"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?
I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a "sponsored recommendation".
Why am I seeing ads if I'm already paying for the premium plan!? π
If you're not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
Basically every computer hardware manufacturer is collecting telemetry and sending it home. If youβre using MacOS or Windows, your OS is doing it aswell
Or Android, or iOS, or a Chromebook, or whatever other OS you're using next year, if it isn't some sort of Linux/UNIX system... and even some of those might not be great, but at least you can find out.
Tbh i have used linux on my home pc for years now and now they are very polished products , except most corporate apps are not there !
Which corporate apps?
Perhaps I'm lucky, but I rarely have an issue.
Adobe , microsoft office , catia etc etc etc
I mean.. Android and ChromeOS are Linux underneath. MacOS is.. related to Unix. Hang on, I need to look up that lineage..
Also Lineage.
Edit: MacOS used/uses the Mach kernel, and uses code βderived from BSDβ, vague as Wikipedia is. That could mean itβs a whole copy-paste or that it just borrows ideas from BSD.
It has a history in the US anti trust (when the laws really worked)
MacOS has userland tools from some FreeBSD version (quite obsolete, IIRC). Also there's a port of bhyve called xhyve for MacOS. Its kernel I wouldn't expect to have much in common with BSDs.
You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
But you're paying for the GOOD recommendations now, not the free bad ones... /s
In the immortal words of James Stephanie Sterling "corporations don't just want some money. They want all of the money"
Because why make money off you one way, when they can make money off you two ways?
It seems you can turn it off by touching "what's this?" or "learn more" the next time you see one of these.
Really shitty that they don't even put this as a setting though.
You are always the product when you do not own physical or digital non-DRMed copies of your media.
If you can't reliably and repeatedly play your music in the middle of nowhere 50 miles away from any internet signal, you are the product. Download MP3s and take your music back.
And people on the lemmy.world instance wonder why we fight for the right to talk about piracy.
so i should have like and hdd of 1000tb just to listen to musica and series?
Just like back in the day.
You don't have to carry it all at once, swap playlists around. Carry 300-500 songs at a time, more than enough to really appreciate each song rather than bebombarded with choices
That's cool, and I would pay a small fee for the convenience of not having to carry all that around
Same. Which is why Spotify exists.
They treat your subscription as a promise of continued business. You're literally funding them trying to continue monetizing you and dominating your attention.
Fuck Spotify, fuck Netflix, fuck all of them.
VPN + Stremio
I want FLACs!
I want WAVs.
Just convert it with FFmpeg
I know I can do that.
Have you heard about sarcasm? That's what I was doing.
I thought maybe you thought that WAV was purer than FLAC
Nah, I just like to brag about how the file is uselessly bigger
Look, they ask me at the audio store how I listen to my music when I ordered two amps to try out, just to make sure I don't just use Spotify.
So I guess it's never out of question that people consider WAVs a completely different sound qualities.
You can download lossless with Apple Music and listen to it with no data connection.
Yes, but I want the files themselves, so I can back them up and not worrying about losing them in the future.
The lesson is that corporations will take, take, take no matter what. They will never honor any kind of social contract, and will always abuse anyone and everyone for profit to the maximum extent they are able.
So stop letting them take advantage of you.
And if they make a mistake, "my bad". You make a mistake and it's $100 in fees.
Unless, usually, they are a not for profit organization.
Or at least not a corporation that is expected to provide infinite growth for their shareholders.
Even then. Look at the way they pay people and treat volunteers...
And push for legislation that doesn't allow em to do this in the first place.
Cause it doesn't make it right, but on some level it's hard to blame them for pushing the limits, if there's no resistance or repercussion. That's how we ended up in this mess.
Tech moves fast. Government moves slow. Most of these issues boil down to legislative failures.
I go hard when it comes to this. Firefox + uBlock Origin, use open source alternatives, don't communicate outside of Signal, 2FA on everything, you name it. And it's exhausting at times, not gonna lie. But my effort reinforces my sentiment that it shouldn't fall to the consumer to put in all this effort just to have some a basic, healthy blend of convenience, privacy, and security.
Might I add, I hate the way every user-facing UI has devolved into the Youtube Shorts / TikTok "doomscrolling" swipe-UI now. There seems to be absolutely not a single braincell left in UI development to even consider the actual use case of the interface.
It's all just:
Not sure what this has to do with the post. You don't need to swipe to dismiss that modal.
Hold on! This is a modal?! That's even worse, I had these card-style things as scrollable cards before! π§
what's worse about it? You just need to touch "DISMISS"
That is literally what non-Open Source/capitalism is like:
Man you're absolutely correct. But I've yet to find a simplified music streaming solution that functions as seamlessly across a wide range of devices as Spotify connect does.
I want an alternative... I also don't want to manage a library as extensive as a streaming service's offerings myself. I need convenience.
I have a pretty sizeable local collection, and it can be a pain to manage sometimes. Tagging can become a real pain as well. A real splinter on the scrot.
I recently found Spotube. It uses the Spotify search API then plays the audio from youtube. Basically spotify premium for free.
Haven't actually used it yet though.
Spotube looks really interesting. It says that you can use it as anonymous/guest, but it looks like it still requires a Spotify account. I don't have an account, but I might have to make one just to test it out lol
Yeah, reading through the github issues it seems the developer meant you can play stuff logged out but you can't use spotify search without an account so the search doesn't work unless you log in.
Enshittification in action.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it's everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they're locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.
This is because capitalism requires infinite growth.... which is literally fucking impossible so everything either grows infinitely or dies..... or option three: gets so fucking big it abuses governance to prevent itself from dying while murdering it's competition.
I hope they die but I doubt it.
Why do you hope they die? It's not the next one in lune is going to be any better.
I wish there was a way to permanently store this article into people's brains.
Well, not really. But you know what I mean.
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
What I really love about commercials is that if I click on them and order a life time subscription of whatever product they're selling, I'm still gonna get the same commercials.
People defend intrusive advertising by appealing to some sort of social contract (ie you suffer through these things in order to get Spotify or whatever for free) but it's not a social contract if the platform holds all the cards
Are we getting Spotify for free, if we're buying premium?
The problem is you can't "buy" products any more. Companies see that as interest, and then start to throw additional advertising to see how much they can get away with. Fuck that shit.
They've also run almost any way to do it outside of their ecosystems. If I want to listen to happy hardcore music, I have to hope spotify has it, but it's rare to find that on most playlists, I'd have to go spend thousands of dollars for the same experience that Spotify offers, and that's to own every track I'm even curious about.
Well we can always pirate !
Yo ho, yo ho!
Advertisements are now pretending to be recommendations
Haven't ads always been recommendations in some roundabout way? Regular ads are technically just a company recommending their own product/service to you (whether you need it or not).
I mean, real life recommendations are more often than not that too. I mean, ones you get asking friends.
Spotify is garbage. You pay them to basically pirate unlimited music (they pay table scraps). They have no values or integrity, but they do have a greedy business model.
I buy albums off bandcamp instead. Or from the artist's site directly.
A bit difficult if you want to just stream random music that somehow matches your interests.
There's other streaming services. I'd recommend any over Spotify.
Which one do you prefer / recommend?
Soundcloud is one! Some artists let you download their music and others don't. Other than than Soundcloud isn't open source, I don't see what's wrong with them.
Bandcamp is DRM-free, so whatever you buy there, you truly own it. Unlike on most other platforms.
It's personally a catch 22 for me.
I listen to an absolutely absurd amounts of different artists. A large portion of them simply don't have albums available for purchase and if they did... I would actually go broke buying all the stuff I listen to.
Every single day I type in a Combo of 2 random letters and numbers into spotify and listen to the first artist I don't recognize.
It really sucks that Spotify doesn't pay the artists anything reasonable but I haven't found an alternative that allows me to consume as much different music as I currently do.
This isn't even including the podcasts and audio books into the equation.
Why letters and numbers?
Some artists use numbers in their names and adding numbers will change what the search returns sometimes with odd results.
Honestly it's a shame that most good music pirating sites have gone to the shitter, literally the only way to actually pirate and own music I could find via searching vigorously was through youtube to MP3 converters.
rutracker and soulseek are good options for finding music.
Greedy business model seems slightly unfair tbh. Spotify struggles to remain profitable and theyβve only raised their prices by like $1 in a decade
Maybe they shouldn't've thrown so much money into the pivot to podcasts, then thrown a bunch of money at that meathead idiot.
Just because they're incompetent doesn't mean they're not greedy.
Also, executives can still be cleaning up even as the company struggles to profit.
yeah, it's not spotify's fault that splitting $10/month between all the music you listen to doesn't pay the artists very much.
Yea, companies that pay more typically either charge more (Tidal) or have the advantage of a massive profitable company backing them (Apple Music)
Yeah they have been playing fast and loose with their 'premium' plan for a while. I cancelled and switched when they started serving ads to podcasts (not the baked-in ones from the podcast - dynamic ads inserted by Spotify).
It's insulting that they would pull this crap and embarrassing that we all put up with it.
I stopped using Spotify after I noticed that a song's share URL contains unique tracking elements. Then they started trying to lock down the podcast market, which reaffirms that leaving was the right choice.
I switched to Deezer for the pod cast issue. My favourite pod cast kept being deleted from Spotify. Owner said it was Spotify at fault. Also had issues with offline mode.
Deezer is awesome.
Deezer nu-
thats where you made a mistake
About a year ago I switched from Spotify to a local library with the Symfonium music player on my phone and Rhythmbox on the PC. I have not once looked back.
Plus, you get the satisfaction of growing a collection that can last forever.
I highly recommend it !
may I recommend Strawberry on desktop? It's really nice to use with large collections! https://i.imgur.com/ViOJK6B.png
Why does my Strawberry look like it's from 1999 :/
GTK theme issue?
if you're on windows it cant really theme that well, but if you're on linux you can use qt6ct to retheme it to look a bit newer, i'm using the "kvantum-dark" theme
I've tried it, not my cup of tea. Rhythmbox conforms to my GTK4 theme a lot better, and the layout is so much more suited for me.
I feel that Strawberry's layout is ugly as sin, but hey, everyone seems to think Rhythmbox is ugly so maybe that's just me.
I admire any active music library management app tho. Seems like there aren't that many people with local music libraries anymore, so we don't get many new apps like Strawberry or Rhythmbox where MTP transfers, tag editing, lyrics, etc are big focuses. So cheers to the devs of Strawberry and thanks for the recommendation!
My dream is for Rhythmbox to be ported to libadwaita, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. All the latest GTK4 music players are extremely simple, with no library management features whatsoever. Think Amberol, GNOME Music, and G4Music. I wish I had learned some C when I was young and had the time so I could just port it myself.
Yes!
You paid yes but... what if MORE money?
But think of the poor billionaires!
I hear you, tell me more!
Yeah, I dropped Spotify when they started plastering my home screen with ads for podcasts that I didn't want to listen to. If there had even just been a way to hide them after the fact, but no. I guess they really needed to justify the deal with Joe Rogan.
"What are you gonna do? NOT use us? lmao owned." - Spotify
Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal waving furiously Pick me! Pick me!
I haven't tried all of those, but I like Deezer. It plays music and it's much less pushy about podcasts or other crap that Spotify always clutters your start page with. The queue interface is also simpler to use. The only downside I see is that search is noticeably slower than Spotify on desktop.
Deezer nuts lmao
Just buying the mp3s and having them forever.
Aren't you buing just the license to play it, though? Like, if they delete them from their catalogue you can't listen to them anymore?
Not unless you're "buying" it from some service that doesn't let you download the file. Definitely don't do that.
Yeah it's odd for it to act cocky when it's actually one of the few modern service products that has plenty of competition that people are willing to use.
Get 'vanced lmao
Android auto, doesn't have an app
Apple Music has better audio quality and pays artists better.
I just use InnerTune on Android.
Spotify pissed me off with some billing or API thing (don't even remember the details) back in 2012, so I cancelled and never looked back. From what I'm reading now and then things is just getting worse and worse - and I have no clue why people (especially paying ones) are sticking with it.
My whole family uses it, and itβs fine (the paid plan). People just want to hate on Spotify in this thread. More power to them, but itβs nowhere near as horrible as they describe. I get all my music and podcasts from there.
I just cancelled Spotify and switched to Tidal a few months ago exactly because of shenanigans like this. I was getting popups to look at recommended eBooks that I had to buy.
That was it for me and I cancelled immediately. Between the ads and the countless bugs and issues I had while using their app, glad I made the change. Been a premium member with Spotify for almost 10 years.
I did the same, but it was because my card expired and instead of updating the details and having my premium plan continue as usual, they slyly took the opportunity and upgraded me to the duo plan which cost a few quid extra without my consent.
Since I never asked for this and because cards expire all the time, I decided not to take this punishment/con and decided to take my money elsewhere. Tidal has been great outside of voice assistant compatibility
To Spotify's credit, when I cancelled, I forgot and did it 2 days after it renewed and asked customer service for a refund. They did it no questions asked
In a similar boat but switched to Apple Music. I tried Tidal for a couple of months but it seemed like they are more interested in promoting BeyoncΓ© and other friends of the owner than to help me discover music I love.
Made that switch two years ago, still absolutely love Tidal. Wish it had a WearOS app but I'll take hot with the higher quality sound and no-bullshit app
I canceled after the first time they did this with the "Drake takeover" in 2018. Their customer support claimed it wasn't advertisement, lmao.
Haha I also complained about that on their support forum. They claimed it was a recommendation.
Coincidentally this is the reason I quit Tidal after just a couple of months: they would push commercial hip-hop artists everywhere even though I am not into that.
xManager if you're on Android.
I've been to their website and GitHub and I still don't understand what the app does. Could you give a quick eli5?
It's kind of like a hub, where you can download and update modded Spotify.
In the modded Spotify, you have all the benefits of a premium account and actually more because the modded version provides its own benefit, minus downloading.
I'm scared of using that tbh, cause last time I used a modde version of Spotify (simply the tablet apk on android so it would let me play individual songs), they found out and sent me an email saying that they have the rights to delete my account and my playlists if it were to happen again.
Make an alt account, and follow your playlists of your main account :)
Ah gotcha. Thanks!
It's funny because the radio industry used to have this pay-to-play model. It began to be called "payola" and triggered a huge controversy including congressional investigations and an FCC crackdown. Yet here we are, with the same shit happening again in digital format. This is honestly worse than payola since radio was free and this is not. I don't like paying to be advertised to. Considering leaving Spotify; there seem to be more and more shenanigans like this popping up, AND their subscription price just increased!
I work in the radio industry (digital side) and have to sign a payola contract every year.
The Wikipedia article says "payola" is an illegal practice and that text links to "commercial bribery" - so are they starting to get bribed into doing stuff like this too even though it's a paid service? That "they want all the money" statement must go deeper than I thought.
Once in a while here, for the rest no ads in the slightest here in the Netherlands, itβs all Gucci.
delete Spotify. it's toxic
I haven't had any issues with Spotify. I've discovered a bunch of new artists since joining a couolr years ago. I even remember the very first. I had no idea who Token was. Now I'm a fan. What's wrong with this kind of thing? I'll admit it's not as good as old fashioned radio used to be but it's still great, and being ad-free when paid is pretty amazing.
Nothing wrong with discovery, though masquerading an ad as an algorithm recommendation is super shady.
That said, Spotify has a track record of treating artists horribly. It also has atrocious sound quality compared to every other service out there.
I'm using Tidal. Has one of the highest artist pay out rates, and top notch quality.
Man tidal is nice. It also seems to be curated by people who actually care about music. The recommendations it has given me have been amazing.
You happen to know of a nontoxic alternative that doesn't involve torrenting?
Modded Spotify Premium w/ gold theme by RockMods, download from Mobilism. Works really well, been using it for months. Checks out with all the antivirus scanners I use, and most stuff on Mobilism is safe (there's exceptions of course, but I'm sure you know how to be safe if you mention torrenting). Create a separate spotify account for it just in case it gets "fixed" though. Seems well supported by updates. Much better to the alternative - torrent client for downloading 'Linux ISOs'...
If you don't own the music/games/movies you pay for, you are always the product.
I think with Spotify the artists are the product.
I pay for Amazon Prime music premium or some shit, and about a month ago they started putting an ad up literally every time I log in telling me to subscribe to super-duper premium or whatever the fuck they call it. Seriously guys? How about no?
GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.
TLDR: You don't need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.
I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn't sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.
Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.
At some point I discovered that some record stores (I'm talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.
When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you'd even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx's "Kilroy Was Here" in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore's P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.
Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.
Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn't I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?
And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.
So I got off. I've started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.
Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I've amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.
But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don't stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you've got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn't have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you've started to play the game of triaging.
In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don't think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify "solved the problem" by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won't believe (because someone's been skinned to get that price, and it wasn't the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).
Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.
Unrelated service, but I use Walmart for their grocery delivery, which I pay for and I have a Walmart+ subscription. In the "my items" section, the section specifically for things I have already purchased before, they recently added sponsored items.
Yes, it's clearly marked but for fucks sake Walmart I'm trying to just get more of stuff I've bought before. You have pages and pages of sponsored stuff elsewhere, leave my items alone!
I recently tried a new feature they added that would add recommended stuff into my already made playlists. I didn't like it and turned it off in the settings, but it still persists in basically advertising music that is completely unrelated to what I have. Like I shouldn't be hearing fucking TikTok by Kesha in my 90's grunge mix. It's all the more infuriating that it continues to act as if it is on when I turned it the fuck off.
For being so sophisticated, it's incredible how dumb the Spotify algorithm is.
For me somehow it decided Pink Moon by Nick Drake was my favourite song. At first it just threw it in the mix randomly when albums finished playing and it went on to play suggestions, but after a few times of me not skipping it it went ballistic. Now every time an album finishes it goes straight to Pink Moon. No matter what Spotify radio I try playing it will be Pink Moon. I keep skipping it and it keeps coming back. I don't have a problem with Nick Drake I just can't stand that song any longer. I never once played that song intentionally.
In the end I just cancelled my subscription.
It feels like they did it on purpose, because the main reason I actually pay for Spotify is because it generally is actually pretty good at recommending songs based on other songs I've checked the like box on, and I was able to find new music that didn't completely suck balls.
This shuffle feature doesn't seem to use the same algorithm. It just shuffles in artists that are currently popular and may have paid for the bump.
Since they believe that they are the landlord and you are a tenant using their product so ... !
Unpopular opinion - in Spotify (and Spotify ONLY) I actually like that it does this. I like discovering new music and Spotify seems to have really good recommendations sometimes. Sure they collect a lot of listening data - but how else could they give good recommendations if they don't know what you like?
I agree with you, but you may be missing the point - this recommendation is sponsored, so likely it wouldn't have been recommended unless the artist paid.
Without this feature, I wouldn't have known that Yeah Yeah Yeahs and PJ Harvey released new albums. So I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm happy artists I already love can still reach me; on the other hand, I hate that smaller artists I don't know about yet still have to pay to play
It's the least offensive type of advertising I see day to day. I couldn't care less how my listening data is shared, and I don't understand the zero tolerance some people have for adverts - it's not all bad.
If they ramp up the adverts, people will vote with their feet.
The crazy thing about paying for Spotify Premium is that their podcasts still run ads! disgusting.
Aren't those from the uploader, not Spotify? I know darknet diaries does sponsors.
Nah, they're not. I'm getting ads in my native language when listening to podcasts in English.
Very interesting.
What sort of ads are you getting? I have premium and podcasts do not have ads aside from the sponsors from within the podcast itself (like how YouTubers do sponsored segments).
Same. I've seen multiple people say this here and I've yet to experience it. Makes me wonder if the particular podcasters they're listening to have opted in to some sort of ad revenue thing from Spotify.
The whole notion of "If you're not the product, then you're the product" died a while ago.
Now, you're paying for the product, and you continue to be the product.
Paying for the product = monthly/yearly subscription You're the product = unique identifiers, data mining/harvesting, tracked across the web, etc. Perhaps even training some AI models in the background, too.
Yup
So this is what "neofeudalism" boils down to?
That's more "the oligarchs own and run everything and you must work for their benefit or you die"
Install ViMusic on Android and all your problems are gone. https://f-droid.org/packages/it.vfsfitvnm.vimusic/
InnerTune is also nice, UI is closer to YouTube Music.
There are about a million YT Music clients on F-Droid
I cancelled my subscription. They're upping the price for the listening even though they've been steadily cutting the payouts to independent artists for years. Support small artists instead.
I don't use Spotify anymore. But I also don't listen to "tons of different music". I have about 200 albums on Bandcamp and I pick up something new every couple weeks. I'm paying money, sometimes as much as a subscription, but I get to keep the music. It supports the artists. Sometimes they even send you a personal message.
Bandcamp got bought by epic and that sucks, but they're still the best music service I know.
Bandcamp hasn't changed at all since the Epic acquisition. Yet, at least. This is from an artist's perspective, too, as I use Bandcamp as essentially my website and main place to push people to if they want to purchase my music rather than stream.
Yeah I was real nervous when it first happened, but nothing has gone sour yet. I have held off some purchases until Bandcamp Friday though as a result.
Same, though I typically try to only purchase on Bandcamp Friday anyway just to further support artists. I mainly use Spotify and just make Bandcamp purchases for stuff that Spotify doesn't have, which is typically small bands, so it's worth it to wait.
That's good to hear. I was pretty concerned.
And Spotify didn't advertise at paying users for almost a decade until, well, today.
Not that I'm a fan of the ridiculous "I tOlD yOu sO" posturing in this thread, given that it's been almost a decade of initially groundbreaking and later reasonably high quality service.
One thing those commenters are right about though is: these companies will pursue profit to the bitter end and ads are a virtual inevitability for any major media platform.
I listened to 9,852 different tracks in 2022 from 3,247 different artists across 6,720 different albums.
It's just not feasible for me to buy them all.
Convenience and family plan is the only reason I have it. I've also got a local DNS server with ads blocked, so that helps. Otherwise I'd be pirating again. Have over 80k songs from back in the day, just need the newer stuff.
Buy CDs from the artists you like, and then rip them to .flac using Exact Audio Copy! π
I use Bandcamp and usually will wait for the days they give artists 100% of the revenue and buy everything I've been waiting on. You get a flac download so you can secure your purchase in case the site shuts down later, but you also have access to streaming.
Bandcamp is great too! I've downloaded everything I've bought from there, but one artist deleted their page and now I can't download what I purchased anymore. That's the only negative I can think about.
Yeah I get that. That's why I immediately download all purchases and back them up off site as well.
Plus, Bandcamp will also recommend new music and related artists. The recommended artists at the bottom of a band/artists's page are listed by the artist themselves, so you can pursue music that inspired the music you like.
Yeah and even the front page recommendations are so much better than anything Spotify ever gave me. Bandcamp is how I found one of my all time favorite bands, Zeal & Ardor.
I also pay for Premium and get these ads. I always think it's funny because it's never anything I'd ever actually want to listen to
Honestly a music platform is one of the only places I would actually welcome targeted ads. Where it can analyze my taste and suggest new music accordingly. But instead they just promote the highest bidder which is always lame pop music.
Never understood why anyone would want to rent their music in the first place. As good as the service may be when you sign up for it, you know it will eventually turn to shit as they're trying to monetize every last cent out of it, and then your only choices are to endure the shit or to quit the service and be left with nothing.
Convenience, pure and simple.
I used to maintain a gigantic Google Play Music library and used that to listen to music. I also had a hard copy locally and used Winamp.
Then Google killed GPM and there was no real good alternative at the time so I picked up Spotify and got easily hooked on the ability to listen to anything I wanted at any time. No ripping, no uploading, no buying, no hassle, no nothing. I've discovered so much music through the recommendation engine. Some are bigger bands I just hadn't listened to, some are obscure.
But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.
Never understand why anyone would want to buy their music in the first place. I got tired of music really quickly, so buying would be waste of money for me, since, after some time, I won't be listening to music I bought. For me, renting music is better than buying. And sometimes I would just like to find some new music, since I'm tired of listening to the same old s*it. Just give me something random, something new, I newer heard before. But that's just me, and I believe this is not for anyone.
You can disable it pretty easily in the settings. I wish more apps let you opt out of ads so easily.
Could not find it on android, do i need to use the webapp?
Maybe it's on notifications menu, but there are some many things in there and nothing related to ads
Try clicking the βwhatβs this?β I think it explained it when I did it. All I know is I got it once like a year ago and immediately disabled. Still stupid that they do this for paying customers but it wasnβt that hard to opt out.
I couldn't deal with Spotify constantly pushing its industry plant artists and those paying to get into my recommendations. Fuck this company for not giving a shit about your actual tastes
Apple Music pays musicians, Qobuz pays the best and costs the most
They both sound really good. If you have the money and are willing to compromise on a few things than Qobuz is the nice one
There's also Tidal. Which pays well but is a buggy mess
Apple also rolled out a really good seaparate app specifically for browsing and listening to classical music.
Classical music doesn't organize easily into "bands/albums" the way most works from the last 80 years do. Most music players tend to fall apart when you try to organize a library of classical music in any coherent manner. So they solved this problem by desiging a completely separate UI for it.
That's pretty cool. Shame it's iOS only.
I've been on Tidal for over a year with barely any bugs. Highly recommend!
I've actually had zero issues with tidal since I switched a couple of months ago, it pays artists better and I think it has more artists on it. I don't use the mobile app much though if that's what's buggy, I mainly use the desktop app (on Linux) and occasionally the Plex integration to listen from my tv
I dropped Spotify and starting using iBroadcast and haven't looked back. Glad to cut another subscription.
I wasn't aware of that service. - Thanks, good tip!
Yes. You always will be with any corporate streaming service.
Soon it will be pay for Spotify on the same tier but also hear ad's.
How to introduce ads to the current premium tier without having everyone complain and leave
Step 1 - Introduce a new paid tier that's cheaper, has all the premium features, but still has ads
Step 2 - wait a few months
Step 3 - increase all prices so that new "cheaper" tier is the same price as the current premium tier
I complained about this to their support one time
They gave me a month free lol
I'd love to leave streaming services and roll my own server, but I rely on things like the Release Radar and song radios for discovery and just haven't been able to find a self-hosted solution for that.
I don't want to have to plan out the music I'm going to listen to, I just want to dive in.
I use the Spotify data via Every Noise at Once (https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=name&name=) to gather band suggestions, but it is an annoying amount of work compared to having a script that sees all of my music and makes a playlist of 20+ songs using that data for me. Have not found a solution for that.
Shit like this is why monopolies and oliglopolies don't work. I hope people complain AND jump ship in big enough droves for this to change. Self-hosting and the old fashioned "buy your own music permanently" option are good too.
I don't use streaming services, I just buy MP3's (or AAC's on iTunes or whatever they're using nowadays, it's been a while) and keep them locally and on the cloud. Never liked most Streaming Services' recommendations anyway.
Mp3s are fortunately in a really good place with them being DRM free. Was why when Google Music shut down I was still able to download my music purchases and keep them for myself. It's one of more widespread consumer friendly digital options out there compared to all the DRM and account based digital options that exist for other products.
Meh, for not very much a month I can pay for premium Spotify and rip 320 mp3s to my hearts content, for anything that is more obscure or just not released on Spotify I buy through bandcamp. I used to buy a lot more but being much poorer now I'm going to take advantage of saving so much money and still being able to have files that I can hold on to and use how I like.
Me listening to Joe Rogan in my car:
βThis episode is brought to you by Athletic β¦β
βAaaargh! I pay Spotify! They gave you eight and eight figure contract! Why the fuck are there ads??β
There's an easy way to fix that. Stop listening to Joe Rogan.
The little I've seen of Joe seems like this:
Some rich guy you've never heard of: "So, umm, yeah, I've been trying this new form of yoga."
Joe: hits blunt and drinks something harmful "Oh yeah?"
Guy 1: burp "Yeah, and it's really opened my eyes and shit, y'know?"
Joe: "Oh really?"
(This but for who knows how long).
".. listening to Joe Rogan..."
Thanks for telling.us you're stupid.
Use blackhole or newpipe
Not to be confused with Tim Janus, world championship burping title holder. I believe he also holds record for longest recorded burp at 18sec.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gU3jBonhsrQ&feature=share7
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=gU3jBonhsrQ&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I haven't subscribed to Spotify for quite some time, have they added proper 2FA feature (not for artists)? I think it's been "under consideration" for a long time
Tidal is a good alternative. Will have to go elsewhere for podcasts, though.
the synonymes entry in the english language for "ads" is expanding everyday
The biggest bullshit...
Spotify Exclusive Podcasts also contain sound ads here in germany. For me it was a reason to unsubscribe as i don't listen anymore to so much new music and have a own catalog of music from past.
I have around 5000 songs in a playlist. Anyone got an idea of how to migrate them to just local .mp3 files or something?
Any sailor worth his salt needs spend a few seasons earning his sea legs before he can begin to call to claim any understanding of the sea.
AKA, There is no easy way. It will lots of time and manual labor to find all the individual files in your Playlist.
Have you looked at spotify-downloader? it uses YouTube, so ymmv for quality, but it could be a good first step.
You are also the product coz they keep raping your data and selling it to advertisers on other platforms.
Arr.
There still is ni better way to listen to music than downloading it and playing it locally or via private local network.
Plexamp!
I never understand this. Is someone paying for spotify to push their music on people?
Is this like the new mlm scheme where artists have to pay spotify first so the algorithm prioritizes their songs so they can earn that same money back?
The screenshot literally says "sponsored recommendation". Not sure how much more clear it can be that somebody paid money for that.
I still pay for premium because it allows me to intercept their high quality 320kbps ogg streams.
Interesting π€ "intercept" as in to rip them?
And suppose a friend asked me how you do that. What should I tell them?
Look up soggfy or zotify. Can't link them here for obvious reasons.
You can use them without premium but the quality of saved files will be lower.
This is exactly why I see Spotify as nothing more than a green garbage bin. I'm going back to my vinyl records.
Why should they not make more money out of you? You already sold yourself when you signed up.
And they up the prices and you just better shut up about it. Talkin bout you fucking YouTube...
Just been downloading all songs off Spotify to have them locally and find another way of expanding my library forwards, I've had enough of Spotify.
Wow, I'm not gonna move to another subscription music app. If I see this, I'm back to mp3s and maybe something selfhosted.
PlexAmp and Plex are a good option
Because the dollars must flow
Dude right though!! Those are the worst!! And they only seem to pop up when I'm tossing a playlist on right as I start driving, worst fkn thing!!
Music ads are nonsense
So if Spotify pays artists so poorly (I'm not claiming they don't), then why do those artists stay on the platform? I have no qualms about using my paid Spotify account. I don't really care how much they pay artists as long as they are paying artists.
Critical mass. They remove their songs from Spotify and the likelyhood of people changing platforms to keep listening to them is next to zero.
In a past thread on this topic, I've seen a few indie artists say that they benefit because Spotify amplifies their audience. They make crap on the streams, but a larger audience base is worth the trade-off since they'll be able to sell more concert tickets and merchandise.
Spotify has definitely helped me to discover new artists, but then I mostly listen to that artist on Spotify (Mostly because I'm not in their country.)
Honestly spotify should really let small artists make their pages more interesting.
No streaming platforms pay well. Are you saying that artists should pull out of all streaming services? How would new artists get their music to a general audience?
I cancelled my sub after I kept getting bombarded by some Michelle Obama podcast/book thing. Popped up so many times over the course of a week that I just yolo'd out and went with Youtube Premium (which gives Youtube Music as part of the deal).
Pirate all the things. No love for any corporation.