Spotify still lives in a parallel universe
The most famous music streaming service in the world has no real competition, which is terrible for them and even worse for us
Benchmark is “something that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged.” And benchmarking is “the act of measuring the quality of something by comparing it with something else of an accepted standard.” “Dictionarily” speaking, of course. In real life, my worn out textbook would say: “It should be operationalized as a core metric to measure performance, but its meaning and usage shifts according to personal interests.”
Picture loads of big numbers that almost nobody knows how to interpret: 1 million page views, 80,000 impressions, 400 interactions, 6,000 mentions, you know the drill. Now wrap them as you wish and spread this divine gift on your behalf, respecting two commandments only:
Thou shalt not compare.
Thou shalt not bear true value on thy numbers.
Here’s a classic example: in 2017, The New York Times CEO, Mark Thompson, proudly announced that his goal was to reach 10 million digital subscribers. By when? No idea. Thompson is everything but stupid: there was no deadline, and therefore no accountability.
The strategy worked perfectly. Almost every tech and media journalist in the world published his 10-million subscriber proclamation and not one person questioned the basic premise: is it too much? Too little? Is it ambitious? Disappointing? Journalists didn’t have a clue (it happens more often than you might think) simply because there was no benchmark for comparison.
The New York Times is in a league of its own so nobody had any idea how to assess how realistic his goal really was and Mark Thompson knew that. (Much later, he managed to update his gamble with a workable deadline of 2025. But it’s irrelevant now, as he won’t even be there to collect fame or blame).
This optical illusion, brought to you by TheNew York Times, mirrors Spotify’s reverie these last few years. They say they’re doing great — as in turn-down-for-what kind of greatness — but are they?
In December 2017, almost three years ago, I published an article called Spotify could be more popular than Instagram; here’s why it is not. In order to explain my 2017 logic, I did two things: first, I compared oranges, apples and durians; then, I identified six ways in which Spotify was stumbling.
First of all, let’s revisit my fruit salad metaphor, which consisted of comparing dissimilar platforms. In December 2017, Spotify had 150 million users (60 million premium subscribers). Today — pandemic times and all — it has 299 million. The last time Instagram announced its numbers was more than two years ago (June 2018), when it hit 1 billion users. Now, it certainly has surpassed this threshold by a large margin, so there’s no point in comparing them anymore.
In a broader sense, though, numbers are still intriguing.
All the other platforms I’ve listed in 2017 have grown at the same pace, give or take, except for TikTok, of course. When Musical.ly was rebranded as TikTok in August 2018, it had 100 million monthly active users, whereas TikTok in China had just reached 300 million. Now — despite the political dispute — they’re close to reaching 900 million users. It is somehow ironic that the former Musical.ly is now the seventh most used social platform on the planet — and, yes, I’m still comparing oranges and noodles.
Despite all the glory publicized over the last three years, Spotify is still a frail player when set against all the other time-consuming platforms. Its 299 million users (free and premium combined) puts the music service behind Pinterest (322M), Twitter (340M) and, believe it or not, SnapChat (382M). Not to mention, it remains light years away fromYouTube (2B), Instagram (1B+) and TikTok (900M).
Ok, but wouldn’t it be fairer— friendlier at least — to compare Spotify with other music streaming services? I’ll get back to that in one sec.
The second part of my 2017 rant has divided Spotify’s problems in six points: identity, interface, partnerships, public relations, creativity and artists “dilemmas”.
Starting with the last, let’s check what happened with the Spotify vs. artists showdown since 2017. Spotify CEO and founder, Daniel Ek, still hasn’t found a way to improve his relationship with content creators. His company has one of the worst paycheck stubs of all music streaming services and it still draws recurring criticism from everybody — from the furious to the pretty funny. Moreover, Spotify never tried alternative methods, collabs or products to boost artists earnings, which is absurd, to say the very least.
Moving on, the company’s identity and the app’s interface haven’t gone anywhere since December 2017. Apparently, Spotify has dropped the “social media” bit for good and decided to stick to the “music app” persona alone — which would be ok, if they didn’t keep dipping back the social media pool every now and then. Last March, for example, they decided to teach “how to customize and share your profile”, for no apparent reason.
As far as user experience is concerned, I must say, it has aged poorly. After some bureaucratic face-lifting, its interface is virtually the same mess as three years ago. The noticeable difference is now they firmly believe their algorithms are as sharp as ever (they’re not) and, man, get ready for this: erratic music recommendations are everywhere.
But all is not lost: Ek finally dove into the podcast market by acquiring Anchor and Gimlet and signing exclusive deals with A-list stars. Isn’t he kind of late? Yeah, but Spotify has lost so many opportunities over the years — and it still is — that I’ll be checking the better-late-than-never box on this one.
If “partnerships” finally took a big step ahead, the “creativity” part, though, errs on the side of caution. Frankly, I have no idea why Spotify executives are uncommonly conservative. Maybe it is Ek’s fault. Or maybe all the staff brought to the office the same better-safe-than-sorry LinkedIn profile they created to be hired, I don’t know. Whatever the issue, the result is that: A) there is no disruptive path that could overwhelm users, sponsors and rivals, B) every announcement is as boring as a conversation where everybody agrees and C) the impression of omission disguised as low-profile attitude is a constant. Remember that disconcerting YouTube channel three years ago? It is still there: 23k views on the Joe Rogan announcement video, 7k views on the League of Legends partnership — a real blast.
What leaves us with bad press, to end my 2017 list. Ek has stopped fighting with Taylor Swift, which is a step forward, I guess. So I decided to acknowledge that by looking for more “good news”, not in the cruel world of journalism, but inside Spotify’s own news channel. This is me, Dan, hoping for the beginning of a lifelong bond…
Shocking no one, however, even Spotify’s own news hub is full of some pretty weird stuff. Here’s my Top 3, which I found after 20 minutes browsing randomly (I’m sure there’s much more where these came from):
In October 2018, they announced new features to premium subscribers. What were they? Well, apparently not much, since a 21-second cryptic video could summarize the whole thing.
In December of the same year, they seemed excited about a partnership with Ellen Degeneres. If you have no idea what this partnership is about, do not worry, you’re not alone. There’s no sign of Ellen promoting anything, and the page link on Spotify site leads to nowhere. To make up for that, though, there’s a mumbo jumbo interview with Spotify Creative Director Alex Bodman that’s worth a look.
Brazil is a mystery in Spotify’s hands. Mia Nygren, Managing Director for Latin America, for example, gave an evasive answer when asked about Anitta, one of Brazilian’s most popular singers since 2013 and now EA’s Fifa 21 star. Fun fact: a question asked by Nygren’s own team. Also, Spotify partnered last year with a paid service in Brazil that became a frequent flyer on consumer complaint sites because of a tie-in sale. Another fun fact: this partnership was arranged to offer a four-month Spotify premium membership (which is not a tie-in sale, but you get the irony, right?).
Whether they like it or not, it turns out that the lack of a benchmark is bad for them, Ek and his band, but it’s worse for us, consumers and artists. It is not just that Spotify could be as popular as Instagram but also, more importantly, that they could offer a much better service.
And that’s exactly one of two reasons I don’t compare Spotify to other music streaming services. Despite being a giant in the industry, Daniel Ek’s company loses in many head-to-head comparisons — Tidal has a better sound quality, Bandcamp has a better paycheck, Pandora has a (much) better music recommendation, and so on. Apple, Amazon, YouTube and Tencent are a different story: each one has a distinct goal and they’re playing their own “bundle” game. The same goes for Primephonic and Idagio: they’re targeting a niche market, in another league.
The second reason I don’t compare Spotify to other music streaming services is much more appealing. Five months ago, during an interview with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Studio 1.0, Daniel Ek admitted that the company actually thinks in terms of “billions of users worldwide” in the future. As you may have already suspected, it was a New York Times type of statement, with no target date. How Ek plans to build that, however, is clear, and it can be found in this 2019 statement: “More than 20% of all Spotify listening will be non-music content. We will begin competing more broadly for time against all forms of entertainment and informational services, and not just music streaming services.”
So… it wasn’t just me. Daniel Ek also knew all along that Spotify, not only could, but should be more popular than Instagram. He just didn’t know how to do that then, and he still doesn’t know how to do that now. At least, not yet.