YouTube from now on should have equal, if not better quality than Spotify is willing to provide for free. The only downside to using YouTube or plug.dj for music is the huge consumption of data when on mobile