A million people pay for Spotify, but the service should further simplify its offering
The Guardian reports that Spotify has now convinced a million customers to pay for the service, a figure that represents about 15 per cent of active users. This is pretty important for the company, since it’s a loss-maker at present, which has also found it tough to attract advertisers. (It’s also not exactly hugely popular among musicians either, since the per-play payments they receive from Spotify are extremely low.)
But what still surprises me about the service is its price-points. The company has simplified things of late and removed options, in order to encourage you to pay. Gone is the 24-hour ‘for a party’ option and the unlimited ad-free version—Spotify Open now restricts you to five hours of listening per week (unless you signed up before the restriction came into force). However, there are still two options for those willing to pay: Unlimited and Premium. The former is the free service minus the aforementioned restrictions, for £4.99 per month. The latter is the same, but with the addition of mobile-app support and an offline mode for playlists, but for £9.99 per month.
It’s well known that people are often reluctant to part with cash if they’re afraid of making an error. Sometimes choice can be a bad thing. In the case of Spotify, I wonder whether more people would sign up if the company just provided two options: ‘limited and free’ or ‘unlimited and not free’. Most people I know who are keen on Spotify but haven’t signed up consider a fiver the sweet spot, but they’d want the mobile service too. They’re just not prepared to pay an extra fiver to get it, and so they don’t pay anything at all.
You are right about the £5 sweet spot. I’d use the ‘mobile app’ for jacking my android into various speakers around my home, but more than a quid a week for the privilege of not having to faff about with a netbook for the same purpose is not worth it. What’s more, I don’t see why an application for android should be seen as different to the Windows one. They’re both computers.
I’d also be encouraged by better performance of the free service when streaming to my desktop – currently it’s 50/50 whether it will buffer forever or work fine. Apparently the paid version solves this but I want proof first. As for the advertising – the lack of variety in adverts (and how crap they are to boot) keeps me off the service more than it ought to.