I pay that for my Audible monthly subscription. If their library was a good one, it would certainly be worth it. And with Audible, I'm buying one book a month.
I guess I look at it differently. I'm ok with the fact that they held off until they got things sorted out. Nothing worse then launching prematurely.
I’m at a big industry event in France and Spotify is here. They just told me they’re going to uninvited all the stars and DJs that were about to play upon me telling them this news (I kid I kid. But they don’t oook like they’re hurting for money).
Actually it's well over 6 years now they've been jerking around on this, since CES 2017, when they first announced lossless "Hi-Fi" as coming soon, with beta testing occurring that following March. Radio silence then ensued for the next 4 years.
Spotify's most recent lossless promise/renege is now over 2 years old, that splashy announcement by Billie Eilish/Finneas made in Feb. 2021. This wasn't a case of making sure everything was working right and that they not offer something prematurely, that was Amazon/Apple having torpedoed Spotify's planned revenue projections by racing to the bottom on price with their own lossless offerings, both of which were rolled out very quickly thereafter.
But that is the nature of a successful business. Adapt according to where the market is. It would have made no sense at all to roll out a product that will likely fail if the market had changed.
I don't know of too many successful businesses that announce a forthcoming offering to their customers not once but twice, only to then renege on that offering for a period of not months but years. Typically a forthcoming offering is only announced when it is imminent, otherwise it is kept fully under wraps, and in this case that would have been very important given the nimble ability of Spotify's big boy competitors to foul up their plan.
Exactly, so when you've announced something and can't deliver on it, the original plan needs a revamp. Adding audiobooks would have been one such revamp, but it shouldn't take well over 2 years to arrive at that course of action. Spotify knew who their deep pocketed competitors were all along, so various contingencies should have been mapped out prior to that 2021 grand announcement. They looked bad in hiring Billie Eilish and Finneas to announce something they couldn't deliver on, and then take 2+ years to hatch a Plan B.
And they are also doing just fine without it. It's a luxury, not a necessity. And yes, businesses do stupid things all the time. But this is really did very little to inconvenience their existing customers.
Yeah, it’s a luxury they are doing fine without. I would just love to know how they spent 2-1/2 years to come up with what they did. Maybe they’re holding an ace up their sleeve that they haven’t revealed yet.
It's likely the same program they had 2 years back. And, I'm guessing, they are offering nothing more than cd quality, for their "high res".
I've wondered that too, likely the only thing that would jazz people including their current Premium subscribers is if they somehow make it the same or very similar pricing to what they are already paying. If not, then Amazon and Apple will have succeeded in fouling things up for Spotify, at least to the tune of about 70 million paid subs each. Spotify still way ahead at 180 million paid subs, but as you said in an earlier post, you'd have to wonder how many more paid subs Spotify might have had Amazon/Apple not thrown that wrench in the works 2 years ago.
Not on a P&L level they aren't. While they have far and away the most paid subs, they are still losing huge money every quarter, and that's only tolerable for so long.
I highly doubt that Apple and Amazon getting those subscriptions is because they offered higher resolution. For the -vast- majority of people, Spotify meets their sound quality threshold. They got those subscriptions because Apple is Apple and people like Apple, and Amazon because Amazon Prime is also ubiquitous. And I say that because if they got those subscriptions because of higher-res, Spotify would have done it. They have enough $$$ to research the market's wants to the ends of the earth. That they haven't done it also says to me, once again, what I already assume- people don't really care that much about resolution beyond a certain people. Most people don't even know what it means. We all tend to think the type of people we personally talk to represent more people than they actually do.
I do tend to forget that people like myself and others that are interested in higher-resolution streaming are a very small subset of the overall audience. I was thinking that Spotify and its executives look like fools for making promises and then taking 2-1/2 years to come up with a seemingly weak offering. They may look like fools to me, but the vast majority of their subscribers are probably not even aware of the supposed fiasco, given where the announcements are made and the publications that cover the news. They can effectively ignore us while tossing out a bone now and then.
Spotify has 500+ million users and 180 million subscribers. What’s the overall audio forum population? I have no idea but it’s small compared to that. Even going by the very unscientific method of looking at comments on Facebook ads fed to a broad audience …audiophile tendencies seem to get mocked as much as they’re championed. Our industry hasn’t done a great job of selling itself to the masses.
