To stop the same two companies from owning everything? YouTube Music and Apple Music are shameless anticompetitive moves, leveraging market dominance to move into other existing markets. (I'll afford more lenience to Apple Music, since iTunes was already huge, being the undisputed king of music sales before streaming subscriptions took off.)
I've also been using Spotify for longer than YouTube Music, or its predecessor that Google killed (as they do periodically) even exited.
It's quite funny to me to frame Spotify as an underdog, though I suppose there's truth to that, because of the sheer size of Apple and Google. I've never thought of it that way.
I mostly listen to albums, the Spotify “library” is a reasonable way to browse my saved albums.
Spotify (now) supports lossless.
Spotify connects to Sonos, wiim, etc. devices
Spotify supports marking albums and playlists for offline sync, including to my Garmin watch.
I participate in a number of collaborative Spotify playlists (e.g. on group trips, at parties, etc.). I’ve never seen anyone make a collaborative playlist on another platform, much less missed out on participating in one.
Shazam results have an “Open in Spotify” button and Shazam adds everything it identifies to a Spotify playlist.
When I’ve used it, the YouTube Music UI has felt like it’s not really designed for people who listen to music the way I do at all.
I’m not willing to go without YouTube just to spite Google but I’d rather not give them money or attention/usage if I can avoid it.
I don’t know how many of these would also be ok with YouTube Music, but it’s clearly not all of them and I suspect it’s close to zero. I’m fortunate that the cost of Spotify is not a burden for me, and I’d much rather pay it to get closer to the experience I want than try to get by with YouTube Music.
Pro Spotify: existing playlists and history, better artists info, better UI.
YouTube Music is both better and worse: UI has some usability issues and unfortunately it shares likes and playlists with the normal YouTube account, as a library it has lots of crap uploaded by YouTube users, often wrong metadata, but thanks to that it also has some niche artists and recordings which are not available on other platforms.
Ads are not the only problem with the modern web. Accessibility (or, the lack thereof) is more of an issue for me. 20 years ago, we were still hopeful the Internet would bring opportunities to blind people. These days, I am convinced the war has been lost and modern web devs and their willingness to adopt every new nonesense are the people that hurt me most in current society.
Where do I cut the $10/month? No like seriously, I'd easily pay $10/month to never see another ad, cookie banner, dark pattern, or have my information resold again. As long as that $10 is promised to never increase, other than adjustments for inflation.
But I can't actually make that payment - except maybe by purchasing a paid adblocker - where ironically the best open source option (uBlock Origin) doesn't even accept donations.
Meta publishes some interesting data along these lines in their quarterly reports.
I think the most telling is the breakdown of Average Revenue Per User per region for Facebook specifically [1]. The average user brought in about $11 per quarter while the average US/CA user brought in about $57 per quarter during 2023.
Setting up Kagi is as big an improvement to search as an ad blocker is to your general internet experience. After about a week you forget how bad the bare experience is, and after a month you'll never go back.
I'm definitely behind some of my peers on adopting LLMs for general knowledge questions and web search, and I wonder if this is why. Kagi does have AI tools, but their search is ad free and good enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for with little fuss.
It's a lot more than that. The U.S. online ad market is something like $400-500 billion, so that's about $100/mo per person. The problem is that some people are worth a lot more to advertise to than others. Someone who uses the internet a lot and has a lot of disposable income might be more like $500+ a month.
The more visible and annoying ads are, the more effort (and money) I will spend buying from competitors and actively dissuading other people from buying the product.
It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.