Re:How bad is your Spotify?
by thaumasiotes on Thursday December 24, 2020 @03:48AM
(#25525996)
> Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.
Pandora wants to get rid of those features. All their advertising now is "if you pay for a premium account, you can play whatever music you want, on demand".
This reminds me really strongly of how eBay decided that (1) customers prefer to buy things at a fixed price [completely correct]; so that (2) they should try to prevent people from listing ordinary auctions, because customers don't like those. [No!] Instead, the goal was to just be the place where people would go if they wanted to buy something online.
Except of course that that completely undermines the concept of eBay. They were an established auction site that intentionally drove auctions away. And then they complained that people preferred to buy things from Amazon.
In both cases, it looks like a popular company with an established brand sees a rival that's even more popular, and concludes that the only path forward must be to implement features the rival offers while discontinuing or discouraging any features where they're doing better than the rival is. How does this make sense?
Pandora wants to get rid of those features. All their advertising now is "if you pay for a premium account, you can play whatever music you want, on demand".
This reminds me really strongly of how eBay decided that (1) customers prefer to buy things at a fixed price [completely correct]; so that (2) they should try to prevent people from listing ordinary auctions, because customers don't like those. [No!] Instead, the goal was to just be the place where people would go if they wanted to buy something online.
Except of course that that completely undermines the concept of eBay. They were an established auction site that intentionally drove auctions away. And then they complained that people preferred to buy things from Amazon.
In both cases, it looks like a popular company with an established brand sees a rival that's even more popular, and concludes that the only path forward must be to implement features the rival offers while discontinuing or discouraging any features where they're doing better than the rival is. How does this make sense?