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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

One of the (only) things I think Spotify gets wrong as a service is they’re too cheap. I pay for prime, Spotify and Netflix in my house - (we occasionally sub Netflix for Disney). A price rise to Netflix or prime would cause us to reconsider, but I think I would stomach Spotify doubling their price quite easily with no change in service.

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Counter example, if they raised their price by more than $1-2, I'd cancel it. The music discovery hasn't been great and it mostly suggests playlists of the songs I already listen to. Inertia is the only reason I haven't cancelled and bought all the songs directly

They did and I did

See I think how you feel about Spotify is exactly how I feel about Netflix. I don’t use the discovery of Spotify much, if at all. The value is the catalog.

Spotify maybe cheap compared to Netflix.

But it is way overpriced compared to Apple Music (definitely) and Tidal (arguably).

Not having lossless audio and paying artists less is ridiculous.

We have duo for my wife and I, so Spotify is £8.50/month each. Apple Music is £11/mo.

60% of my listening is through a pair of AirPods over Bluetooth, 30% on a Sonos system and 10% using semi decent wired headphones. Lossless isn’t something that is a differentiator for me.

I have some music on both Spotify and Apple Music - the reality is that even with a few thousand streams per month we haven’t even made back the cost of 2 hours of rehearsal space. The reality is that for artists making a living off this, the problem isn’t the difference between 75 and 80% that Spotify holds onto, it’s the fact that the artist only sees 15-20% of what’s left over.

Spotify is already steep in my eyes when I compare it to Netflix. Probably because I'm looking at video bandwidth vs audio bandwidth but paying for music more than you pay for movies feels weird in my monkey brain. No shiny picture, less money monkey say.

For me the value proposition is that there’s zero fragmentation. I know that by paying what I do for Spotify, I have access to pretty much everything. That’s worth a decent premium to me.

The problem with Netflix is the same as console exclusives in video games - fragmenting the ecosystem means I look at the service for the content it has vs the other services. But with Spotify it fills that niche entirely.

> I know that by paying what I do for Spotify, I have access to pretty much everything

Apple Music, Tidal etc have almost identical libraries.

Catalog size stopped being a differentiator years ago.

I mean compared to video streaming sites - Netflix and prime have vastly different libraries. If Spotify and Apple Music had different libraries to the same degree, id probably bounce between them both and be more price sensitive. The fact that Spotify (and apple and tidal) have the full catalog mean the network effect is likely to be my main decider.

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