Spotify being one of the most loved brands has come down to this, and no wonder! We've seen popular brands being poorly rated en masse as part of agenda driven boycott campaigns, but what we see here is more of a genuine disappointment with the product by its users with its recent update.
Assuming someone on the Product side decided to rip off all the features of a basic music player to drive growth in the form of paid subscriptions, Growth additionally will also have to handle the poor Playstore ratings as the outcome.
What do you think should Spotify start doing from here? Not asking from a user's perspective (I know we all want free music without their annoying ads) but from a business perspective.
My 2 cents on this -
Charging for something that was previously āfreeā is always a major no-go decision in most cases. I have tried experimenting this personally, and have faced similar backlash resulting in us shutting down that experiment.
In this case, the next course of action depends on Spotifyās strategy.
They may want to pivot to a purely paid app direction slowly.
the freemium formula of having millions of free users who arenāt gonna buy the subscription may not be working well for them. And they may just decide to cut the herd thin and have only willing to pay customers.
In a mature product like Spotify, they need to monetise their users and ad-based revenue might not be working too well. In an app where users passively listen to songs/podcasts, click through rates on ads must be lower than that of YouTube where your attention is on the app. Hence, only monetisation lever double down would be paid subscriptions.
Sure it would lead to poor reviews and people leaving the platform but Spotify may see it as
Itās an interesting watch for sure
Thanks for the elaborate response.
You were spot on with YouTube CTR part. Also, I'm not so sure about how much ad revenue Spotify makes since I too have been using their free version and never really came across ads that matched my persona or what I was browsing for outside. Spotify never addressed this over the last few years IMO. I felt their targeting was all over the place in addition to their huge volume of super-annoying (meta level) ads! YT on the other hand is right on the money with its ads usually and hence a better CTR obviously.
Just to add one more point about the mass 1 star ratings, google might consider them as spam reviews and might delete a few of them restoring the previous ratings or somewhere similar
Simple. Indians usually donāt pay for shit. Spotifys premium penetration is under 5% while the rest of the world is at 35%+. The business is not sustainable in India unless there is a way to hit this threshold
You have mass 1star ratings coming from people that didnāt want to pay for the service in the first place and thatās expected,, review bombing is a known phenomenon and google will purge
Maybe a solid Monetisation plan without making the app unusable to the average free user is the only way forward. But Indians being pissed off about a free service becoming paid is classic showboating and this pearly clutching needs to die, otherwise weāll live in a Jio world soon where everything is free until itās not
Along with monetization happening the main reason for most 1 star ratings seem to be the disabling of the core features of a music player. Did read through the reviews before posting it here, and I think people are still fine listening to ads. I see this more as a Product level issue negatively impacting Growth and not the other way around.
While the Growth Team can attempt to get the negative reviews purged by Google (the easier way, of course), how much actual product led growth will happen is still a question mark.
I feel that it's not just about not paying for shit.
Giving something for free for years and then one day deciding to make it paid, is a bad business model.
They should have made it paid from the start. But nooo, you can't do that in a freemium world can you...
I mean, those who're paying are not affected. I didn't even know there were changes until my friend shared it. And for those who know the quality is Spotify, playstore ratings doesn't matter.
But yes, YouTube music is š„
Personally, I'm tempted to take a paid subscription for YT Music. What would you suggest for podcasts? YT or Spotify? In terms of vastness of content and quality.
I cannot answer your questions since in don't use these for podcasts. But I have the subscription for both of them. I actually pay for YouTube premium and am getting music as well
Should have started charging from day 1. Never works free >> paid. This journey always turns out to be bad unless theres a monopoly or duopoly of that product. Eg. Uber and Ola. Only two major in market. Swiggy and Zomato. Log ek to idhar jaayenge ya udhar - no 3rd option. So free to paid works in these cases. Premium will never work here IMO. There are many jugad available. Youtube open rakhnege, pehle 20 sec add seh lenge but indian consumer wont pay for nice product. Hard crack that code.
They will just pay Google to scrub the rating clean
Google might just do it across the board for other apps that got cancelled too lol
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The rock only gets bottomer for spotify free users š spotify wrapped youāll be missed šš¼
I was honestly okay with the ads, but this was my last straw lol
Ah this gives me pain. Wynk was such a big part of my life once upon a time :/
