- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
Apple Music isn’t the best streaming music service — it’s just the least annoying::Competitors like Spotify and YouTube Music may be your first choice for music on Android, but you might want to reconsider
Everyone picks a streaming service for their needs. YT music has a large library bundled with ad free YT, Apple Music is a natural choice if you’re in the Apple ecosystem and Spotify exists too.
I recently switched to Tidal from Spotify and haven’t looked back. The UI is familiar enough, having lossless is really nice, and not having my phone lag whenever I open my library is great.
Then there’s the other factor of how much each streaming service pays it’s artists. To make 1000$ in revenue, this is how many streams an artist needs:
YT Music : 500,000 ($0.002 per stream)
Spotify : 314,465 ($0.00318 per stream)
Apple : 125,000 ($0.008 per stream)
Tidal : 77,882 ($0.01284 per stream)
Granted, musicians almost never make their money from streaming services. However, if an artist were to have that 314k streams on Tidal instead of Spotify, they’d make 4 times as much money.
The number you pulled for YouTube Music is based on free users watching YouTube videos. YouTube Music streams from paying subscribers are 4x that at $0.08 per stream.
The Spotify number is also averaged across free and premium users - I’m not sure the number for premium users only but it is likely closer to what Apple and Tidal pay since those are premium-only.
The other problem though is that none of the services have implemented user-centric payments. So your money on any of the services is going to Taylor Swift, Drake and Bad Bunny no matter who you listen to because everyone gets paid based on their percentage of the total streams.
The artist rates continually decline for every platform. In the not-to-distant future Tidal will be as shit as Spotify is now.