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So OP has posted this everywhere, even getting it flagged on Hacker News. Article is weak sauce:
I would agree with author that there are many problems with Spotify but concentrating on the artist revenue per stream and then publishing your top hits of the year as YouTube links? Really? Go and find out what the artist share per stream is on YouTube (regular YouTube video) for soundtracks. I’ll wait. Hint: there’s a reason that soundtracks using unauthorised copyrighted work get muted or taken down rather than revenue being redistributed.
Recommending a paid desktop MacOS music app for local content? There are hundreds of local music players but OK… but none of the criticisms of Spotify were about the client! Foobar2000 (mentioned for mobile playback) supports Spotify streaming…
Article seems to boil down to ‘I got tired of Spotify recommendations and I am an aspiring musician at an early stage in my professional career so I am recommending Bandcamp and soap boxing about artist revenue share’ . There’s a reason that people, some with local music libraries in the TeraByte range listen to Spotify. There’s also all the competing services - Apple Music; YouTube; Deezer; Tidal; Amazon; etc…
Recommendation to OP: If you are trying to persuade people on something, then decide what point you want to concentrate on, consider the pro’s and cons for your position, and make your point based/reinforced on that. Don’t meander around a bunch of inchoate personal gripes and affections that don’t really relate to one another or any particular point.
Adding our Boys Qobuz to the list of competing services Paying in 2018 13 times more than Spotify And yu get to own the musics you buy on Qobuz and can put it on your NAS for example
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What was the main point he missed?
They went back and read it and edited their comment apparently lolz. What an ass.
I down voted because you added nothing to the discussion. It was just a completely empty criticism. On top of that, I read the article, and it’s clear to me that this poster read the article too.
But I’m curious as to what your actual criticism is.
Not going to give substack any views, so I’ll pass on this one
What’s wrong with it? (I never heard about it, just asking)
They outright won’t ban Nazi content from their website. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
It’s not just “won’t ban”.
They collect money from subscriptions to Nazi authors, and pay those authors.
They are a Nazi publisher.
They commodify and profit from Nazis on their platform. When called out for it, their response was “We don’t like Nazis either, but we won’t do anything about them and we’ll continue to take our cut from their presence on our platform”
That sounds an awful lot like them quietly liking it
Oh I remember hearing that quote. That was them? I had a conversation about it like a week ago. I read “substack” in the article but all tech names are pretty interchangeable to me. They all have the same groupings for the type of thing they are and substack sounded like image hosting or something to do with coding or some template bank for some kind of necessity like invoices or something. Point is, tech names are stupid and I didn’t even put the name to the site as I read it. Good to know, though.
If you’re so petty about it, use archive.org or archive.is to view the page
Fellas, is it petty to refuse to support Nazis?
Viewing a website doesn’t mean supporting the website. Especially if you use an adblocker.
Linking to their content and posting it here does, because it spreads that garbage around
If you have an adblocker, and you’re not visiting any of those nazi sites directly, but do derail a comment section about a totally unrelated article? I say it is, yeah.
Then again, I can be pretty petty about circlejerks.
I wouldn’t really call it a circlejerk to be against people who publish and profit from Nazi material.
The person who wrote the article we’re supposed to be discussing in here is at least 2 degrees away from the nazis. At what point does it become circlejerk?
The Lemmy instance you’re on is linking to a substack and is collecting donations, but you seem to be fine with that. So I guess the threshold is 3 degrees?
I have nothing against the author of this article. I do have something against Substack. It really is that simple. If this article is posted somewhere else I’ll read it.
If this Lemmy instance had a bunch of Nazi content and the admins said they wanted to keep it up, then I’d block this instance. I wouldn’t try to rationalise it by saying “oh well it’s not like all the content is Nazi content…”
Again, it really is that simple.
If you’re fine with supporting a platform that welcomes Nazis with open arms, fine, you do you. It’s a personal choice.
If you’re fine with supporting a platform that welcomes Nazis with open arms, fine, you do you.
Now you’re basically implying that I’m a Nazi-sympathiser. I find that a cheap tactic and highly offensive.
That’s my issues with these kind of oversimplifications and guilty-by-association-fallacies. Before you know it, everyone is Hitler. I’m not supporting anyone here. I read an article about Spotify on a blog, nobody gained any measurable financial worth from that.
I don’t think we’re going to find a common ground here. Have nice day.
If I’m going to travel to a certain city I’m not going to stay in the hotel that’s hosting the Nazi convention. Here you are saying “yeesh it’s not like the convention will be inside your room!” But there are other hotels - simple as that.
You act like a person needs some much better, really, really good reason not to read this article. If the site hosts Nazi content, that’s quite enough for me to just scroll to the next post. Why do any of us need to convince you or anyone else why this small act of conscience is valid?
You definitely don’t have to. But if you were actually trying to, let me assure you that equating the reading of a harmless blog post to paying a hotel would not have done the trick.
A while back I realized my phone has 256GB of internal storage and since I don’t take pictures or put anything else on it, I was running around with 256GB of free storage wherever I went.
And that’s pretty much when it clicked for me that I was paying Spotify for access to music I already have from the pre-spotify days for a convenience that no longer is valid.
I dove into my box of CD’s and DVDs and put the 30 something gigs of music I collected since the mid 90’s on my phone and haven’t used spotify since.
EDIT: and, yeah, I’ve re-instanced my music, movie and series downloaders and went back to sailing the high seas.
I switched to Netflix/Spotify, because of the convenience and timing of release they provided, they were also more reliable in terms of quality (“free” versions labeled ass 1080p often aren’t actually 1080p, etc).
But the sheer cost of Spotify, Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, etc, etc, etc to listen to and watch what I want, has made the convenience/cost calculation move from being acceptable to being even more than what it used to be buying CD’s and DVD’s.
On top of that the audio and video quality have deteriorated over the years, availability has become spotty, at best (like certain services removing movies and shows, even some removing movies and shows you paid extra for), we’re also dealing with these services pushing ads on top of us already paying subscriptions and fragmenting their market to the extent everything has become entirely unaffordable.
I used to buy maybe 2-3 CD’s in a year and a boxset of a show and a movie once a year.
Now simply subscribing to every service that has something I want for just 1 month costs more than what I spent per year previously.
Gabe Newels words are still right on the money.
Piracy is a service problem and the service provided these days makes Piracy the better option, again.
I don’t stream either. All my music, I own. No one is taking it away.
Unlike Disney, Netflix, etc, Spotify is the only streaming service where I never think oh this is missing let’s find a torrent.
Music streaming (at least for the consumer) is so much better than video. Where it’s super scattered over multiple services all wanting money.
I find that I can only find about 90 percent of what I want to listen to. That’s more than enough of a burden to opt out entirely. Live albums, demos, collabs, and obscure dead bands you can’t really find with great success
I frequently can’t find songs. I will say they generally are obscure though.
I agree with her arguments about Spotify overall, but this amused me-
To celebrate my newfound freedom, I downloaded a 13-minute long Taylor Swift megamix, and CAN YOU DO THAT ON SPOTIFY? I didn’t think so. I also then went on to Bandcamp after I got paid the other day and bought some music. It felt good.
As if Spotify somehow prevented her from doing those things anyway…
Don’t ya know if you have prime and Netflix you can no longer legally purchase a blue ray ever
And in 2024, Spotify will stop paying out songs which get less than 1000 streams in a year. Which means for me, as an artist in the early stages of my career, I am going to get paid nothing. I could get over 1000 streams on all my songs in total, but still get paid nothing. I could get 999 streams on a song one year and 999 streams on it the next year… and still get paid nothing.
As the author states in the previous paragraph, Spotify pays 0.003c per stream. I don’t think the author has done the maths. 1000 streams equals 3c. He’s complaining over not getting paid 3c as if that will fund his career
It’s not 0.003¢ per steam, it’s $0.003. (Actually £0.003, per that article.)
So 1000 streams should pay $3.
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You (or your label who represents you) voluntarily put your music on spotify and can always pull your content if you want.
Equating this to theft makes zero sense. And your post is universally upvoted. Wtf?
He’s complaining over
*she’s
Spotify used to be good but now they charge you the price of buying an album outright.
Might as well buy an album monthly and actually own it.
That works if you listen to just a small number of albums, but I average about 15 unique albums per month and probably 60 per year.
lol yeah I listened to over 150 new genres and thousands of artists this past year (according to Spotify wrapped), buying all those albums would be thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands.
Just to add, I do buy albums but more as a way to support the artists. Tidal is for convenience.
If I was really strict about paying for all my media (which I cannot afford now), I’d buy the albums gradually anyway, starting from ones I like most.
Also how do you discover so much?
£10 = the price of every single album you listen to in a month, combined?
It was 9.99 for many years and now it’s 10.99, a ~10% increase. Not sure how a single, small price increase in years turns something from good to bad. Sure, there are many reasons to dislike Spotify, but pricing?
Last year I’ve listened to more than 6k different songs. If you’d be generous for the math and say 12 songs an album, 9 euro per album it’s still over 5k a year. Spotify is just cheaper for me, even the high seas would cost me too much in terms of time
Everyone who listens to the same downloaded 50 song playlist everytime they open Spotify premium is paying for you to use the service
But I use it much more similar to you than those people so I am also winning lol.
Not to mention that if everybody listened like thak guy spotify would just increase prices.
I spent >100$ on concert tickets to listen to artists I found on Spotify. Probably would not have spent this money nor discovered those artists by listening to 50 songs downloaded 10 years ago from Limewire.
I listened to 6k songs, just because spotify has them.
Do i need it? Absolutely not.
I cancelled when they increased the price and i went back to buying an album for life from the discount bin and putting it on repeat with the other 20 albums i still owned.
Back when I had an ipod I spent days downloading songs. I don’t think my listening habits changed all that much, now I just don’t download them via “legitimate” routes anymore
Down voted cause substack allows nazi content.
Blocking because irrelevant comments are annoying
That’s nice for you
Upvoted because this article was an interesting read.
Hey all, I’d like to distance myself from Spotify, but I really enjoy their discovery features. I’ve learned about a lot of bands both new and old that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Do you have any suggestions for a service that could replace this aspect of it?
I’ve used Spotify, Apple music, YT music and nothing beats SoundCloud stations for discovering new music based on a song.
and their “More of What you Like” playlists are just stations based on your recently most played songs and they just don’t miss.
for someone like me that has songs from a lot of different genres in my regular rotation of 10-15 songs every month or so, it’s perfect for discovering music.
Bandcamp is pretty good. They do writeups that I think are written by real people. When you look at a band you like, it tells you about stuff other people who like them have. I’ve found a lot of stuff there.
It is more about buying music than renting it, however. Most albums it will ask you to buy after a certain number of plays. I think the band can configure those details
Bandcamp was bought out by Epic Games, fired half of it’s staff to make the bottom line look better, and is now owned by some private corporate music licensing company that refuses to recognize it’s employee union and fired even more employees that were all involved in their unionization effort. I wouldn’t recommend supporting them anymore.
This all happened in September btw so any enshittification of the service has yet to come to fruition.
If you like modern rock, theres a free app (no ads or any bullshit either) or listen via website. Former radio DJ quit the industry and started his own online station. Im definately biased here as i used to listen to him all the time when i would drive all day long, but as its literally free and not supported by ads.
No account needed also
Anyways if you like modern rock whatwasthatradio.com
It is dedicated to only playing new music
He didnt like all the amazing music that exists to continue to go completely unnoticed by commercial radio so hes doing it himself
Hes supported by subscribers on patreon etc
If i remember correctly all songs are 36 months or newer
This is a proper SOCAN licensed service (canadian broadcasting license I think) so hes doing it proper.
I personally have found at least a dozen new artists to listen to because of this free service
heres some of the bands he has done interviews with to give you an idea.
I find last.fm’s “similar artists” feature more accurate that Spotify’s. But that’s just for finding new stuff and tracking your history. Not really for actually playing the music. I linked it to Spotify and use them both together
There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, used to love last.fm and pandora etc
Not that it’s any better in terms of ethics or artist pay, but YouTube Music has relatively decent auto playlist generation with settings for discovery. Plus you get ad-free YouTube without having to use piped or vanced or whatever people are using these days.
Yeah I know it’s not a popular position these days but I have been a Google Music subscriber since the early days.
IMO YT Music doesn’t disappoint when it comes to finding what you’re looking for.
And not having to worry about fighting Google on ad-blockers with YT is a convenient add-on.
Search your favourite artists. Wiki them etc. and learn about them whilst simultaneously finding where they’re members play in other bands or have other projects. Also, it can illuminate what they’re influences were/are and you can listen to that too. I find a shit-tone of new music this way.
Deezer. Interface/UX is a little jank but it’s private and discovery is good.
Radio Paradiso. Berlin based radio. Weird and wonderful.
I use Yandex Music for discovery. For some reason, I can’t get Spotify to recommend the same amount of new stuff I like. You might need a proxy though because the content there is region-locked. Also I used both Yandex and Spotify for free, it’s just fine on desktop with Ublock Origin.
How about FM radio waves?
So you can hear the same 5 songs on repeat interspersed with tons of commercials?
Radio fucking sucks, amigo. Literally the most homogeneous playlists ever unless you are close enough to a college radio station or a major city that can support anything other than top 40 or the same 100 classic rock songs.
I discover more ads than music that way
Ah yeah I love hearing the same 30 songs over and over again with 60% ads, great idea
This is why I’ll never feel bad pirating any music found on the radio.
This seems to be the standard music streaming experience
Spotify has always been a pain in the ass. For the longest time you couldn’t listen to a single song someone shared because they forced you to create an account.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
I don’t know why I feel like this is okay for Spotify to do but not YouTube.
My thinking is clearly flawed
Yup, either require an account to use the service, or don’t. Don’t do some weird middleground. It totally makes sense for saving playlists or whatever.
To enlighten our android-using brothers and sisters… https://xmanager.app/ is a good way to enjoy spotify if you insist on using it.
Do you know if it it works with Android Auto?
Yes, this is an installer for modded Spotify.
For Android Auto though you need to turn on developer mode and enable unknown apps to be shown – it won’t recognise the modded app by default.
After that it’s fine in my experience.
I use Spotube, which avoids their app entirely. not super stable, tho
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I switched to Tidal from Spotify because as secure my password is, I would always be intereupted mid-listening by my app putting on a shitty random music (often RAP) and discovered that there was an underground operation of people using pirated accounts to inflate stream numbers to get into the popular playlists. And with Tidal I can use Tidal-DL to download flacs to my Navidrome server which is cool.
this happened to me as well and i have no idea how. fascinating
Does it work with JellyFin as well?
Ugh, spotify soot again?
At least according to spotify (it would probably be illegal for them to lie anyways), Spotify pays almost 70% of revenue to rights-holders (whoever distributes the thing, e.g. record labels), which means they take about the same cut as Steam. Good luck complaining about that.
You often see people citing the $.003 per stream for rights-holders figure for Spotify. That’s not exactly what Spotify decides! Spotify pays rights-holders share of the 70% of the revenue based on how much they were streamed. TL;DR: Spotify pays rights-holders slices of pie based on how much their artists help bake. So, if artists aren’t getting payed enough, Spotify simply isn’t getting enough revenue despite reinventing radio for its free tier!
Not to mention how certain rights-holders (fortunately not DistroKid) gobble royalties away from artists. And, the author’s solution to (insert @Nougat’s comment here)?
(On a side note: I hate Tidal free, because it “doesn’t” have ads! Every single interruption I’ve encountered so far is the generic Tidal announcer telling me to subscribe to premium. Sometimes I even get a freaking video “ad” on cellular data telling me the same thing, and there are only 4 “ads” in total! There’s no variety! It’s just repeating! Aaaaaaaaa (dw just yelling me name
For what its worth (and its totally fine if you dont see it the same way) a free service that is promoting itself is a special type of advertisement and should be excluded from talking about ad supported content or when using just the phrase ads
That being said it is still equally disruptive but its not trying to schill you something you arent already committed to using and for free service thats an entirely fair way for them to try to get new subscribers and seems more like promotion than advertising
Agree to disagree but i do think its an important distinction when discussing ads
My current rules are that I’m gonna spend £10 a month on music (what I’d be paying Spotify) and try to buy directly from artists. I’ll allow myself listening to stuff on Youtube so I can gauge whether or not I wanna then go ahead and buy a song or an album if I’ve listened to it enough times and want it in my library.
So … it’s okay to listen to it for free on YouTube and maybe buy it directly, but not to pay a Spotify subscription and listen to it there (and also maybe buy it directly)? The whole rant about “Spotify doesn’t pay musicians very much” comes off as disingenuous.
The amazing mental gymnastics that these people go through to justify their piracy and inane behaviors.
Musician’s pay is just the excuse of the day for them to feel okay about what they’re doing. Honestly, if you are gonna pirate then just pirate, stop pretending that it’s for a good cause or higher purpose, other than to keep your own wallets stacked.
You could’ve replied to 100 comments on this thread about piracy but you replied to the one that had nothing to do with it.
Fai point, but regardless it seems to have struck a nerve with the piracy crowd.
I don’t have beef with piracy itself but I found it hilarious the number of pirates here standing on their soapboxes, pretending to be some kind of modern day Robin Hood and virtue signaling super hard.
Guys, you are still ripping off artists and content creators regardless of their deals with media company, just admit you want shit for free.
Honestly? No, while I do still pirate, I am slowly buying all the music I can buy in form of vynils records and CDs, other than digital downloads from bandacamp.
Watching for free on YouTube is not piracy, and laughably, I’d say it is better than using Spotify that quite literally exploits artists for cents.
