Spotify also has very little user stickiness. I switched pretty painlessly to Tidal and now I get better quality audio and the artists get more royalties and I don't have to have JRE and Peterson staring at me every time I login.
Totally agree how painless it is switching services - Tidal paying tunemymusic for music library imports was a good idea.
I wonder if that is part of why Spotify started pushing podcasts so hard - they can get exclusive content easier that way vs going with "commodity" music artists which will be available at all their competitors.
It 100% is. It’s very hard to get an exclusive with any recording artists, let alone enough big ones to meaningfully move the needle. With other good services around Spotify is basically a commodity player in the streaming market.
But exclusive audio content (Podcasts, audio books, etc) is something they can do to keep people from switching. Whether it’s only on Spotify or maybe just comes out a week early and ad free, it’s additional value the other services can’t provide.
Plus Spotify has made all the streaming money they will. They’re not going to grow another 100m users on music alone. But wall street wants more and podcasts driving subscriptions and podcast advertising is a real growth opportunity to make Wallstreet happy.
Of course none of this is good for Frank and Sally podcast listener. But when did that ever matter? The big companies have decided how things will work.
This is my thinking. Unless Spotify builds up a library of exclusive content, they will be destroyed as soon as apple and google stop doing such a shit job at music.
