Music publishers accuse Spotify of 'bait-and-switch subscription scheme'

floofloof@lemmy.ca to News@lemmy.world – 219 points –
Music publishers accuse Spotify of 'bait-and-switch subscription scheme'
engadget.com
10

I thought the music companies were the 70%+ shareholders of Spotify

Just canceled mine today, hardly used it the past few years anyway because of funkwhale and yt revanced.

How is Youtube music?

Spotify wants another $2 per month from me for "numerous improvements and fixes", like putting Joe Rogan right in my face everytime I start up and not shuffling properly.

I think ts great! Sound quality is as good or better. Ive always discovered new music more from yt than Spotify personally so it has about 10+ years of my listening habits to go on and it dies a good job finding new stuff I like

While downloading is technically locked for free {even revanced) users ther are appa like newpipe or ytdlp that you can use to rip the audio in various formats. .

For organizing large collections and playlists I think both Spotify and YouTube are not really good but yt music on the desktop/webui is great where Spotify has a better interface for their mobile app. This might be more of a me problem though because I prefer organizing my collection offline using something like ex falso and musicbrains picard.

In terms of music library size they are pretty much equal, I used soundiiz ($5 service) to export and sync my library from spotify to yt and it got most everything, playlists included.

I think overall it might take some adjusting to if you're very used to Spotify and its UI but its a very suitable replacement.

Hmm what am I missing here...

Spotify is raising prices because it wants to sell product "B" next to "A" that it already had. But now the management of Product A is claiming that the extra money from raised prices belongs to them because spotify was selling A first?

That is quite ballsy ... granted I expected nothing less from the greedy music industry, but this is quite on a new level.

Okay so in plain terms (from what I can tell) they’re arguing that Spotify isn’t paying them enough because they have product A and product B. A bundle of A and B has their prices raised but only costs a dollar more than product A with its costs raised. So they’re arguing that they deserve a larger part of product A since B clearly isn’t adding much value to their platform.

Then additionally they claim that by offering product B as a standalone subscription, the price they’re setting for product B only serves to allow Spotify to pay them less for A in those bundles.

This makes sense because it’s a good way to reduce the money paid to the music side of the business by inserting new things into their services and then claiming that the new rate increases are due to that new service (that they don’t have to pay out as much to audio book companies for).

It's clear that they made an end run around the rules, laws and agreements they made.

I hope some judge throws the book in their face for it and forces them to pay out of their profits to the artists at the rate they agreed was fair before they began selling audiobooks.

Spotify is predatory and isn't paying artists enough for their content but a lot of anti spotify news anymore is envious and just as predatory music companies trying to take a bite out of them.

Spotify is no worse than anyone else except very lesser known artists can put their music on here and actually have a chance at exposure that other platforms don't offer.

Overall 6/10. I've tried other music streaming platforms and methods and in my opinion Spotify has what I want. Everyone will price gouge if they could. But I especially will never use YT music.