10 Ways Beats Music Could Be Better Than Spotify

Spotify has been in the game for more than five years now, and has amassed a mighty healthy collection of songs—more than 20 million, to be exact. In order to beat Spotify, Beats must have an extensive library of songs—it doesn't need 20 million from the start, but it does need a few million ready to go. As listeners, we like having a variety of choices, so having an extensive library is key, and the more Beats helps us in creating great playlists that will keep us coming back, the better.

The main draw for signing up for a service is to check out the things you can't get anywhere else. If Beats can get artists to stream albums or songs exclusively on their service, they'll have a big game changer in their court. If they have something like NPR First Listen, where users can listen to music before it's released, along with an interview and short profile of the artist, it could totally keep users coming back for more than just music. Interviews and profiles seem feasible, too, since the company has Pitchfork's former Editor-in-Chief on staff.

To complement an efficient song recommendation system, Beats Music needs a simple, easy-to-use search function. While Spotify might feel unwieldy at times, if Beats can create a search engine that allows users to search by label and other filters that Spotify doesn't have, that will be a huge improvement over what Spotify has had half a decade to refine.

Artist pages on Beats Music have a lot of potential. While Spotify's artist pages are simple to say the least, Beats can expand upon pages and make them feel more alive. Spotify organizes its artist pages from most recent music to oldest, with each biography page resembling a cheap blog. If Beats can do their own videos, snap exclusive pictures, and add some color to its design, the service may actually turn into a destination you'll head to for articles about your favorite rapper while listening to their latest hit.

Spotify lets users embed playlists to websites and blogs, but it can be a little annoying when it automatically opens the app, or doesn't let you play a song if you're not signed in. Beats should go the way of SoundCloud, by letting users easily embed and share files across many platforms, particularly on popular social media sites and without an account.

Dr. Dre only has one album on Spotify right now, and Led Zeppelin has two. Two, from one of the biggest rock groups of all time. If Beats can pull out at least one of these artists—and Dre's music seems like a lock—they'll be tapping in to a huge fan base that will surely flock to the service to get their dose of The Chronic or "D'yer Mak'er."

While we said earlier that Spotify has 20 million songs in its arsenal, we left out one important fact. Twenty million seems like an impressive number, but a recent report said that about four million of those songs have yet to be played. A little depressing, no? So, to complement its theoretical extensive library, Beats needs a good algorithm that will weed out the things we more than likely wouldn't want—because the last thing we want is being recommended a struggle rapper when we're building a epic gym playlist.

Spotify has a strange way of getting money to artists. Instead of paying per song, they give an artist a small percentage of money based on how many times his or her song gets played in a given time period in relation to all of Spotify. There's more to it than that: artists get cash based on how much money Spotify has for a given country. So if Spotify has $100 in royalty money for, say, Canada, and one artist made about .01 percent of November's streams, that artist is getting $.01 cent. By creating a better system of payment that is more attractive to artists, Beats will be making the musicians happy, and in turn, the users happy.

We all know what we hate most about Spotify, Pandora, and any other subscription music service: ADVERTISEMENTS. Easy. But hey, it's the price of being able to listen to the music free of charge, and it's the simplest way to get users to pay for a subscription in order to get rid of them. Beats Music is going to be the same way too, and we don't blame them. But if their advertisements are narrated by Dre with a new beat tagged along, we probably won't mind them as much as a commercial for your local car dealership.