As soon as I need to subscribe to multiple services to find my music I’m going back to piracy. Fuck that anti consumer shit.
You should already be going back to piracy. Spotify is scamming you and artists.
fun fact:
Jellyfin works for music (and audio books) just as well as it does for movies and TV shows!
And being open source, there are apps specific to certain use cases. Like on ios there’s Finamp for music and Plappa for audio books.
It also streams in FLAC quality!
Plex also has Plexamp which works great for music, if you’re like me and got the lifetime Plex pass long ago.
Lifetime Plex Pass here too. I got it long ago.
I still migrated my server and uninstalled it once I tried Jellyfin for a few days because of the performance difference alone.
yee, so far I haven’t found anything close to Plexamp on features that I want, that lifetime license paid for itself a long time ago
Is there a FOSS music discovery service? I like to listen to 1920’ to 1960’, and the radios and discovery in those era on Spotify work extremely well.
I’m not sure. In my case with Jellyfin it’s fully self-hosted and not connected to any kind of discovery service.
I appreciate the value of automated music discovery services. I listened to so much last.fm in the early days of it. But like I have posted about before, I have been trying the old fashioned way lately and liking it a lot. I search for the best bands, best songs, best albums of a certain genre or period. It gives me some listicles on music websites and some discussions between what seem like real people, etc.
So then I just start downloading entire albums or discographies, and then work those in to listen at work. Maybe listen to albums as albums, or shuffle play all songs from the artist, or make a playlist, or just shuffle play my entire library.
When a song really jumps out at me, I’ll generally add it to my ever-growing playlist.
The piracy service still sucks compared to Spotify.
Another annoying part about this is how well everything is integrated.
- I can switch my playback between mobile phone, PC, and living room sound system at any time
- I can join a playback session on a Bluetooth speaker that a friend started to skip or queue songs
All of that is driven by monopoly which is bad, sure, but shit’s convenient af
Yeah I’ve trying to get away from Spotify for years. I still pay for Tidal and yt music too but Spotify service is unmatched by anything out there. It’s not even close.
I used an old ipod to put my songs on, as well as an old iPhone since Apple.has a decent default music player versus the free version of Spotify.
Because piracy is way better for artists
I would guess it has a healthier impact on artists as a group than Spotify does, yeah.
Probably I should develop other habits, but I find hard to improve the amount of good discoveries I got through Spotify with barely no effort… I do the effort to “obtain” those I like from time to time, yet still the effort is low, efficient and worth of it
My fear is, when do those turn into trashy AI music so they don’t have to pay artists.
I have doubts trashy AI music can trigger me at all… in any case nothing is forever, so I am paying attention to the drift in the offer and quality, at current pace my forecast is that within 5 years my musical habits will have drifted away from spotify to something I do not know yet…
The only continum in my whole life is my ever growing offline library, modernized with technology pace, and that is fed regularly and more likely will be preserved… and if someday I lost everything, I will still have my love for the music I find worthy to remember…
nummy treats
tbh you can get by with skipping whole pirate thing and just listen to local and internet radio there’s still a lot of good things out there
Boy, this band’s name sure made this headline confusing.
I didn’t realize this was band related until your post
I’m only vaguely aware of them because one of their songs was used as the House theme, and I still thought the article was describing an upcoming cyber attack on Spotify.
I wish more bands I like were on bandcamp
Tidal HiFi is really good, better sound quality, has most music.
They also pay the artists better.
Its also cheaper, somehow.
my only complaint with tidal is they such at properly assigning music to the correct artists. i’ve opened tickets by contacting their twitter and they sometimes fix the issue but only until the next release of a song
TBH if you’re an artist you’ll probably make more money by NOT being on streaming platforms and having people buy your music directly - spotify in particular pays fuck all, you might as well have your music on The Pirate Bay. Hell, putting your own music on pirating platforms is probably better for discovery, and people who like your music will buy the albums.
Spotify must die
I had friends try to get me into Spotify, never liked it.
I use antennaPod for podcasts, highly recommend
Fellow AntennaPod user. All my podcasts I listened to elsewhere, no adds, no political bullshit, all good.
Yeah an amazing podcast app
Have you guys read the article ? Spotify is denying the claim of massive attack and other platforms as misinformation, they are claiming that the firm the CEO invested in is only working towards military defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. I don’t know what is true and don’t have the time to check, but it looks to me like a decent response if true.
Not saying Spotify isn’t problematic, but that might be overblown misinformation.
Then again, if you want to cancel Spotify, good, I’m all for it, I don’t like the enshitification they are undergoing. But this reason might not be the one you should put on the resignation form, it might not send the right message to Spotify.
The company, Helsing, pledges to only sell towards democratic governments. I think it’s a very slippery slope. In my opinion, once you’ve taken a step towards the military industrial complex, you are the military industrial complex.
I’m not sure how much funding came from the profits of Spotify. It could have come from other investments. Ultimately, you have Spotify leadership involved in a defence company that makes drones. Ethically, I don’t like my money going towards someone who invests in this.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and our best ally ever, and really good at licking rocks in the desert too.
They’re more than an ally! According to Mike Huckabee, Israel is America’s wife.
It’s good to have sane and rational people running things, with yearly visits to lick rocks in the desert and everything.
The way we’re heading I sense warp drive and replicators are just around the corner.
Spotify has been shitty from inception IMO. I’ve tried it a couple times at different points and first off, just didn’t like the UX at all.
The “free” tier is unusable if you’re an active listener and not the type to just have something, anything, playing as background noise.
My biggest pet peeve with Spotify and most of the other big modern streamers: There’s a tenuous connection between the listed artist and a “real” artist, so there’s no way to tell if you’re listening to something intentionally created that can be found elsewhere, or just procedurally generated slop uploaded by some rando. Google is just as bad if not worse with this since merging Google Play Music with YouTube. Apple seems to get this part right, but I have no other reason to switch.
Anyway, that’s not even touching any political/ethics/business aspects of Spotify. It’s hard to imagine it becoming any shittier, and I’ve always wondered how they have the market share they do. At some point I realized that it’s kind of just the default option for the more casual listener who isn’t already slotted into Apple or Google for everything. Plus it has official, polished integrations with a lot of other apps/ecosystems (e.g. Discord, Xbox).
I’d sooner bring lossless versions of all my stuff local and tag every track by hand than give them any amount of money, but it’s clearly not made for me so that doesn’t mean much.
I’ve been driven more to web radio stations, even terrestrial radio (streamed or actual FM). there are some great free/non-commercial choices out there still with human DJs. (Shout-out to kexp). Human-curated radio is still viable for discovery and going out of your comfort zone musically, and human “taste-makers” still have a place, which is reassuring. There are a few newish low power FM stations around me which are actually good, which is an interesting and unexpected development.
You can put one of the other reasons, such as: a) they pay some podcasters a LOT of money and have one of the worst payouts to artists out of the streaming services b) they donated to the inauguration of a cheeto, c) they are just getting lossless audio, but at a lower quality than some other services
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I read it and also don’t know what’s true beyond the headline which, in my mind, was the key takeaway regardless of the bands motives.
I was a reasonably happy Rhapsody/Napster user until crypto bros bought it and turned it into fucking garbage. They literally broke the damn app (not phone, entire web app) for weeks after some weird change where they put crypto crap into it. It was entirely unusable.
After that I gave up. Spotify has far more support and integrations. I don’t care for Spotify and how little they pay their artists, but it works and support is far wider.
I’d go back to Napster if they weren’t ass as they did actually pay their artists better. Their app footprint is tiny and support is weak. I integrate a lot of stuff with my home assistant and other things; trying to do it with Napster would likely be a frustrating dead end.
Give Qobuz a try. I did the free trials on a few services and found it to be the most feature complete
Because fuck’em, that’s why!
I appreciate the move, bold for them and the fanbase.
Nowadays probably Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, Drake and Taylor Swift together could make an impact if they decide to leave (spoiler: no way)Good. Streaming is for cowards
This news finally made me get off my fat lazy arse and do what I’ve been telling myself to do for far too long…
Hello Qobuz
I love it. The streaming services deserve to die, for their shady practices towards artists…
Because the record labels were so much better…
We are in need of a good alternative, where the money we give the service goes to the artists based on how much we’ve listened to that artist personally, not on some amalgamated metrics. I want to be able to open my account and see I’ve given £2 this month for bandwidth and management costs, £1.20 to Taylor Swift, £1.50 to Massive Attack, £1 to Portishead, etc.
If at any point you can make money by buying accounts and playing your own tracks over and over, then the service has fucked up.
The worst part is every little bit gets chopped up before it ever makes it a musician.
Have to pay a label/publisher, then you have to pay a Metadata distributor, and Spotify, plus any other royalties for samples if they’re used.
Fun times.
I wonder if something could be built based on fediverse technology. Artists could host their own instance of some music library software, and have granular control over how it’s monetized - pay per stream, buy a digital copy of a specific song/album, have monthly fees for different tiers of access, you could maybe even sell merch or concert tickets on it - kind of like Patreon, except the instance owner has full control over what’s offered and how it’s monetized. And then in the client for this new thing, you could have a list of all the instances and choose which ones you want to give money to, and if it spoke ActivityPub, you could integrate some sort of feed into Lemmy/Mastodon/etc clients.
Why bother with the federation if every artist is going to have to host their own instance to keep control of how content is played and monetized?
For the same reasons Lemmy is federated:
- Resilience - if one server goes down, only that one artist’s music becomes unavailable
- Control - if the artist owns the server, they can control it/moderate it as they see fit
You can’t really count on either of those things if you’re putting your music up on Spotify, Tidal, etc.
Edit: there would be nothing stopping several artists from handing together and hosting all their music from a single server/instance, if they wanted to. That’s the point though, there’s choice
Okay, so what I really meant was how federation the way it works here would be of any use. It’d actually make the artist lose all control, as everything gets mirrored.
If we use the federation as nothing but a discovery mechanism for other nodes, I guess it would accomplish those goals. But then you could do it without the federation too. Have a central discovery server so that any apps immediately know where to connect, instead of the user having to choose (federation is confusing for normies, remember?)
Right, ActivityPub would really just be the discovery mechanism, obviously you wouldn’t want the actual music to be mirrored to other instances.
If you use a centralized discovery server, you’re right back to where you are with Spotify - at the mercy of whoever controls the discovery server, and shit out of luck if the discovery server goes down. Federation is only confusing for normies because the clients for popular fediverse apps don’t do a good job of making that part clear (or hiding it away).
Agreed. fwiw Bandcamp is currently kinda like that for their digital tracks tho it was bought out a couple years ago so will begin enshittifying any day now…
Afaik that’s the system youtube uses for videos/streams with youtube premium (and twitch as well with turbo). You can’t see where your money went as the viewet, but supposedly (don’t have sources rn so feel free to correct mr, but I’ve heard multiple creators say this) it’s just the same revenue split as other purchases, applied to the price of your membership and distributed based on what you watch.
This is true. All of the points, and especially the transparency on who gets our money… We are in need of good alternatives, but I don’t think, that transparency is a good business model unfortunately :(
I’m waiting to see how this all will unfold.
Since at least the late 80s record labels sucked, not the streaming services suck. Time to just get rid of copyright on music and audio recordings.
Time to just get rid of copyright on music and audio recordings.
I’m sure the musicians will approve of this solution.
good
Protection
