Spotify - the future of music!

Is that statement a year too late? Spotify is slowing becoming a household name - at least from what I see around me. Everyone at least knows about the service and most people use it. 24 million active users is a lot of users! I still think its great to see an online music streaming business doing well. It gives us hope that there is room for money to be made in that business, as we've seen so many other players start strong and fiddle away to their death, unable to sustain the business end of it.

What makes it really hard for an online music streaming service to survive, unfortunately, is not the technical aspect of making the product itself. As an engineer myself, knowing that truth is a hard pill to swallow. The large amount of licensing fees that Spotify and other services have to pay to stream music is a big chunk of their cost. Pandora and Spotify reportedly pay more than 60% of its cost in licensing fees. With the additional cost of running the service itself, the hardware needed for their servers and the manpower needed to continue refining their product, it makes it incredibly hard to sustain this business model. The fact that Pandora almost went bankrupt a couple of years ago with their large user base, shows the difficulty of this business model.

Besides the licensing fees, there are other factors that make it really hard for a new company to emerge in this market. Big players like Amazon, Google and Apple have recognized the number of users they can attract through online music streaming and given their other sources of revenue, can sacrifice money to attract users with a standout product. Despite all this, Spotify has managed to be a leader in user base and can really take advantage of that towards creating a more sound business model and creating a great product that stands the test of time.....hopefully!

But......this blog post is more about the product itself and not about the business. When I first started using Spotify, I loved many things about the product right away. Sharing music was my favorite feature. I am the kind of person who shares anything I find remotely interesting with my friends. In college, I was notorious for sending youtube links and articles to all my friends and they would always poke fun at how they mark my emails as read (sob). So when I saw the ability to share music directly from Spotify, you can only imagine my excitement about the product (and my friends' disappointment)! I also loved how you could collaborate on playlists. One of my friends and I share a similar taste in electronic music and the fact that we could put a shared playlist of our favorite electronic songs was a great feature!

The best feature about Spotify really was the online streaming of course. From a user's standpoint, the idea of online streaming is so hassle free its beautiful. I don't have to look for songs online. I don't have to buy entire cd albums for one song that I like. Wait a minute, I don't have to buy anything! People hate to pay for stuff. I now did not have to pay for individual songs on iTunes. Sure the ads were annoying after a while, and really its a great business model to have us listen to free interrupted music, so that we can pay for uninterrupted music. Works like a charm - worked on me at least. Additionally, having the ability to listen to music on your cell phone and make music available offline completed the essential elements needed to enjoy the music experience. Everything was spot on from the beginning.

But.....I cannot help but feel that there hasn't been much done since that wonderful beginning. I started using Spotify more than 2 years ago. Nothing much has really happened since that time. More music has been made available, which is essential to the overall experience. But product features have not improved much since then. Yes, they did launch Spotify Radio - but my experience of Spotify Radio has honestly not been good. When I am in the mood to switch from playlists to radio, I end up going back to Pandora because Spotify's radio just does not compare. Listening to Pandora is truly an amazing experience. When I start the radio session on Pandora, I truly feel that Pandora knows my music taste and my mood better than I do. Rarely do I have to skip songs. Spotify is nowhere close to that right now.

Then there are other little improvements that I am surprised have not been made. The ability to share music means you have an inbox of songs sent to you. However, there isn't a sent folder? Don't Inbox and Sent messages go hand in hand? If I can see the songs sent to me, surely  I should be able to see the songs I send to people so that I don't flood their inbox with the same song (not that I mind, but they might!).

The collaborative playlist idea is great, but collaborative on Spotify means that everyone who follows the playlist can collaborate on it. What if I only want to collaborate on the playlist with one of two other people but have anyone follow it? Maybe there is a way to do it, but if its not obvious to the user, then the feature isn't well designed, is it? Besides songs, having a podcast section to listen to, would bring in more users and expand to their experience as well. Whenever I am in the mood for podcasts, I have to go back to iTunes for them.

There is an interesting website called turntable.fm where you can enter a music room and multiple 'djs' take turns playing songs. Having a similar feature to go to can help broaden the user's Spotify friends and connect with more people who have similar taste in music as well.

I still love Spotify and use it for almost 8 hours during the day when I work. However, the honeymoon phase of this relationship is long past and I am looking for a little more from them now. Hopefully, Spotify won't remain stagnant and will keep adding more to an awesome product!