5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Use Spotify
Music sales have shifted from physical to digital with the advent of streaming services such as Spotify, which was launched in 2006 and has seen explosive development ever since. Due to its ease of use and large user base, it has amassed over 400 million subscribers.
Spotify, on the other hand, isn't perfect. Inequitable artist pay, hosting of questionable content, and a lack of functionality are just a few of the many reasons you may not want to use the service. Here are 5 reasons why you shouldn't use Spotify.
- You Don’t Own Anything
- Annoying Ads for Free Users
- Promotion of Podcasts in an Aggressive Manner
- Poor Artist Payout
- Limit to how many songs you can download
1. You Don’t Own Anything
Although Spotify offers a free membership, the company's primary goal is to get people to upgrade to a paid one. Spotify is a subscription service, but you don't own any of the music you listen to.
In essence, you're paying for the right to listen to the song for a limited time. You have no recourse if Spotify or its artists decide to remove the music you've purchased. That goes for any temporary or permanent outages that may occur. When you buy a vinyl record, you own it for life.
2. Annoying Ads for Free Users
With a Spotify membership, you won't see any ads at all. In order to keep the service free, Spotify inserts adverts into your music. Because the service can't be offered without limitations, this is quite understandable.
In addition, the adverts appear at least every two songs, which is a nuisance. Many customers have complained that the volume of these commercials is louder than the music itself. With the exception of a few playlists, all songs on the free tier are played in shuffle mode, which completely ruins the listening experience.
3. Promotion of Podcasts in an Aggressive Manner
In some respects, podcasts are more important to Spotify than music. Spotify recommends new episodes as soon as you listen to a single podcast. On Spotify's main screen, there is a "Shows you might like" area for podcasts, which can't be removed. Searching and scrolling are all that is needed to find the music you are looking for.
4. Poor Artist Payout
A little over a third of the money you make listening to music on Spotify goes to the company. Once Spotify has determined the rightful owner of each stream, it pays them anything from $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, depending on the country.
For every one million streams, an artist may expect to make $3,500. As a result, the platform only generates significant money for the most well-known musicians. It diminishes the value of art and forces most musicians to look for other ways to make a living, such as touring, physical sales, and other forms of products.
5. Limit to how many songs you can download
The initial limit on the number of songs you may have in your Spotify library was set at 10,000. Music fans found this restriction to be inconvenient. Spotify removed the restriction in 2020.
This limitation does not apply, however, to the number of songs that can be downloaded from Spotify for offline listening. For each device, there is a maximum of 10,000 downloads (up to five). A huge amount of music will have to be sacrificed if you frequently travel for long periods of time.
