3/31/2023 0 Comments Spotify musicThis is backed up by artist and label data from the likes of Digital Music News (opens in new tab), which states that “historically, Apple Music has paid artists much better than its streaming music rival, Spotify” and found that this continued to be the case last year. These rates depend on a lot of factors, including where you stream the music, but it’s been hard to ignore breakdowns from some of my favorite artists like Public Service Broadcasting (above), that consistently place Spotify towards the lower end of the payout scale. But the money that Spotify pays to rights-holders (now almost $40bn since the streaming service started) doesn’t necessarily reflect what goes to the actual artists. Spotify’s recently updated Loud & Clear (opens in new tab) website, which breaks down the economics of music streaming, is naturally spun in its favor. Then there’s the thorny, and hugely complex, issue of artist payouts. They’re both interesting, but they belong in different worlds. I like that, for the same reason that I don’t want to go to a music festival to see Pixies followed on stage by Ezra Klein grilling a professor about the US elections. It doesn’t try to cram podcasts into the app, keeping the two separate. Both offer CD-quality, hi-res lossless audio and support spatial audio to help them deliver music in Dolby Atmos, too.Īway from pure sound quality, there’s also a refreshing simplicity to Apple Music. I'm also keen to try out Spotify’s new AI DJ feature before I go, which hasn’t rolled out in the UK yet where I am based.īut for someone who wants a simple music player, without ‘curated previews’ and the constant background hum of monetization, Apple Music and Tidal are stretching their lead at the top of our guide to best music streaming services. 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.
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