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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this refrain a lot, and honestly, I don't understand it.

Spotify is the incumbent. They built an awesome product before on-demand music streaming was widely available. It will be very difficult for Spotify to compete? Spotify/Google Play/Rhapsody have a multi-year advantage in user acquisition and product development. Apple may be Apple, but if their biggest differentiator is that downloaded songs integrate into my iTunes library, that's not enough for me to switch over.

I'm on Google Play and have no plans to leave. Not because I love the service, but because my music is already there and I don't see anything about this service that's new or different enough to pull me away.

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Apple's biggest advantage isn't that Apple is "Apple"; their biggest advantage is that if you own an Apple device, you already have Apple Music. You can't uninstall it or run away from it.

Using every other service requires downloading that service's app and while that isn't a huge barrier for those of us in tech, that is a HUGE barrier for everybody else. Plus think about all the grandparents, soccer moms, and teenage girls that use iPhones and don't really consider any other phone. Those people probably aren't the people that are using Google Play or Spotify, but now they have Apple Music on their phone and ready to go. With all the attention Apple Music has been getting from that whole Taylor Swift Fiasco, there's no doubt that almost everyone has heard of it already and eagerly awaiting its arrival.

If you're a techie and you own an Apple device, then why partition your music selection with Spotify? Apple Music has almost every song Spotify does plus Apple has a better relationship with the record companies, so you know you're money isn't going to a company that's under some serious pressure to change their business model. Plus Apple Music has music videos and a social component for artists to reach out to their fans - which is kinda slick in my opinion. If none of that moves you then okay, try it for free for 3 months. Three months!! No matter what you think about Apple Music's competitors, why not stop paying them for a month and try out Apple Music? I'd wager many people aren't going to move after that.

Apple Music's future success won't depend on the service it's self, but on fitting into Apple's ecosystem and Apple's ability to reach the general public in ways that other streaming services can't. Plus, iPhones are the best selling phones in the United States so a lot of people will have this service already. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of the week, more people have Apple Music on their phones than Spotify.

Spotify is in serious trouble. That's BEFORE we start discussing how record labels want Spotify to kill its free tier and how many users will flee the service when that happens.

Put more concisely - Apple maps is used 3.5 times more often than Google maps on iPhones.

Well, it helps that Apple maps is in many ways a better experience than using Google maps. And I don't just mean the OS-level integration (e.g. showing directions on the lock screen). I mean the Google maps aesthetic is very inconsistent with the platform conventions (even more-so since they went all heavy on material design). It just feels annoying to use, which is why I don't bother with it anymore. Especially since Apple maps seems to have caught up on the quality (at least here in the bay area).

Here in some parts of Canada, unfortunately, Google Maps app is still superior in finding locations. Also there's a nice feature where if you have a Google Calendar event coming up with the location specified, when you do a search, it will try to match with that first, which was a nice surprise for me.

Apple Maps actually does that too. If you have an upcoming event with a location in your iOS calendar, when you tap the search field in Maps, it suggests the location of the upcoming event right at the top of the list, before you've even typed anything.

I'm not sure the exact rules it uses for this. An event of mine at 2pm tomorrow wasn't sufficient to show it, but I added a test event in 1.5 hours and it showed that one. It might be the same criteria that Notification Center uses to determine when to show an upcoming event.

I don't know if it prioritizes explicit searches in any way, but automatically suggesting my upcoming event's location without having to type anything at all is pretty good.

(Note: I tested this on the iOS 9 beta, but I know I've seen this behavior in iOS 8.3 in the past)

>> Spotify is in serious trouble.

But, the thing is, they're not. Apple is the one fighting the uphill battle in streaming music. Yesterday they had no subscribers. Today they have nobody paying them for the service. They are playing catch-up.

My grandmother may have an iPhone and may be forced into having Apple Music on her phone. Her computer-literate grandson might even show her how to use it. But it's a very large bridge to cross to go from pushing software to somebody's phone to getting them to pull out their credit card and subscribe to a service.

And by the way, the comparison to Maps made below holds no water. Maps is free, interchangeable with Google Maps, has zero switching costs, and is often opened by mistake because it is, after all, designed to replicate Google Maps.

I agree with the Parent - Spotify is screwed. I've only had 30 minutes with the Apple Music app, and it's awesome. I mean, it's not just an acceptable substitute (which Apple Maps for anyone who took a bus wasn't for 2+ years), it's a serious competitor - that's included on every iPhone by default

I'm willing to wager by end of year, Apple Music will be used 2x more than Spotify on iPhones. That is, I'm guessing by end of year Spotify will have stalled at around 25 million paying subscribers, and Apple will have around 50 million+. And the curve for Spotify will be flat, or descending, while Apple will still be arcing up.

I guess we'll see though.

Even if the growth curve for Spotify flattens for iPhone users in the U.S., you still have the entire Android market, and let's not forget that Spotify has an international customer base. To say that they are screwed is an awfully bold assertion.

Apple surely has a lot going for it, but let's not forget that Spotify has a partnership with Uber and is a very innovative company in it's own right. Apple Music just launched. Spotify has been around for 4+ years. Late to market entrants don't have a great track record of user acquisition.

>> But, the thing is, they're not.

But, the thing is, they are. I'm a long-time Spotify fanboy and cancelled my subscription after 30 minutes of playing with Apple Music. Have you spent time with Apple Music? I'm not really sure what Spotify could even do to make me return?

It makes sense to those of us who are using iTunes (especially iTunes Match). There are many of us. There are also many people who aren't using iTunes and they probably will stick with whatever is working for them now.

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