Netflix Sucks and So Does Spotify and All the Rest (Premium)

In an ideal world, we would pay companies for the products and services we use in a win for both sides of these relationships. But the inherent nature of capitalism has always contorted the benefits of competition—more choices, lower prices, and so on—because of the need for for-profit companies to continually grow. This isn’t new, but our relationships with the companies we rely on has always been one-sided in their favor, and technology has only exaggerated that balance, leading to ever-bigger companies, less competition, and reactionary attempts to reset the market with regulation. And in recent years, this unbalance has shifted even further, and faster, thanks to the rise of the Internet, subscription services, and now AI.

That’s all very simplistic, I know. But one of my earliest observations in my career, back in the suddenly nostalgic 1990s, was that people who used Microsoft products like Windows and Office seemed to misunderstand their relationship with the company that made these products. You are paying for this software, I argued, and the one-way nature of this relationship was backward. Microsoft, I said, should listen to its customers and address their concerns instead of continually seeking out new sources of revenues while leaving existing shortcomings unfixed.

Yes, that was also simplistic. But I assume you can see the point: For a product like Windows to make sense in the 1990s, when personal computing use was just starting to explode, the benefit it provided had to be commensurate with the money its users paid for that product. These things may be difficult to calculate, and it’s perhaps too easy to complain about the cost of anything. But when it comes to paying for things, you either see the value or you do not.

These days, the sheer volume of products and services at our disposal, the effortless ways in which they can be delivered, and the ease at which we can pay for them has led to a situation in which personal technology almost seems to be eating itself. Just in the entertainment space, we’ve moved from slow-moving generations of various types of physical media, to digital media, and now to streaming media in our lifetimes. In doing so, we saw the value of each transition as choice and convenience multiplied.

But we also complained. First, about the need to rebuy the same content in new formats. And then about not actually owning any of this content. And even more recently about the curious ongoing price hikes despite there being more choice and competition than ever. In each case, we feel wronged because that value equation, that balance we expect of any win-win, seems off. And those hard feelings are magnified when the price hikes keep coming and coming and coming. We have more of everything than ever. But it feels like we have less, in part because these companies don’t respect our needs, let alone meet them, and in part because the prices keep going up.

As I’m sure you know, this shift is called enshittification, a perfect term for a terrible process by which a product or service we’ve used over some period of time is worsened for its users because the needs of its makers—required for their financial growth—outweigh the needs of customers. In this horrible calculus, making a product or service worse for users somehow makes sense to that shareholder-owned, profit-seeking entity. And the impacts of this strategy, always terrible, are even worse when they impact huge audiences. As is especially possible with the Big Tech firms that antitrust regulators are only now, belatedly, trying to rein in.

I’ve written about this a lot in the past year or two, and because my focus is on Microsoft and Windows, a lot of that conversation has focused there. But there are even worse examples, examples that impact even more people, and they are very often related to entertainment services. Music services like Spotify. Video streaming services like Netflix. And God help, now gaming services like Xbox Game Pass, a product that just jumped the shark, seizing defeat from the hands of what should have been an Activision Blizzard-fueled, celebratory victory lap.

Like you, I’m a consumer of these services. Too many of these services, as I pay for a bewildering—no, embarrassing—range of technology products and services. I do occasionally review this spending, as we all should, but not often enough, as we all do. Like any person, I have good advice I can’t take myself, a recent chestnut being that one way to save money on subscription streaming services is to just a different one each month. And like you all, I bet, I complain, mostly to myself, about what seems like an insidious, purposeful, and arbitrary series of ongoing price hikes for these services without end.

But unlike most of you, I exist in a weird nexus between these personal technologies, the companies that make them, and the people who use and pay for them. This is my 30th year writing about personal technology, and in that time, I’ve watched as this world shift from an inelegant Windows-based monoculture to a healthier, more heterogeneous set of choices that has nonetheless been undermined by the accelerating forces noted above in recent years. Put simply, things sucked then, and they suck now, despite all the improvements. And that sucks.

As an enthusiast and a reporter; a user, a customer, and a critic; and having been around for a long enough time to have gained at least some perspective, I’ve had some The Matrix-like moments in recent days in which I briefly saw past the veil of our perceived reality and glimpsed the harsh terribleness of the real world. Come to think of it, They Live is the better reference: In that 1988 John Carpenter film, which may or may not seemed dated today, it’s been a while, Roddy Piper’s character comes across a pair of sunglasses that reveal how individuals are being manipulated to consume, breed, and conform via mass media. It’s your basic anti-commercialization story, set in a science fiction version of our world.

I can relate. As I spend more and more, get less and less of what I want, my unhappiness grows. For all the choice, for all the competition, I’m constantly running into roadblocks dividing my needs and wants from the needs and wants of the companies I’m paying. This is what’s happening when Microsoft silently enables OneDrive Folder Sharing after I’ve explicitly said no to multiple requests. But that’s just one example. There are so many more. So many more. It’s almost depressing to review the products and services I pay for and find one that I’m completely satisfied with. Sonos, Spotify, YouTube Music, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, whatever. They all suck. Where “suck” means don’t do what I want. They used to. That’s enshittification.

But I mentioned a few glimpses behind this Oz-like curtain that divides the perceived reality and the real reality, for lack of a better term. The divided between marketing and truth, I guess.

As you know, I write about Big Tech and the other companies in this industry every day. Perhaps less obviously, as an enthusiast, I also read about these companies, or otherwise consume information about them, every day as well. Some of this comes up in the form of industry books, documentaries, YouTube videos, or whatever else that I may recommend to others with similar interests. But some of this just comes in the form of writing news each day, and the associated research that comes out of that.

Today, for example, Spotify reported its latest quarterly earnings. By all accounts—well, by financial accounts—Spotify is doing just great, thank you very much. It’s profitable, undercutting the opinion of a friend of mine in the financial industry who assured me, repeatedly, that its business model made such a feat impossible. And its numbers are all up, often by double digits: Monthly average users, premium paid subscribers, ad-supported subscribers, margins, on-hand cash, whatever. You can scour its earnings report to look for weakness, but Spotify seems to be doing OK.

Spotify’s financial health is not interesting to me. I pay for Spotify—indeed, I pay for the most expensive plan it offers, Spotify Family, at $19.99 per month, because my wife, son, and daughter all use the service. But I do not: I have never liked the Spotify user interface or how it works. I need (or at least want) to access my own music files in addition to the subscription-based cloud library, and my options there have shrunk over the years dramatically.

But the one thing I would have said about Spotify until fairly recently is that it at least seemed to deliver on its core promise as a music service. I may not like how it looks or works, but hundreds of millions of people do, including those in my own family. And I may need (OK, want) some old-school combination of my music and its music, but most people don’t have this concern. I had that much self-awareness, just as Spotify was successful enough as a music streaming service to finally cause Apple to belatedly buy its way into this business through its acquisition of Beats so it could copy Spotify.

Two things about that last point.

In creating Apple Music, Apple entered a lucrative market created by others the way Big Tech often does, by buying its way into a market they did invent. And then it abused its dominance in mobile devices to undercut that rival in multiple ways: It charges third parties fees to be its App Store, fees it does not charge the Apple Music business internally. And because it can subsidize Apple Music with its hardware sales, it can offer the same features and services as Spotify at a lower price. Big Tech is always going to be Big Tech.

But Spotify doesn’t come off well here, either. Assuming your goal was to, I don’t know, listen to music.

To keep the growth going—and, I suspect, to help counter Apple’s anticompetitive business practices—Spotify has branched out beyond music. It entered podcasting, a market in which it is the Apple-like Big Fish compared to the pioneering but small companies that were already there. And its impact has been devastating: By (over)paying for content to jumpstart this effort, Spotify destroyed podcasts financially. This is a root cause of the problems facing TWiT, the company behind my Windows Weekly and Hands-On Windows podcasts.

But that wasn’t enough: Next, Spotify went after audiobooks as well. Here, the harm was mostly to Audible, I guess, a company owned by Amazon, which is a Big Tech firm no one should ever feel bad for. It’s too early to say what the impact is here, to audiobook companies, authors, or listeners. But in just a few short years, Spotify has transitioned from being the world’s premier music brand to a company that … what? It just indiscriminately offers audio content of whatever kind now? Cripes.

I wrote about my problem with this strategy previously in Podcasts Are Not Music (Premium), but in another moment of self-awareness, I can admit that some people, of course, like this evolution. They see the addition of podcasts and audiobooks in Spotify (or YouTube Music, from that other infamous copier of everything, Google) as a value-add, a benefit. I get that. And while I will cynically point out that 1-in-10 people seem to think of bundled crapware in Windows as a similar value-add, I can at least reach a middle ground. This choice is fine. But those customers who don’t want podcasts or audiobooks or both cluttering up their Spotify app should be given the choice to hide that content, at the very least.

This is not a choice. And the reason this is not a choice is that it’s in Spotify’s best interests that customers be exposed to this content because that’s how you learn about it and how you may end up using it, increasing your reliance on the service and justifying the next price hike. After all, that expensive Joe Rogan podcast that destroyed the financial viability of that market isn’t going to pay for itself. Spotify did launch “basic” plans this past June that don’t offer audiobooks, and in researching this article, I decided to switch to Spotify Basic Family. (Look at me, saving $3 per month.) What I can’t do, of course, is hide the non-music content, no matter how much I pay them.

This type of problem has always been curious to me, and when you think about the issues we have with Windows 11, people—myself included—often note that we would pay extra to not experience these issues, But with Spotify, I was—until about 30 seconds ago—already paying for the most expensive tier. And yet, my choices are/were constrained. This has to be purposeful. But the obvious question is, why?

I think I know why. Separate from my reporting on Spotify financials today, I was browsing through my news feed when I came across a post on an Apple-centric blog that with a provocative headline: An Apple vice president in charge of Apple Music had claimed in an interview that Spotify had “stopped innovating.” I pushed that story into Pocket, and later that night, I read the post, which linked to the original interview. This was interesting to me.

The interview, in a publication called Wallpaper, was ostensibly about the newly reintroduced Beats Pill smart speaker, but they asked Apple’s Oliver Schusser about Apple Music, too, and how satisfied he was about the success of that service over the past five years. Schusser had a lot to say on this topic, and much of it was about Spotify.

“We are very clearly positioned as the quality service,” he said. “We don’t have a free offer [unlike Spotify’s advertising-supported tier]. We don’t give anything away. Everything is made by music fans and curated by experts. We are focused on music, while other people are running away from music into podcasts and audiobooks. Our service is clearly dedicated to music.”

So that addresses my point above, in a way. Though Apple, to be fair, offers both podcasts and audiobooks through separate services and apps for each, and those are all limited to the Apple ecosystem. This is a classic Apple differentiator, and an example of how each company in whatever market chooses a go-to market strategy and then sees how it goes. Apple’s strategy is, sadly, insular because it can afford to be thanks to the subsidizing it gets from its hardware sales. Other music, podcast, and audiobook service providers don’t have that advantage.

“With spatial audio, we’ve completely revolutionized the listening experience,” he continues. “[Historically] we went from mono to stereo and then, for decades, there was nothing else. Then we completely invented a new standard [where] now 90 percent of our subscribers are listening to music in spatial audio. Which is great.”

Here, again, what he is really bragging about is related to market abuse, though it does, of course, benefit Apple Music subscribers, which don’t have to pay extra for lossless or spatial audio. Spotify has long planned to offer this functionality, too, of course, but it has continually delayed it because of the extra costs: Again, Spotify can’t rely on hardware subsidies as Apple does, and so it will simply have to charge customers more for lossless and/or spatial audio. It just raised prices this past Spring, but the latest rumors suggest these even more expensive tiers are now coming soon.

Which is also interesting: That Apple VP just bragged about being the quality service with no free tier, the implication being that a great service would only be paid. And yet here’s Spotify, forced to charge even more for the same features. Does that make it an even higher quality service?

I’m kidding. But the competitive dynamics here are interesting. And in that sense where each company has to choose its go-to market strategy for itself, Spotify’s strategy, organically to some degree but also reactionary thanks to Apple’s entry, involves multiple tiers (choices), some of which are ad-based, some of which are free, with different price models, and commingling new content types like podcasts and audiobooks with music. In some ways, you can almost view this as being comparable to the old Windows PC vs. Mac battles and the respective go-to market strategies there: There’s more choice, and a wide range of pricing and offerings, on the PC side. But also more chaos.

Also related to this, I noticed that Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek posted a short and seemingly impromptu video to Twitter timed to his company’s earnings release to congratulate the team and thank customers. His take on the business is interesting.

“We had a really great quarter,” he said. “We are now (at) over 246 million paying subscribers, 626 million (monthly) active users, and, financially, we had our biggest free cash flow quarter in the company’s history. I really attribute this success to all the innovations that we keep on making better and better, and stickier and stickier. We saw daylist, which was a huge fan favorite. We also announced audiobook countdown pages. This is a great way for authors to build excitement about their upcoming releases, and a great way for them to build new fan connections in a way they haven’t been doing before … If you’re in the U.S., you’re now getting over 250,000 audiobooks, over 6 million podcasts, and almost the entirety of all the world’s music for just $11.99 (per month). That’s a pretty amazing deal.” (He then goes on to suggest that paying for all these separately was worth more than $26 per month.) People are realizing that Spotify is an amazing product that is also offering an amazing value.”

And there it is. Value. The win-win.

There is so much to unpack here, but what he’s really describing is the backend business rationale, the go-to market strategy that Spotify has adopted, and how it’s worked out for the company. From my perspective as a consumer, this success has come at the expense (literally) of people like me. Spotify adds new features each quarter, but the one feature I want—just music, with no podcasts or audiobooks, and no advertising of that crap in the app—will never happen. There’s a potential win-win in there for audiobook authors, it seems, and a win-win for subscribers who do want all that. But the only obvious win here is for Spotify, which has finally found a way to compete with Apple, a company with so much money it can afford to wait them out, like an army surrounding an isolated outpost.

Spotify isn’t unique in any way, of course: I’ve been dealing with this value equation since my first dawning awareness of the perils of subscription services courtesy of the Columbia House Record and Tape Club in the late 1970s. But there is no company, no service, that has mastered enshittification quite like Netflix. In this area, Netflix stands alone.

Netflix is special—or especially horrible, I guess—because of the depths to which it has fallen thanks to ignoring basic user interface needs and raising prices repeatedly in the wake of a content explosion free-for-all that was, for a time, the pinnacle of video streaming, the 21st century successor to HBO. Indeed, I’ve often described Netflix as the one no-brainer in video streaming. But that’s no longer the case. And with so many other viable alternatives, perhaps it’s time for a change. Or for me to at least take my own advice and stop being a hypocrite.

But change is hard. And I go way back with Netflix. Back to its early days of mailing DVDs around the country in little red sleeves. The days when Blockbuster was still a thing, when it belatedly fought back against the Netflix threat with a rival service that essentially doubled the DVDs you could watch if you returned their mailed discs to a local store. Blockbuster disappeared, as did the Netflix DVD service. And the service that replaced it, which started off as a dumping ground for C-level straight-to-video titles no one wanted, improved and then became dominant and inevitable.

The Netflix we know today is a multi-headed hydra of service offerings, the enshittified finale of a horrible evolutionary process that we now see being repeated everywhere throughout personal technology. There were so many improvements over the years involving video quality, streaming performance, and device compatibility. And then the service split ever further, becoming not one thing but many things, none ideal. In this market, Netflix is the apex predator: Its most recent move was to take away tiers that were better suited to customers than its own needs.

The ways in which Netflix victimizes its customers are many. Too many to count. But my biggest gripe is the queue, arguably the center of the Netflix user experience. You browse the Netflix collection, and when you find a title you want to watch later, you add it to the queue. In time, that queue grows. And then it becomes unmanageable. So unmanageable, that you may simply give up. I’ve done so, many times. My wife and I sometimes spend more time looking for something to watch than we do actually watching the thing we eventually settle on, fuming in the dark mad at Netflix, but really just mad at each other. And settled is the right word: Despite a rating system, the movies and TV shows that Netflix recommends to me have little to do with my preferences. Indeed, much of it is content I’ve already seen.

Netflix is a disorganized mess, and it’s by design. If you are foolhardy enough to try and manage your queue, you will find that you cannot. You can laboriously remove items, one at a time. But you can’t organize them. You can’t create interest-based sub-queues to easily find things later. You can just face an ocean of choices, arrayed in rows, like a million bottles of nearly identical Italian dressing in a grocery store of your nightmares. And what you’re offered is to Netflix’s benefit, not yours. Just as the special dishes in a restaurant are often tied to food items that they have too much of or about to go bad, Netflix’s customers pay the price for its insane content purchases from ever more foreign countries. This works just like podcasts and audiobooks in Spotify: If they put it in front of enough people, someone will consume it. If not, no worries, they’ll just raise prices again.

The topic-based rows of content you see in Netflix change all the time and are arranged differently all the time. Sometimes your queue is at or near the top, sometimes not, and sometimes … it seems not to be there at all. Today, the first choice I see in the “Your Next Watch,” “Award-Winning Movies,” “Thriller Movies” rows—and probably others, I get upset just looking at it—are all titles I’ve watched on Netflix. Netflix doesn’t care, and it certainly doesn’t care that I gave one of those movies a thumbs-down. Its algorithm isn’t smart in any way. It’s just designed to push the crap Netflix wants to push. It makes me insane.

In the same way that Spotify has expanded its definition of itself from music to general audio content, Netflix has expanded its definition as an entertainment service to include video games. I do not want to play these games but, more to the point, I don’t want to see them either. But Netflix promotes them endlessly, and it doesn’t offer a way to hide them, just as it doesn’t offer a way to hide all the content from India it just acquired. Indeed, Netflix just announced that it is actively developing 80 new games. For f’s sake, Netflix.

Netflix is also getting into other forms of entertainment, because of course it is, including live events and, more recently, sports and sports-like entertainment like WWE wrestling. And through all this expansion beyond the core of the service that most people want, the prices just keep going up. Indeed, raising prices might be the most innovative activity that Netflix engages in, as it bears down on family (and friend) account sharing to further scrape any remaining revenues it can from a bewildered user base. (Don’t worry, YouTube jumped right on that gravy train, too. They’re all doing it.) My Premium subscription has a base price of $22.99 per month now, but I can add the kids for $7.99 per month each if I’m feeling magnanimous.

I’m not.

Not that it matters: Netflix’s financial health is strong. It gains millions of new subscribers every quarter, somehow, and its revenues keep going up, by double digits in each of the last quarters at least. (As with the queue, I tired of looking.) Last week, it reported almost $10 billion in revenues (up nearly 17 percent YOY), a net income of $2.1 billion (up 44 percent), and 277.65 million subscribers, up 16.5 percent. This company couldn’t care less what I think about it. Why would it? It’s too busy plotting new video game releases, new seasons of South Korean TV shows, and other content I couldn’t care less about myself. That’s our relationship right now: A mutual disdain.

And there we are. The end game. The place where there are no good answers, no real solutions, just complaints and this inescapable feeling that I’m being had. That these services that made so much sense at one time, and offered such great values, started making less sense over time, and now seems openly hostile, like they’re daring me to let go. But there’s no going back, not really. I’m not going to start buying audio CDs again, just as I’m not going to buy movies on Blu-ray. This is a one-way, dead-end street, there’s no way back, and the alternatives are absolutely just as terrible. And if they’re not, they will be.

In biology, the hyper-growth we’ve seen over the past decade in Big Tech is called cancer. We don’t have a cure for cancer, and even when we can combat it, when we find out about it before it’s too late, the side effects are often terrible. And that’s what this feels like.

Maybe AI will solve it. But I kid. We’re screwed.