1st world problems, but I’m paying for Apple Music since my running playlists are on there (Spotify didn’t support offline on Apple Watch at the time) and most of my other playlists are on Spotify. I’ll probably pay for both forever for lack of time to consolidate.
Same with streaming services, sadly.
Their discovery-specific algos/UX are ok, but I think becoming the global de-facto music/audio-specific social network is their biggest moat. It’s been so tough to replicate that apple/google/amazon have yet to make much of a dent despite spotify’s actively hostile UX and practices.
Edited to add: Music generes and fandoms have always been tribes and spotify was the first to capitalize on that aspect of music culture. Other companies approached their products in a “building a “digital CD-vinyl collection” kinda way, but there are few network effects in that.
Spotify was just first. But I think there's a lot of momentum here, most people don't like changing their habits after all.
That's how some products exist even with competitors price dumping against them.
YTM is a lot better to allow you to upload your music.
Deezer has a better algorithm
At that point I notice the Spotify moat is actually quite substantial in my use case and switching to another service is pretty much out of the question.