I understand that it’s a different model that will not work for everyone. But check out Bandcamp’s payout model. Find new music via internet radio/MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that)/yt and buy it via the model that is straightforward and at least seems to put the most money in artists’ pockets
Bandcamp also has a “discover” feature where you can set which genres you are interested in. I did find some interesting albums this way too
MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that
I’m a bandcamp user and buy stuff regularly there, only because they are the lesser of all evils… but what is their current status? I thought they went bankrupt and owned by tencent?
Are they still fighting the good fight? Or heading toward enshittification?
Bandcamp was owned by Epic Games, not Tencent for a short while, and now owned by Songtradr which does not have anything to do with tencent.
At least, this is what i found.
They are still doing the Bandcamp Fridays where everything you pay goes to the artist, so that’s nice.
I imagine they will inevitably enshittify since the buyout but they seem to be good still for now.
The nice thing is I get to download the files so I’m not fucked when it happens.
There’s a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it’s Spotify, on top of your label
Yes and…
Lily Allen and Kate Nash are on OnlyFans and make more money there…
Yeah, but that’s probably partially due to their existing fame.
Well, yeah.
They make more money from OF than from Spotify… and they are not doing porn.
Can anyone tell me how to cancel Spotify service? I went to their website, but it wouldn’t let me in without installing or logging into their app. And from their app I can’t find a way to cancel!
This is a legit problem with many services now. And some companies are, right now, being sued for this dark pattern practice.
You can sign up with one click, but to cancel they make it impossible. Some companies literally will process an account cancellation only by registered letter. How messed up is that?
If you are using Paypal, log in to Paypal and go to Bills. Select Spotify and scroll down - there should be a link to cancel the subscription at the bottom.
Spotify was my penultimate subscription. Still have to bring my AWS Lightsail instances back in house. :(
Yeah, enshitification indeed. Was quite happy 4 years ago. Worth $10/mo. to get what I want and some new stuff occasionally thrown in. Suggested music tracked my tastes, easy UI, all that.
Then they upped it $1. Fine. Then I started getting all sort of bullshit when my playlist ran out. “Fuck was that?!”
Now that I cancelled the paid version, the ads are killing me. Look, I’m a GenXer, accustomed to ads for free TV and radio. I’m fine with that revenue model. But fuck me, just like modern radio, the ads became so thick as to be distracting. And of course I can’t use it in the deep woods where my internet is sketchy.
I download all my playlists. FOSS I can use to upload and play that on my phone? Guess I’m back to pirating.
I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.
Once something gets critical mass and becomes “default,” it doesn’t even matter, people just use it and take it.
Yeah. Didn’t work on Librewolf (only stock FF), the UI was slow, the recommendations (the reason I wanted to try) were pretty bad, the ads couldn’t be blocked properly and left a few seconds of silence in their place (the only site I encountered that behaved like this!), and logged me out repeatedly (sometimes mid-session), presumably due to me using a proxy.
I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify’s weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!
They pay artists better and it’s been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn’t easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.
Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you’re into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn’t pay as much as direct support.
This reads as an ad but I’m genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.
As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.
Wow, and they didn’t even get into the seperate streaming numbers.
I don’t know, do you people let Spotify decide that much about what you hear? I normally never let the music run through so that automatic recommendations play, but I choose explicitly what’s added next in the queue. So the problem mentioned in the article is not relevant to me at all.
I usually only listen to one album at a time, front to back. But I think most people don’t do that.
Yes, listening to whole albums is not only great with albums you already know, but it’s also my favourite way to get to know new artists. A single song is often not enough to understand the whole picture or range.
Well, seems to be an old-fashioned approach. But I’m also not the type of person who has music blare in the background all day. So I don’t like the radio-like approach by Spotify to just let anything play what the algorithm thinks is fitting.
I’m a little weird like that, I often listen to the whole discography if I find a single song or album I like. My music knowledge is very deep and but rather narrow
deleted by creator
No, I don’t think that and I did not write anything like that. I was just sharing my perspective. And was interested in learning how other people use the player.
deleted by creator
I was asking a question, so yes, I wanted to know how other people see this and how people use the music queue.
Of course I’m sure that there are many different ways to interact with Spotify and I don’t think that any specific type of use is superior.
But since I don’t let the algorithms influence my music selection very much, the problem described in the article doesn’t have that big an impact on my everyday life.
I’m not saying that I think Spotify’s approach is right. I would like a much more user-friendly music player anyway, unfortunately I find Spotify quite cumbersome and inflexible.
Apart from that, I think that artists should get a bigger share for the use of their works.
deleted by creator
I didn’t know this, but it makes sense. One of my biggest complaints about streaming (Pandora is guilty of this, too) is that anyone with a copy of Ableton and a mediocre talent can crank out tracks barely modifying the base toolset. I tend to listen to a lot of variants of electronic music. 95% of the music is absolute crap. 4.5% is tolerable. And 0.5% might end up in my playlist. Less tan 1:100/songs. I have no doubt that “band” or artist names were made up to crank something out, abandoned, and started up under a different name to churn out more boring samesies hoping for a few plays in one of those “made for you” playlists.
So the service doing this for themselves and enabling it for profit isn’t surprising.
Yeah I guess it’s always been this way. Does anyone remember the Captain Oblivious mp3 “mixtapes” he used to put out regularly, like 20 years ago? Indie and underground music. Rule of thumb, I would listen to only about 1 in 20 songs more than once.
One of my biggest complaints about streaming (Pandora is guilty of this, too) is that anyone with a copy of Ableton and a mediocre talent can crank out tracks barely modifying the base toolset.
People being able to do art isn’t a bad thing, and I’m glad streaming has made publishing so much more accessible.
If you don’t like it you don’t have to listen to it. Every time some algorithm playlist churns out another spoonful of slop you don’t actually have to open wide.
You could just look up the artists you like and what other people like that’s like those artists, or look at collabs they’ve done or who remixes them or been remixed or covered by them and who they’ve been in bands with and what genre they tag to see who else is in that (micro)genre/niche.
I’ve never actually listened to someone else’s playlists, not man-made nor generated, only my own, and I regularly listen to extremely niche folks with 1k-40k Monthly Listeners all of whom are completely legitimate artists with unique great music, many of them electronic actually.
The truth is that 99% of people like copy-paste slop and that’s why they click on the slop and gravitate towards algos or charts for top ten artists.
And a global market for music with a low entry barrier means that it’s easier than ever to get started artistically expressing yourself for fun and for yourself, just as it should be, but still hard to be actually heard if you want to take it commercial, even if it’s fairer system than the gatekeeping of labels.
Art… look, I get the premise of what you’re saying, but just because art is mediocre or just bad doesn’t free it of criticism because “art.” It can be shitty art and be called exactly that. It’s not sacred.
Edit: nice massive edit you did.
And is this argument that “if i don’t like it I don’t have to listen to it”? The WHOLE POINT of Spotify is to listen to it and be exposed to music, and my position was that it’s littered with crap. You’re basically telling me that if I don’t like billboards along the roadside I shouldn’t bother having a car? Lol, whatever man. Shitty art is still shitty art. Not everything belongs in a gallery.
Yeah sure, it’s actually good to think critically about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s existence is a negative, which is how your comment comes off - dismissive.
In the same way the world would be a slightly worse place without the joys of b-movies like The Room or Suburban Sasquatch or Plan 9 FOS, or without outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston etc…
I don’t need to listen to badly made music any more than I need to be exposed to budget hotel room art on the walls of the Louvre. You wanna watch B movies? Great! But nobody’s inserting 30 C and D films between your current netflix series.
“badly made music” is a subjective idea.
“Inserting 30 C and D films” implies forcing someone, you are never forced, Spotify is not a goddamn radio station, you can just click on the track or album or artists you want.
That’s the whole selling point of portable music since the days of the original Walkman, that you listen to what you want, and not what’s on the radio.
Same thing with Netflix, you can click the search bar and type in your film or show of choice, you can even stop using Netflix altogether instead of just consooming like a slop vacuum.
Maybe touch non-algorithmically selected non-personalized grass too.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Completely agree. I had this exact discussion not too long ago about the recording industry 20+ years ago - or at least before the advent of widely available mp3 downloads. The recording industry and DJ/Radio was and still is an awful tyranny that plays kingmaker and squeezes every possible cent out of fan and artist alike while telling the fan what they’re supposed to consume and the star what they’re supposed to sound like.
The upside to that content filter was that some genuinely good music got made and put on albums where both A and B sides were good to great. The downside is that a ton of artists never had a chance at being heard who might be just as good or might have shifted the genre, added to the repertoire, yet the music landscape was more monochromatic.
IMO there was a lot less chaff 30 odd years ago because they got filtered hard. But consumers were also forced to listen to the billboard top whatever all the time.
Now with affordable tools readily available and the ability to easily upload music to various streaming services the production of music has been democratized. This is good in the sense that it lets more people be heard. It’s also not so good because the ability to climb to the top is far far harder, far fewer will make any real money, and for every good single or A side there’s a thousand B side throwaways.
I just recently discovered a band on Soundcloud that has amazing tracks but they all have the familiar feeling of good songs being listened to decades ago, with the voice of the singers similar to that of famous singers of all genres. This is the band in question. [(https://soundcloud.com/flowerpunkhobo)]
I think it’s AI generated music from previous songs from the past.
Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.
I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.
Really hated when they started adding auto play of another unrelated podcast when my current podcast ends, like I don’t want your shitty podcast selection Spotify. The enshitification of the web continues.
Don’t use Spotify for podcasts. They’re actively trying to kill off what we know as podcasting and trying to lock the media into their own service.
Instead, use any app that supports Podcasting 2.0.
I deleted the app the day the day they implemented this. The podcast they started playing was a 30 minute podcast advertising mattress firm or sleep country.
If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it
We can do this with crypto now.
Ideally you want to use a hardware wallet though so the payment money doesn’t have to sit in a hot wallet connected to the internet, but that means pressing a physical button to initiate the payment, but it could just sit beside the computer, and eventually be built into computers.
Alternatively, you could have a hot wallet and it’s all seamless, but you risk the loss of funds from a compromised browser.
It’d include a permanent record of your ownership of what you purchased as well as long as you keep that seed phrase around, so you could redownload it if you lost the files.
Edit: And if the system was built around something like IPFS then the files would always exist.
I’m not sure how IPFS is different from torrents. I don’t think it’s solvable with blockchain too.
It’s nice that someone’s made electronic distributed gold, but that doesn’t include a payment system.
EDIT: in any case, I’m aware of various systems covering small pieces of what I’ve described.
Maybe I’m thinking of a different distributed system, but there’s one out there that replicates it’s files to different hosts if one ever goes down. With torrents people need to actively keep it up and it could be just one machine that eventually turns off, or one machine that the FBI raid and take down.
Edit: and crypto was for the payments and tracking of ownership. If you want it to be that easy to pay as pinging an IP, it can’t be credit cards or other similar methods. There are barriers all over the place to sending and receiving with that and it’d be rampant with fraud.
That it all-around sucks? That I’ve been telling people this since it’s creation? That nobody fucking listens to me? Or that this preview picture looks like ET and Titanic had a mash-up. Or all of the above.
It’s all of the above, duh.
I agree with most of this, but how have you never come across Munch’s “The Scream” before? (Have to admit, I lol’d at your description of it tho)
Seriously. I’m not at all an art guy so I feel qualified to observe that The Scream is probably one of the top 5 (and definitely top 10) most well known paintings, somewhere shortly after Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
So happy I switched to Tidal long ago because the pathetic music stream quality it has. I made me had headaches , literally. For the ones who don’t know Best quality audio streaming are Tidal and Apple music . YouTube music is pure crap quality as Spotify.
Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I’d love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.
I’ve been using Deezer for almost a year now.
Things I like:
- Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
- Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.
Things I (we) don’t like:
- As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows (“hits” in other word).
- My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don’t have servers.
I find Flow fantastic for discovering new songs.
Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
I couldn’t find any info on this. Do you have an article?
Not about the removal of said songs. But basically it’s a rapper known to use lot of controversial metaphors often using lot of etnic stereotypes in his lyrics about pretty much every communities including his own. Some anti antisemitic association compiled lyrics they took issue with on a video they published on twitter and it reached the prime minister. He then tweeted about starting an investigation on said rapper for terrorist and nazi apology in his texts. It went nowhere cause there is simply no such things in those lyrics but apparently deezer didn’t need a conviction to decide some songs had to go. If you want to search for more details rapper name is freeze corleone, be warned tho, he like to play with controversy so a lot of his lyrics contain conplotist bullshit and dictator/terrorist namedroping. But it’s never about their ideology that’s why talking about apology is stupid imo.
I’ve been using Deezer since Tidal dropped Plex support. So far the library seems to be the same as Spotify, at least I wasn’t missing too many songs when transferring my Spotify playlists in.
I like the built-in song identifier and radio station support. The song quizes are a little gimmicky, but kinda fun. I probably haven’t used it enough for recommendations to get me down, but so far nothing crazy has popped up there.
I’m not sure if it’s just my phone, but every couple days when I first launch the app, I need to close and reopen it to get it to load, my desktop app constantly throws up a banner saying the app is offline, but it doesn’t actually effect functionality, so it’s just annoying more than anything.
i use it with deemix-gui to download my music. works like a charm (using your ARL as login method still works)
Using it for four years or so, very happy with it.
In my experience, the same fake albums show up on Deezer as Spotify. Frankly, I think the best way is Bandcamp. For for an album, download it forever. Stop paying to listen to the same music over and over and get DRM free tracks you can listen to your way while giving the money to the artists selling their albums directly.
Bandcamp the union busting company that laid off like 75% of its staff over 2023…?
The best way might not be a perfect one. Still a little bit better than most other options.
I have now used Deezer for a bit over half a year after Spotify.
The song selection is pretty equal. The playlists can even automatically be imported/exported with TuneMyMusic.
I think Deezer’s best feature is the song radio which finds songs of similar genre, and it really does find songs and artists I have favorited after hearing them. I always found that feature in Spotify to work pretty poorly.
However, if you don’t have an exact song in mind, finding music by theme is terrible in Deezer. There are few set categories, but the amount of user-created playlists is very small, compared to Spotify.
I’d recommend giving it a try, but I wouldn’t say its better or worse than Spotify. Just different.
I was recommended RiMusic from Lemmy, using the YouTube music selection.
It has a radio function but it makes wierd presumptions: say I radio off a synthwavey film soundtrack song, it’ll favor more show music that has little in common with the original selection. Maybe it’s just me.
I don’t pay for Spotify, but if I do pay for music then I would choose Tidal
