Boycott spotify +1
Spotify: the company that continues to find ways to make YouTube play music not a horrible choice.
Like… How the fuck.
I mean yeah, I have a Revanced yt music app so I don’t have to worry about ads or anything. It works damn near identical to Spotify too.
Mine stopped working last week. Did they release new patches yet?
Not sure, I’ve been using one from a year or two ago, and it hasn’t stopped working for me yet. I do get some prompts to upgrade to premium, but I can just ignore them.
I just upgraded to .52 it seems to be workable again.
was probably just a specific patch level running on it.
I’m out of the loop. Why is there a Spotify boycott?
The biggest band out of Bristol have told their record label to pull all their songs from music streaming app Spotify, in protest at its founder investing more than £500 million in a military AI company
They’ve been changing their terms of service over the past year with some shady stuff and have continuously screwed over creators. I’m planning on yanking my music out of there too.
I’ve been a Pandora subscriber for years because it’s just a better service for music nerds imo. Their “radio” function goes way deeper into catalogs than Spotify ever did. Someone please tell me they’re not run by fascists
The parent company , XM Radio, donated to Trump and gives fascists a platform. Also their pay out to artists are among the lowest.
Which is a real shame because I’ve discovered so many good non-mainstream artists thanks to Pandora’s algorithm.
D’oh!
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.
This is just not true. If I buy eggs from my neighbor who raises chickens, how is that unethical?
The issue for me is that AI generated music has ruined my experience with Spotify. It started recommending lofi beats (easy to generate with AI) and I didn’t want to spend weeks pushing the algorithm to not have it recommend me that crap.
Other users have complained about the downturn in quality of the weekly recommendations, which is what kept me there in the first place.
SoundCloud appears to have better recommendations for the type of music I like.
https://mashable.com/article/spotify-ai-generated-songs-dead-artists-pages
Yeah, +1 for SoundCloud, depending on your tastes their reccomendarions/stations have been pretty top notch.
I’m not sure if you’d call this a “boycott”, but many people have also just never used Spotify because they care more about supporting musicians than convenience.
Likely because of that old military investment drama where a company making drones for Ukraine and EU defence did an investment round and spotify joined, which prompted every russian bot farm to attack spotify because of it. As an European, I feel like paying them even if I don’t use spotify.
Ohhhh that’s a band’s name
Great band.
Mezzanine is a masterpiece. It could’ve been released yesterday. The sound is timeless.
One of the best albums ever made
Literally listened to it yesterday. I never get tired of it
I only know the House M.D. intro song, but I do like it. Mezzanine, I think?
Mezzanine is the album, the song is an instrumental version of Teardrop
Teardrop.
(Mezzanine is the album)
check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfCylD7YOEg
First discovered Massive Attack from the soundtrack of the movie Hackers, which came out 30 years ago this week.
🫡
If not for the improper title capitalization in the headline, it hella reads like a hacker or group of hackers attempting to delete every song on the service. 🤣
deleted by creator
I develop kew (a terminal music player), so I’m biased, but I started kew because I rejected Spotify many years ago.
I think that kew (or other private/offline music players) together with flacs from Qobuz are actually a great alternative to Spotify. Throw in some Bandcamp albums in there for great justice. Once you have a decent collection, you will feel liberated.
I especially think that Qobuz needs more exposure.
I LOVE KEW, THANKS FOR MAKING IT! ive used it for years with my CD collection and it beats out everything in comparison.
Hey, thanks, appreciate it.
I love Lemmy so much cause there’s people that make me feel dumb, and no one that makes me feel smart. It pretty fucking refreshing!
Also thanks so much for your hard work. I got you on a small donation.
Edit: super git ignorant, guessing code berg doesn’t have that button. You got a “buy me a coffee” type thing set up?
Yes I do : https://ko-fi.com/ravachol. Thank you so much!
I love Lemmy so much cause there’s people that make me feel dumb, and no one that makes me feel smart. It pretty fucking refreshing!
Just don’t read comments on political posts
Real, no matter what it’s a purity test and there are no true Scotsmen
Not to be stupid (I’m new to trying to get my shit offline and go back to physical media / owning digital copies of all my media) what is a “terminal music player”? I love finding these sorts of projects in my quest to take back my time and money!
It’s a music player for POSIX terminals that you can find on Linux, macOS and FreeBSD.
It looks like this:
Oh nice! Thank you for the screenshot!!
Oh, that’s really 'kew. Excellent naming. I’m so snagging this now :D.
Oooh nice, it’s even in Debian repositories 👍 Trying it out now.
I’ve been using bandcamp for years, and I feel pretty good about it. I’d spend about $10/month and get 1-2 albums, and now I have a pretty big collection. I’ve been unemployed so I haven’t bought new music, but my library is still here and ad-free.
Bandcamp might enshittify, since it’s privately owned, so make sure you download the drm-free copy of anything you buy.
Bandcamp is better than Spotify - Ampwall is better than Bandcamp. It’s artist owned (developed by Chris from the non-fash Black Metal band Woe). The fees are much, much lower than Bandcamp.
Bandcamp has “Bandcamp Fridays” when 100% of the sales go to the artists. The next ones are on October 3rd and December 5th.
In the Ampwall business model the artists pay to upload their music but listening is free.
Sounds fine for hobby musicians, but not for anyone professional.
Problem is ampwall basically has a non viable business model beyond it’s current scale. So it’s likely to never really replace other options. It’s good to have around tho.
Why is Ampwall’s business model non-viable?
Interesting. Haven’t heard of this one but from their FAQ and writing it sounds interesting.
Not sure if a subscription fee for artists will work. Bigger ones can certainly afford it.
The main problem as I see it now is what any new platform has: getting people to use it.
Bandcamp was sold to Epic Games who then sold it on.
The outlook isn’t great for Bandcamp, but I can’t see any better alternative that supports new artists to the same degree.
I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop, but it’s been like 2 years with no changes (knock on wood).
BTW check out the little Bandcamp instance we have here~ Post your favorite album!
Which is great and all, but Massive Attack aren’t on that either.
Bonus points for purchasing on bandcamp fridays (more money goes to the artists). Two left in 2025: Oct 3 and Dec 5.
We post a lot of Bandcamp links on [email protected] because the free song streaming is great and a lot of bands are on there. Eventually they’ll enshittify and get rid of the free streaming or require a signin at which point I’ll move on to something else (dunno what?!)
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.
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
Good on them, fuck Spotify
First band on my playlists that is actually removing their music. I’ll probably need to look at an alternate service now. Or build my own service.
Bandcamp is probably the best for the artists. If you want something more similar to spotify, Deezer and Tidal both pay artists better than Spotify if I remember correctly. And neither of them have done anything like platforming Joe fucking Rogan. Though it’s possible that they have done something terrible that I missed. At least a good place to start looking.
Deezer’s largest shareholder is Access Industries, Inc which was founded by Len Blavatnik. He’s one of the ~50 individuals on whom sanctions were imposed in June 2024 by Volodymyr Zelenskyy and has been pumping money into efforts to sway public opinion in favor of Israeli genociders.
Oh FFS. Guess I’m just going back to piracy, somehow the most moral option.
Well…shit. Good to know.
Anyone know if Tidal is affiliated with genocide, Russian oligarchs, or other atrocities? Or if there are other better options?
Not that I am aware. They were built around treating artists better. They will enshitify eventually as that is to be expected now with any company, but their payouts to artists being proportionally higher and their superior sound quality to almost anything short of quboz makes them a good choice for now. Also their new music recommendation algorithm is quite good.
Yeah, I’ll probably look at Deezer (if it also has podcast integration). The Spotify app has become more buggy and shit over the years anyway.
Deezer does have podcast integration, though I haven’t used it for that yet.
Yeah, looks like it does, but it doesn’t appear to have all the podcasts I follow on Spotify.
Yeah, usually it’s some old hippy like Neil Young that I’ve never listened to anyway.
evicting JOE rogan would be goodstart from spotify
Simple maths. How many customers does it cost us to platform assholes, conspiracy nuts and nazis, and how many customers does it get us?
Adding to that how much they pay the idiot, I feel the balance is tipping towards firing him.
if spotify is getting too much people dropping the service, because of him, they would terminate his role on the MUSIC PLATFORM.
The damage is done. Even if they declined to renew his contract (they wont because the fascists will threaten them) it is just too late. Unfortunately most music is owned by production companies and the individual artists do not have distribution rights to wield against Spotify.
No one should use garbage Spotify!
Honest question, how else do I easily discover music that matches my taste if I don’t use a streaming service?
Spotify isn’t the only streaming service, it’s just one of the worst, like ethically.
and to answer your question there are sites like Rate Your Music that let you find albums similar to albums you like.
Which one is ethical and not shit? I left Google play music because it turned into a worse version of itself with a half baked rebrand. Didn’t care for tidal much.
The most ethical music streaming service is probably Qobuz, followed by Tidal. If those are too niche for you, the next best in artist payout would be Apple, then Deezer and YouTube Music. And the only one worse than Spotify is Amazon.
Spotify is like 3usd in my home country. Any app that does price matching?
Price matching?
What I meant is more like a competitive price, or at least a regional price. Residing in Turkey rn and the only affordable things are the ones with regional prices
I’ve made several efforts to try out Deezer, tidal and Qobuz. Their library just comes up short within 2-3 searches for some of the more niche stuff I want to listen to. Depending on what you listen to they can be great, I’m sure, I’d much prefer using Qobuz but for completeness… I assume the only ones that come close are Amazon and Apple and at that point, why even switch?
Apple is actually a much better choice than Spotify. My numbers are a few years old but iirc, Apple pays artists almost twice as much as Spotify. Only Amazon has a worse artist payout than Spotify. Of course, Tidal and Qobuz are still much better than Apple but they also have the limitations you’ve mentioned. Oh and Apple and the others don’t fill out playlists with AI generated music so they themselves can get the payout for the plays. You know, like Spotify does. Realistically, even YouTube Music is more ethical than Spotify these days and that’s saying something.
- Talk to other human beings about music.
Music is not meant to be a solitary hobby. Share what you like, they’ll share what they like.
- Like a piece of music? Look up that producer, or record label if it’s small. Look up the session musicians. Don’t just look up the artist.
Generally it’s not just the artist that makes the music top tier. There are other great professionals involved in the background and good people hire other good people to work in the background.
This is easy. Once you start doing this you end up with a queue of albums you want to get round to listening to. It’s easy enough to find too much music yourself without an algorithm. You start finding the artist radio a waste of your time.
The rabbit holes I’ve been down following a producer, guitarist, or bassist, etc. are usually very rewarding and often you pop up in another place you knew already after finding out about some lesser known great music on the way.
Number 1 is extremely slow, and I like so many tracks nobody I know likes. And if I look up similar artists on Spotify I instantly have the ability to listen to music instead of digging through record labels then manually searching for tracks on… I guess YouTube?
Spotify instantly gives you what the record companies paid for the algorithm to give you.
“Digging” isn’t hard. Give it a go.
But it sounds like you’re listed to “tracks” not albums. Frankly that’s your biggest mistake.
If you like lots of tracks other people don’t, you’ll always be struggling against an algorithm trying to feed you 3 minute songs nobody hates.
Listen to albums and every time you follow a rabbit hole you’ll have 40-80 minutes of music to listen to at least once, multiple times if it’s good.
You’ll find albums that are worth listening to as a whole and some you’ll keep tracks in playlists.
Personally I moved from CDs to Spotify to YouTube music, to buying CDs again, soon to have them on Jellyfin.
Once you get into actually listening to albums, 3 or 4 albums from eBay or charity shops are what I’d have paid for a subscription and if I need to take a break I’ve still got my old music and don’t have any more to pay.
You can of course sail the high seas if you’re strapped for cash or want things instantly. I consider the big 3 labels harmful and have only bought second hand copies. I try to buy from independents and smaller labels when I can directly.
The harm of the major labels is pretty big and frankly streaming has become their most harmful tool. I want to avoid supporting that model or supporting the big 3.
I don’t fully agree with your first paragraph. My release radar is always chalk full of new releases by artists I enjoy.
Digging? I’ve given that a go when I was a kid/teen. I don’t have hours to spend aimlessly surfing and finding music like I used to. I just can’t be bothered anymore.
I’m not struggling against an algorithm, quite the opposite actually. I like some music in different languages too andi get good recommendations based on those as well.
I get it, ra ra Spotify bad. But it’s been all right for me.
My Spotify library does end up on plexamp
I’ve been using listenbrainz for a bit, and it’s pretty good.
Honest question: I discover at maximum 1 new song that I like per week. I listen to metal and hard electronic music. As soon as the song has 20 seconds of intro I skip it. Spotify only suggests songs with long intros or songs that are just growling, which I don’t like too much, or that electronic over saturated sound where you only have bass and nothing else.
How can I discover new songs that I like there?
I like mixcloud, my partner likes bandcamp. Both have pros and cons.
Potentially I Heart Radio to listen to various artists, then internet search to purchase their albums.
Might have to bring back mix tapes and record favourite songs over digital radio!
People in here looking for less evil alternatives to Spotify and you suggest Clear Channel, the company that killed local radio broadcasting and enshittified the airwaves long ago?
Sorry, i didn’t know about that. We still have local radio here in Australia, so it’s not so dire down here.
Spotify used to do that very well, but the last years it enshittified. Now it’s very difficult to find new artists or new music, heck even finding a playlist that isn’t auto generated by Spotify has become a challenge. Everything is now pushed by Spotify and they select which artists you listen to, the artists that make Spotify more money.
Personally I’ve been using SoundCloud for the past 10 years at least and it’s been great.
Sorry, nothing against you personally I guess, but I’m getting a little tired of this question.
You’re on social media right now, there are music communities.
Most posts do NOT link Spotify.
Personally I can add a few more sources/habits, but that would seem like the first and most obvious answer.
Music communities/discussion is not the same as spotify music discovery.
Communities can recommend you music that is the same genre as the music you like.
Algorithms can recommend music that you will like as much as your input taste.
Music communities/discussion is not the same as spotify music discovery.
Well they specifically asked “if I don’t use a streaming service”.
Communities can recommend you music that is the same genre as the music you like.
They can, but you can also try something else.
Algorithms can recommend music that you will like as much as your input taste.
To some degree, but there are other ways (better imho) of broadening your horizon.
original comment:
Honest question, how else do I easily discover music that matches my taste if I don’t use a streaming service?
Spotify must die
Totally just bought a Massive Attack shirt from their website. Their “Ceasefire Now” shirts with the Doctors Without Borders quote are amazing.
Merch is usually a better way to support them than buying their music even (they get a bigger share of the sale).
Those shirts are indeed awesome, but $42 (American)?!? That’s insane for a t-shirt. Or maybe I’m just being a curmudgeonly old man.
I see you haven’t bought a band T-shirt in awhile! (also they use materials that have all sorts of fair trade, organic, and social justice certifications) (also I chose one of the $35 ones)
I’m ok with paying premium for band shirts even though they’re just basic tees with a print. It’s my way of supporting the artist aside from attending live shows, because streaming their music doesn’t really do anything, and buying physical CDs/vinyl isn’t practical for me.
Band merchandise is basically a donation with a reward, it’s not meant to compete on price with store-bought clothing.
I don’t quite understand how is protesting the investments into EU drone companies that also supply Ukraine with drones would lead to a ceasefire, but I’m not a mathematician
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.
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.
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
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
Qobuz crew reporting in
Does qobuz pay artists more?
It does!
Seconded!
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
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)
