Of course Spotify is preferable.
If you were to compare the premium tiers only of both platforms I think you’d be pretty right. The water gets muddy when you chuck in Spotify ad funded. It skews things heavily in Apple’s favour.
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It feels like people get hung up on the rates when ultimately Spotify are handing over (significantly?) more money.
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Huh? It only hands over more money because it has more users surely! That is not a stick to beat with Apple with. Apple Musics rate is higher, that is the number that matters.
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And access too.
Spotify is platform-agnostic, so available no matter what you use. Even CarPlay/Android Auto aren’t necessary to listen while driving if CarThing is born. And I hope it is!
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That’s my point. Ultimately fighting over who pays a higher share seems pointless when growing the whole pie is going to lead to meaningfully more revenue for artists.
It feels like the streaming services get a bad rep when ultimately they are paying out the majority of their revenue. Strange that the labels don’t seem to get as much scrutiny.
They do, they were quizzed by MPs earlier this year: Parliamentlive.tv - Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee
If you don’t fancy watching that (I don’t blame you) Music Business Worldwide covers the session and the issues with the economics of music streaming here. It’s a long read, but it’s worth it: The harsh reality about the music business, and a pantomime led by clueless self-regarders. - Music Business Worldwide
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Podcasting slowly being taken over by big tech.
Really interesting read. I think it’s a tough one. Streaming (and the internet at large) naturally tends towards a few big winners.
I see my Spotify sub as paying for access to music in general rather than supporting a particular artist.
For any non major artist who wants to live off their work, they’d have to figure out ways to diversify their income through live music, social media, advertising, merch. In the same way that YouTubers or professional bloggers also do.
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I think this is just the natural world, people want to make money from their podcast. It’s not the fault of Apple or Spotify if they want to make someone pay per month to listen to it.
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I’m sure I saw in the recent event that Apple has enabled the ability for podcast subscriptions in iOS 14.5. I don’t think they’ve turned it on, yet, though.
I get how it works. It’s just a shame that one of the last truly open platforms will soon mostly disapper behind proprietary paywalls.
Just to note that Apple have been fatastic stewards of the open pocasting system for the past 15 odd years.
I’m fine with what Apple & Spotify have done here. As I see it, it’s just making it easy for podcasters to offer premium content behind a paywall, without having to worry about implementation details. Apple & Spotify provide the infrastructure, and take a cut of payments.
What I’m not fine with is Spotify buying popular shows, removing the previously publicly accessible RSS feeds and locking content into their own (****ty) app. It goes against everything podcasting has ever been, and limits the platform in significant ways.
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It’s dangerous to say never but at this point it’s tough to see a serious YouTube competitor. Hosting video is so non-trivial in terms of cost and infrastructure.
It’s a shame because Google could definitely use the competition.
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I took our an Indian Premium sub a few months back to get around the ads.
We watch a LOT of YouTube and the ads were getting insufferable.
I think there’s a virtually zero chance of a viable competitor at this point. I can’t imagine the expense involved in running YouTube.
If you use the Brave browser, it usually skips the ads on YouTube. I have it on my computer pretty much for the sole purpose of viewing the occasional YouTube video.
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I guess you still watched the video right?
Herein lies the problem. As long as the data shows audience retention at a reasonable level, this will continue. YouTube’s argument will be ‘just pay for premium’… and people are, at a really significant rate too.
What I do wonder though and haven’t tested, is if you were to VPN to a country that’s less desirable to advertisers, would you see fewer ads? I’d assume the answer would be yes.
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YouTube Vanced if on Android is well worth looking into 
If ad-free YouTube was like, £3.99 a month I’d pay it. I don’t want YouTube Music. I pay for All4 ad free and that’s the kind of price I’d be wanting.
But as someone above said, I end up watching the ads, so from Google’s perspective I’m doing what they want so they have no incentive to change it.
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Maybe I’m just so used to them now but I don’t really even notice the ads being that intrusive. I know I’ll wait for one, click to skip or wait, but I don’t really notice there being multiples and it being that annoying. Certainly not enough for me to pay!
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