MUSIC: Spotify v Apple Music v Google Play Music

Just what the world doesn’t need - another blog comparing streaming services...

I’ve been streaming music as my main way of consuming music for about seven years now.  Like most people I started with Spotify, and that has been my go to music place since then.  

However a few things happened recently that made me decide to reevaluate this.  The first - EE gave 6 free months of Apple Music (data included).  The second - I started using a Chromebook as my main computer, and got 3 free months of Google Play Music with it.  As I was becoming a bit disillusioned with the Spotify Android app, it seemed like a good idea to check out the competition...

Apple Music

I’d tried Apple Music for a month when it first came to Android and remember not expecting much and having my expectations met.  What surprised me about my second try of Apple Music was how little has really changed since it launched.  Most obviously for me, the sound still sounds flatter than Spotify Premium and Google Play.  I’m by no means an audiophile and most of the time use the headphones that came with my phone and am happy with that.  So for me to notice it is quite a thing.  There are some quirks of the interface that are odd - it took a Google search for me to figure out where the repeat function is, and there’s no way of ‘liking’ a song from the lock screen - minor irritations that add up.

One of Apple Music’s selling points with its playlists is that they’re made ‘by hand’ (ie by music loving individuals) rather than by algorithms.  The curated playlists can be good, but for me there's no discernable difference between the ones on other services. The relatively short length of them is much more digestible than Spotify’s 4 hour plus ones. Despite all the bubble tapping when setting up (a gimmicky way to tell the app your tastes) and upvoting songs, after 2 weeks of daily use the playlists never seem particularly tailored to my tastes - the most recent have been Rock In The 00’s, Hits Of 1980, and Indie Hits 1987, and there aren’t really any surprises there. These are practically identical to lists on the other services, and not particularly personalised.  They just leave me thinking that I could make a better Rock In The 00’s playlist for example, which defeats the point of having curated playlists at all.

Probably I should accept that Apple Music is not designed for the likes of me. I don't use iTunes, I don't have an iPhone or any other Apple product - I’m sure you get a lot more out of it using it on iOS.

Spotify

Formerly a big fan of Spotify I found myself becoming more and more dissiosioned by it. The Android app is somewhat deficient in features - relatively basic features at that, such as being able to reorder songs within a playlist. That feature is something which can't be done on the web player either, meaning that using my current setup curating a playlist is not possible. It's method of uploading your own songs is also fiddly, requires access to a Windows or Mac desktop and only works if you download these songs to your device - meaning it won't work on your phone without premium.

There’s two things I still really like about Spotify that makes it stand out. The first is the ability to share playlists either via Facebook or embedding into a blog. The other is its music discovery algorithms, leading to the Discover Weekly playlist and decent (and very long) curated playlists recommended based on your tastes.

But guess what? You can get both these features for free on the free tier. So if you’re going to pay for a service you might as well pick another and get the best of both worlds...

Google Play Music

Perhaps it's inevitable that using Google systems exclusively, the clumsily named Google Play Music is the best one to suit my needs. It's chiefly web based - although there are apps for Windows and Mac the web player is good enough I don't miss having an app for the Chromebook. You can stream your own tracks by uploading them into the cloud via the website.

Finding all this out was something of a surprise.  I’d subconsciously written Google Music off as being a lame duck without ever really trying it out, and it’s only ever been recommeneded to me by one other person when talking about music.

It’s a little bit weak on recommendations and though it has excellent curated playlists, they’re styled as radio stations that you can’t see the actual tracks upfront or play from a particular song.  But the interface is nice and bright (I was getting a bit sick of Spotify’s perpetual black gloom, so something a bit more friendly on the eye is nice). Sharing music is available... But only to Google+, which, well... ahem.

Maybe it’s just because it’s refreshing to have a change, I don’t know, but I let the trial period finish on Google and start taking my money, and cancelled Spotify because I can still use that anyway. Google is ultimately nice to use, has a utilitarian but friendly feel to it, and does the job nicely.

Having tried all these streaming services, really the main observation is that you can’t really go wrong with any of them.  I mean, they all do what they set out to do pretty efficiently - the final choice you make as a consumer is going to be based on relatively minor or superficial details, a similar situation to smartphones - whether you’re an iOS/Android fanboy, these days the noticeable differences from a user’s perspective are almost entirely cosmetic.  The music catalogues differ slightly, apparently, but I’ve not had many situations where something is on one service and not the others.  I listen to mainstream and obscure stuff and haven’t had trouble finding anything at all really.

I chose Google Play Music because I’m becoming more and more rooted in the Google eco-system as time goes on, just as iOS users are going to find Apple Music a natural fit, and Spotify caters for anyone - because of its free tier it's probably the best option if you don't actually listen to music other than the radio that often.  And all of the above only goes to show how mainstream streaming is - it’s no longer some sort of niche thing; it’s no longer the future.  It’s now part of the humdrum, everyday present.

MUSIC: Joanna Newsom Attacks Spotify

I like Joanna Newsom a lot.  Joanna Newsom is cool.

Joanna Newsom is also the latest artist to complain about streaming eating into her bank account – she specifically mentions Spotify, but her music isn’t available on any streaming service.

 

The lovely Joanna Newsom

After some typically eccentric comparisons to bananas she said:

“Spotify is like a villainous cabal of major labels. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists. The major labels were not particularly happy with the fact that as the royalty money dwindled more and more, their portion of the percentage split agreed upon in their licensing agreement got smaller and smaller.”

Now she does have a point – but unfortunately, fairly or not, these complaints from artists are beginning to annoy music fans.

Essentially the problem for artists is that Spotify pay all the royalties, the labels take a massive cut, and the artist gets a fraction.  Spotify responded to Newsom’s complaint by tweeting that they pay 70% of their revenue in royalties to labels, $3 billion to date.  They make the point – and I believe it’s a fair one – that the problem lies with the artists’ contracts.

Who would’ve thought it, the music industry screwing over artists?

And that’s the point – it’s the industry screwing them over.  It’s not us.  I read a rant like that and my gut reaction is “well, what do you expect me to do about it?”  Or more succinctly, “boo hoo”.

Artists need to start getting their managers to renegotiate contracts with the labels instead of washing their dirty linen in public because it’s not a good look for them.  It’s like when bankers complain about not getting big enough bonuses – it pisses off the larger part of society that are struggling on minimum wages and hiking rent prices (soon to be exacerbated in the UK with the loss of tax credits but that’s another story altogether…)

Home Streaming Is Killing Music?

The fact is people who pay for music are going to go for the most cost-effective option.  If you have to live on a tight budget, music is going to come under the ‘luxury item’ category.  I used to spend a fortune on music, even though I was shopping in discount places like Fopp.  But I couldn’t really afford to do that, to the point where my love of music was getting me into financial trouble.  Spotify seemed like a good compromise – paying for music without pirating, and at the same time actually staying in the black (well, sometimes).

So when people I respect and admire – Thom Yorke is another – come out in force against streaming, it doesn’t make me think “right on, tell it like it is”.  It makes me think they don’t understand my situation, or that of a lot of their fans.  It especially seems like a U-turn from Yorke, who was willing to let people pay whatever they felt was fair for ‘In Rainbows’ in 2009.  Well Thom, a lot of people have decided that £9.99 a month is fair given their circumstances, and your response is to have a little moan and take all your music away from them.

As far as I’m concerned it’s not a good look.  People who are streaming are paying for music legally – it’s not realistic to tell customers they should pay more.  Because frankly, there’s a significant amount of those customers who will call your bluff and go back to torrents.  Look at this comic from The Oatmeal – it’s about television rather than music, but the principle’s the same.

This is all reminiscent of the ‘home taping is killing music’ scare of the 80s.  But this time it’s not the big bosses (‘The Man’), it’s the artists who we like to think of as being on our side.  Like I say, I’m not saying artists don’t have a point about being ripped off, but they need to take this up with their labels and managers instead of slagging off the streaming companies because when they do that the implication is that people shouldn’t be streaming.  Which means that they are blaming their own fans, that somehow it’s our fault.  It paints the user as the bad guy, forgetting how much we actually have to pay even for downloads, let alone CDs (and ticket prices, and all that shiny pricey merchandise…)

Not engaging with streaming is starting to make artists look out of touch.  Streaming as a medium is staying.  If Spotify closed down tomorrow (and they don’t make a profit, so who knows?) that wouldn’t change.  Apple Music has further legitimised it as the future, as downloads from iTunes slowly and softly vanish away.  Artists need to deal with it in a more positive way, at least in public, or risk alienating their audience.

PS Joanna Newsom's album, Divers, is out on Friday.  I've pre-ordered it because I like her.  But there are going to be an awful lot of people out there who will be torrenting it and perhaps her entire back catalogue.  I don't condone that in the slightest.  But it is a fact that that is what will happen.  Attack those people Joanna.

MUSIC: Spotify and Forgotify - The Way We Listen Now

Everyone with a computer or smartphone will know about Spotify, even if they don’t really know what it is.  What it is is this – it gives the user the ability to make playlists of music from a massive online database and stream it. 

I groggily heard about a website on the Today programme last Thursday morning – Forgotify.com.  It plays songs which have never once been played on Spotify, which is a surprising 1/5ths of what is available.  Some of this is just boringly obscure (like some of the world music and mediocre renditions of classical pieces).  Some of it is batshit crazy. 

The amount of music available on Spotify is phenomenal – pretty much anything you can think of is there (apart from The Beatles, being as sticky as usual over the licensing of their music – remember how long it took them to come round to the idea of iTunes?  Perhaps after all the financial/legal complications they had during their messy divorce you can’t blame them.  I digress).  It’s been seen as controversial with some musicians – notably Thom Yorke – for the amount an artist receives from each play (not very much according to this BBC report.) 

I think of it as Napster in an age where music industry types are more accepting of the internet.  Napster came along in the 1990s and became essentially that decade’s version of the ‘Home Taping Kills Music’ hysteria of the 1980s.  In the 1960s the music industry worried that pirate radio would stop people buying records.  And so on – historically the music industry has always been suspicious at best of new technology.  But likewise, it always relatively adapts to it once the fuss dies down and they figure out how it can be used.  For instance, the establishment set up Radio One as an officially sanctioned popular radio whilst the pirates were edged out and shut down.

The real attraction of Napster was being able to hear something on demand.  Something the industry didn’t pick up on at the time (not just Execs either; Metallica famously lost a lot of credibility by seemingly siding with ‘The Man’).  It wasn’t a question of owning the music, especially because Napster was at its most popular before the proliferation of cheap MP3 players.  I remember how I used Napster as a teenager.  I would read about some song or band somewhere (normally the NME, for my sins) and want to check it out.  I would download a song or two, which would normally take an age, and if I wanted to hear more I would buy the CD.  It genuinely got me to buy things that I wouldn’t otherwise have – it was just a tool to direct my tastes and make sure my money was being given to the right bands.

Things change, and now the problem for the industry is definitely one of ownership.  The majority of people, enthusiastically or resignedly, have given up on CDs and have accepted digital media is just the way things are now.  It turns out we can live without pretty cover artwork and more shelf space.  So we download our music and pay for it through iTunes, Amazon etc if we're good law abiding citizens.  A lot of people see these sites as charging too much however, and download torrent files illegally for free from The Pirate Bay and the like.

Spotify and other sites like last.fm are largely successful attempts to thwart illegally downloaded files: people can stream music for free with adverts through their computers or upgrade for a tenner a month to get rid of the adverts and, more importantly, use it on the go on smartphones or other devices (like the app on my TV box).  This is actually a sensible and level-headed ‘damage limitation’ response by the industry to illegal downloading – the Spotify user gets their hands on music instantly and relatively cheaply without having to search for hours through dodgy torrent sites and the artist at least gets some money instead of none at all.

Spotify’s main selling point is the ability to find music you already know or may be curious about and make playlists.  Last.fm is designed to make surprisingly good suggestions based on tracks you tag as favourites, exposing the user to things they’ve never heard of (making it, as its name suggests, more like listening to a radio tailored to your tastes).  But both still require a certain amount of input on the user’s behalf to be truly effective.

Which is why I’ve loved messing around with Forgotify.  It feels completely anarchic although it isn’t, being based on a very strict rule – you will always be hearing something found on Spotify which no one else has listened to.  It feels anarchic though, because of the complete lack of logic in the playlist.  What you hear could be complete rubbish, but perhaps surprisingly, it isn't always.  The people who have set it up say it is “a musical tragedy” that some of this music has been ignored.  Speaking in terms of quality this is (understatement warning) not always true – I can live without the MOR stylings of Ray Lyell’s ‘Rollin’ Storm’ as part of my life, for instance.  It’s also not particularly tragic when the aforementioned mediocre classical pieces turn up, which I skip, ditto the religious stuff.

 

Forgetify - Bringing Obscurity Into Your Ears

However, it is tragic when you listen to the pop, and rock songs and remember they were recorded by real people who were in that studio, however long ago, wondering if they were making their first number one.  Putting their heart and soul into mediocre songs like ‘I Gotta Know’, by Boy from 1983 and not knowing that they won’t even be famous enough to turn up on a Google search – which, you know, not being on Google is even less than being a footnote to history.  That’s just being left out of the book altogether. It also gives some of the happier, soulful and music a melancholic and almost creepy feel.  I have decided that I really like The Esso Steelband Of Bermuda’s 1958 ‘Bermuda Honeymoon’ album, but listening to it and knowing that it is essentially unloved by millions of people creates, entirely in hindsight, an eerie atmosphere, despite its upbeat sunny vibe.

These are creative people who tried and failed.  The boys and girls at the party that, in the end, nobody wanted to talk to.  It is heartbreaking listening to songs from Forgotify bearing this in mind, listening to all this unrequited optimism and enthusiasm.  It makes you want to listen to some awful songs out of an irrational sense of guilt. 

It’s refreshing to have something like Spotify – which is designed to give the user complete control over their listening – and perversely using it to listen to things proved beyond doubt to be hugely unpopular, and it’s the kind of subversion that could only happen when we take having everything at our fingertips for granted.  It's undoubtedly pleasureable mainly for the novelty factor and I don't count on it being more than a fad (if it even gets as far as becoming a fad); but it's certainly an enjoyable experiment, and serves to remind us how much of a disposable commodity music is.