I'm not a Spotify user, I'm an Apple Music user, though if there wasn't Apple Music I'd use Spotify.
The reason that I'd never use YT Music is that I never trust anything from Google: their interfaces are ugly, everything's user-unfriendly, and they have the habit of discontinuing a service at any time. Also it has the impression of not really being well-thought as a product: why name a music service after a video service? I know it's not the case but it always reminds me of those low quality music playlists where people collected low quality unofficial music videos back then in YT just for the music: simply not the right tool for the job.
A lot of people listened to music from YouTube as their primary source besides an FM radio before Spotify was available as it is now. YouTube somewhat famously signed deals with music labels back in the day. Content ID was the controversial, but necessary compromise for the music to remain on YouTube. I am pretty sure a very significant percentage of music listeners globally listen mainly from YouTube, I did it and I also saw a lot of people doing it.
It may seem stupid or counter productive, but it is easy and good enough. YT Music is a clear upgrade for those users.
I think YT Music makes more sense than many of the Google initiatives and it will continue to make sense as long as they will have deals with music labels.
I use regular YouTube (not Music) for discovering music by way of playlist mix videos sometimes (such as the retrowave/chillwave/etc mixes by soulsearchanddestroy), but if I like a playlist well enough I’ll rebuild it in my Apple Music library with a combination of tracks on AM natively or in some cases with Bandcamp purchases. Music being tied up in YouTube long term is cumbersome, even with YT Premium offline downloads as an option.
Google already shut down their first music streaming service.
Trying to get your playlists out was a complete nightmare too, some moron at Google decided on a ridiculously poor data structure. It was something utterly absurd like a zip with a CSV file per track, that generally had only that track in it.
Well, they shut down two music services. The first was Songza, which they bought. They then took everything Songza had- namely their awesome mood-based, artisanally curated playlists- and put it into Google Play Music. Then they seemingly let go of everyone who maintained the playlists and never updated them again? Those playlists on Songza were _excellent_ and the Snoop Dog collabs were just delightful.
Not sure how Google internally makes decision but I imagine it works entirely quarter by quarter trying to measure individual Impact with no overarching vision or direction.
> Youtube's best audio is format 251: Opus with a variable bitrate target of 128k. Note that 128k Opus is approximately equal in quality to 320k mp3 (as in, it's generally considered transparent)
I care a lot about audio quality and I use YT premium for music just about every day. You also get enhanced bitrate on some videos with premium.
YT Music really is odd. I pay for YT Premium and so have played with it a few times but it feels rather ill-suited for its purpose… as you say, the video streaming heritage is quite evident. Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, heck even Amazon Music last I tried it have much more music-oriented UIs.
YouTube is also actively hostile to third party devs in ways that at least Apple isn’t, somehow. Third party Apple Music clients have existed for years using official Apple-provided APIs, which YouTube isn’t going to ever allow even for paying customers.
From my end the decision to not use the Google product comes from two places. Firstly, any money I send to Google is probably a net negative for the human race as a whole (though the same could probably be said for Spotify). Secondly (and much more importantly for me personally), YouTube is quite addictive, and having premium would enable me. If someone offered me a music streaming subscription with a bit of free crack cocaine on the side, I would not take it over someone offering me just the subscription, regardless of the price (up to a point)
As a counterpoint, YouTube is a vast chasm of highly educational and worthwhile media. There's no other space like it for long-form independent educators, and it's a creative space we need to protect by keeping it economically viable for YouTube. At least until comparable spaces (with sustainable audiences) exist.
Who cares about a corp, my comment was focused on keeping creators employed. I do think the splits are terrible, and I recommend directly supporting creators you enjoy.
There are plenty of better alternatives to YouTube for independent educational media. For example, Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera which allow independent educators and don't rely on poor recommendation algorithms or incessant advertising (both from the platform and in sponsorships)
I've sampled all of those services. None of those have comparable, sustainable mass audiences like YouTube. They also lack integration with my other consumption, which YouTube provides. And in general, the quality of independent educational content I find on YouTube is quite good and is often a product of YouTube culture itself, now that we are no longer in the first generation of YT creators, and I quite like the culture and its aesthetic.
Udemy, Skillshare and Coursera have failed to create a product which attracts me, and the general population. Their focus on specific content and consumption habits is both a blessing and a curse, depending on who you ask.
I don't know about Udemy or Skillshare, but I gave up on Coursera a long time ago because almost everything on there seems to be of a "X for non-X-majors" variety. They tend assume no prerequisites and are generally super watered down.
Better alternative in some regards, maybe, but for discoverability, there is no bigger platform than YT. It's the Walmart of media consumption with a "you're going to make it up in volume" concepts
YouTube is also a vast repository of conspiracy bullshit with a recommender algorithm that is happy to start feeding you as much of it as you can autoplay.
Yes, and you should disable autoplay and browse with intent. You should network with others and use your network as a discovery pipeline instead of relying on an opaque algorithm.
After a while, the algorithm aligns somewhat anyway and you occasionally get a good recommendation from the front page or related videos. But first, you have to curate your tastes so that it knows what to pull.
I could generalize your comment to say that the world wide web itself contains a vast repository of useless or malicious content and is a dangerous pipeline to extremism. But we find corners of it that don't facilitate toxic content, and we ensure the livelihood of those who produce useful things for us. They benefit from a narrowcasting service with a large audience and ad network such as YouTube. Until one of us can provide them a better service, that's what they're stuck with.
This is my objection to paying them. They push a lot of ragebait. They have a lot of longform advertising that is just raw conspiracies or medical quackery.
My understanding is that 55% of your YouTube premium payment goes to the creators you watched to compensate them for lost ad dollars (and I believe creators actually earn slightly more per premium viewer than per ad-supported viewer). So in some ways, if you pay for YouTube premium you are actually paying to drown out conspiracy theories and ragebait content with whatever content it is that you prefer.
I switched from Spotify from YT Music solely for UX reasons. Spotify is a weird flimsy thing to me (or at least was, back when I rage-quit it). Things like, their Android app didn't even have a "play album" button. Random simple stuff just was made needlessly hard. Queueing was weird, it seemed to nudge you to shuffling / algorithmic playback, they had this weird podcast thing going on that was just in the way, and so on.
YT Music on the other hand, has excellent UX in my opinion. This surprised me, given Google's generally mediocre UX design, but they really got a bunch of competent people on this one. All the basics work the way you'd expect (and that's not trivial to get right). Play, queue, play next. Play album, shuffle, it all just generally does what I expect it to do and I can mostly find the buttons I want easily. You can turn off autoplay. Gapless album playback is on by default. It.. just works!
Also I find the algorithmic autoplay to be pretty great, found some great new artists that way.
The fact that the catalog is bigger because it includes weird bootleg recordings and live sets and anything music-y ever uploaded to YouTube, is a nice bonus. But for me, the UX sells it.
Especially compared to one of their core competitors in the US market: Amazon Music.
I don't know who pissed off who in the world of Amazon, but I'm shocked at how broken the Amazon Music app has been for the last few years. Random stops in the streaming, weird behavior on flagship phones after the app has been in the background for a while, their app store reviews tell more.
At the very least they fixed a (long-standing) bug that caused the scrollbar to conflict with side panel UI elements, making it stop/halt when you tried to view long lists of songs. Their fix was: remove the scroll.
FWIW, I prefer YT Music simply because the same app on the same phone works beautifully. It ain't perfect (my favorite is the random cross-talk with YouTube at times on 'likes', or when I occasionally see the interface change for a particular song in my play list), but I don't have to reset stuff just to listen to a few tracks in a row.
Oh my lord, reordering the queue or playlists on Amazon Music on iOS is one of the most frustrating interfaces I have ever used. It makes me so mad just thinking about it that I can hardly even pinpoint what’s wrong other than “it is almost but not quite completely broken.”
The YouTube Music UI fails at very basic things. Play a track that Google seems is "for children" and you are unable to navigate to another track or browse without it stopping playing, because the service inherited YT's clumsy COPPA compliance solution.
The UI can't cope with long titles. It uses space badly. It doesn't surface content well (no Christmas playlist on the front page during December).
It's a UI mess. I tried switching my family to it since we pay for YT Premium anyway and faced a total revolt.
I just learned that Spotify apparently likes to charge you for Taylor Swift while their algorithm pushes their own AI generated music into your ear buds which costs them nothing. That's how CEOs sell a couple billion dollars of stock options. Question is... Are you gonna continue to support him/them/they? I'm not. I'm gonna go for a bike ride right now and leave the ear buds home and listen to the sounds all around me. Take care y'all.
I need to correct my comment. I had read the ghost artists story here on YC and that was my referral. I didn't know Spotify was hiring musicians to create music that Spotify then owned the rights to and they pushed onto the consumer essentially paying themselves.
Spotify hires creators to create content that Spotify owns, then uses their platform to push it onto their own playlists. They aren't subbing out real artists songs for ghost artists when you ask for a specific song.
Literally the exact same thing that every video streaming service is doing. Isn't Netflix the biggest production company on earth at this point. At least if its a cover of a song the original artist still gets royalties.
I found Spotify to be very playlist-oriented. Not great for people who listen to albums straight through. Things like pushing albums to a queue were not possible on the platform (IIRC the best you could do is play albums "next").
If you're using the video YouTube for music, you're not on the right app.
I have both Apple Music (via One Premium) and YouTube Music via YT Premium, and I lean on YT Music overwhelmingly. Its algorithmic playlists are just a universe better.
Last I tried it, you couldn't even click through different songs in an album without it jumping to the now playing screen. No way to disable that behavior in settings.
Absolute trash of a UI.
Spotify has plenty of warts but it is at least functional.
On top of that, account management, setup, building new playlists is just horrible. It feels like the person who wrote it doesn't listen to music.
Literally anything is better than Youtube music. Given that Google music was actually pretty good back in the day it is hilarious how badly Google has screwed it up.
I guess people have different needs out of their apps.
I was a long time Spotify user. When they decided to give hundreds of millions to Joe Rogan, I switched to Apple Music. Then when I got YT Premium for the video benefits, I randomly tried YT Music and it has been my primary since.
And I have zero complaints. I search for artists and albums and songs and play them. Often I start algorithmic "radio" playlists based upon one of those. It plays the music. I save things to my library. I add things to playlists.
I listen to music and I think it's a great app. And again, 4.8 on the app store, so the people for whom it's a terrible app might be the exception.
What do you want to see in the playlist behavior? I admit I build them without much effort in YT Music and never felt constricted, but I may be missing out.
If the Spotify UI was the only way I could consume music, I would never listen to another song again. It's ugly, barely customizable, wastes space, wastes time, and it's flat-out user hostile, just like recent YouTube UI changes. Except unlike YouTube, I cannot reasonably modify the style and functionality to my liking, or easily use third-party clients.
It seems to me the most ethical mode of consumption which doesn't compromise consumer integrity and freedom is to use YouTube, or pirate, and to make up for lost royalties by directly supporting creators and encouraging creators to cut out the middlemen.
Spotify has such a terrible app, at least on iOS. If you download a song and have a weak cellular/WiFi connection the app prefers the connection over the downloaded song, so you just can't listen to music unless you turn on offline mode.
Similarly, if you have a weak connection and go back a song that song isn't cached which is infuriating.
This mostly happened when I was getting into my car which is barely in WiFi range but the connection wasn't stable enough to be usable, so I'd have to start driving before I could interact with Spotify.
Anyway, I switched to Apple Music a year or two ago. Spotify is trying to lock users in with the social aspect (e.g. Spotify Wrapped) but it's just not worth it.
Man, there's few things as infuriating as the Spotify app refusing to play a downloaded podcast unless i connect to the internet. can disconnect right after it starts playing, so it makes no sense.
Apple Music has a really bizarre interface for managing playlists. It’s so cumbersome and takes way too many clicks. Probably as a side effect of being mobile first
Wow I just tried it out and it's quite awful, you're right. The way Spotify allows you to see what's in the 'radio' station and then add additional tracks to a playlist is great – there's almost no similar functionality in Apple music.
Actually bonkers that discovery is this bad in Apple music
YouTube music's biggest issue is that it's run by Google. The second biggest issue is that they kill their best apps every 5-10 years. YouTube music is only recently getting to Google music parity.. the app that they killed 5 years back and replaced with YT music.
Also, they've ruined whatever they offered for podcast management when they killed google podcasts and tried to direct users to YT music -_-.
Spotify isn't primarily about playing music for me, it's about finding new music to play.
And Spotify's just where all of that is. The quality of the radio recommendations, the fact that there's always a playlist for every TV show soundtrack, that artists put together their own playlists, the quality and variety of playlists overall, and it's where cool people I know create and update their public playlists.
None of the other services seem to come close in terms of that. I see links to Spotify playlists all over the internet. I don't think I've ever seen a link to a YouTube Music playlist?
It's also got a lot more niche music in it. I've switched because that. Practical everyone is on YouTube(willing or not), good luck finding that one self published song from 2009 uploaded from an abandoned account on Spotify though.
Exactly. Recordings of live sets, strange/interesting post/doom/stoner metal albums, and - for better or worse - all the bootlegged stuff that Spotify doesn't have because legal disputes as user uploads.
The Spotify app started suggesting me albums it labels as "Sponsored recommendations" a few months ago and it's really put me off. Now it's hard to trust how good it is at finding new music if Spotify is admitting to deliberately excluding most of its database and prefiltering down to its sponsors.
You're right though, the rest of the things you mention do make it much tougher to decide on whether to switch and what to switch to.
> - Moving all your liked songs and playlists over is annoying
I've switched music streaming services a few times and this is always a pain, no matter which streaming service. I really really wish there were some universal export/import format that all these services shared to make switching easier (but I understand that might not be in their interest).
Because the Youtube Music app is garbage. I already have Youtube premium and tried cancelling my Spotify for a few months, even transferred my saved playlists over, and it was a horrible enough experience that I'm back to paying for both.
100% this. I pay for YT Premium so I have YT Music for free, and I still choose to pay for Spotify because the YT Music app is that bad. Spotify's app is not perfect by any stretch, but comparatively it's amazing. I really miss the old Google Music service. But so goes almost any product run by Google for long enough -- slowly and inevitably into the ground (at least in terms of user experience, if not always in market share).
Wow. YT Music must be extremely bad if Spotify is comparatively amazing. There are so many UX and general usability issues that drive me crazy and crazier still that they have made essentially 0 improvements to the app UX in the last 5 years.
Other streaming services are unfortunately not an adequate replacement for myself, so I'm stuck with Spotify for now, unless I become determined to download my entire 8k+ library of songs for self-hosted options.
That’s a little pot calling the kettle black. The Spotify app has been horrendous for years, ever since they started jamming in all the podcasts and garbage.
I tried switching to it years ago after I was forced to migrate from Play Music (which was superior, IMO). I was _very_ turned off to YT Music matching songs in my library with random audio tracks from YT videos. Perhaps they no longer do this, but I went with Apple Music, which is what I've used since.
And now I'm mad about Play Music shutting down again!
(They, Amazon Music and iTunes/Apple Music had a true "music locker" service where you could upload songs from your library, no matter the source, and play them anywhere. iTunes/Apple Music is the only one left that does this, and even then, I'm not sure if the iTunes part works on Android.)
> I was _very_ turned off to YT Music matching songs in my library with random audio tracks from YT videos. Perhaps they no longer do this
I was also mega turned off by this... initially. At some point it stopped happening to me unintentionally and now it only really happens if I start playing from a YouTube video (which is actually quite help for some obscure songs/remixes). You can also turn off this functionality all together in the settings.
> a true "music locker" service where you could upload songs from your library, no matter the source, and play them anywhere
You can upload your own music and then stream it from any device on YouTube Music now
YouTube doesn't let me add certain tracks to playlists because it has mistakenly labeled them as for kids. It's a stupid platform with way dumber limitations than Spotify.
I've been using YT Music for years and have all my playlists there, but am now considering switching to Spotify because _everyone_ I know sends me Spotify links. I then also feel bad sharing YT Music links when their entire ecosystem (car audio etc) is centered on Spotify, and YouTube is likely to play an ad if they're not a subscriber. Music sharing is kind of a big thing for me and it sucks that I'm now paying for a service I don't use just to share links with people >.<
I’ve seen https://idonthavespotify.donado.co used for converting between services but when I tried it just now with some Apple Music links it identified albums wrong
Sharing anyway in case YouTube music links work better
I never cared for Spotify, but I was an early Google Play Music user. Loved it. Then they forced me to YT music and I left for Apple. The YT UI was so bad.
Now I have both AM and YTM because of bundling. AM stream quality is noticeably better. The YTM UI has gotten better over the years and I think the sheer size of YTM means there are tons of playlists which I like.
My preference now would be to duplicate all the YTM user playlists to AM.
I consider Youtube negative value. It is a service explicitly designed to suck up as much as possible of my time / attention, and youtube doesn't change how their algorithm works just because you pay for it with real money. The watchtime maximizing works the exact same time as at the very least all the content produced withing the ecosystem still needs to be watchtime maximizing.
Why would I ever pay for that?
Edit-to-add: Not to mention that I have yet to forgive google for killing Play Music, a much superior service.
People don't talk about this much, but much of Play Music lives on in Youtube Music. I am not sure if its because I was grandmothered in or something, but all my mp3s that are definitely not otherwise on YouTube still shockingly exist in my Youtube Music "Library".
The storage and library is, yes, AFAICT. It's a "full" migration, everyone I know who used Play Music heavily has had no data-retention issues at all with YT Music.
But the UX is so much worse, it's just mindblowing. Basically all of them left for something else eventually.
YT Music is generally as good or better for casual listening. There's a potential deal breaking quirk in that some tracks are user uploads. You can find obscure stuff that's not easily available elsewhere, but I've found quite a few tracks that are low quality CD or vinyl rips, and concert bootlegs. If you build a playlist, it's not easy to weed out the trash.
Spotify has awesome playlists, both from the community and curated by the company itself.
YouTube is much worse at that, last time I checked. Mostly shitty spam, as with everything Google.
I don't really listen to individual songs or albums, but look for "classic rock for workouts" or "relaxing instrumental for work" etc. Spotify is great for that.
I just search as normal and look in the playlists. Usually something in the top 2 or 3 results is a good one. I think they're ranked by number of saves or something? Not sure. The official ones labeled "Spotify" are also quite good.
I would be more interested in YouTube music if it allowed users to play the audio of any video. Right now, a video has to be tagged by the creator as music for it to be made available on the app.
??? Studio provided digital masters will of course be identical across all of the services.
Apple Music has the upper hand on the very high end with full lossless streaming, but that's irrelevant to almost everyone listening in a compromised situation -- like 100% of bluetooth headsets -- and YT Premium's 256Kbps AAC is extremely high quality.
You, along with many others, seem very confused about this. No one is talking about random people uploading their MP3s to YouTube the video service.
YouTube Music is a separate service. The music is provided by music labels in exactly the same way it is provided to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and others. Music labels provide digital masters and the streaming service encodes as necessary for their users.
YouTube Music definitely has just standard YouTube videos uploaded by random people. It's one of the only reasons I use YouTube Music - listening to vinyl rips of things that were never released in other formats.
When you are on YouTube there is a Music section that includes music videos, random uploads, etc. A lot of people are talking about that in this discussion and it is causing a lot of confusion.
Random rips that people upload on YouTube are not available on YouTube Music (again, not the Music section on YouTube, but the separate YouTube Music service). The only music available is through a sanctioned distributor like Amuse, and of course the labels have direct feeds to these services.
You are mistaken. User uploads, unofficial remixes, mixtapes, anime music videos, entire video game soundtrack rips, etc. All in the YouTube Music app.
To +1 the general "youtube music is youtube": every time I've given the YT music app a try, I've started listening to [what I wanted] only to end up in random youtube mixes (not YT-music-mixes of just studio-uploaded stuff, youtube videos titled "mix" or otherwise, sometimes 10h long, with accompanying looped graphics and sometimes VPN advertising segments and like-and-subscribes strewn throughout randomly) after a few songs.
YTM is YT plus music, not a separate thing. It's very clearly intentionally forced to be that way. It's the primary reason I think it's an awful service (the general UX is a very close second). It does, however, have the benefit of niche user uploads like this existing because it's YT.
I believe the links. The guy is searching for fringe stuff. You can even copy watch ids from YouTube, which is likely what was done here.
But if you are any ordinary user and you are searching on YouTube Music for a playlist and somehow you got a 10 hour random person's video, either you're spectacularly terrible at search, or you're full of shit.
Look, I can link to random stuff too. A couple of YouTube curated playlists, and some of millions of albums. All songs direct from publishers. Zero imaginary ads, or bizarre "videos".
Incorrect. All of those links are taken from the YouTube Music app on Android via search. Some are contrived, but the point is that there is a wide range of counterexamples to your assertion that YouTube Music is this siloed thing that's only music direct from publishers.
Here's a more straightforward example. I search for "action bronson blue chips 2" [1]
The top result is "Action Bronson Blue Chips 2 ((Full Album)) - Please Subscribe" from user 'Lpmixtapes compilation and mixtapes...'[2]
The official release [3] is a page scroll down.
So, I don't think it's reasonable to call people "terrible at search" when these things literally come up as top results in search and are fair game for the recommendation algo to slide into your stream, or "full of shit" when they can give you specific examples of how things you've said are wrong.
Why are you so sure that your experience is the one true YouTube Music experience, and several other people telling you they have other experiences are "making shit up"?
Having said that, having done thousands of search for countless bands, albums, and songs, and having listened to countless playlists, I have never, ever encountered an unofficial track. It has always been first-party official releases.
I guess it's that I'm not looking for stuff for which there isn't a direct licensed track. But the earlier comments about "uploaded with that quality" and talking about replacement tracks is simply wrong for the vast majority of people. You're going to be listening to the music distributors version.
I guess if you're looking for anime music or something where an official listing simply doesn't exist then it's the alternative to nothing.
I use normal YT with premium for music all day, never even felt an urge to try out "YouTube Music". What would be the value add? I already have playlists on normal YT and all my music is there.
YouTube Music is one of the worst pieces of software ever created. That's the only reason I use Spotify at all. YTM on Android crashes randomly, playback stops randomly, it forgets your playback position in podcasts randomly, sometimes it breaks itself so hard that you have to hard reboot your phone to fix it. It's incredible.
Terrible app, variable quality since they clearly re-use music uploaded originally as video with a static background. Apple Music is king of streaming quality, however neither Apple Music nor YTM can beat Spotify's algorithm as far as the kind of music I listen to is concerned.
Does youtube music have a desktop app yet? Or do they still expect me to hunt down one of my many tabs in one of my many browser windows any time I want to change a song? It's a ridiculous UX killer.
I also don't want my music to stop when I restart my browser.
Spotify has albeit unofficial headless client for linux. None of other services I know does. It implements the same interface as smart speakers so can be controlled remotely by any gui client.
I have youtube premium and music. I've never tried spotify but I have to believe it's better than youtube music. It's hard to believe it could possibly be worse.
Why use either when you can download songs from normal YouTube (via yt-dlp) for free?
I've indeed been asking myself that, as a current Spotify customer. The whole point of paying for a streaming service is the convenience of it combined with the monetary support of the artists on it. If Spotify is decreasingly convenient, and Spotify is decreasingly paying artists their fair share, then at some point I might as well just go back to torrenting whole discographies like it's 2005.
For context, I'm an ex-Googler, worked there 2016-2023 during this. For entertainment's sake, I'll list it as I experienced it, rather than just rotely saying "lol disorganized"
- 2008-2015: Huge, absurd Apple fanboy. waiter => create startup => iOS dev. Sold it.
- 2016: Apple rejects me b/c no degree, suggests calling back in a couple years. Google makes me an offer. I join Google.
- October 2016: Wow Pixel looks cool...I work on Android watches...lets try Pixel.
- November 2016: I've been missing out on so much with web services!!! Google is in the future while Apple is in the past!! Even just Google Play Music: Google has iTunes in the browser. Wow!!!!
- 2017: Aw they're shutting down Google Play Music...but hey, I get it! I can see the internal musings and it makes sense, YouTube can commit more resources and has a great content catalog!
- 2018: Wow this dogfood version is great! Lots missing from Google Play Music, seems like a thin shim over YouTube x "play audio only" button x music rights, but there's plenty of time to iterate before release!
- 2019: Ehhh meh this is starting to feel weird, hasn't really evolved much. I do love the recommendation feed better! There's still some stuff to add back, I know they're working on adding your own files back, and they have that excellent Google Play Music/iTunes in the browser UI to be inspired by!
- 2020: Goodbye Play Music, sunset, gone. Ehhhh nothing really changed with YouTube Music, but at least I'm saving money compared to Spotify
- 2022: Podcasts is gonna get sunset and merged into YouTube Music? Makes sense, I guess.
- 2023: Oh man, they sunset Podcasts and YouTube Music wasn't actually prepared for this, they had the absolute MVP for Podcasts...Oh man, look at public backlash.
Man, BigCo management is hard...at the top, they only have bandwidth for Game of Thrones stuff of "We should take podcasts!!" but "delegate" the actual work and people are people, they do exactly what they need to with exactly the resources they have. I guess its cool they're publicly owning the backlash.
- 2024: I am still using YouTube Music. I see your comment on HN, and realize I would have been happier on Spotify all along.
Yes! Spotify evidently does something. You can watch the Netflix show, that takes the original approach to explaining its success from the different angles of key people involved, to review one of the best approaches to answering this question for a company I’ve ever seen.
In a world where musicians and listeners have all the other choices to connect still, IMO Spotify completely deserves its position. I detest the low effort complaints by ppl on Reddit saying their financial success is not deserved.
Their stance during Covid to ban any mentions of the lab leak theory. Even if not considered the most likely, it had always been a possibility, and not an absurdist one.
Man, brain is so weird. The weirdest brain injury symptom I can’t wrap my head around is when people lose the ability to understand the number 0. Like everything else works but this is beyond their understanding. Like what’s so special about this number?
As far as I know Gleam is the only strongly typed language on BEAM, which is important to me since I don't like dynamically typed languages.
But of course Elixir gets optional types now.
I got annoyed at all the invoice generators so I recently built my own in a weekend. I put the data in Airtable and a python script generates the pdfs using typst. Much more flexible than any of the solutions I found and it took me less to build it than the time i spent trying out the available solutions.
They assume a specific format of the invoices and conditionals aren’t easily supported - like if I’m removing VAT use one format, if not use another.
Another problem is the annoying data input where things aren’t organized using tables for quick input, rather than forms on different screens. One more thing that comes to mind is it’s hard to reuse elements, sometimes I have a generic template per client and just swap in and out line items etc.
If DiCaprio asked for such a price and the companies didn't think they could make it back, he wouldn't get it. He is able to set that price due to demand for DiCaprio specifically. I don't necessarily agree with it either but they do consider these things, and they wouldn't pay him that much otherwise.
I never understood why Hollywood insists on using A list actors to do voice acting for animated features. Most of the time it's not even apparent who's performing and I hardly find it a draw that some big name is listed on the billboard.
Dis we really need Chris Pratt and Jack Black to do the voices for the Super Mario movie? Especially when Chris Pratt is basically using his regular voice the whole time?
If a movie with famous actor makes 100M more than without them, why shouldn't they get a significant portion of that?
Is that DiCaprio number salary, or profit/revenue sharing as a producer? Looking at [0] it seems like his highest salary was $30M. He made more on Inception and Titanic, but that was total income, not salary.
Anyway, when thinking about it as cost and value, then it makes sense in our economic model.
I don’t understand your point. The natural progression of things is how we got to this point. You’d need some massive shock to the system (like a legislative law) to change it at this point.
Or a crash in market. Where they simply run out of the big money. So the big ticket items like stars simply do not get hired and everything is done with less people and less VFX.
They’d still do it for less money if there’s less total money in the market. It’s not like a bridge where a pound of steel costs X and not much you can do about it
Argument is that making these things is inherently very expensive, but the actor salaries tell me there’s plenty of left over once production ends. There’s static costs and there’s more fluid ones
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