This is becoming my biggest annoyance with streaming services. The integration with your OS(iOS or android) makes it a much more attractive option when using those devices.

My second biggest annoyance is the increasing trend of "artist exclusives" if you pay a monthly fee and your favorite artist are giving exclusives to the other services I'm less inclined to continue using that service(Spotify) because I don't get the content I want. I don't want to pay for 2 or 3 streaming services. That fracturing of availability is more likely to people going back to pirating music in my opinion.

> The integration with your OS(iOS or android) makes it a much more attractive option when using those devices.

Let me guess, you use iOS? Play Music and Spotify both integrate roughly equally poorly with Google Now/Assistant. You can say "play some X", and it'll ask you which you want to use the first time.

Unless it misinterprets which you wanted to use, which happens 90% of the time for me. It consistently interpreted "Movits!" as "Movies", even despite having their whole discography favourited in both Play and Spotify.

I completely agree with the OS integration annoyance. I use Spotify but it doesn't connect to Siri and the UX is abysmal on CarPlay.

That's mainly an Apple problem though. The integration with Android is very complete, and I don't think there are any features that Google Music gives you that Spotify doesn't.

And that's a good thing given the fact that Google Music (like most Google services that are not free) is only available in the US and a handful of other countries.

>That's mainly an Apple problem though.

And Google's/Spotify's problem is that they do not have any good or even decent phones.

I think that answer tells us more about you than the state of the mobile ecosystem.

Piracy is always better in terms of content. I know they should not be giving everything away for free, but as soon as there are more than two silos (or a world where the combination of any two silos compares to the offering you get with piracy) then piracy will be superior and hopefully force the industry to offer something better.

I personally hope that piracy is now viewed more as stealing than in earlier days. I think there is a greater understanding that the culture of music as a whole will suffer if we don't put any money into the system. I at least hope that members of the HN community don't view relying mostly on piracy to get music as morally OK.

The problem is that digital music is a type of good that is mispriced by the free market: a public good. There needs to be just enough money to going to the artist to get the album recorded, and once that amount of money is there, there is no incentive for anyone to give more money. Giving more money won't make it easier for more people to get the music, because distributing it digitally is pretty easy/cheap. Kind of like a public park. Because this incentive is only there up to a point, the good gets mispriced.

On the other hand, Spotify has an upper hand at the moment by having a client on absolutely everything. I have a spotify client built into my TV for example.

Apple might pre-install their app on iphones, but they don't support even 10% of the devices Spotify does.

And creating a multiplatform coherent, attractive, and performant UI on top of an infinite catalog of music, with recommendations, shareable playlists, "radio stations", and on and on - is no small feat. Apple shows no capacity for doing this any time soon. Heck even Spotify is barely holding it together, and this is their entire business.

If it goes that way, I'd imagine it'll go like Netflix / Prime / Whoever. One deep pocketed music service will bid a load for 'exclusive rights' to [popular artists] and you'll need to subscribe to more than one service to listen to everything. Except eventually most will just pay for none and revert to whatever way lets you do it for free in one place (youtube / piracy / whatever is about then).

I think youtube is its biggest competition to be honest. Because youtube has a frictionless method of payment (ads), has a paid option if you don't want the ads and is massively useful for "discovery".

I could see youtube killing Spotify and all its competitors.

I don't think so. I use Spotify a lot on the go, and YouTube is not suited for that. (can it even play stuff if your screen is locked?)

Also Google doesn't want to cannibalize their own Play Music sales.

I doubt very much google really cares about Play Music sales, it likely only has it because it wants to offer comparable services to apple in order that they don't switch away from android. By far and away Googles most important revenue stream is advertising, youtube fits into the advertising model far better than Play.

Ultimately a generation of kids are growing up right now who use Youtube as their primary source of entertainment and for whom downloading an mp3 is likely to seem archaic. I doubt they're going to switch to Spotify so long as google can figure out offline play for audio (which I've no doubt they can)

> can it even play stuff if your screen is locked?

Yes, with Youtube Red.

> Google doesn't want to cannibalize their own Play Music sales.

Youtube Red is free with a Play Music subscription for $9.99/month in the US.

> (all 3 clones of Spotify)

When Spotify first came out, my first thought when I saw the UI was this was an iTunes clone :) Of course it was much more than just that...