Can’t even seek through songs.
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don’t have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.
Ok, forget about reducing the labels share. I think the other points i made about finding new ways to generate more profits are still valid and better than making the free version almost useless. If spotify wasn’t profiting from free users too they would shut down the free version completely
Spotify isn’t profiting at all; that’s the entire problem.
It’s banking on the hope that offering a limited free tier will encourage some amount of users to become paid subscribers, while offsetting the cost of operating that at least a little bit by serving ads. It’s unfortunate that you can’t make sufficient revenue by just operating a free tier that’s truly sufficient, but those numbers quite clearly do not work.
I mean, are you saying that you would be complaining less if Spotify simply killed the free tier? I rather doubt that.
You said that spotify isn’t profiting at all then explained how they profit a bit for it. I’m sure they would make more profits by finding alternative way to make money like artist subscriptions than from pushing people to subscribe by making the free version almost useless and yes I would complain less if Spotify killed the free version. I only use spotify on desktop to support artists by playing a playlist of artists I want to support on repeat with almost inaudible volume. All music I really listen to is locally either from music i bought or pirated music
