Spotify app on windows only outline. Spotify is the most popular streaming service in the world. With over 200 million active users, it has earned a large audience with its personalized playlists and free access. You can stream music, create playlists, and tune into podcasts without paying a cent. If you opt for the premium service, Spotify can be streamed on nearly any device, smart speaker, or TV. Itâs also super simple to share that music with friends, or create a collaborative playlist. However, we werenât crazy about the ease of integrating your own music nor its lack of video content. Still, Spotify is a solid streaming service that most people will be satisfied with.
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Apple Music vs Spotify: Whoâs Paying Artists More? So, the average observed per-stream payout on Apple Music is $0.00551 vs. $0.00318 for Spotify. Does that mean that Apple Music is paying artists more than Spotify? However, the average payout rate alone is not enough to make this conclusion. Offer currently includes access to Hulu (ad-supported) plan and SHOWTIME Streaming Service, subject to eligibility. Available only to students at an accredited higher education institution. 1 month free only open to higher education students who haven't already tried Premium.
On its website, Spotify claims that âitâs easy to find the right music or podcast for every moment â on your phone, your computer, your tablet and more.â This promises consumers a streaming service that will easily present all kinds of audio content.
Is it true?
Most people will find it easy to engage with intriguing content on Spotify. Michael Stover, owner of MTS Management Group/MTS Records, told us âStreaming sites like Spotify and Youtube are there for music discovery [and] promotion, a way for artists to have their music heard by an audience that wouldnât normally listen.â Spotifyâs personalized playlists will connect you with new music similar to your favorites. Because of its web player, you can listen pretty much anywhere, too.
Thereâs also a ton of unique content, like âSpotify Sessions,â exclusive tracks from artists made in the Spotify Studios. Sometimes itâs a unique cover â like Troye Sivanâs slowed down version of Post Maloneâs âBetter Now.â Youâll also find new acoustic versions of artists songs, like a revival of Owl Cityâs âFireflies.â
Along with podcasts and audiobooks, you can also find poems and speeches on Spotify. And, quite bizarrely, an exclusive motion comic of the âArchieâ series. Thereâs a lot to keep you busy on Spotify, and itâs a great value (especially because itâs free).
Product OverviewBest for
Social playlists, free listening, personalized playlists
Not for
Music ownership, video content, library integration
Features
Personalized music discovery
There are many playlists that Spotify caters to you. Youâll find new songs based on your tastes and listening history added to the âRelease Radarâ and âDiscover Weeklyâ playlists on a weekly basis. There are also seasonal roundups like the âSummer Rewindâ playlist, a collection of your favorites songs from last summer. And at the end of the year, Spotify will collect your most listened tunes in a âWrappedâ playlist.
One of the newer personalized playlists is called Your Daily Drive â a curated morning radio playlist. Itâs a mix of the songs youâve been jamming to lately, a few songs it thinks youâll like, and news hits from NPR, WSJ, or NYT. Itâs essentially a replication of a morning radio show but created for your personal preferences.
If you like to stick to a few genres and artists, Spotifyâs algorithms will keep you in your comfort zone and introduce you to music in your lane. For listeners who like to expand their horizons, youâre better off with Apple Musicâs human-curated playlists.
Free version
Spotifyâs free version is the biggest reason it has so many more subscribers than the competition. Listeners will have access to all of Spotifyâs key features, with just a few limitations. You can only skip six songs in an hour, have to listen to ads, must listen on shuffle-only for some playlists on the mobile app, and wonât have access to offline listening. There are about 15 popular playlists including Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix, that will let you pick-and-play songs and skip as many as you like.
We also love the free option because if you upgrade to the premium plan and eventually cancel it, you will still have access to playlists youâve spent years curating on the free plan. On music streaming services that only have a paid plan, you would have to resubscribe to regain access to your music library.
Social listening
Spotify does a great job of connecting your music to your community. You can watch your friendsâ live listening activity in a feed and tune in to their current jams. If you want to build a playlist for an event, you can make it collaborative and invite friends to add songs. When thereâs a song your work bestie has to hear, you can easily share it with a Spotify link.
Device integration
Nearly every device or speaker is compatible with Spotify. You can use it on iOS, Android, and Windows operating systems. It works on both Google Home and Amazon Echo smart systems, Xbox and Playstation consoles, Bose and Sonos speakers, and many more devices. You can even listen in your car via Apple Car Play or Android Auto. The list of compatible devices is extensive, and itâs unlikely youâll encounter a situation where you canât play Spotify.
Spotify Free Vs Premium Artist Payout Artist 2019 ScheduleWeb player
Unlike Apple Music, you can stream Spotify on an internet browser with its web player. The web player is perfect if you ever find yourself wanting to listen to music, but canât download the Spotify app. If youâre on a computer at school, the library, or work, you wonât have to go without your focus-friendly playlist.
Unique extras
If you look for long enough, youâll uncover a hidden world on Spotify. Buried in the âBrowseâ section youâll find a âWordâ genre at the very bottom of the page. Inside is a whole suite of listening rabbit holes. You can tune in to audiobooks like âGreat Gatsby,â âWar of the Worlds,â or âPride and Prejudice.â Or listen to poetry and speeches, like from a playlist called âPoetry: In Their Own Voicesâ that features over 70 poems by women read by the authors. There are also podcasts, short stories, and vintage radio dramas. During late October nights, you can play scary stories by Alfred Hitchcock or Edgar Allan Poe. Probably the most surprising discovery was a selection of language-learning playlists. You can listen to Italian, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, and Irish language tracks. Theyâre a bit kitschy, but thatâs part of the charm. Itâs a lot like the old school language cassette tapes. The âLearn Chineseâ album cover even says âLearn in Your Car.â
Possible DrawbacksPoor library integration
If you already own music and want to integrate it with your streaming library, weâd recommend a different streaming service. Spotify free ios. Spotify allows you to upload your local files to the desktop app, but it wonât travel across platforms (to the web play or mobile app) and doesnât integrate with your regular library or playlists. Spotify users have been complaining about this since 2014, and Spotify still has it filed in a âNot Right Nowâ idea pile. You also canât purchase any songs or albums through Spotify.
Lack of video content
Spotify has focused all its attention on music streaming, which means you wonât find much in the way of video. You may encounter the occasional video snippet that plays in the background of the song as artwork, but it wonât be the full music video. If you do discover a music video or obscure documentary, itâll play in vertical format (an internet taboo.) When compared to music streaming services like Apple Music and YouTube Premium, Spotifyâs video selection is disappointing. On competing platforms, you can find music videos, artist documentaries, and talk show bits.
Abandons old playlists
Donât fall too hard for a playlist on Spotify, as the service often neglects to update older playlists. Itâs âUnderground Hitsâ playlist hasnât been updated for over a year, despite the 500,000+ people who follow the playlist â a bad look for a roundup of âhits.â Workout favorite, âGet Your Body Rightâ hasnât been updated since 2015, both âEasy Acousticâ and âFamily Road Tripâ havenât seen fresh tunes in over a year. If youâre the kind of person who doesnât mind stagnant playlists, this might not be a dealbreaker, but itâs probably a concern if you get sick of hearing the same songs over and over again.
The Competition
Spotify vs. Apple Music
The starkest difference between Apple Music and Spotify is that you have to pay to use Apple Musicâs services. There is no free version of Apple Music, but it does offer a very long 90-day free trial. There are fewer personalized playlists on Apple Music, but we preferred its human-curated mix tapes anyway. Youâre more likely to encounter new music outside of your comfort zone with Apple Music, while Spotify will feed you songs it knows youâll like (and sometimes might get sick of). Apple Music has a wide array of unique content like a âCarpool Karaokeâ series, an âUp Nextâ new artist documentary series, and Beats 1 live radio station. You can also easily upload your own music and organize your library on Apple Music. Casual listeners will probably prefer Spotify, but audiophiles will love Apple Music.
Spotify vs. Tidal
If youâre into high-fidelity music streaming and hip-hop music, Tidal is the service for you. Spotify download folder windows. Owned by Jay Z, Tidal is the only place you can stream the entire discography of both Jay Z and Beyonce. You can also hear early releases from hip hop artists, like Kanye West. Tidal offers a $20 per month âHiFiâ streaming plan that lets you stream music at the level itâs recorded in the studio, however, youâd need some impressive equipment, and keen ears, to really notice the difference. Investing in Tidal services is best suited for those who are really into music and audio technology.
Spotify FAQCan you keep the songs you download from Spotify?
No. Downloading music from Spotify only allows you to tune in when youâre offline and not using WiFi. The files arenât actually saved for use if you arenât using the Spotify app. If you cancel your premium subscription, those downloaded songs will be invalid.
Is Spotify Premium worth it?
Maybe! If you stream music constantly and like to listen on smart devices, youâll benefit from Spotify Premiumâs features. Casual listeners who donât mind the occasional ad will be perfectly happy with Spotifyâs free service. Michael Stover, owner of MTS Management Group/MTS Records, advised us, âIf you listen to a lot of music, and you like to discover new artists before purchasing a whole download or CD, then spending $10 [a month] is probably worth it.â
How much data does Spotify use?
Every time you stream, download, or upload you are using data to transmit that information. Home internet and cell phone plans typically have data caps, and your speeds will drop if you exceed that limit. At its highest quality (on the premium membership), Spotify will consume 2.4 MB per minute of music played. So if youâre listening non-stop at work for six hours, youâll use about 1 GB of data. Thatâs not much data at all, especially compared to streaming Netflix (which takes 3 GB for just an hour of HD streaming). Unless youâve got your tunes playing 24/7 all month long, you probably wonât need to worry about data while streaming Spotify.
The Bottom LineSpotify Free Vs Premium Artist Payout Artist 2019 Nominees
Spotify is one of our favorite notice the difference and is unlikely to disappoint most people. Even if you arenât sure, thereâs no harm in trying out its free service. Spotify creates a ton of personalized playlists to connect you to music thatâs similar to the songs you already love. It also hosts tons of unique content like language learning, audiobooks, and podcasts. You can listen nearly anywhere with its endless device compatibility, mobile app, and web player. All these features make Spotify the best streaming service for casual and social listeners.
Spotify Free Vs Premium Artist Payout Artist 2019 YoutubeRecently Added
Among the glut of lists on the internet toward the end of last year, Spotifyâs Wrapped 2018 broke through, perhaps landing on more social media feeds than any other. Instagram-ready graphics detailing every userâs most streamed songs and artists became empirical proof of fandom, a dorm-room poster for the digital age. Artists got in on the action, too, sharing their own versions of the Wrapped graphic with data on total streams, number of listeners, and the countries where those listeners resided. The data collectively reinforced the power of Spotifyâs brand: Itâs global, itâs personalized, and itâs increasingly omnipresent.
Zoë Keating, a cellist based in Vermont, posted her Wrapped graphic to Tumblr in December. She generated 2 million streams from 241,000 fans in 65 countries who listened to her music for a combined 190,000 hours. Of course, the key number missing from this data deluge was the amount of money Keating made from so much worldwide engagement. She provided that figure, too: $12,231, or about half a penny per stream.
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The fact that Spotify and other streaming services offer paltry payouts to artists is widely knownâKeating, in fact, has helped bring the issue to light by posting her streaming income for years. Part of the problem may be the way Spotify calculates royalties, which is based on the 2 million streams Keating received rather than the 241,000 people who listened to her music. âWhenever I try to explain to fans how streaming payouts actually work, fans have been shocked,â she says. âThey think that if they are playing all Zoë Keating, that the portion of their subscription that is going to the artist is all going to me. But itâs not.â
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Spotify and other prominent streaming services have divorced the listening habits of individual users from the allocation of the money that each pays for the service. Instead of divvying up a given listenerâs $10 per month to the artists he or she streamed (excluding Spotifyâs roughly 30 percent cut), the subscription money is put into a collective pool that is distributed by aggregate play counts across the platform. Think of it like having your paycheck fluctuate based not only on your own performance, but on the performance of everyone else in your industry as well. The better your colleagues and competitors do, the less money you make.
Critics of this approach say it hurts smaller artists who donât attract gobs of casual fans or rack up passive listens through Spotifyâs increasingly influential playlists. âItâs really contributing to income inequality in music,â says Keating, who categorizes her music as avant-garde classical. âIn the recent past it might have been possible to make a middle-class living on your music. In the current streaming economy, the only way to survive is to be huge.â
In the pay-per-stream model, artists are motivated to accrue spins, rather than devoted fans, by any means necessary. A catchy three-minute earworm that begs to be played ad nauseam generates more revenue than a longer, less repeatable track, even if the same number of people listen to each song every month. Artists are responding to this financial incentive by releasing shorter songsmore frequently. But musicians like Keating, whose instrumentals can be as long as eight minutes, lose out by not making songs that adhere to norms of radio-friendly consumption.
âIn the recent past it might have been possible to make a middle-class living on your music. In the current streaming economy, the only way to survive is to be huge.â âZoë Keating
Critics say the current model also invites fraud. In 2014 the funk band Vulfpeck generated $20,000 in royalties through Sleepify, an album of silent tracks that it encouraged users to play on repeat overnight as they slept. Though Spotify expressed admiration for the project as a âclever stunt,â less scrupulous people have gamed the system as well. According to an investigation by Music Business Worldwide, a scammer in Bulgaria generated as much as $1 million in royalties in 2017 by setting up about 1,200 dummy premium accounts and having them stream playlists of fake artists for months. And while not explicitly fraud, a cottage industry has emerged of composers making generic, ambient background music under fake aliases. These songs end up on Spotify-branded playlists such as Ambient Chill and Peaceful Piano, where they can generate outsize revenue if they soundtrack coffee shops or boutique clothing stores for hours a day.
At the most basic level of fairness, this model fails because it makes some fans more valuable than others, despite everyone paying the same price for a subscription. The average Spotify user streams about 25 hours of content per month. If you stream less than that, youâre generating less money for the artists you care about than the power users who listen to Spotify constantly. âWhat weâre saying is these folks that are streaming 24 hours a day are dramatically more valuable than I am even though weâre both paying just $10,â says Sharky Laguana, a San Franciscoâbased musician and entrepreneur whose Mediumposts about royalty payments have been shared widely.
The solution, according to a growing number of proponents, is to switch to a user-centric model. In this system, a subscriberâs monthly payment would be split among the artists whom that individual listened to. Light users would reward the few artists they regularly stream with greater royalties. Heavy users would have their subscription money split among a wide swath of acts. This would realign the streaming era more closely with the economics of the age of physical media, when niche acts that managed to build a small but loyal fan base could make a living. âMore people are consuming music than ever,â Laguana says. âSomethingâs off when you can have the same audience size as you did 20 years ago but youâre making a fraction of the money.â
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The impacts of such a transition would be tough to predict and would vary from artist to artist. A 2017 study in Finland found that under the current pay-per-stream model, the top 0.4 percent of tracks in that country accrued about 10 percent of royalty revenue. Under a pay-per-user model, those same tracks would get only 5.6 percent of the revenue, with more royalty revenue being distributed (unevenly) among less popular tracks. However, in a discussion paper responding to the Finnish study, Spotify director of economics Will Page argued that the complexity of switching to a user-centric modelâtying millions of user accounts to millions of artist accounts on a rolling basisâwould raise Spotifyâs administrative costs significantly, with those extra costs possibly wiping out the revenue gains for less popular artists. Laguana was skeptical of this logic, noting that Spotifyâs own personalized year-in-review graphics had already done the heavy lifting of calculating each userâs listening habits. (Spotify did not respond to a request for comment.)
Itâs unclear whether a flow of money toward less popular tracks would most substantially benefit up-and-coming artists or someone like Drake, who has a consistently popular back catalog. But the shift would make intuitive sense to fans and eliminate some incentives for bad actors. And even small fluctuations in royalty rates, percentage-wise, can have a huge impact when youâre a small act and every dollar counts. âItâs not as simple as big artists vs. indie artists,â Laguana says. âWithin every tier, there are folks that are winning that probably shouldnât be winning.â
âMore people are consuming music than ever. Somethingâs off when you can have the same audience size as you did 20 years ago but youâre making a fraction of the money.â âSharky Laguana
The debate over royalty payment models has been humming along in the music industry for years, but 2019 may be when the shift to user-centric payments finally starts to happen. Deezer, a Spotify competitor based in France with 7 million paying subscribers, plans to implement the user-centric model later this year. âA user-centric model has a number of benefits for artists. It creates closer links between artists and their audiences, because it lets fans support artists more directly through streaming. It also helps fight fraudulent behaviors on streaming platforms and it increases transparency for artists and rights holders,â Alexander Holland, Deezerâs chief content and product officer, said in an email. âOur goal is to introduce a new payment system where the revenues generated by each user are correctly assigned to the artists that the user is listening to.â
Spotify has mostly been quiet about the issue, though CEO Daniel Ek tweeted in 2017 that the argument in favor of the user-centric approach âisnât [supported] by data.â As the leader in the streaming space, the company has little incentive to embark on a complicated overhaul of the way that it allocates royalties. Even the fraudsters, in a perverse way, benefit Spotify by paying for subscriptions and boosting the companyâs all-important monthly active-user metric, which is tied to its fate on Wall Street. âTheyâre selling subscriptions,â Keating says, ânot music.â
The only way the user-centric model is likely to gain widespread support is if musicians make a lot of noise about it. But while past campaigns about restructuring streaming payouts have been backed by the likes of Taylor Swift and Smokey Robinson, a change to royalties that benefits smaller artists most will have to be a grassroots effort, with independent acts like Keating leading the charge. âMy music genre is never going to be Top 40. That doesnât mean itâs not a success,â she says. âItâs niche. And I really feel like the niche is important culturally. Itâs important to make it so that artists in the middle have a viable living.â
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