"There's not enough listeners for the number of music services. If your service stumbles, it's easy to move onto something else, so you really only get one or no chances to convince your potential customers."

I agree, and even feel more strongly about it. Even if you don't stumble, it's hard to compete with Google and Apple at this point, because they have their services tightly tied in with their other products. Buy an iPhone (hell, or even a laptop or tablet), and Apple Music is integrated out of the box. Same with Google Music.

Personally I think Spotify is doomed to fail (for various definitions of "fail") for the same reason. There are some people who want their music decoupled from their OS/hardware, but I think there are so many more than want it to "just work", and I think that Apple & Google have a better shot at that than anyone else, at this point.

I won't switch from Spotify though because it meets my needs and furthermore they keep innovating. One thing I can look forward to in getting back to the office on Monday is my new week's playlist that Spotify creates for me. I listen to a wide variety of music and they have helped me discover a lot o f artists and songs I'm really into.

Totally agree. Spotify's weekly discover playlists have made me look forward to Mondays.

'Discover Weekly' is the one feature keeping me with Spotify. Their UI annoys me on a daily basis, but I've got a lot of great recommendations from them. Frankly, I wish Apple would mirror this feature, though it goes against their whole 'human curated playlists' philosophy.

Interesting. The only reason I used rdio was because of all of the good initial impressions designers and product people I knew had of it. The biggest assumption it made was that people understood the 'sliding pane' UI as being self evident, and it wasn't.

Wouldn't the only reason there being limited choice be because of the way music deals are structured? I'm not familiar enough with how those work but having a mismatch of payouts / winning labels vs listeners would be a problem.

Apple, etc., should open an API and SDK to allow developers to build better and innovative UIs on top of the data and streams. The UI is what I enjoyed most about Rdio and enjoy least about Apple Music and others.

Catalog consistency was probably a licensing issue and not technological, I should point out. Same reason movies just disappear from Netflix every so often.

It absolutely was a licensing issue. But it results in a horrible experience for the end user.

As a music nerd, no, it's not easy to move along to another service. Rdio was the closest thing to a social environment that was all about the music, not one's irrelevant social graph. I benefitted from studying hundreds of curated playlists, whose affinity was learned from what the site offered. Spotify, et al, doesn't do that.

My experience was mostly the same. The mobile apps were awful when your connection was spotty and frequently refused to actually play music or skip track, meaning I'd have to kill the process.

Being unable to add local tracks like I can with spotify is a killer feature that was missing as well.