Even Amazon has created their own music streaming service to compete in the market, with a limited version available for Prime members and a fully-featured version available for a monthly subscription.ĭespite the competition, only one real service has emerged to battle Spotify on a similar level. Pandora expanded their service to include a $9.99 plan featuring on-demand listening. Tidal also made waves when they launched under the helm of Jay-Z and the promise of high fidelity audio, though despite the launch of timed exclusives like Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and Jay-Z’s own 4:44, the service has struggled to maintain users and subscribers. Google launched their own music streaming service, the poorly-named Google Play Music All Access (later shortened to just Google Play Music), which still operates today alongside YouTube Music and YouTube Red. Rdio was an early competitor, though it was eventually sold to Pandora when it became obvious the company couldn’t compete to scale.
Of course, once Spotify launched, it was only a matter of time before rivals began flooding in from the woodwork. The addition of a mobile app on both iOS and Android made it easy to take your music on the go. Suddenly, it didn’t make sense to purchase digital singles for a buck or two when, for a monthly fee similar to the cost of an album, you could listen to practically every song in the world, allowing you to create and curate your own library, playlists, and more. Despite streaming giants like Pandora, an internet radio service, and Rhapsody, which in many ways served as precedent to Spotify’s business, it wasn’t until 2011 when music streaming began to blow up. For a moment, however, it seem as though digital stores like iTunes had revitalized the music scene, allowing songs to be purchased for $.99 through Apple’s storefront (and later raised to $1.29 for most popular songs). The industry had been through hell and back throughout the 2000s, following the rise of music piracy and Napster in the beginning of the century and continuing with the use of both Limewire and torrents. When Spotify finally launched on US shores in the summer of 2011, the way we think about music changed forever.
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