For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.
Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.
Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was reading and was waiting for the "LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don't deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe."
Thank you!
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
Some subscriptions make sense for the consumer, or at least justifiable.
IMO a music service like Spotify is absolutely one of them.
Turning heated seats in a subscription? Burn in hell.
Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all.
This is bunk. If people pirated the record labels out of business we would have less music sure, but there will always be people who make music for the love of the craft, rather than just to line an executive's pocket.
I'm all for directly supporting artists (and I buy albums and merch directly from the band wherever possible), but let's not pretend like the people pulling the strings aren't also responsible for the shitty situation they're in.
Fuck the recording industry and how they treat artists. And I say that as a premium streaming service customer.
The amount of it would still be dramatically reduced. Those people who are making music solely for the love of it already exist today and people are perfectly welcome to listen to them; nothing is stopping them at all.
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
Of course not, and I clearly called out that there would be less music if there wasn't an monetary incentive to do so. But at the same time, record industry titans falling would leave a massive vacuum that would be filled by more independent artists and labels. In the end, there would be less music overall, but there would still be some way for artists to get their cut.
Industry titans aren't music, they're merely the middlemen who craft what they think the public wants to hear and leech money from artists. Them falling would be a boon to the smaller and more niche acts who don't get the chance to explode because they don't have the weight of a major label to push them into the spotlight.
Making money through the art, not making art for the money
If you still have to work a full time job to live, that's a lot less time available to create art. You sound like you'd expect artistic friends to give you a discount on their work "to get their name out there"
It's a quote from a rap song.
Agreed, I have Spotify premium for the convenience, but I have no illusions about where that money goes, which is why I go to concerts and buy vinyl records when possible.
we have a family subscription (12€/mo.?) in our household, and i would probably not go back to pirating music anytime soon. they offer genuinely great features and from your post, they don't seem to be the bad guy here. anyway, if it's not shutting down in the next couple of months, i'll keep using it. but they do neet to get some FLACs onto there soon.
if there existed something like spotify for video streaming, i probably wouldn't even pirate movies right now.
I personally would never pay for music it it weren't for Spotify.
Yeah, Spotify has supposedly been working on a lossless option, but it's been in the works for years now. Don't have a clue what the hold-up is, especially given that other services have it already. Tidal and Apple Music have it already if it's something particularly important to you.
These aren't the only options. I've gotten into Bandcamp and it's great because I can listen to an album multiple times before deciding if I want to buy it. Then when I do, I get a DRM-free FLAC copy to keep forever, and a much larger portion of money goes to the artist.
Sure it doesn't have the extreme catalog of Spotify or things like social playlists. It's very album-based (which I like personally) and takes a little more effort to choose what you listen to. But I've had no difficulty discovering new artists and great tunes.
Of course the company has problems too. The new buyer just laid off half the staff and says they won't recognize the union, so we'll see how it fares. But even if it goes under, I keep the music I bought.
You'll hate to hear what is currently happening with Bandcamp.
I seriously do not believe that companies running major online services continuously for over a decade have not made a profit. This must be Hollywood accounting.
It's not at all a coincidence that this happened at the same time interest rates were rock bottom. Lyft has never had a profitable quarter, nor has Spotify. I think Uber has had a few, but they've also heavily struggled. Netflix does well, but no other video streaming service has been profitable. Disney+ has already started to dial back on production as a way to cut costs. Reddit has been around for a long time and isn't profitable.
Capitalism isn't actually as easy as a lot of people think it is. To make sense of this, you have to realize that in extremely low interest environment like we had, the primary business objective is not profit, but rather, growth. Especially in the tech world, you're trying to sell a story to investors that you're creating an entirely new market that you're poised to absolutely dominate, and that if they simply give you money now, rather than getting some profit in the short-term, they're going to wind up owning a lot of extremely valuable shares in the next Microsoft, or Netflix, or whatever. Debt is very cheap, and so tapping into that stream of investor money doesn't cost you much at all, and you can build some cool new thing that people like a lot. The problem comes when the chickens finally come home to roost, and the investors expect to get something for their money. That is currently happening, now that debt is much more expensive and investors are much less willing to take big risks, which means that those services that were living off of investment money now need to either establish that they can actually make the numbers work or perish.
Spotify, for instance, is sitting on nearly two billion dollars of debt. Now, they're not in the worst position, because for better or for worse, the labels need some streaming services because that's simply how people consume music today, so the labels will have to keep it alive on way or another. But it doesn't change the fact that the numbers need to add up eventually. Reviewing Spotify's sheets, they're not in a terrible position though. They lost $453 million in 2022, but they also spent $1.48 billion on research and development. They've been doing a lot of development on podcasts and ML-based recommendations, which is probably where a lot of that went, and the kinds of engineers that work at Spotify don't come very cheap at all.
Now, you'd probably say that they could simply not do that and content themselves with being a perfectly adequate music streaming service, but if they announce that they're doing that, it opens a huge opportunity for a competitor to go guns a' blazing to try to develop a bunch of flashy new features to steal customers. Additionally, the labels, and indeed musicians as well, don't want music to be cheap. They want it to be valuable and so desirable that people are willing to pay a decent amount for it. Musicians aren't exactly selfless saints either; no one really is. Plenty of artists, of all genres, could easily make their music completely free to access, play free concerts, and personally cover all associated costs with doing that. But they don't, because at the end of the day, everyone wants a slice of the pie.
So they would rather take in more debt at an unfavorable time than to maintain a profitable leading business or even to limit research investment to a sustainable level? That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.
Yet ultimately they make up for those excesses by squeezing the customers more.
If investors, knowing all that you do for this long, continue to approve this approach, then it seems like it's itself a mechanism to try to extract more out of a market that could have been stable. In which case referring to it as an inevitability to be blamed on customers who aren't really paying its worth doesn't seem quite accurate. After all, if they were, the investors would be seeking to expand in some manner, right? Which means these businesses aren't allowed to simply be profitable, and customers will always be on the hook for that.
But still they can't be quite so unprofitable to be unsustainable or they would just fall apart. If hollow hype was enough to keep investors in, we wouldn't see tech fads come and go so quickly. Seems to me that most tech companies don't get to survive their "unprofitability" for so long.
It's still not a good justification for making the free version completely useless. Those limitations are just ridiculous; I miss the days where paying for a product only meant getting rid of ads and gaining some exclusive features. Maybe they should also reduce the label share instead of always making the customers pay more. I refuse to pay a subscription for non-trivial things like music; they can still make money off me with ads when I use the free version. They can increase their profits with other features like they are already doing by allowing people to buy merch from Spotify.
Those days were built on the backs of venture capital. They were never sustainable. Now you're on the other end, and it's either deal with more ads and more restrictions, or pay up and get rid of all of that (or use something else).
I pay for albums i can afford by buying them and pirate the rest
I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I doubt major labels can live without Spotify as much as Spotify need major labels. They can push users to pay for Spotify by adding more cool features for payed users instead of removing fundamental features of the free version. Forcing people to pay is never the right solution
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don't have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.
I definitely did NOT post a comment, read this comment, then delete my comment for feeling foolish.
Jk i did.
Great take 12/10
This is ridiculous. Spotify has been effectively doing dumping as an economic policy, and now that they have a sizeable portion of the market share, they're turning to enshittification to make a profit. I see nothing defensible in that. The fact that they can't turn a profit means that they're trying to drive out competitors with less VC money.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps, and especially not ones engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, and it's embarrassing to defend that. I've never used Spotify and I never will, but the idea that they lose money on every user tempts me. I second the other guy in the comments: If it isn't economically viable, it shouldn't exist. It's just wannabe monopolism otherwise
Fundamentally, no industry can survive on VC money forever, so there simply has to be some kind of crunch eventually, either by reducing the product, increasing the price, or both.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist. Spotify is not going to be able to operate at a loss forever, and while there is a discussion to be had about what level of profit is warranted, I don't think it's a particularly wild thing to say that the answer is at least non-negative profit.
If it isn’t economically viable, it shouldn’t exist.
What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
Who would have thought that good old dumping at a large scale and inadequate economic regulation would lead to companies basically "starving" themselves in a Mexican standoff?
And it's not just Spotify it's a major chunk of the tech companies, because no one learned anything from the dotcom crash.
Well, if you don't pay with money, you're paying with your attention. Do you think they create this huge service just for funsies?
Tbf, out of all media streaming services across movies, series, and music, Spotify has the highes bang-for-your-buck. It's still like Netflix at that time when there was only Netflix and you could watch almost everything on one platform. I still buy records that I like on physical media like vinyl, but Spotify is such a great deal for convenient listening to all music out there.
Man these people forget the days when a month of Spotify would afford you 1 CD. I remember cause I would spend half my paycheck on music. I'm just sitting here happy for services like Spotify and YouTube in my life. I remember a time when music and information was much harder to obtain (even illegally).
But if you bought the CD you actually owned something. Stop paying for the services and you have nothing if all you used was spotify/YouTube/pandora. I gave up on paying for streaming years ago and spend the same amount monthly on purchasing music. I get CDs, either new or used. I’ve amassed a collection and I don’t need Internet or monthly charges to play them.
But I don't want to own it. I don't want to amass a collection of CDs taking up space somewhere. Been there, done that. I have a large collection of ripped mp3s from CDs I bought in the 90s and early 2000s (I've long since disposed of the physical media). I haven't clicked on a single one of them in years, I just keep them for nostalgia sake and because they take relatively little space.
I just occasionally want to listen to music sans commercials or annoying DJs wasting my time. For the cost of 1 CD a month my entire family can listen to almost anything they desire, at any time, without hassles (on Pandora in our case but I assume the economics are similar).
Same thing with movies, honestly. I watch them once and move on. There's a small handful I like enough to rewatch and I do own those.
I get the whole, we don't own anything anymore, argument and I mostly agree with it (see my massive Steam library). I just want both options to be viable. Streaming for ephemeral entertainment and actual ownership for the things I choose to keep.
We all have our preferences and I enjoy the quantity of music I can get in a heartbeat. It really sucked when you were 16 and spent $15 on a CD that sucked because there was no way to hear it ahead of time.
Valid point, but commuting with my turntable to listen to my sick vinyls on the go is a pain in the ass. Also moving sucks ass when you have a metric fuckton of sensitive vinyl to move. Owning stuff also has its downsides. Also no way I'm digitizing my vinyls and cutting them and shit to listen to them on the go, ain't nobody got time fo dat.
I gave up on CDs roughly 15 years ago because I don't like the format compared to vinyl (small album art, plasticy jewelcases, ...).
You owned the music when you buy it. With multiple backups the risks of losing it it very minimal but with spotify or other streaming services, if you have to reduce your expenses you completely lose the access to the music till you pay again. Spotify always grey out songs too so even when you pay you may not have access to the some of the music you want to listen to
I feel you, the value from Spotify is enormous. I can sift through ten different bands in no time just because I decided that I want to look up a new genre that I may or may not be totally into by the end.
Yeah don't use it if you don't want to, idc. But you might accept the thought that there are people that think the deal Spotify puts on the table is good.
I know not everyone will agree, but I think YouTube premium is the better bang-for-buck service. $3 more per month than Spotify and includes YouTube Music premium and YouTube Premium. So all the music and ad-free YouTube.
Except what YT Premium does is easily doable with free tools.
Only so long as Google decides to continue serving content for free to people who contribute nothing to their bottom line, which isn't guaranteed to last.
An argument could easily be made for Spotify as well. There are plenty of options for streaming music for free to your device with download support. Just about anything can be done for free if people are willing.
I'd rather vote for Deezer. Costs the same, but you also get lossless (16-bit 44.1kHz FLAC) audio.
By the way, free-mp3-download.net rips songs from Deezer. And if you don't like spending storage, you could self-host your own Navidrome server, though I get that may not be convenient.
What a shame it would be if this drove more people into using those awful cracked versions of the Spotify apk that give you most of the premium features without a premium account. Truly the godless heathens over at xManager (https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager) must be rejoicing over this.
Cheers, I knew about ReVanced but this is a new one for me
might have something to do with their motto "don't make us popular"
Real shame.
In terms of privacy is xManager safe? When I downloaded it I was faced with an ad which seems sketchy for a GPL licensed application.
Been using it for years. The ad thing is recent but it's safe. They have to make money somehow and it was only an ad when I was downloading the app off of their updater. After that the actual Spotify app is add free.
I agree with you here. There may be a better service out there, but I certainly haven't found it yet. I use Spotify in my car (via USB to my phone), in my kitchen, master bath, living room and kids rooms on Google mini's or Amazon Echos... And I don't have to go out and download anything, it just plays what I want when I want it.
I have the family premium plan and honestly love it. I haven’t downloaded an mp3 in years because Spotify is so convenient. As far as subscription services go, this one is top tier for me.
Now when we look at movie streaming.. well that’s what the music streaming could have been like. What an absolute mess.
Now if only they'd pay the musicians worth a shit. Maybe they should strike next.
Full disclosure I am on Spotify family plan and I love it because
It would be nice if companies didn't slash features and would offer music for free with features beyond that of broadcast radio.
It would be nice if we didn't have the mechanisms demanding infinite growth from companies because sometimes that's just not possible or even necessary.
Imagine if Spotify could just be like ok, yeah we're good no need to make major changes, everyone is happy, life is good thanks. Versus: oh shit we need to boost the quarterly numbers who can we fuck over to get there? I know, customers and musicians both! Yay!
That article, while not necessarily wrong, is blatant propaganda and overlooks the most important issues until the final paragraph, and even then it only touches on it once.
As someone with expansive knowledge and experience in the indie music industry, with a lot of experience dealing with streaming services and Spotify in particular the biggest problem is not the % of value created paid out, it's what the actual value is. They don't touch anywhere on how much you get paid per play, how the value is created, how the money flows once it's in Spotify's hands, etc.
As said in the article, artists and indie labels/distributors have basically no ways to reach Spotify to negotiate a price, but Spotify itself paid literal millions to license a few major labels in the beginning. The 'value' of a play is extremely skewed, where you'd need upwards of 10.000 plays to equal a single play on a nightly radio show for a big broadcaster like the BBC or at a festival with 500 people. On top of that, if you work hard, network properly and prepare your release you can get quite good exposure through radio, dj and other live plays, whereas with Spotify you have to be lucky that they put your pitch towards the right 'tastemakers', they are actively working against user (influencer)-playlists, have piss poor customer service, blatantly favour major label tracks in their algorithms and don't actual care about their listeners.
On top of that we've got the obvious subscription enshittification, classic outlandish manager/director salaries and bonuses, the need to have an ever-rising share price and more.
Thanks for the insights. No holy among the capitalist companies...
It’s also not a new or Spotify-centric problem, either. Labels have been screwing over the artists for decades.
Yeah I work at a label we pay our artists about 30% of what we make off them, but that isn't actually that bad considering the amount of overhead there is at a record label and the amount of services we provide for them. Just advertising alone makes up about 1/3 of a big label and we will spend more on advertising, distributing and actually allowing them to make music than we actually pay them, so in terms of end value it's probably closer to 60 or 70%
In this case, it's a good thing that Spotify is an European and not an US company. Less incentive for enshittification. At the same time, the main reason they fuck over musicians so much is not so much Spotify but because of record labels and ads themselves. The record labels are the ones with the financial power, holding the copyrights. It's not that Spotify doesn't pay labels, they do, then in turn the labels keep most of the money and fuck over the artists. At the same time, the record labels came last to the streaming game. Blinded on the madness that was the Napster and peak P2P era, a war they lost, they didn't want to even sell digital copies. Many awards and labels didn't considered digital sales, legitimate sales. An many rogue artists sold or gave their digital albums for free to protest this. So they were always behind the curve. When Apple forced the labels to sit at the table for iTunes, they had no bargain leverage and were forced to accept shit terms in exchange for the hope that streaming would stop piracy. As a result, the tech giants got to keep most of the revenue bag and that's been the status quo ever since.
On the other hand, adverts don't pay. We tend to forget this because the likes of Google and Facebook are so massive. But the only reason they make any money is because of how massive they're. Adverts are a shit form of payment. Too expensive and no one wants to advertise with you, too cheap and you can't cover even the platform maintenance, it's a delicate balance. The result is you need millions of eyes to make any significant amount of money from an advert. There's a reason cable and open air TV has devolved into 15 minutes of advertisement per every 20 minutes of entertainment.
Spotify pays a fraction of a cent for every play. It takes 150 plays of a song to make a dollar from advertisement, and most of that dollar is gonna stay with the record label. This is significantly worse for indie and small up and coming artists. They simply can't make a living out of Spotify unless they are already big and have a massive following. This hurts the whole industry as it becomes harder and harder to nurture new talent.
The up side is that, although they are getting shafted by Spotify and the labels, a subscription play is worth more than a free play. Up to ten times more than a free user play. So your subscription does help pay artists more. The down side is that less than 25% of Spotify users pay for a subscription.
As someone who was once a small artist on Spotify, they do actually pay really well. Better than most places.
I used to think the same, but these days it seems like most songs from my favorites/liked list are no longer on Spotify, as I hear the same 10 or 20 songs over and over again when I have it on random play, and when I manually try to go through my list it'll skip over songs and not let me select them.
I guess the competition with the other music delivery companies is coming down to certain companies have exclusives for certain songs and artists.
I've never paid for any streaming music plan and I love it. I never have to pay to listen to music because I already have MP3s of all the good music
To each their own. For me, I really like the Discover Weekly/Daily features to discover new music and I can’t see how I would ever “already have MP3s of all the good music” since that’s an ever changing set. Heck, I still have a ton of old mp3s I used to rip and/or download, but I haven’t listened to them in a while.
I would gladly pay for a similar AYCE movie subscription, but I refuse to sign up for a ton of different services and play the “which service is that movie on again?” game. Instead it’s a very different approach for me.
Generally I agree, but spotify has just recently started to reach the point of profitability. And with high interest rates and reduced venture capital, its now or never for them. I, as a paying customer, haven't felt this enshittification. But if they make that turn, then I'll quickly resort to self-hosting digital music purchases, Lidarr, and Plex.
Also as a service I think it’s much more polished and better working than its competitors, even if it is shiftier for free users.
This is just for the free tier. The subscription is still a fair price and good service right now. They haven't fucked it up yet, tho I don't care for all the audiobooks and podcasts. But, there's definitely worse things they could be doing and be getting away with.
I've been using Spotify for almost 2-3 years. The only thing I can say is the app gets DEGRADED EVERY YEAR!!!! They do their best to bring more and more bugs with each update. I'm done with Spotify shit, also they removed a lot of regional songs from my country. The only reason I pay for Spotify is because I can download/rip their music and store it on my Plex Server.
what do you use for downloading from Spotify
Deemix and Deezer is better. Spotify streams in low quality.
Their app for android sucks blue donkey balls and I'd happily pay more if I'd get to use a slightly less retarded cousin of this app.
The other but:
Spotify in on itself is not very bad right now and basically could and SHOULD continue as-is forever.
However, the economic system as it currently is requires it to continually come up with new crap that nobody needs nor wants (see also all Microsoft software that went from absolute shit thirty years ago to absolute slimey shit with lots of useless but pretty ding dong bells attached to it with a nice camera hidden inside to spy on the insides of your butthole) and it only a matter of time before...
Some exec gets hired there that promises to double their revenue, then implements some shit that will double their revenue once, gets this exec his bonus upon which he immediately quits to go to the next company to fuck over with a pineapple, leaving Spotify with a huge exodus of users, a dwindling service, and two years later it's dead.
I've seen this cycle with too many large companies, and it's the same story over and over. Be it Boeing, Disney, just about all large game companies, etc etc..
Spotify app sucks in the sense that they keep refining their UI to reduce the number of buttons on the bottom of the screen. When it first started they were five, then after a while there became four. I got used to where everything was, so of course with the recent update there now three so I have no freaking idea what is what.
So they went to the same model Pandora used to use 15 years ago
Well the model Pandora still uses.
Pandora had a cheap yearlong plan. They scrapped people's existing plans when they switched to monthly and wouldnt credit the remaining months on long term subscriptions.
Cancelled then and have never used Pandora since. Since then it has been Youtube for a specific song (until recently due to adstacking) or reliable nautical measures.
It was the reason I came back to Spotify when I decided to give Pandora a shot, way back when.
Putting all the best features behind a paywall, opening up ad space as well as sponsored song spots... Where have I seen this before?
Pandora, but at least they were honest about it.
When Sirius bought Pandora and started bleeding subscribers, that closed doors for Spotify. No way to increase revenues but by increasing ads.
Wait, how would Sirius/ Pandora bleeding subscribers be a bad thing for Spotify?
Spotify is losing money, they gain nothing by having free users, if they convert some people to paying customers it's worth it for them. You can't expect to listen to music for free when license holders charge ridiculous fees.
Yet they can bring in the fear factor blockhead and other hot garbage for how many hundreds of millions of dollars?
It's funny, Rogan lost me as a listener right around the time he made the Spotify deal.
At the time I actually had Spotify premium too, I just wasn't interested in the conspiracy right wing shit.
Then I pretty quickly got fed up with Spotify and dropped my sub altogether.
It's like the big awakening of licence holders. Like someone finally explained to them what the internet is, how it works, etc. All around, things are starting to get re-structured in the way it worked in irl before. The same charges and middlemen.
The gates to the open internet are being closed and the registers are being set up.
We're also not a consumer anymore, but a subscriber. A subscriber can be traced, bound to your product for a lifetime.
I only hope that, unlike movies and series, big labels don't get the idea of starting their own music streaming services and end the licensing to all existing music streamers.
For now it's like Netflix in the old days. All streamers have about the same catalog in music.
... Except they gather your data and use it to try and make profit.
Say least radio required them to give genuine value to you. Radio had to give away shit and run contests to get caller info to figure out how many listeners they had, to get advertisers etc. It was a real business.
Spotify just buys the music catalogue and then forces you into their ecosystem.
Except it seems like you can still skip forward. That's not something you can do with radio.
In addition, radio has those incredibly annoying station identification bullshit announcements like "You're listening to JFRH, the cooooolest FM station in the greater Grumug metro area!", often with annoying sound effects like lasers and so on. Even worse, they often interrupt the music to have an ad for the station, in which the station-ad claims that this is another hour of ad-free music.
It was already like this in Europe when I began to use Spotify in 2015. I do not hate it because the app's free tier is already unusable to me due to the adverts.
The free version is completely useless on smartphone. I hope the limitations won't come to the desktop version
Tech Bros, reinventing classic technology with a veneer of techno babble.
Nah, it's better than radio because now they can track you and sell your data, including everything they get from your phone, to the highest bidder.
I don't mind paying for music
When I was a kid, I would go buy a CD basically every paycheck/allowance, for probably around $15-$20 of '03 money. 12ish tracks. I would add basically about 30 tracks to my collection per month for $30-$40. And even though I owned those (as long as my little brother didn't fuck up the disc), I could only access the handful that I could carry with me. If you told 15-17 year old me, that for $11 a month I could access basically any music I could think of instantly, anywhere, I would've been like "sure, and then we'll listen in our flying cars, right?"
There are lots of things that absolutely suck about modern life and the enshittification presented here, but music fans have it pretty good.
Me neither, but I do mind paying a subscription for a shitty service that does not let me actually own anything and changes the rules every year.
I have no clue what you're talking about. I've had Spotify premium for 5-ish years and nothing has randomly changed. The UI changed a bit here and there but nothing you couldn't ignore if you wanted to and that's it. I get all the music on the planet and podcasts, it's a good deal if you ask me
That's why we pay for a good service instead. The subscription is a fraction of a cost you'd get from paying to "own" the media, and it's not like you still can't combine the two either. It's not one or the other.
And this is why I buy vinyl.
How do you combine a subscription service with having ownership of the media? If you're not happy with Spotify just got to iTunes or the likes and buy the individual songs. Or what am I missing here?
This is why I tried to buy all my albums through Bandcamp... but Bandcamp has a new owner that fired half the staff and I'm worried they're gonna get enshittified.
Spotify is garbage, last time I used it it was missing basic features like sleep timer, play count, song rating, and history. I buy my music and use poweramp instead.
Spotify has sleep timer and listen history. I don't see the need for song rating and play count, that sounds like old UX to me. Doesn't actually add functionality for me.
Love power amp.. I'm on Spotify thou.. so I don't get to use it too much
I would love for power amp to be able to connect to the main online storage services thou.. that's where most of my music I own is nowadays
I've been a happy paying spotify user for well over a decade, I love listening to new music all the time. Also, for counts/history I just scrobble to last.fm
They just need to add commercials for Premium that have horns or police sirens and they'll be all set
I thought this was always how the free version was? Which bit of that is new? I remember only being able to shuffle play until I got premium
Yeah I'm also very confused here. Maybe it's different depending on the country? I'm in the US and I'm pretty sure the mobile version has always been like this
And Netflix and other streaming services, despite supposedly saving us from cable, re-invented cable.
But the good news is, maybe it's time to get the good old iPods/DAPs back into the mainstream again. You can have a big SD card with all the music and podcasts you could ever want without tying yourself to a specific service.
I own quite a lot of mp3s legally. Host them on a 50 dollar raspberry pi with something called Navidrome which uses a protocol called subsonic.
I can stream my own music from my home to my phone etc or anywhere. Otherwise yeah just having them locally is the other best option.
I tried it free once, and found it generally unusable.
Like it was filled with annoying adverts, but it wasn't adverts for other people. It was adverts for itself. All overly chipper voice actors going "Wow, is it true that Spotify Premium is just £9.99 a month?" as if that's how anybody has ever talked in the history of humankind.
The free version is funded by paying customers. The only purpose it has is to annoy you into paying.
I was happy to use Amazon Prime's version for a bit, and then they decided that merely paying for Prime wasn't enough, and I had to pay special extra fees to listen to albums. So I got Spotify instead, because fuck giving more money to Amazon.
Yeah for a few months there I was starting to like the Amazon player too and then they made it worse for more money and I realized.... I am so done with Amazon and paying them $180 a year for barely getting things (mostly scams and garbage) shipped from them, a weird mess of a video player and radio.
I actually have YouTube premium because at least it helps me get rid of the onslaught of YouTube ads and helps pay my creators of choice slightly better, and the music player is I guess just basically YouTube which isn't that bad. Not perfect but not bad.
For a company worth over a trillion dollars, there's this unmistakable layer of couldn't-give-a-fuckness to all their products.
From a store that ships blatantly fake products, through the video service that misses subtitles on like half the movies, or looks like it's been transferred from a well used VHS, to the music service that used to let you listen to full albums, but on playing you notice that a bunch of tracks are missing from it.
And the race to the bottom ain't even over yet.
It's actually really fucking sad how bad their marketplace is. I can buy more legitimate tech items from a creepy back alleyway in Malaysia and that's a really bad sign. I don't want to be scammed and have to return every other item or more, it's so wasteful.
They are able to burn so much money without even a second thought it is so impressive and scary to watch. So yeah "This track is not available" was like final straw.
P.S. on couldn't give a fuck-ness did you know that Amazon video has a share watch function that includes a live chat and sync play? They paid a developer for this and it seems completely forgot it's in their system
All these companies want to control what content you consume. Just walk away.
I know Plex gets a lot of crap here, but they have done me no wrong allowing me to simply play the music I like. Spotify is ruining artist discovery, which is exactly how radio became the shithole it is now. At least Pandora leads at artist discovery.
You can just use Jellyfin which is open source.
Plex (or equivalent) pairs great with Bandcamp where you can download the music you buy in lossless quality.
For now. Sounds like maybe Bandcamp might not be around much longer.
If you get a YouTube music subscription can you use it to rip higher bitrate audio? I thought free videos bitrate was capped, I’m just using yt-dlp to archive videos/channels at the moment
Your daily reminder: if you don't own it, it's not yours.
:::spoiler Disclaimer
The it in this case is your music library, and by own I mean have in your personal possession and not DRM'd.
:::
what point are you even trying to make here? we know we don't own the music. if you truly care about DRM issues, then you're not even on Spotify to begin with. DRM is not the problem with this post. this is specifically software locking previously free features for the sake of increasing shareholder value down the line. say what you will about that, but it does not have anything to do with DRM or ownership...
Funny, this is a summary of what I didn't like about Pandora.
I know, it's pretty silly and very dishonest. I just find it so bizarre that the boundaries of what these finances can provide are drawn around these lines. Skipping songs was "profitable" 1 week ago, but now it isn't? It is very goofy.
fuk spotify i dont need my music streamed over the internet
mp3s forever
Oof, Better watch out or you're gonna catch some .FLAC for saying egregious things like that!
(Can always convert them to fit individual devices)
My biggest issue with Spotify was that they were changing the main screen layout what seemed like every other week. Like bro I don’t do podcasts so keep them off my homepage.
I ended up canceling and going to Apple Music because we were already paying for their other services and it was cheaper with their bundled membership. I also have a Plexamp server with all of the music I have ripped over the years and actually prefer that to Apple Music
Man I grow up buying at least 2/3 album a month. Paying monthly Spotify for almost all the music in the world seems like a good deal to me
You're renting, not buying. When you stop paying... poof! Your music collection is gone.
Buying the individual albums is still an option. The benefit of renting through Spotify (or any similar service) is that it's dramatically cheaper than owning the same amount of music.
How is non-premium different from normal radio?
I think that's the joke
radio tries retain listeners and spotify free tries to annoy listeners
I think the free version is just what the free pandora was years ago. Maybe I am missing something there.
Pandora had one thing Spotify didn't have though, and that was "bad," but good for me. Pandora could play at a lower bitrate, so I could get it to work without skipping on long drives or in low reception areas easier.
The suggested songs on Pandora are way better than Spotify IMO.
Spotify's web client is garbage too, I used to subscribe but cancelled years ago.
If you're using Android, check out xmanager. It's basically a free cracked version of Spotify Premium.
Lmao that website is terrible. Doesn't even tell anything what the app does just gives a link to apk in github. Also github page doesn't explain anything.
It doesn't, but that's where most of the Spotify mods come from. The app will let you download the modded versions of Spotify.
xmanager
Spotify kind of sucks. I've been using Bandcamp for years (though they sold to epic and then got sold to some vultures, so they might be doomed)
If I buy one album a month for a year, that's about the same as a subscription except I get to keep what I bought. And after a few years I have a big library and don't need to buy as much. And the musicians get a bigger cut.
If you're listening to stuff that's not on Bandcamp I don't know what to tell you. Probably buy it from elsewhere, or if it's old just pirate it because it should be public domain anyway.
This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.
We do not care that we don't own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it's almost a perk that I don't because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify's library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.
I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don't want to go pirate it, I don't want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.
And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I'm a member at our local zoo. I don't expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I'm a member at our museum. I don't feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don't own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.
Spotify is the exact same for me.
Thanks for a well written reply. I'm glad that you have a model that works for you. I'm bummed that I don't think Spotify really does right by the artists (and other issues with them). I guess in your analogy that would be a zoo mistreating the animals? Not the best metaphor I'll have to think more on how to work that.
I also really want more people to consider other options. A lot of people I don't think really consider that they could buy instead of rent. I'm confident there are many people who listen to like five albums and are paying Spotify for that every month.
I’m bummed that I don’t think Spotify really does right by the artists (and other issues with them).
One thing I feel like people keep forgetting is that artists weren’t making much money off CD sales or radio plays anyway. People tend to single out Spotify as a unique problem in the industry, but things weren’t necessarily better before. Artists have always made most of their money from ticket and merch sales. It was true then and it’s true today. And it’s also still possible to use Spotify and also still pay to go to concerts and buy merch.
I don't know why anyone would give Spotify money when they pay Joe Rogan to spread vaccine disinformation and union bust.
I use YouTube music. It's far inferior to what Google Play Music was, which was literally perfect, but it's not Spotify and I really think it does mixes best of all. Apple Music is so very Caucasian, I gave it a shot but it just comes back to the whitest music possible every time.
You know, it is literally pick your poison, google/alphabet is not a better company either.
This is probably the first time I've seen anyone argue that paying Google is the more ethical choice. Fuck that company with all of my heart, I literally pay for both email and search just to use their services as little as possible, and will be caught dead before I start paying for YouTube.
I really got tired of them adding ads to podcasts - just felt like a real insult to paying users. So I hopped ship. There are apps that make it relatively simple to export your data to a new service.
I don't mind having ads while listening to plain radio. But on Spotify there were more ads than songs lately, so they forced me to buy a subscription. They did not reinvent the radio, they made it worse.
on Spotify there were more ars than songs lately, so they forced me to buy a subscription
Aah, so their tactic is working 100% as intended.
But they didn't force you to do anything. you willingly chose to reward them for their shitty method instead of ditching them because of it.
Wow, you subscribed because they made their service worse?
Is that weird somehow? You like a thing. Then the thing changes into something worse but there is a paid version of the thing which is still good. You decide whether you liked the thing enough to spend x amount of money on it.
Spotify has been like that for years now on mobile devices. At least here in Germany
One think that idgaf about paying for is Spotify or any music streaming service. We use a family plan anyway but even full price isn't great value for money.
It’s the price of a single/couple CDs and you get access to almost every single music
Jesus Christ these people are delusional? What do they want? Eminem to come sing to them in the shower because that's the only way $10/mo is worth it?
Truly amazing. 2023 really is the year for less for more
Pay $0 to use a product from a business that is losing money
Business makes a policy change to try to convince you their product is worth paying for, but still let's you use a version of it for FREE
Wow this company sucks, I've given them nothing and they're taking everything away
In a capitalist society you speak with your money. It's the only language businesses speak. If you're not giving a company any money they're not going to cater their product to you, plain and simple.
Spotify has an AI DJ that I actually quite enjoy. It says your name, asks how's it going and does it a pretty good job of mixing up music I like. It thinks I like country music every once in a while though. I have a couple of songs, but can't stand new country music.
Spotify has an AI DJ that I actually quite enjoy. It says your name, asks how's it going and does it a pretty good job of mixing up music I like
I only skimmed, but not one single suggestion to federated our music? Isn't that what we need to do now, and not for downloading, simply sharing libraries. It's out there...
There's a ton of technical reasons that would be difficult and stupid expensive, even if completely ignoring the aspect of being highly illegal.
Federation isn't a magic concept that instantly fixes the internet.
https://medium.com/brain-labs/why-spotify-struggles-to-make-money-from-music-streaming-ba940fc56ebd
For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.
Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.
Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was reading and was waiting for the "LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don't deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe."
Thank you!
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
Some subscriptions make sense for the consumer, or at least justifiable.
IMO a music service like Spotify is absolutely one of them.
Turning heated seats in a subscription? Burn in hell.
This is bunk. If people pirated the record labels out of business we would have less music sure, but there will always be people who make music for the love of the craft, rather than just to line an executive's pocket.
I'm all for directly supporting artists (and I buy albums and merch directly from the band wherever possible), but let's not pretend like the people pulling the strings aren't also responsible for the shitty situation they're in.
Fuck the recording industry and how they treat artists. And I say that as a premium streaming service customer.
The amount of it would still be dramatically reduced. Those people who are making music solely for the love of it already exist today and people are perfectly welcome to listen to them; nothing is stopping them at all.
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
Of course not, and I clearly called out that there would be less music if there wasn't an monetary incentive to do so. But at the same time, record industry titans falling would leave a massive vacuum that would be filled by more independent artists and labels. In the end, there would be less music overall, but there would still be some way for artists to get their cut.
Industry titans aren't music, they're merely the middlemen who craft what they think the public wants to hear and leech money from artists. Them falling would be a boon to the smaller and more niche acts who don't get the chance to explode because they don't have the weight of a major label to push them into the spotlight.
Making money through the art, not making art for the money
If you still have to work a full time job to live, that's a lot less time available to create art. You sound like you'd expect artistic friends to give you a discount on their work "to get their name out there"
It's a quote from a rap song.
Agreed, I have Spotify premium for the convenience, but I have no illusions about where that money goes, which is why I go to concerts and buy vinyl records when possible.
we have a family subscription (12€/mo.?) in our household, and i would probably not go back to pirating music anytime soon. they offer genuinely great features and from your post, they don't seem to be the bad guy here. anyway, if it's not shutting down in the next couple of months, i'll keep using it. but they do neet to get some FLACs onto there soon.
if there existed something like spotify for video streaming, i probably wouldn't even pirate movies right now.
I personally would never pay for music it it weren't for Spotify.
Yeah, Spotify has supposedly been working on a lossless option, but it's been in the works for years now. Don't have a clue what the hold-up is, especially given that other services have it already. Tidal and Apple Music have it already if it's something particularly important to you.
Supposedly they have a hifi service on the way that will offer lossless streaming, potentially pretty expensive though - https://www.techhive.com/article/790882/spotify-hifi-release-date-when-is-spotifys-lossless-tier-coming.html
These aren't the only options. I've gotten into Bandcamp and it's great because I can listen to an album multiple times before deciding if I want to buy it. Then when I do, I get a DRM-free FLAC copy to keep forever, and a much larger portion of money goes to the artist.
Sure it doesn't have the extreme catalog of Spotify or things like social playlists. It's very album-based (which I like personally) and takes a little more effort to choose what you listen to. But I've had no difficulty discovering new artists and great tunes.
Of course the company has problems too. The new buyer just laid off half the staff and says they won't recognize the union, so we'll see how it fares. But even if it goes under, I keep the music I bought.
You'll hate to hear what is currently happening with Bandcamp.
"This one time at band camp..."
I seriously do not believe that companies running major online services continuously for over a decade have not made a profit. This must be Hollywood accounting.
It's not at all a coincidence that this happened at the same time interest rates were rock bottom. Lyft has never had a profitable quarter, nor has Spotify. I think Uber has had a few, but they've also heavily struggled. Netflix does well, but no other video streaming service has been profitable. Disney+ has already started to dial back on production as a way to cut costs. Reddit has been around for a long time and isn't profitable.
Capitalism isn't actually as easy as a lot of people think it is. To make sense of this, you have to realize that in extremely low interest environment like we had, the primary business objective is not profit, but rather, growth. Especially in the tech world, you're trying to sell a story to investors that you're creating an entirely new market that you're poised to absolutely dominate, and that if they simply give you money now, rather than getting some profit in the short-term, they're going to wind up owning a lot of extremely valuable shares in the next Microsoft, or Netflix, or whatever. Debt is very cheap, and so tapping into that stream of investor money doesn't cost you much at all, and you can build some cool new thing that people like a lot. The problem comes when the chickens finally come home to roost, and the investors expect to get something for their money. That is currently happening, now that debt is much more expensive and investors are much less willing to take big risks, which means that those services that were living off of investment money now need to either establish that they can actually make the numbers work or perish.
Spotify, for instance, is sitting on nearly two billion dollars of debt. Now, they're not in the worst position, because for better or for worse, the labels need some streaming services because that's simply how people consume music today, so the labels will have to keep it alive on way or another. But it doesn't change the fact that the numbers need to add up eventually. Reviewing Spotify's sheets, they're not in a terrible position though. They lost $453 million in 2022, but they also spent $1.48 billion on research and development. They've been doing a lot of development on podcasts and ML-based recommendations, which is probably where a lot of that went, and the kinds of engineers that work at Spotify don't come very cheap at all.
Now, you'd probably say that they could simply not do that and content themselves with being a perfectly adequate music streaming service, but if they announce that they're doing that, it opens a huge opportunity for a competitor to go guns a' blazing to try to develop a bunch of flashy new features to steal customers. Additionally, the labels, and indeed musicians as well, don't want music to be cheap. They want it to be valuable and so desirable that people are willing to pay a decent amount for it. Musicians aren't exactly selfless saints either; no one really is. Plenty of artists, of all genres, could easily make their music completely free to access, play free concerts, and personally cover all associated costs with doing that. But they don't, because at the end of the day, everyone wants a slice of the pie.
So they would rather take in more debt at an unfavorable time than to maintain a profitable leading business or even to limit research investment to a sustainable level? That really makes it sound like being unprofitable is a choice rather than an inevitable reckoning with a fundamental unsustainability of the business.
Yet ultimately they make up for those excesses by squeezing the customers more.
If investors, knowing all that you do for this long, continue to approve this approach, then it seems like it's itself a mechanism to try to extract more out of a market that could have been stable. In which case referring to it as an inevitability to be blamed on customers who aren't really paying its worth doesn't seem quite accurate. After all, if they were, the investors would be seeking to expand in some manner, right? Which means these businesses aren't allowed to simply be profitable, and customers will always be on the hook for that.
But still they can't be quite so unprofitable to be unsustainable or they would just fall apart. If hollow hype was enough to keep investors in, we wouldn't see tech fads come and go so quickly. Seems to me that most tech companies don't get to survive their "unprofitability" for so long.
It's still not a good justification for making the free version completely useless. Those limitations are just ridiculous; I miss the days where paying for a product only meant getting rid of ads and gaining some exclusive features. Maybe they should also reduce the label share instead of always making the customers pay more. I refuse to pay a subscription for non-trivial things like music; they can still make money off me with ads when I use the free version. They can increase their profits with other features like they are already doing by allowing people to buy merch from Spotify.
Those days were built on the backs of venture capital. They were never sustainable. Now you're on the other end, and it's either deal with more ads and more restrictions, or pay up and get rid of all of that (or use something else).
I pay for albums i can afford by buying them and pirate the rest
I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I doubt major labels can live without Spotify as much as Spotify need major labels. They can push users to pay for Spotify by adding more cool features for payed users instead of removing fundamental features of the free version. Forcing people to pay is never the right solution
The labels could murder Spotify in a day if they decided to simply stop offering them licenses and went exclusive with Apple, Amazon, Tidal, or anyone else.
The labels of course do get quite a lot of money from Spotify so they don't have much of a reason to do that, but again, they really are the ones that hold the cards.
This is business. The only right solution is the one that gets them closer to financial stability. They have been developing features for the paid tier and have been exploring other revenue streams (hence the deep dive into podcasts), but ultimately, they have absolutely zero obligation to give away content for free.
I definitely did NOT post a comment, read this comment, then delete my comment for feeling foolish.
Jk i did.
Great take 12/10
This is ridiculous. Spotify has been effectively doing dumping as an economic policy, and now that they have a sizeable portion of the market share, they're turning to enshittification to make a profit. I see nothing defensible in that. The fact that they can't turn a profit means that they're trying to drive out competitors with less VC money.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps, and especially not ones engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, and it's embarrassing to defend that. I've never used Spotify and I never will, but the idea that they lose money on every user tempts me. I second the other guy in the comments: If it isn't economically viable, it shouldn't exist. It's just wannabe monopolism otherwise
Fundamentally, no industry can survive on VC money forever, so there simply has to be some kind of crunch eventually, either by reducing the product, increasing the price, or both.
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist. Spotify is not going to be able to operate at a loss forever, and while there is a discussion to be had about what level of profit is warranted, I don't think it's a particularly wild thing to say that the answer is at least non-negative profit.
What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
Who would have thought that good old dumping at a large scale and inadequate economic regulation would lead to companies basically "starving" themselves in a Mexican standoff?
And it's not just Spotify it's a major chunk of the tech companies, because no one learned anything from the dotcom crash.
Well, if you don't pay with money, you're paying with your attention. Do you think they create this huge service just for funsies?
Tbf, out of all media streaming services across movies, series, and music, Spotify has the highes bang-for-your-buck. It's still like Netflix at that time when there was only Netflix and you could watch almost everything on one platform. I still buy records that I like on physical media like vinyl, but Spotify is such a great deal for convenient listening to all music out there.
Man these people forget the days when a month of Spotify would afford you 1 CD. I remember cause I would spend half my paycheck on music. I'm just sitting here happy for services like Spotify and YouTube in my life. I remember a time when music and information was much harder to obtain (even illegally).
But if you bought the CD you actually owned something. Stop paying for the services and you have nothing if all you used was spotify/YouTube/pandora. I gave up on paying for streaming years ago and spend the same amount monthly on purchasing music. I get CDs, either new or used. I’ve amassed a collection and I don’t need Internet or monthly charges to play them.
But I don't want to own it. I don't want to amass a collection of CDs taking up space somewhere. Been there, done that. I have a large collection of ripped mp3s from CDs I bought in the 90s and early 2000s (I've long since disposed of the physical media). I haven't clicked on a single one of them in years, I just keep them for nostalgia sake and because they take relatively little space.
I just occasionally want to listen to music sans commercials or annoying DJs wasting my time. For the cost of 1 CD a month my entire family can listen to almost anything they desire, at any time, without hassles (on Pandora in our case but I assume the economics are similar).
Same thing with movies, honestly. I watch them once and move on. There's a small handful I like enough to rewatch and I do own those.
I get the whole, we don't own anything anymore, argument and I mostly agree with it (see my massive Steam library). I just want both options to be viable. Streaming for ephemeral entertainment and actual ownership for the things I choose to keep.
We all have our preferences and I enjoy the quantity of music I can get in a heartbeat. It really sucked when you were 16 and spent $15 on a CD that sucked because there was no way to hear it ahead of time.
Valid point, but commuting with my turntable to listen to my sick vinyls on the go is a pain in the ass. Also moving sucks ass when you have a metric fuckton of sensitive vinyl to move. Owning stuff also has its downsides. Also no way I'm digitizing my vinyls and cutting them and shit to listen to them on the go, ain't nobody got time fo dat.
I gave up on CDs roughly 15 years ago because I don't like the format compared to vinyl (small album art, plasticy jewelcases, ...).
You owned the music when you buy it. With multiple backups the risks of losing it it very minimal but with spotify or other streaming services, if you have to reduce your expenses you completely lose the access to the music till you pay again. Spotify always grey out songs too so even when you pay you may not have access to the some of the music you want to listen to
I feel you, the value from Spotify is enormous. I can sift through ten different bands in no time just because I decided that I want to look up a new genre that I may or may not be totally into by the end.
💀
Surely you have a better explanation for why Spotify isn't giving you the full service for free.
Yeah don't use it if you don't want to, idc. But you might accept the thought that there are people that think the deal Spotify puts on the table is good.
I know not everyone will agree, but I think YouTube premium is the better bang-for-buck service. $3 more per month than Spotify and includes YouTube Music premium and YouTube Premium. So all the music and ad-free YouTube.
Except what YT Premium does is easily doable with free tools.
Only so long as Google decides to continue serving content for free to people who contribute nothing to their bottom line, which isn't guaranteed to last.
*with free tools from thankless efforts.
You can donate to projects you like tho
Preach. I’d rather donate to those folks than give google money lawl
An argument could easily be made for Spotify as well. There are plenty of options for streaming music for free to your device with download support. Just about anything can be done for free if people are willing.
YouTube is basically the same price as Spotify in my country (only 12 cents more actually), so even more bang for my buck, specially for family plans.
I'd rather vote for Deezer. Costs the same, but you also get lossless (16-bit 44.1kHz FLAC) audio.
By the way, free-mp3-download.net rips songs from Deezer. And if you don't like spending storage, you could self-host your own Navidrome server, though I get that may not be convenient.
What a shame it would be if this drove more people into using those awful cracked versions of the Spotify apk that give you most of the premium features without a premium account. Truly the godless heathens over at xManager (https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager) must be rejoicing over this.
Cheers, I knew about ReVanced but this is a new one for me
might have something to do with their motto "don't make us popular"
Real shame.
In terms of privacy is xManager safe? When I downloaded it I was faced with an ad which seems sketchy for a GPL licensed application.
Been using it for years. The ad thing is recent but it's safe. They have to make money somehow and it was only an ad when I was downloading the app off of their updater. After that the actual Spotify app is add free.
This wants me to download TikTok...
If I were to use this, would I use a Spotify login/password with it? I'm not clear if this app allows you to save playlists and favorites, etc.
It builds a custom spotify apk that you install. Except for the parts it cganges, expect it to be the same, logging in included.
Who tf uses Spotify without a premium account?
I'd rather pirate that shit that use it for free (I like to hit next all the way).
IMHO Spotify is one of the few services that it is worth to pay.
Cough cough xmanager cough cough.
On github or xmanagerapp dotcom cough.
I agree with you here. There may be a better service out there, but I certainly haven't found it yet. I use Spotify in my car (via USB to my phone), in my kitchen, master bath, living room and kids rooms on Google mini's or Amazon Echos... And I don't have to go out and download anything, it just plays what I want when I want it.
I have the family premium plan and honestly love it. I haven’t downloaded an mp3 in years because Spotify is so convenient. As far as subscription services go, this one is top tier for me.
Now when we look at movie streaming.. well that’s what the music streaming could have been like. What an absolute mess.
Now if only they'd pay the musicians worth a shit. Maybe they should strike next.
Full disclosure I am on Spotify family plan and I love it because
It would be nice if companies didn't slash features and would offer music for free with features beyond that of broadcast radio.
It would be nice if we didn't have the mechanisms demanding infinite growth from companies because sometimes that's just not possible or even necessary.
Imagine if Spotify could just be like ok, yeah we're good no need to make major changes, everyone is happy, life is good thanks. Versus: oh shit we need to boost the quarterly numbers who can we fuck over to get there? I know, customers and musicians both! Yay!
afaik that's mainly the fault of the music labels, they charge quite good money, but they don't give it to the artists: https://blog.groover.co/en/tips/loud-clear-spotify-2/
That article, while not necessarily wrong, is blatant propaganda and overlooks the most important issues until the final paragraph, and even then it only touches on it once.
As someone with expansive knowledge and experience in the indie music industry, with a lot of experience dealing with streaming services and Spotify in particular the biggest problem is not the % of value created paid out, it's what the actual value is. They don't touch anywhere on how much you get paid per play, how the value is created, how the money flows once it's in Spotify's hands, etc.
As said in the article, artists and indie labels/distributors have basically no ways to reach Spotify to negotiate a price, but Spotify itself paid literal millions to license a few major labels in the beginning. The 'value' of a play is extremely skewed, where you'd need upwards of 10.000 plays to equal a single play on a nightly radio show for a big broadcaster like the BBC or at a festival with 500 people. On top of that, if you work hard, network properly and prepare your release you can get quite good exposure through radio, dj and other live plays, whereas with Spotify you have to be lucky that they put your pitch towards the right 'tastemakers', they are actively working against user (influencer)-playlists, have piss poor customer service, blatantly favour major label tracks in their algorithms and don't actual care about their listeners.
On top of that we've got the obvious subscription enshittification, classic outlandish manager/director salaries and bonuses, the need to have an ever-rising share price and more.
Thanks for the insights. No holy among the capitalist companies...
It’s also not a new or Spotify-centric problem, either. Labels have been screwing over the artists for decades.
Yeah I work at a label we pay our artists about 30% of what we make off them, but that isn't actually that bad considering the amount of overhead there is at a record label and the amount of services we provide for them. Just advertising alone makes up about 1/3 of a big label and we will spend more on advertising, distributing and actually allowing them to make music than we actually pay them, so in terms of end value it's probably closer to 60 or 70%
In this case, it's a good thing that Spotify is an European and not an US company. Less incentive for enshittification. At the same time, the main reason they fuck over musicians so much is not so much Spotify but because of record labels and ads themselves. The record labels are the ones with the financial power, holding the copyrights. It's not that Spotify doesn't pay labels, they do, then in turn the labels keep most of the money and fuck over the artists. At the same time, the record labels came last to the streaming game. Blinded on the madness that was the Napster and peak P2P era, a war they lost, they didn't want to even sell digital copies. Many awards and labels didn't considered digital sales, legitimate sales. An many rogue artists sold or gave their digital albums for free to protest this. So they were always behind the curve. When Apple forced the labels to sit at the table for iTunes, they had no bargain leverage and were forced to accept shit terms in exchange for the hope that streaming would stop piracy. As a result, the tech giants got to keep most of the revenue bag and that's been the status quo ever since.
On the other hand, adverts don't pay. We tend to forget this because the likes of Google and Facebook are so massive. But the only reason they make any money is because of how massive they're. Adverts are a shit form of payment. Too expensive and no one wants to advertise with you, too cheap and you can't cover even the platform maintenance, it's a delicate balance. The result is you need millions of eyes to make any significant amount of money from an advert. There's a reason cable and open air TV has devolved into 15 minutes of advertisement per every 20 minutes of entertainment.
Spotify pays a fraction of a cent for every play. It takes 150 plays of a song to make a dollar from advertisement, and most of that dollar is gonna stay with the record label. This is significantly worse for indie and small up and coming artists. They simply can't make a living out of Spotify unless they are already big and have a massive following. This hurts the whole industry as it becomes harder and harder to nurture new talent.
The up side is that, although they are getting shafted by Spotify and the labels, a subscription play is worth more than a free play. Up to ten times more than a free user play. So your subscription does help pay artists more. The down side is that less than 25% of Spotify users pay for a subscription.
As someone who was once a small artist on Spotify, they do actually pay really well. Better than most places.
I used to think the same, but these days it seems like most songs from my favorites/liked list are no longer on Spotify, as I hear the same 10 or 20 songs over and over again when I have it on random play, and when I manually try to go through my list it'll skip over songs and not let me select them.
I guess the competition with the other music delivery companies is coming down to certain companies have exclusives for certain songs and artists.
I've never paid for any streaming music plan and I love it. I never have to pay to listen to music because I already have MP3s of all the good music
To each their own. For me, I really like the Discover Weekly/Daily features to discover new music and I can’t see how I would ever “already have MP3s of all the good music” since that’s an ever changing set. Heck, I still have a ton of old mp3s I used to rip and/or download, but I haven’t listened to them in a while.
I would gladly pay for a similar AYCE movie subscription, but I refuse to sign up for a ton of different services and play the “which service is that movie on again?” game. Instead it’s a very different approach for me.
Enshittification everywhere. Selfhosting forever
Generally I agree, but spotify has just recently started to reach the point of profitability. And with high interest rates and reduced venture capital, its now or never for them. I, as a paying customer, haven't felt this enshittification. But if they make that turn, then I'll quickly resort to self-hosting digital music purchases, Lidarr, and Plex.
Also as a service I think it’s much more polished and better working than its competitors, even if it is shiftier for free users.
This is just for the free tier. The subscription is still a fair price and good service right now. They haven't fucked it up yet, tho I don't care for all the audiobooks and podcasts. But, there's definitely worse things they could be doing and be getting away with.
I've been using Spotify for almost 2-3 years. The only thing I can say is the app gets DEGRADED EVERY YEAR!!!! They do their best to bring more and more bugs with each update. I'm done with Spotify shit, also they removed a lot of regional songs from my country. The only reason I pay for Spotify is because I can download/rip their music and store it on my Plex Server.
what do you use for downloading from Spotify
Deemix and Deezer is better. Spotify streams in low quality.
Spotify in on itself is worth paying for BUT...
Their app for android sucks blue donkey balls and I'd happily pay more if I'd get to use a slightly less retarded cousin of this app.
The other but:
Spotify in on itself is not very bad right now and basically could and SHOULD continue as-is forever.
However, the economic system as it currently is requires it to continually come up with new crap that nobody needs nor wants (see also all Microsoft software that went from absolute shit thirty years ago to absolute slimey shit with lots of useless but pretty ding dong bells attached to it with a nice camera hidden inside to spy on the insides of your butthole) and it only a matter of time before...
Some exec gets hired there that promises to double their revenue, then implements some shit that will double their revenue once, gets this exec his bonus upon which he immediately quits to go to the next company to fuck over with a pineapple, leaving Spotify with a huge exodus of users, a dwindling service, and two years later it's dead.
I've seen this cycle with too many large companies, and it's the same story over and over. Be it Boeing, Disney, just about all large game companies, etc etc..
Spotify app sucks in the sense that they keep refining their UI to reduce the number of buttons on the bottom of the screen. When it first started they were five, then after a while there became four. I got used to where everything was, so of course with the recent update there now three so I have no freaking idea what is what.
Is there a term for this?
I really see this fucking our economy
Cory Doctorow calls it: Enshittification
It's pretty fitting I think.
Or "platform decay" if you need to talk to your grandma about it.
"Enshittification," an inevitable part of the cycle of capitalism...
So they went to the same model Pandora used to use 15 years ago
Well the model Pandora still uses.
Pandora had a cheap yearlong plan. They scrapped people's existing plans when they switched to monthly and wouldnt credit the remaining months on long term subscriptions.
Cancelled then and have never used Pandora since. Since then it has been Youtube for a specific song (until recently due to adstacking) or reliable nautical measures.
It was the reason I came back to Spotify when I decided to give Pandora a shot, way back when.
Putting all the best features behind a paywall, opening up ad space as well as sponsored song spots... Where have I seen this before?
Pandora, but at least they were honest about it.
When Sirius bought Pandora and started bleeding subscribers, that closed doors for Spotify. No way to increase revenues but by increasing ads.
Wait, how would Sirius/ Pandora bleeding subscribers be a bad thing for Spotify?
Every tech company right now?
This is literally just commercial radio.
This is enshittification 101
Spotify is losing money, they gain nothing by having free users, if they convert some people to paying customers it's worth it for them. You can't expect to listen to music for free when license holders charge ridiculous fees.
Yet they can bring in the fear factor blockhead and other hot garbage for how many hundreds of millions of dollars?
It's funny, Rogan lost me as a listener right around the time he made the Spotify deal.
At the time I actually had Spotify premium too, I just wasn't interested in the conspiracy right wing shit.
Then I pretty quickly got fed up with Spotify and dropped my sub altogether.
YARRRRR.
I mean there are ads.. does the ad revenue not counteract the licensing fees?
It's like the big awakening of licence holders. Like someone finally explained to them what the internet is, how it works, etc. All around, things are starting to get re-structured in the way it worked in irl before. The same charges and middlemen.
The gates to the open internet are being closed and the registers are being set up.
We're also not a consumer anymore, but a subscriber. A subscriber can be traced, bound to your product for a lifetime.
I only hope that, unlike movies and series, big labels don't get the idea of starting their own music streaming services and end the licensing to all existing music streamers.
For now it's like Netflix in the old days. All streamers have about the same catalog in music.
... Except they gather your data and use it to try and make profit.
Say least radio required them to give genuine value to you. Radio had to give away shit and run contests to get caller info to figure out how many listeners they had, to get advertisers etc. It was a real business.
Spotify just buys the music catalogue and then forces you into their ecosystem.
Except it seems like you can still skip forward. That's not something you can do with radio.
In addition, radio has those incredibly annoying station identification bullshit announcements like "You're listening to JFRH, the cooooolest FM station in the greater Grumug metro area!", often with annoying sound effects like lasers and so on. Even worse, they often interrupt the music to have an ad for the station, in which the station-ad claims that this is another hour of ad-free music.
It's shitty, but it's not as shitty as radio.
It was already like this in Europe when I began to use Spotify in 2015. I do not hate it because the app's free tier is already unusable to me due to the adverts.
The free version is completely useless on smartphone. I hope the limitations won't come to the desktop version
Tech Bros, reinventing classic technology with a veneer of techno babble.
Nah, it's better than radio because now they can track you and sell your data, including everything they get from your phone, to the highest bidder.
I don't mind paying for music
When I was a kid, I would go buy a CD basically every paycheck/allowance, for probably around $15-$20 of '03 money. 12ish tracks. I would add basically about 30 tracks to my collection per month for $30-$40. And even though I owned those (as long as my little brother didn't fuck up the disc), I could only access the handful that I could carry with me. If you told 15-17 year old me, that for $11 a month I could access basically any music I could think of instantly, anywhere, I would've been like "sure, and then we'll listen in our flying cars, right?"
There are lots of things that absolutely suck about modern life and the enshittification presented here, but music fans have it pretty good.
Me neither, but I do mind paying a subscription for a shitty service that does not let me actually own anything and changes the rules every year.
I have no clue what you're talking about. I've had Spotify premium for 5-ish years and nothing has randomly changed. The UI changed a bit here and there but nothing you couldn't ignore if you wanted to and that's it. I get all the music on the planet and podcasts, it's a good deal if you ask me
That's why we pay for a good service instead. The subscription is a fraction of a cost you'd get from paying to "own" the media, and it's not like you still can't combine the two either. It's not one or the other.
And this is why I buy vinyl.
How do you combine a subscription service with having ownership of the media? If you're not happy with Spotify just got to iTunes or the likes and buy the individual songs. Or what am I missing here?
This is why I tried to buy all my albums through Bandcamp... but Bandcamp has a new owner that fired half the staff and I'm worried they're gonna get enshittified.
Spotify is garbage, last time I used it it was missing basic features like sleep timer, play count, song rating, and history. I buy my music and use poweramp instead.
Spotify has sleep timer and listen history. I don't see the need for song rating and play count, that sounds like old UX to me. Doesn't actually add functionality for me.
Love power amp.. I'm on Spotify thou.. so I don't get to use it too much
I would love for power amp to be able to connect to the main online storage services thou.. that's where most of my music I own is nowadays
I've been a happy paying spotify user for well over a decade, I love listening to new music all the time. Also, for counts/history I just scrobble to last.fm
They just need to add commercials for Premium that have horns or police sirens and they'll be all set
I thought this was always how the free version was? Which bit of that is new? I remember only being able to shuffle play until I got premium
Yeah I'm also very confused here. Maybe it's different depending on the country? I'm in the US and I'm pretty sure the mobile version has always been like this
And Netflix and other streaming services, despite supposedly saving us from cable, re-invented cable.
But the good news is, maybe it's time to get the good old iPods/DAPs back into the mainstream again. You can have a big SD card with all the music and podcasts you could ever want without tying yourself to a specific service.
I own quite a lot of mp3s legally. Host them on a 50 dollar raspberry pi with something called Navidrome which uses a protocol called subsonic.
I can stream my own music from my home to my phone etc or anywhere. Otherwise yeah just having them locally is the other best option.
Spotify is now a Pandora knockoff.
Soooo, pandora?
Isn't free Pandora the exact same thing?
I was making that comparison, yes
I tried it free once, and found it generally unusable.
Like it was filled with annoying adverts, but it wasn't adverts for other people. It was adverts for itself. All overly chipper voice actors going "Wow, is it true that Spotify Premium is just £9.99 a month?" as if that's how anybody has ever talked in the history of humankind.
The free version is funded by paying customers. The only purpose it has is to annoy you into paying.
I was happy to use Amazon Prime's version for a bit, and then they decided that merely paying for Prime wasn't enough, and I had to pay special extra fees to listen to albums. So I got Spotify instead, because fuck giving more money to Amazon.
Yeah for a few months there I was starting to like the Amazon player too and then they made it worse for more money and I realized.... I am so done with Amazon and paying them $180 a year for barely getting things (mostly scams and garbage) shipped from them, a weird mess of a video player and radio.
I actually have YouTube premium because at least it helps me get rid of the onslaught of YouTube ads and helps pay my creators of choice slightly better, and the music player is I guess just basically YouTube which isn't that bad. Not perfect but not bad.
For a company worth over a trillion dollars, there's this unmistakable layer of couldn't-give-a-fuckness to all their products.
From a store that ships blatantly fake products, through the video service that misses subtitles on like half the movies, or looks like it's been transferred from a well used VHS, to the music service that used to let you listen to full albums, but on playing you notice that a bunch of tracks are missing from it.
And the race to the bottom ain't even over yet.
It's actually really fucking sad how bad their marketplace is. I can buy more legitimate tech items from a creepy back alleyway in Malaysia and that's a really bad sign. I don't want to be scammed and have to return every other item or more, it's so wasteful.
They are able to burn so much money without even a second thought it is so impressive and scary to watch. So yeah "This track is not available" was like final straw.
P.S. on couldn't give a fuck-ness did you know that Amazon video has a share watch function that includes a live chat and sync play? They paid a developer for this and it seems completely forgot it's in their system
All these companies want to control what content you consume. Just walk away.
I know Plex gets a lot of crap here, but they have done me no wrong allowing me to simply play the music I like. Spotify is ruining artist discovery, which is exactly how radio became the shithole it is now. At least Pandora leads at artist discovery.
You can just use Jellyfin which is open source.
Plex (or equivalent) pairs great with Bandcamp where you can download the music you buy in lossless quality.
For now. Sounds like maybe Bandcamp might not be around much longer.
Use Spotube. It isnt have these limitations. You get premium spotify for free 😆 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=oss.krtirtho.spotube
Plz spread the word, it is the only way we can move them to right way, if they feel it...
"changed"? More like "removed"
Try this instead
https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader
yt-dlp go brrrrr
If you get a YouTube music subscription can you use it to rip higher bitrate audio? I thought free videos bitrate was capped, I’m just using yt-dlp to archive videos/channels at the moment
Spotify is very easy to crack, at least on Android
Even cracked I didn't like it, I swapped to YT Music ReVanced. The Spotify algorithm used to be good for me but lately it kinda sucked.
All I have to say is:
Haven't paid shit in like 10 years and I try to download the songs I like for my self hosting.
Just checked out spotube and that's exactly what I've been wanting. Spotify recommendations using YouTube as the audio source. Very cool project.
I remember when it was a literal radio feature in Spotify and it was this but the algorithm was decent and you could curate different stations.
Why did they get rid of Spotify Stations? Like I'm about to subscribe to Pandora to get this back but 128kbps.
They got rid of spotify stations but you can make a "radio" playlist from any song or other playing. Not as good still but better than nothing I guess
Next update will show text lyrics in free version. If you want to play the audio you better have premium
Your daily reminder: if you don't own it, it's not yours.
:::spoiler Disclaimer The it in this case is your music library, and by own I mean have in your personal possession and not DRM'd. :::
what point are you even trying to make here? we know we don't own the music. if you truly care about DRM issues, then you're not even on Spotify to begin with. DRM is not the problem with this post. this is specifically software locking previously free features for the sake of increasing shareholder value down the line. say what you will about that, but it does not have anything to do with DRM or ownership...
So it's pandora now?
Funny, this is a summary of what I didn't like about Pandora.
I know, it's pretty silly and very dishonest. I just find it so bizarre that the boundaries of what these finances can provide are drawn around these lines. Skipping songs was "profitable" 1 week ago, but now it isn't? It is very goofy.
fuk spotify i dont need my music streamed over the internet mp3s forever
Oof, Better watch out or you're gonna catch some .FLAC for saying egregious things like that! (Can always convert them to fit individual devices)
My biggest issue with Spotify was that they were changing the main screen layout what seemed like every other week. Like bro I don’t do podcasts so keep them off my homepage.
I ended up canceling and going to Apple Music because we were already paying for their other services and it was cheaper with their bundled membership. I also have a Plexamp server with all of the music I have ripped over the years and actually prefer that to Apple Music
Man I grow up buying at least 2/3 album a month. Paying monthly Spotify for almost all the music in the world seems like a good deal to me
You're renting, not buying. When you stop paying... poof! Your music collection is gone.
Buying the individual albums is still an option. The benefit of renting through Spotify (or any similar service) is that it's dramatically cheaper than owning the same amount of music.
How is non-premium different from normal radio?
I think that's the joke
radio tries retain listeners and spotify free tries to annoy listeners
You pay for the data to reach you
I think the free version is just what the free pandora was years ago. Maybe I am missing something there.
Pandora had one thing Spotify didn't have though, and that was "bad," but good for me. Pandora could play at a lower bitrate, so I could get it to work without skipping on long drives or in low reception areas easier.
The suggested songs on Pandora are way better than Spotify IMO.
Spotify's web client is garbage too, I used to subscribe but cancelled years ago.
Just listen to the radio then instead of complaining here?
You can actually do both, at the same time too
If you're using Android, check out xmanager. It's basically a free cracked version of Spotify Premium.
Lmao that website is terrible. Doesn't even tell anything what the app does just gives a link to apk in github. Also github page doesn't explain anything.
It doesn't, but that's where most of the Spotify mods come from. The app will let you download the modded versions of Spotify.
xmanager
Spotify kind of sucks. I've been using Bandcamp for years (though they sold to epic and then got sold to some vultures, so they might be doomed)
If I buy one album a month for a year, that's about the same as a subscription except I get to keep what I bought. And after a few years I have a big library and don't need to buy as much. And the musicians get a bigger cut.
If you're listening to stuff that's not on Bandcamp I don't know what to tell you. Probably buy it from elsewhere, or if it's old just pirate it because it should be public domain anyway.
This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.
We do not care that we don't own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it's almost a perk that I don't because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify's library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.
I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don't want to go pirate it, I don't want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.
And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I'm a member at our local zoo. I don't expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I'm a member at our museum. I don't feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don't own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.
Spotify is the exact same for me.
Thanks for a well written reply. I'm glad that you have a model that works for you. I'm bummed that I don't think Spotify really does right by the artists (and other issues with them). I guess in your analogy that would be a zoo mistreating the animals? Not the best metaphor I'll have to think more on how to work that.
I also really want more people to consider other options. A lot of people I don't think really consider that they could buy instead of rent. I'm confident there are many people who listen to like five albums and are paying Spotify for that every month.
One thing I feel like people keep forgetting is that artists weren’t making much money off CD sales or radio plays anyway. People tend to single out Spotify as a unique problem in the industry, but things weren’t necessarily better before. Artists have always made most of their money from ticket and merch sales. It was true then and it’s true today. And it’s also still possible to use Spotify and also still pay to go to concerts and buy merch.
I feel like we have different definitions of "big library". I listen to dozens of new albums a year.
"Product X sucks because I use Product Y. If you like something else just steal it." Bout sums it up.
I don't know why anyone would give Spotify money when they pay Joe Rogan to spread vaccine disinformation and union bust.
I use YouTube music. It's far inferior to what Google Play Music was, which was literally perfect, but it's not Spotify and I really think it does mixes best of all. Apple Music is so very Caucasian, I gave it a shot but it just comes back to the whitest music possible every time.
You know, it is literally pick your poison, google/alphabet is not a better company either.
This is probably the first time I've seen anyone argue that paying Google is the more ethical choice. Fuck that company with all of my heart, I literally pay for both email and search just to use their services as little as possible, and will be caught dead before I start paying for YouTube.
Seems I've picked the perfect time to get back into Mini-disc!
Deezer+Deemix -> Jellyfin -> Symfonium
Xmanager
I really got tired of them adding ads to podcasts - just felt like a real insult to paying users. So I hopped ship. There are apps that make it relatively simple to export your data to a new service.
I don't mind having ads while listening to plain radio. But on Spotify there were more ads than songs lately, so they forced me to buy a subscription. They did not reinvent the radio, they made it worse.
Aah, so their tactic is working 100% as intended.
But they didn't force you to do anything. you willingly chose to reward them for their shitty method instead of ditching them because of it.
Wow, you subscribed because they made their service worse?
Is that weird somehow? You like a thing. Then the thing changes into something worse but there is a paid version of the thing which is still good. You decide whether you liked the thing enough to spend x amount of money on it.
Funkwhale is pretty cool to those who use spotify. I love this playlist: https://open.audio/library/playlists/596
Spotify has been like that for years now on mobile devices. At least here in Germany
One think that idgaf about paying for is Spotify or any music streaming service. We use a family plan anyway but even full price isn't great value for money.
It’s the price of a single/couple CDs and you get access to almost every single music
Jesus Christ these people are delusional? What do they want? Eminem to come sing to them in the shower because that's the only way $10/mo is worth it?
And he better bring pizza
@alphacyberranger This is why I still use my 160GB iPod Touch + Soulseek
I know, lots of services are currently going to shit, but quite the timing with Bandcamp imploding, too...
Truly amazing. 2023 really is the year for less for more
Pay $0 to use a product from a business that is losing money
Business makes a policy change to try to convince you their product is worth paying for, but still let's you use a version of it for FREE
Wow this company sucks, I've given them nothing and they're taking everything away
In a capitalist society you speak with your money. It's the only language businesses speak. If you're not giving a company any money they're not going to cater their product to you, plain and simple.
Looks like this is India only?
https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/spotify-limits-features-for-free-users-india-8975967/
The things listed in the screenshot have been like that for years at least here in Germany on mobile devices. I thought it was like that everywhere.
What alternatives to Spotify exist? Any recommendations?
I've really been enjoying TIDAL after I got frustrated with all the garbage YT music was putting into the app.
InnerTune is the best alternative I've found. Uses YouTube music, is free, no account required, and it has a really great UI.
YouTube clients like NewPipe.
Miss the radios and CDs? Blame record labels.
Oh did they remove the 5 skips per day maximum?
Neat!
GOT IT
I pay for Spotify but my dad has the free version. They don't even have the ability to queue specific songs. Oof.
I mean, it's radio but you pick every song they play on the station. Still an upgrade
So Spotify couldnt become profitable just by hawking my personal info and invading my privacy? What kinda shit company are they?
Just gonna throw the name Innertune out here... look into it :p
Give Vimusic a try!
You dont have to pay for radio receivers just ads for listeners.
At least the radio has someone that talks and occasionally interacts with the audience
This isn't always a good thing, like most "morning zoo" shows.
Spotify has an AI DJ that I actually quite enjoy. It says your name, asks how's it going and does it a pretty good job of mixing up music I like. It thinks I like country music every once in a while though. I have a couple of songs, but can't stand new country music.
Jesus Christ
I am on lemmy right?
I only skimmed, but not one single suggestion to federated our music? Isn't that what we need to do now, and not for downloading, simply sharing libraries. It's out there...
There's a ton of technical reasons that would be difficult and stupid expensive, even if completely ignoring the aspect of being highly illegal.
Federation isn't a magic concept that instantly fixes the internet.
I pirate all my music since that's the only "service" that has never tried to fuck me over