Groove Music is literally dead. Play Music is buried on the Play Store somewhere as if Google doesn't want people to access it. Seriously, I had to do a Google search to find it. Its UI is not as good as Spotify (in my opinion) and the service doesn't seem like a priority for Google.

I haven't tried Apple Music and Amazon.

Spotify on the other hand has a decent desktop app available on Windows, macOS and even Linux. Their mobile app is great, too. They have brand power, a UI that a lot of people like and their AI-based playlist engine is amazing.

Then why is Spotify so freakin popular? Why do they have more than double the subscribers as Apple Music which arguably has major advantages (resources, pre-installed, etc)?

First mover advantage? Spotify has been around for many, many years before just about anyone else that matters. Since they're all basically the same thing why would you change after new ones came out? I kept with Google Music for the longest time before moving to spotify only because of the family deal (which, if I remember correctly, came before Google's deal and really the only reason why I ever switched).

Sorry, not buying it. You don't grow to 60 million paying subs on a generic product that has little more than a first mover advantage. Their subscriber count grew 50% from Sep 16 through Jul 17 alone when everyone was competing aggressively. It grew a ton after Apple Music came out. It grew a ton after Google Music came out. It grew a ton after Amazon Music came out.

Maybe, just maybe, Spotify is actually really great and customers love it.

This reminds me of people debating Apple vs Android circa 2012.

Yep. Apple Music is a nonstarter for me because the Android app was pretty shitty when I tried it in early 2017 and didn't integrate into the rest of the OS in native-like ways, especially when it came to things like Android Auto. I find the Google Music interface a disaster, and the Spotify clients seem to have better last.fm integration, which I haven't found in the Google clients. I also hate the desktop Google Music client, it's quite primitive feature-wise. Spotify's desktop app isn't as nice as iTunes (why are play counts and granular ratings gone from everywhere else :( ) but at least it's a start, and last.fm can pick up on play count tracking for me. Amazon's offering seems even more half-assed than Apple's.

If you're gonna ask me to re-create all my playlists and invest the time to train the recommendation engine, your client better be damn good. Otherwise what's an extra few bucks a month for not having to bother relearning shit? $10/month difference would probably get me thinking, though...

- Bundle the subscription with another service. Like when dropbox pro came with the galaxy S.

- Seamless user registration and free trial that comes with automatic recurring payment. You'd be surprised how easy it to get $5 monthly out of android/apple account without people noticing.

- Bots, lost and fake accounts

- Arrange statistics generally speaking and careful wording. "subscribers" doesn't distinguish between free trial, inactive accounts or long term regular users.

There are plentiful ways to handle PR however you like. Only the insiders really know what's happening inside a company.

If you're making the argument "Spotify probably isn't that much more popular, it just inflates its numbers" you've got a high burden of proof to clear with people who see everyone around them using Spotify at a much higher rate than the competing services. Maybe that's not your experience in your circles, but it's clearly a lot of other peoples', just from reading this thread.

Let's not call that "inflating numbers". No company will publish a detailed report on their users, costs and revenues.

I am making the argument that a company saying it has millions of users and is growing is not enough to judge of its current and future situation.