Spotify has raised prices for the second time in a year, with no new benefits, after its CEO sparked outrage by claiming the cost of creating 'content' is 'close to zero'
(www.techradar.com)
from ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 04 Jun 2024 17:09
https://lemmy.world/post/16177224
from ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 04 Jun 2024 17:09
https://lemmy.world/post/16177224
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IIRC this means the family plan costs more than 3 individual plans did like 3 years ago. If not more than it saves you like $.50 in comparison. I would try and look it up but Google search has also turned to shit so I don’t feel like dealing with it.
The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.
Indie internet is better, hi Lemmy
They’re still scraping us unfortunately
What. It’s meant to stream music. Tf do you mean?
AI generated music based off your likes and listening. It lines up with his statements. There was no innovation here. The same as every “disruptor” technology that just cheapified everything and one it was ubiquitous attempt to remove the core of the business.
The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that’s the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.
the playlist saved for offline playback that will still try to connect to the internet for like 30 seconds when you open it while actually offline. the Discover Weekly playlist that will serve you the song that you’ve marked as “not interested” over and over and over and
The UI that gets progressively worse with each update, ruining what was perfectly fine before. The attempts to create the audio focused equivalent of TikTok.
The way shuffle constantly shuts itself off even when set within the settings to be the default. The shitty Smart Shuffle that adds in songs that break up my playlists terribly. The way it plays the same song again the first time you enable shuffle and hit next.
Yall are noting not even the reason why I went to Apple Music: no ability to actually consistently sync an offline library across devices, your own files.
The “repeat” option that activates itself is probably the most frustrating bug. I can’t recall the last time I legitimately wanted to listen to a song on repeat but it enable itself very often.
If I could simply remove the feature I would.
That’s never happened to me
That actually sounds pretty cool, how do I get that?
You do you I guess. If you scroll down far enough on the android app home screen it will start displaying recommended content in the typical short-form layout. I believe you can also click on a small rectangle on some playlists and it will do a similar thing.
I use Tidal and get annoyed because the shuffle clearly has a recency bias to it, and it keeps trying to recommend show tunes to me in my Daily Discovery, and the suggested albums for me has become considerably worse since the last update, but everything i hear about what Spotify has been doing has made me glad i switched over a couple years ago.
How good is tidal? Is its catalogue as good as Spotify?
Yeah, get a trial and see though.
I’ve recently switched from Spotify to Tidal and I’m happy with it…
Tidal does have higher bitrate songs, also atmos and sony’s 360 audio and when done right the spacial audio sounds nice. Amazon music is decent too and it comes with prime.
The cache part pisses me off. I’m fucking paying you to stream me music. Not the same fucking shit over and over and over again.
I really don’t get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It’s not a hard thing to implement.
True random shuffle would be a terrible idea. No one wants the same track showing up multiple times in a row, which would not be uncommon in true random shuffle.
I think the idea is that the play order for the entire playlist is shuffled on each loop, so you play all songs in one order, then it shuffles, and you play all songs again but in a different order.
^this - why is it so hard to implement sigh
I disagree that that’s what it means, IMO “shuffle” explicitly means each track exactly once. Pedantry aside, what I meant was a truly randomized order when you shuffle a playlist. It’s a major critique of Spotify among users and has been for a very long time.
You can make a truly random shuffle that doesn’t do that in like five pibes of code. This is the most pointless objection to random shuffle that I’ve ever seen.
Lines of code. Lines. Not pibes.
In unrelated news, I hate autocorrect. Pibes is not a fucking word.
I mean, not really. This is actually a non-trivial topic, and true random is a really bad label for what someone actually wants out of a shuffling algorithm.
See the following engineering blog post on the subject: …atspotify.com/…/how-to-shuffle-songs/
They did add audiobooks.
Though the interface for audiobooks sucks, so I hope they improve it.
Their podcast and audiobook integration has been so sloppy.
The last thing I ever wanted from Spotify was audiobooks or podcasts. We’ve had excellent apps available for several years already, we don’t need half assed bloat added to (very poorly) replicate the same features
The part is what drives me mad. Podcasts and audiobooks are not that hard to do properly. You could very easily separate them into distinct apps or at least a special tab that acts like a proper player. Instead audiobooks are basically albums.
There’s a shuffle button.
On an audiobook.
Yup this is what irks me most. I don’t think of audio books and music in the same context. Why the fuck are they mashing them together? Wrapped includes podcasts…
Nah, what’s worse is that it’s only 15(!) hours per month!
Which for most people would give you a week of audiobooks to listen to in your commute to work.
Sure, but it also only counts book time. If you listen 2x it’s only 7.5 hours.
Without podcasts I am not sure I’d still use Spotify
Why not use a free/cheap pocketing app designed for it specifically? All the podcast apps I’ve tried are far better than spotify. UI-wise at least.
It’s the dumb goal of tech bros to create an “everything app” that does everything you want.
If anything, they’ve taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they’re making record profits, and jacking up the price
Spotify actually doesn’t make that much profit, if any.
But the record labels are major shareholders and definitely influence the pricing structure. Spotify is essentially a marketing frontend for the record industry.
I am literally looking at their financial report for 2024 Q1 and it shows a profit.
They’re reporting 1.00 billion in gross profit as of Q1 2024 so yeah, they make money. It’s kind of impossible to compare much though since they’re the only freestanding music competitor that’s popular.
The closest comparison I can make is using Apples reported figures of making around $9.2 billion in revenue for its 93 million user base.
Meanwhile Spotify is making around 2.63 billion in revenue for its near 3x subscriber base estimated around 240 million. So I wouldn’t say they’re not making money, but maybe you can see why they think they can squeeze a lot more. Best to just unsubscribe honestly, they’ll keep doing this
So they’re leaving a lot of money on the table and getting criticized for their greed? I’m not sure how that’s a coherent position.
This is why they have record profits. They attack at both ends. Strip features, increase prices.
They haven’t ever been profitable with just streaming music.
So now that Tidal has moved its Hi-Fi tier price down to match Apple’s wtf is Spotify doing? Charging more than the competition, paying artists less, and not even offering lossless?
And as long as people keep subscribing to them, they’ll March right along collecting that sweet money.
There are services for transferring playlists
yes but often there are some mixups… which is a PITA for those of us with ~10K+ songs
I’m an album man so while I have beyond that many tracks it’s more seemless for me.
Would you happen to have one to recommend to switch from Spotify to apple music? I’m thinking about moving but my playlists are keeping me from leaving.
There’s probably I few. I used Soundiiz before, just get a free trial and convert them. I also just found Playlisty.
I used TuneMyMusic when I switched to Amazon Music a few months ago. It worked really well. It costs $4 or $5 to subscribe for a month but it’s a huge time saver.
I moved all my music using the SongShift app on iOS which was super convenient. At least when I bought it, it was a 1 time cost of like $5, not sure about now. But it matches songs and lets you see which ones don’t line up and then copies the playlist over exactly the same.
I predict in a few months, they will put their API behind a paid tier.
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Data takeouts are non-optional under the GDPR, so I would be very surprised if that happens.
Spotify has over 200mill paying subscribers and over 600mill total I believe. They an afford the peel off unfortunately.
From what I can tell Tidal won’t even publish their subscribers so it must be pretty small.
Nvm I think my app bugged out
And they don’t offer music videos like Apple does
So is there an alternative that’s comparable? I am done with their price increases.
I assume Apple Music?
businessinsider.com/…/best-music-streaming-servic…
Not really. They all cost about the same amount. In that article is right around $11 across the board.
I got Tidal since I read they pay artists a bigger share per track played.
I like it’s hight quality audio but don’t like it’s suggestions much. I did discover a few good songs but mostly I build my own playlist. To discover music I prefer to start playlist based on a song I like rather than their suggestions but it’s not perfect.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
Not a significant amount and they, along with all streaming services, have massively cut artist payouts in recent years. There aren’t really any good platforms for artists. Only labels get any amount of meaningful money.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
There’s bandcamp, but it’s not really a streaming platform per se.
I got grandfathered into YouTube Music since I was using Google Music when it got shut down. While not as good as Google Music, YT Music works well for me and has been building playlists suited to what I want to listen to. Plus, some lesser known local artists that only have their music on YouTube as video uploads will still show up on YouTube Music. I haven’t really tried any other serious streaming platforms, and only YT Music and Spotify natively sync to my car with maps.
Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That’s the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don’t care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn’t cut it.
I have never understood playlists as a ‘feature’ of these ‘services’. If someone wants that, why the hell don’t people just download the music and make local playlists? But the entire idea behind playlists has always baffled me - ‘yes I want to listen to the same songs in the same order every time I select this’ bro you’ve just made a mixtape from the 80s. And paid for the privilege. Good job.
For me the one and only appeal of any of these ‘services’ is to take what I currently like, blend like 3% of ‘similar songs/artists’ that I likely don’t know about, and get the hell out of the way otherwise. I’ve never had a decent experience with ‘let’s throw random shit at you and pray you like some of it’ ‘discovery’ systems. I don’t care what is popular with the masses, I don’t care what your ‘djs’ have ‘curated’, I don’t want to listen to your reinvention of radio, I don’t want to listen to someone talk between tracks, I don’t want to even be aware of talk show ‘radio’ oh my christ. Just give me fucking music, that I like, with a hint of weird. I give you my imported data from X prior service, I give you my entire last.fm data, I cannot make it any easier for you to do this. Just, do, it.
deep breathing
Sorry, I went to a place there. After like 20 years you’d think someone would get the formula right.
Counterpoint, I love the Spotify Discover Weekly feature. I’ve found some great gems. As for random playlists, I like to find lists that other people have made based on different genres I may be in the mode to listen to. Finding and downloading songs, to me, is way more inconvenient than using Spotify.
I am an audiophile with thousands worth of gear. As far as streaming services go, I find Apple to offer the best bang for the buck. The second best would be probably YouTube. Tidal was unique years ago with hires lossless but that’s not uncommon anymore. Apple offers it as standard. Apple and YouTube also offer music videos which is a nice perk.
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Honestly €56 million in profit seems small for an operation as massive as Spotify that has so throughly saturated the market. That does not make it excusable at all. I’m just surprised to see that number.
I’m sure there’s tons they’ve made that their accountants have managed to classify as something other than “profit,” so they don’t have to pay taxes on it
First reasonable response I’ve gotten lol
Most shitty companies do it with stock buybacks
Profit is AFTER they pay their CEO and other suit’s
Yes I am aware.
But is that net or gross?
If it’s profit it’s net by definition. Gross can’t be profit. You’re thinking of revenue. Gross is total revenue before any costs deducted.
You may need to realign your usage of phrases. Their 2024 Q1 financial statement has a line for “gross profit” and “net income/(loss) attributable to the owners of the parent.”
I’m going off the number from the article that your dude linked. The guy said “€58 million in profit.” Totally possible he’s wrong though.
I’m just saying there is a difference between “gross profit” and “net profit” because their official financial statement differentiates between it.
I dunno, my QuickBooks shows me gross and net profit. Gross profit is your income after you remove cost of goods sols (COGS). Net profit is what the org nets after everything else like payroll and other expenses.
Yeah you right. Don’t bake and lemmy, folks
Who cares what the “company” does when, as CEO, you rake almost $400 MILLION a year
mywage.ca/salary/celebrity-salary/daniel-ek
PS: and this is while receiving “no salary” (which they sell as if they were running a charity and meager $1.4 million in “other” compensation
I mean I understand there are a lot of caveats to that statement. Like I said, just kind of a surprising number. A company as massive as Spotify can have its revenue shift 10 of millions easily within a year, which means with a little nudge they could easily become unprofitable.
It would be like, I don’t know, realizing after you’ve paid all of your bills and groceries everything you have $300 at the end of the month. Not a lot of wiggle room. This isn’t sympathy and the stakes aren’t the same lol, I’m just saying their margins are not as high as I would have suspected.
A cursory search shows me competing figures - 7000+ and 15000+ employees. Both are very, very large numbers. Id have guessed they make hundreds of millions a year, not mid-8 figures. That’s probably what their payroll runs for 3-6mo.
Edit: for perspective, they have over 200mill paying subscribers. If ~800,000 left they’d be break even. That’s like .4% of their MAU’s.
Well that depends… if I have only $300 at the end of the month but I have already paid every bill and allocated $1,000,000 for entertainment, another $1,000,000 for personal expenses, another $1,000,000 for pet services, etc etc etc… the $300 left mean nothing… why do I need “wiggle room” when I can not just wiggle but literally run in every direction until I get tired and still not hit any limits?
The relatively small profit margin is a PR strategy… one that is working well on you giving you the false impression the company is “tight” when in reality, they are milking every bit of it before you get to that figure.
It’s not good PR because it makes me think they’re poorly structured and poorly allocating their money lol
if it makes you not buy into their subscription, then it’s poor PR… if it makes you think they are not greedy fucks, then it’s good PR
None of this impacts whether or not I pay them. It makes me think they are wasteful and greedy. Those are not mutually exclusive
if it makes you change your opinion of them but not enough to either pay them or stop paying them, then it means nothing to them
The only reasons I should pay or not pay for something are 1) quality of service for the cost and 2) ethical considerations.
Poor management does not factor in unless i am dependent on it for work. This is purely entertainment. Their being dumbasses is not a factor.
You’re kind of moving the goalposts here as well. This is a silly debate at this point. All I said was I was surprised at the stated profit.
Ok, my only goal in replying to you was to point out that, your surprise is based on some fake, very easily manipulable information… They do this manipulation in part to portrait themselves as something they are not, which is part of the PR strategy whether it works on you or not… that is all
They are usually losing money
statista.com/…/profitability-development-of-spoti…
That’s insane… 1000 plays per track?
Round #451 of telling people to stop using Spotify and consider one of the many, better alternatives.
I mean they do have one good thing going for them: you can separate the art from the more controversial artists, because you know for sure the artist isn’t getting a damn thing from spotify
What are some alternatives? I’ve heard Tidal is one of the better ones. I’m not necessarily opposed to piracy/ripping my CD collection + self-hosted streaming, but if I can pay someone else for the convenience I’d rather do that.
Do any services have a comparable family plan too?
You should list some.
Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz, Apple Music
Deezer user checking in. After Spotify’s Rogan deal I tried Pandora, Apple Music, and Deezer and the latter was the only one I could live with. I’ve been using it for three years and never plan to go back.
How are any of these better? They seem to all be shitty in all the same ways. Also I have no intention of giving Apple a single dollar, for a littany of reasons.
I purchase the family plan of YouTube Music. In addition to the music, it comes with ad free YouTube videos. I watch a lot of yt so it’s a no brainer for me. Never used any other streaming service so I can’t compare.
I would suggest anyone bothered by this to look into xManager.
Kind of love and hate that their website doesn’t explicitly say what it does. Like, if you can’t figure it out, you probably shouldn’t do it, even their GitHub is a bit dodgy on what the software is for, you can figure it out, but it’s never explicitly stated what it’s specifically meant for. “We help you install old versions of the app who must not be named” kinda bullshit.
I think it’s intentional to avoid eyes on taking it down.
This is the way.
Anyone have an alternative with the same content, offline play, and integration into Android Auto? I would love to switch if something meets my needs.
I’m downloading Tidal to give it a shot but I would also like to hear other options. Tidal seems promising from a 30 second glance but that doesn’t tell me much.
I went with Tidal, not sure about Android Auto tho, what is that?
Android auto is pretty much when you plug your phone into your car stereo and it runs like it’s own os from your phone. Google maps, music, etc. It just doesn’t run all apps though. Spotify is currently the key to any music playing in my car, so it’s important that whatever I use works with it. Apparently tidal does work with it so I might give it a shot. I will lose all my playlists though. 😔
Ohhh I see! That’s pretty cool!
Yeah that’s rough :/ I had tonnes of playlists that I just kinda sacrificed! You could sit down and remake them tho if it’s worth the time investment! 👀
If it’s worth anything, Tidal has had great offline support so far. I’m missing a handful of tracks, but the offline support might be enough to move to Tidal. It’s either generally better quality, better offline, better shuffling, and a dollar less per month, or a console/tv app and a few more albums.
Another day, another moment of being thankful for my dedicated .mp3 player.
I don’t consider this apples to apples.
Walkman/Discman/MP3 Player. These you need to acquire music yourself, then inject it.
Spotify/Tidal/YTM/Deezer etc, these are services that add recommendations and allow you to listen to practically anything under the sun. They are no the same thing.
Smh I want to get off Spotify for tidal but I don’t feel up to teaching my parents how to use a completely different music app
Spotify Premium in practice has new benefits!
More specifically: Lyrics that they took away from regular users some time ago.
They fucked it up for premium users too, though, since they’ve done that. Half the songs that I knew to have lyrics either no longer have them, or they constantly “fail to load.”
Seriously, damn, that’s feels like such a basic thing
I remember I used to have an add-on (at least I think it was an add-on; didn’t Spotify officially support those at some point?) that synced the lyrics of a song to the timestamp. It used user submissions to figure out the timestamps and edit the lyrics. It was pretty cool.
After watching how similar business practices torched Twitter, I think this dude is underestimating the general public’s commitment to just sail the high seas.
The average person: Spotify sucks and is making me hate them even more
Shareholders seeing layoffs followed by AI replacements for those workers and then repeated price hikes: 🤑
The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer. It’s very obvious that it only improves, at best, the next quarter’s returns for the investor. Once that husk of a company stops “line going up,” the money goes elsewhere and we repeat.
If the line can’t go up through creation it’ll go up through destruction.
It worked differently before speech was considered money. Or I like to tell myself that.
It worked differently before because the information network was orders of magnitude slower and data was expensive as Pope shit.
Nowadays, the information is almost instant and everything is interconnected and data storage is cheap so we got big data with people paid solely to boil that down to algorithms that squeeze money as much as possible from customers.
Just look at all the streaming services that makes you pay more if you don’t want ads and they resell your data. Triple dipping baby
This is for sure a big part of it also. Greed greed and greed being the main draw lol
Everyone that works for a company is poorer, every company is scraping by and making cuts, but executives are making more and more money
So you don’t think your life is better than someone from the 16th century?
I’m so tired of this nonsense argument, is capitalism your God to which you give credit for every human accomplishment? How did capitalism help to raise the Russian serfs to the status of a world superpower? It didn’t… How did capitalism help Russia get to space before the United States? How did capitalism help human life improve before the 16th century?
I wonder what you even think capitalism is. I wonder if you comprehend that technological advancement, markets, money, and trade aren’t synonymous with it.
You love democracy but when it comes to matters of economic decisions you are bootlicking the petite dictators that control every aspect of your economic life. You are employed by people whose means of acquiring wealth is to skim off the top of what you’re producing and steal it from you but you are too busy making eye contact while you suck them off that you don’t see their hand in your pocket.
The world is burning and there’s plastic in your balls because of capitalism, you are such a good submissive little peasant.
Remember: Stealing from big, evil corporations is morally correct.
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Then let them die.
and? what do you recommend?
Supporting artists directly via bandcamp and other options.
If you can’t support artists directly, and would have to buy physical media which supports the record label and not the artist…pirate.
Bandcamp is great but in the POV of a third worlder, bandcamp is never going to reach our audience. People barely make ends or spend much on other subs so paying separate artists not something people here would prefer. Maybe ideal for supporting one or two artists you love.
Sadly, physical media is dead here. Vinyl is still alive in some places but not here.
I don’t support spotify but right now its the best here if you pay premium ofc. if there’s a better alternative that’s not geolocked, has good recommendation algo and pays artists better than spotify, i will be always happy to switch.
You see, the music labels know that stealing from Spotify is morally correct.
IIRC labels own bits of Spotify, so they get their money that way. They don’t care if their music on the app actually makes a profit.
I just hope that one day Spotify goes premium-only and all of you can go cry somewhere else.
Literally the hero of the music industry, but the whole lemmy takes a dump on them. Man, people on this platform are just all poor and uneducated. So, everything paid is bad, and no idea of what’s actually behind the costs.
Go pirate some mp3s and remember, that despite how disgusting music labels are, if everyone did what you do, your favorite artist would’ve stopped producing their music long-long time ago. So, this simply puts you into the same leeching category with the corpos that you so despise.
The hero of the music industry? How do you mean? I’m not disagreeing with you re the pirating of mp3s, but I believe artists make far more in touring than streaming revenue - particularly with Spotify, which has very publicly been a sticking point in the past
So what is their excuses for older musicians that paid for expensive studio time before the day of home studios? Cause they still pay them like shit too
Here’s a few things that are cheaper!
If you want it on your phone, SD cards are cheaper than ever for big space. Unless you’re on iPhone.
Unfortunately most android phones are slowly phasing away the SD card slot. The only flagship that still supports it is Sony with their Xperia. I don’t know of any major mid-rangers models that still support it. The only low end phones now. But the overall experience is painful.
On the positive note though, the migration process during the setup wizard copies all your music to the new phone
That really isn’t much of a positive note if you have a lot of data. You are forced to buy the higher tier storage if that’s even available to you.
My Xiaomi phone for $400 supports up to 1 TB SD cards, so that’s pretty sweet.
Even Xiaomi are getting rid of the MicroSD slot now (and the headphone jack). At least onboard storage has been starting to increase again, although it’s not close to the amount a SD slot can provide.
Xiaomi is phasing it out as well <img alt="" src="https://lemdro.id/pictrs/image/5f6de658-0a7c-4726-8d97-fc84f3b36351.png">
MOTOROLA
Again even Motorola is phasing out micro SD card. Anything above 300ish.
Production cost for a full length album STARTS at around $10-15k.
That’s a lot more than “zero” in my book.
In the modern era, that’s not exactly true. This number is only relevant if you’re outsourcing tracking, mixing and mastering which are all things that can be done in a bedroom nowadays. How do I know? Because I did so myself a number of years ago.
If you’re not learning how to do these things yourself, you’re simply wasting money or you’re rich enough/your band is supported enough to not give a fuck.
The only thing we paid for was album art and mastering simply because I wanted one specific engineer to do it just cause. All in all we paid less than $2k for a full release. We could have paid zero if we did our own artwork and I mastered the album myself which is not exactly impossible for the average person to do.
I get your sentiment, but money is not necessarily needed en masse to release music any more. If you already have your instruments and associated gear, a REAPER license is $60 and you can use the included plugins to create a full professional quality release.
I had a plethora of plugins a while back but I’ve wiped them from my drive in favor of REAPER’s stock plugins, the available JS plugin libraries and a few choice free plugins along with a single drum VST. That’s it. I have pro quality mixes and masters with just that.
The days of the studio as a necessity are over. Studio time is a luxury, not a necessity.
I want to end this comment with a big “fuck you” to Spotify anyway because streaming services are cancerous to the music creator scenes.
I totally get where you’re coming from, have done the DIY production thing, etc. And with full respect to the piece of art you put your soul into, I have to ask, was it a commercial success? As in, paying the bills at home? Because in my experience, you do end up having to invest those kinds of sums if you want to make a return at that level. I hate how music is commerce, trust me. But that’s just what I’ve seen so far.
No it was not what many would consider a commercial success. My music is a bit niche, but it was a success in its own right. We had label support (non-financial, basically just printed CDs) for our debut release and more than recouped the cost and if we followed up with releases it likely would have had potential to snowball by re-investing the money into the band. We only released digital and CD digipaks of the album, no merch no extra anything and that gave us more than enough for a second release and then some. I just have no use for the music “industry” as it were. Music is not a means to an end for me, its an outlet and I do it on my terms. I don’t jive with the industrialization of art in general and I certainly don’t want to whittle my relationship with music down to how much money it can make for me. I get it if people wanna commoditize it though. That angle is just not for me.
Indie artists by and large self produce and a metric ton of them do so to an incredibly high caliber. Big tech Spotify man is not wrong, he’s just an asshole. A leech, if you will.
I appreciate you taking my question in the spirit it was meant, and the thoughtful response.
I guess what rubbed me the wrong way about CEO Douchebag’s comment was that it discounts just how relatively enormous of an expense production can be for the small artists trying to make a living. I’ve spent some time in the music industry and it has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The necessary evil of commerce intersecting with art is a big reason for that, especially coming to the realization of just how necessary that evil is.
But yes I agree, it is definitely possible to create excellent art of high technical quality from home.
I never did get a music subscription of any kind. Guess I am glad about that now. I just host my own server. Spotify never had a quarter of what I want to listen to anyways so I guess there is that.
Listening to Legion of Mary 12-10-1974 right now.
The only reason I keep Spotify anymore is that I’ve got a family plan with something like six accounts. I gave those to random acquaintances back in the Facebook days - people who are really into music.
If I cancel Spotify, there are five people out there who are suddenly and without warning going to find themselves without music.
I really don’t even remember who they are, but I feel like continuing the subscription is my community service
Pretty sure you can see their email address. This should give you the opportunity to message them stating you’ll be canceling the subscription. They’ll still be able to subscribe on their own.
PSA:
Innertune
Vi Music
Spotiflier
Edit: Maybe check out Ri Music, Vi Music’s Successor
ViMusic has not been updated in quite some time. RiMusic is actively being developed.
Thanks!
Glad I moved away from Spotify to Apple Music years ago (for different reasons tho)
I’m so grateful, I have thousands of songs and just hit shuffle and made my own playlists. I always thought internet radio was overpriced 😅
Just for funzies, my Spotify family plan in Canada is $17.84 CAD, which works out to $13.05 USD at current exchange rate.
Usually Canadians are screwed harder on, well pretty much everything, so I’m surprised that Americans are paying more for this. Guess it’s “what the market will bear” or similar nonsense. Please discuss.
Just FYI, Napster’s family plan is only $14.99 CAD
I cancelled spotify a few months ago, when getting some free Apple music with my Airpods. Not the best, but still happy that I don’t have to use Spotify anymore, will probably shop around after my free period with Apple is done
I was satisfied with Apple Music myself (until I no longer had need for it), but I keep hearing that Tidal is one of the better services if Apple doesn’t quite cut it for you. Supposedly they have a reasonably fair cut for the artists compared to Spotify, and also good audio quality (to be fair, Apple has high quality available too, if you enabled it in the settings)
Who?
Switched to Tidal when Spotify announced their reduction in artist pay, and I can highly recommend it. The interface is much better, although lacking podcasts (but luckily there are many great FOSS podcasts apps out there).
what do you mean ‘although’, that’s an added benefit!
I liked having both in the same app until I discovered AntennaPod, which is far superior to Spotify’s podcast manager.
I was mostly joking but I’m just so over podcasts. Even when people who I like and follow on YouTube talk about their podcasts my eyes glaze over.
I have so little time and patience for low effort hours long drivel that i find what I’m doing now more worthwhile than listening to a podcast. Not saying all podcasts are like this obviously but that’s my default assumption.
It’s just like everything else in the world, 90% of things are shitty, but the good 10% of things are always worth finding.
Multitask. Listen to a podcast AND do what you are doing now. Can’t be many people that sit down, focus and say “I’ll now listen to a podcast and do nothing else”.
that’s only more proof that it’s worthless.
“lacking podcasts” is a plus for most people, I think. But Tidal’s interface is a bit worse for me in one thing: it lacks the “remote control” Spotify has: controlling playback from any device on any device (e.g. playing on the computer and using the phone as a remote) and also the ability to transfer the playback from one device to another - like pausing it on the computer, picking up the phone, connecting it to car and resuming playback.
I use KDE connect for remote controlling, so I never even noticed. But I can see that being an annoying loss.
I upgraded to a decent set of headphones with a dedicated DAC, then realised just how terrible Spotify’s sound quality is, even on maximum. I hung on a while for the empty promise of lossless audio then ditched them.
I’m now increasingly glad that I’m giving money to their competitors.
Spotify’s encoding (vorbis 320kbps) should be transparent at the maximum bitrate. However, it’s possible that the files uploaded on there are mastered differently, for average consumer consumption instead of the full dynamics of most source material. I know SoundCloud enforces “loudness” mastering with presets when uploading for example.
The real reason Spotify’s quality is inferior to others is that, if you have the music files, you can apply in-app parametric equalization on every platform and compensate for imperfections of your output device.
My problem was by the time it had been through normalisation for equipment and hearing correction, it sounded very artifacty. Maybe a lack of bits and low sampling rate.
I just download to actually have the songs. No DRM, No Ads, No song getting removed from streaming service… I have 500+ songs downloaded in opus format and it only takes 2.5Gb with many of them being longer than 5 minutes. I don’t know why people keep using these services while they keep saying they hate it because there are so many ads or why they keep paying for DRM (aka. not owning anything)…
Where do you download them from?
YouTube Music
Not OP but I use bandcamp so I can pay the artist a decent amount rather than what ever Spotify does. Not sure if the new owner has increased the cut they take though
Soulseek is still a thing.
Musician here…
…I tell people to download both the mp3 and the wavefiles from Bandcamp. Sometimes Soundcloud has a download option (depends on the artist). I still buy CDs where I can.
Tidal, Deezer and Quboz all have ways to download the content. The most stupid one being to record the output of the music player, but there’s tools that automatically get the full metadata too and ensure the audio is cropped to silence.
To do it in an intended way, Bandcamp and other services let you pay once to have access to the source file on your account “forever”.
For Spotify, there is
spotdlwhich downloads the music from YouTube Music, and then embeds the metadata from Spotify.Isn’t YTM like 128-192kbps AAC? I’d rather not even bother ripping that lol
Do you have any recommendations on what would be better to do?
If you must use Spotify, use ZSpotify with DOWNLOAD_REAL_TIME and hope you don’t get banned. Alternatively, use it with a burner account.
I prefer Deezer and pay for Deezer HiFi. Deemix still works to rip FLACs from there.
Thanks, I certainly don’t have to use Spotify.
Napster
Opus at max bitrate is only like 1/4th the size of FLAC. At that point, why not just store it in 10GB while keeping the full quality?
That definitely makes sense, maybe I should do that… thanks
Same here, been collecting since the iPod Mini days, 18,000+ songs and 100gb+ of data (almost all mp3 though)
Serve them up with Airsonic and i’ve got my own streaming music service i can use anywhere.
Yeah I also use Jellyfin so I can also stream them from anywhere!
I’ve spent a good part of my life downloading my music and using mp3 playing apps. On time I downloaded Spotify to add songs to a shared playlist with friends. I figured I might try the app since I have it installed.
This is the worst music playing app in the world. (I was on free tier) How could anyone see this and think “oh yeah I will pay a subscription to this service”. Seriously
Actually purchasing music is insanely expensive. Paying a flat fee to have access to essentially the entire collection of music humans have ever created, instantly, is unparalleled value. But you do you.
Meanwhile every update makes the app worse
told them to go fuck themselves and canceled my subscription yesterday. they really didn’t stop to consider just how many options people have for music
I was telling people to try music on spotify and youtube, and then buy it on bandcamp etc. Download a copy. There sometimes comes a time when labels crumble, or streaming sites go bankrupt.
For anyone out there, I recommend giving Tidal a shot and for podcasts, I recommend a FOSS app called AntennaPod. This is the combo I use myself, I’ve been using Tidal for a bit over two years now and just recently switched to AntennaPod.
AntennaPod is great, I used it for years. I eventually switched to self hosting AudioBookShelf which does audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts. One main reason was because podcasts more and more yank the old episodes and put them behind a patreon. AudioBookShelf downloads the episodes to your server so you always have them. About 5 months after starting using it another one of my podcasts pulled that stunt and I was super happy to have all of the old episodes still.
I’ll have to keep that in mind, thanks for that. I honestly had no considered some BS like that happening.
I suppose I’m a “content creator”. I write music.
I WISH all my recording gear was free. Fucking hell. The amount of money I’ve wasted in the last 30 years… sheesh.
Btw, thank you for creating. It makes my world a little nicer experiencing new art.
🙇
Free for Spotify. Not for you. They don’t care about you.
Oh dont I know it.
Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
You can influence things with your wallet.
If you can, and they have it on there, buy your favorite albums on Bandcamp, then they are yours forever
I thought that Bandcamp was shutdown?
I dont think so? As far as I can tell, my account still works and I bought an album there the other day.
It looks like the company has been sold around a few times in the last few years and i think its gotten worse, but I honestly cant tell lol
It has been purchased by EPIC and a large portion of the staff was layed off. But it is still up and you can still buy music there.
theverge.com/…/bandcamp-layoffs-epic-songtradr
On paper. But in practice…
Hollywood accounting and pirate profiteering undercut what artists would normally be paid.
You can influence how you feel about your consumer habits, but capitalists are still going to capitalize.
I just switched to Tidal, any recent issues?
Not loving the delay in Android Auto but the quality difference is truly night and day.
Any good way to transfer playlists?
There were apps out there to help with this when I switched from Spotify to Tidal. I can’t remember the name anymore though. It just sucks up all your saved songs and playlists, matches them in the other service then adds them. Almost everything I had moved over without a problem. I do miss the social aspect of Spotify, being able to share links with friends. No one I know has tidal except the people on my family plan. There are services that will turn your song link into a linktree like page with links for Spotify, tidal, YouTube music, deezer, etc., but that’s clunky.
Sharing a track from Tidal will take you to a page that links to the song on multiple platforms. Try this: tidal.com/track/68705949?u
That doesn’t help for whole playlists, but it at least helps with sharing with friends
I used TuneMyMusic when I moved from Apple to Tidal.
Now this isn’t without its own stupid system.
So to transfer all your music and not just a limited amount you have to sign up to pay for it. Now I’m fine paying a one off fee for this service as it was seamless, what in against it the only options being an annual fee or a recurring payment.
It cost me like £3, maybe less in being lazy. But I had to sign up, do the transfer then immediately cancel. I understand some people might be bougie and use multiple services, but not having a one time fee irked me.
If you go this route, as it is easy as tidal will send you there, please do what I did and send them a complaint afterwards about the ludicrous system and that they should add a one time fee to make it even easier. Heck I would have paid £5 for this as I have so many playlists and liked albums and songs etc.
I mentioned it on here previously and someone alluded to free services but I can’t confirm.
Tidal now has built-in transfer of playlists, at least from Spotify.
I used Soundiiz and it works pretty good. Gives you an overview after the import so you can see what’s missing or wrong.
Another clueless CEO who doesn’t know what makes his company’s very existence possible.
Another thing I don’t use, and its users with problems I don’t have.
There are times when it’s good to be asocial.
I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.
AOL profited for over a decade on people who signed up for the service and simply lost track of it, paying month after month for something they’d forgotten they even had.
Crazy that these services can just raise premiums whenever they please without even reaffirming that the customer still wants the service. I guarantee that if you needed to re-verify your account on a price increase, firms with big client pools would never raise their rates again.
Gyms exist solely because of people like that.
And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that’s somehow legal.
Does the CVV number on credit cards not change when they’re renewed in the USA? Or can companies still somehow charge cards without an up-to-date CVV?
They sometimes have an agreement to update the card after expiry
Plexamp is better than any other music app I’ve tried.
Finamp for anyone using Jellyfin github.com/jmshrv/finamp
iTunes Match is $25/year if you have an iPhone.
Oh so only $100+ a year*
How does $25 become $100+
you need to buy a very expensive phone to “enjoy” the sale
A “subscriber consent to renew on price increase” law would go a long way
.
Looking at you, amazon prime free trial auto renew
Just another CEO denigrating the work of those who make him rich.
I switched to TIDAL, for this, for the disgustingly low amount of revenue passed along to artists by Spotify (the entire value of their business), and for the fact that they continue to partner with Rogan after all the disinformation he peddles.
Not a huge proponent of streaming services in general, but some are objectively better than others. Spotify is atrocious. Tidal is a lot better.
I also switched to Tidal after learning about Spotify’s dystopian future war AI powered killer robot plans. It’s also bullshit how little they pay artists.
I wish Tidal had podcasts, but I’m happy enough with AntennaPod.
My music app not having podcasts is a bonus for me. They really should give users the option and not force it upon you.
They don’t anymore.
Though I am far more concerned with Spotify’s attempts to destroy what is otherwise a last bastion of internet freedom with their exclusive podcasts.
They do, but not as an exclusive. This year Spotify signed a deal with him worth 250M.
But also yeah, I can appreciate that sentiment.
Ah, last I heard the deal had just expired. Now they’re paying him even more money than before? And for what reason?
At least it sounds like that Spotify exclusive bullshit is dead?
Welp, gonna try Tidal tonight.
Isn’t this also on the Publishers? They get paid first before the artist.
Spotify is usually reported as one of the worst paying for the artists.
They also don’t distribute the value by time listened, but pool in and award the largest artists (don’t remember the specifics, you might need to look it up).
They were also found/accused of using their auto generated playlists with made-up artists who’s money goes to ‘noone’, just shady stuff.
I left when I saw how much of our money they gave to Joe Rogan to punch down on trans people. Already paying for YouTube pro for years and finally took advantage of their music app. It’s been great. My car and every Google screen in the house have native support. The only disadvantage is everything from tinder to open source crap I run at home only integrate with Spotify.
What open source stuff? Asking for a friend
Home Assistant is the biggest
lost me in the second half
Streaming services don’t support artists in any meaningful way.
Instead, buy music for download when it’s available (Bandcamp and the like).
If not possible, just pirate it and buy merchandise or go to a concert. You will bring as much revenue to the artists this way, than listening to them on Spotify for 200 years non stop, and it will be cheaper for you in the end.