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So OP has posted this everywhere, even getting it flagged on Hacker News. Article is weak sauce:
I would agree with author that there are many problems with Spotify but concentrating on the artist revenue per stream and then publishing your top hits of the year as YouTube links? Really? Go and find out what the artist share per stream is on YouTube (regular YouTube video) for soundtracks. I’ll wait. Hint: there’s a reason that soundtracks using unauthorised copyrighted work get muted or taken down rather than revenue being redistributed.
Recommending a paid desktop MacOS music app for local content? There are hundreds of local music players but OK… but none of the criticisms of Spotify were about the client! Foobar2000 (mentioned for mobile playback) supports Spotify streaming…
Article seems to boil down to ‘I got tired of Spotify recommendations and I am an aspiring musician at an early stage in my professional career so I am recommending Bandcamp and soap boxing about artist revenue share’ . There’s a reason that people, some with local music libraries in the TeraByte range listen to Spotify. There’s also all the competing services - Apple Music; YouTube; Deezer; Tidal; Amazon; etc…
Recommendation to OP: If you are trying to persuade people on something, then decide what point you want to concentrate on, consider the pro’s and cons for your position, and make your point based/reinforced on that. Don’t meander around a bunch of inchoate personal gripes and affections that don’t really relate to one another or any particular point.
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I down voted because you added nothing to the discussion. It was just a completely empty criticism. On top of that, I read the article, and it’s clear to me that this poster read the article too.
But I’m curious as to what your actual criticism is.
What was the main point he missed?
They went back and read it and edited their comment apparently lolz. What an ass.
A while back I realized my phone has 256GB of internal storage and since I don’t take pictures or put anything else on it, I was running around with 256GB of free storage wherever I went.
And that’s pretty much when it clicked for me that I was paying Spotify for access to music I already have from the pre-spotify days for a convenience that no longer is valid.
I dove into my box of CD’s and DVDs and put the 30 something gigs of music I collected since the mid 90’s on my phone and haven’t used spotify since.
EDIT: and, yeah, I’ve re-instanced my music, movie and series downloaders and went back to sailing the high seas.
I switched to Netflix/Spotify, because of the convenience and timing of release they provided, they were also more reliable in terms of quality (“free” versions labeled ass 1080p often aren’t actually 1080p, etc).
But the sheer cost of Spotify, Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, etc, etc, etc to listen to and watch what I want, has made the convenience/cost calculation move from being acceptable to being even more than what it used to be buying CD’s and DVD’s.
On top of that the audio and video quality have deteriorated over the years, availability has become spotty, at best (like certain services removing movies and shows, even some removing movies and shows you paid extra for), we’re also dealing with these services pushing ads on top of us already paying subscriptions and fragmenting their market to the extent everything has become entirely unaffordable.
I used to buy maybe 2-3 CD’s in a year and a boxset of a show and a movie once a year.
Now simply subscribing to every service that has something I want for just 1 month costs more than what I spent per year previously.
Gabe Newels words are still right on the money.
Piracy is a service problem and the service provided these days makes Piracy the better option, again.
I don’t stream either. All my music, I own. No one is taking it away.
Unlike Disney, Netflix, etc, Spotify is the only streaming service where I never think oh this is missing let’s find a torrent.
Music streaming (at least for the consumer) is so much better than video. Where it’s super scattered over multiple services all wanting money.
Maybe you don’t listen to many international songs, I always find grey songs on the playlists I like.
Probably most artists I listen to are European or American.
I find that I can only find about 90 percent of what I want to listen to. That’s more than enough of a burden to opt out entirely. Live albums, demos, collabs, and obscure dead bands you can’t really find with great success
Yeah I’ve never fully switched to Spotify because of that but I do like their library and ease of use, the playlist function we use for parties a lot and it’s just easy and everyone understands it already.
As a Phish head and purveyor of bootlegs, and sometimes specific masters of classic albums, my personal music collection has always been a sacred space.
I frequently can’t find songs. I will say they generally are obscure though.
I agree with her arguments about Spotify overall, but this amused me-
To celebrate my newfound freedom, I downloaded a 13-minute long Taylor Swift megamix, and CAN YOU DO THAT ON SPOTIFY? I didn’t think so. I also then went on to Bandcamp after I got paid the other day and bought some music. It felt good.
As if Spotify somehow prevented her from doing those things anyway…
Don’t ya know if you have prime and Netflix you can no longer legally purchase a blue ray ever
Obviously this is presented in the sense that being a Spotify user means you’re not pursuing other methods of music acquisition, and to be fair that’s probably the case for most people, you’re paying for a service that’s supposed to meet all your music listening needs after all. Personally I also use other means like vinyl, YouTube, and a large local collection but that’s because I’m deep into music, also as a maker of it.
And in 2024, Spotify will stop paying out songs which get less than 1000 streams in a year. Which means for me, as an artist in the early stages of my career, I am going to get paid nothing. I could get over 1000 streams on all my songs in total, but still get paid nothing. I could get 999 streams on a song one year and 999 streams on it the next year… and still get paid nothing.
As the author states in the previous paragraph, Spotify pays 0.003c per stream. I don’t think the author has done the maths. 1000 streams equals 3c. He’s complaining over not getting paid 3c as if that will fund his career
It’s not 0.003¢ per steam, it’s $0.003. (Actually £0.003, per that article.)
So 1000 streams should pay $3.
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You (or your label who represents you) voluntarily put your music on spotify and can always pull your content if you want.
Equating this to theft makes zero sense. And your post is universally upvoted. Wtf?
Have you considered the power imbalance when you describe them as voluntarily putting it on Spotify? What are your views on “paying people in exposure” or unpaid internships?
I would be open to hearing an argument as to why Spotify should pay no matter what. I could get behind that.
However, if you voluntarily put your music on spotify, and can remove it any time you want, and you are claiming spotify is committing theft against you. . .well, that just doesn’t hold any water. I mean, you hold all the power in this case: it’s your music that you fully control.
What are your views on “paying people in exposure” or unpaid internships?
I can see both being beneficial, but most of the time lame. The latter is something that benefits the wealthy, so I think it should be discouraged. But if you voluntarily did either of these things and then tried to claim theft, I would meet it with the same argument.
Spotify can’t tell big fish to go unpaid but they can target small creators as they’re likely the ones who most need to be paid for their work. “Work for me for free and maybe I’ll pay you in the future” is lame but consider the small print says “we may stop paying you in the future if you fall below a change in threshold in the future”.
People say “internet piracy” is theft and that doesn’t even deprive the person of a thing they had, merely a strongly assumed “lost sale”. We know the creators had a sale because Spotify do this to make money earned by the works.
If I said I will donate money you give me to charity but I instead keep the money did you give it to me “voluntarily”? Probably not because you were deceived.
they’re likely the ones who most need to be paid for their work
IIRC, we are talking about if you don’t break the 3-5 dollar threshold. If you’re banking on that money you’ve got way bigger problems than Spotify not buying you a cup of coffee.
People say “internet piracy” is theft and that doesn’t even deprive the person of a thing they had, merely a strongly assumed “lost sale”
The question is…do you think piracy is theft? If not, then I don’t see why you would even bring up this point.
If I said I will donate money you give me to charity but I instead keep the money did you give it to me “voluntarily”?
No, of course not, because you committed fraud by lying to me what the money would be used for.
If Spotify gave no warning and did it retroactively, then you have a point that it was deceptive and fraudulent, but this sounds like they have announced in advance that they are changing the policy. So this isn’t them saying one thing and then doing another.
Is it safe to assume a significant portion of creators are in that threshold? 3-5 dolors from a lot of people for the biggest company in music streaming. I think Spoity nickel and diming a bunch of smaller creators is the real financial problem.
To determine where you draw the line I make small steps towards Spoity. If a Mafia gang member spells it out that you need to pay X every month or else while you live in this town, is it theft? You can just move away, do you have the power?
I believe my comment above was removed for the Oblivion guard line where if you are caught stealing you must pay a fine go to jail and if you refuse then you will be struck down. He does this even if you take something of little value. We all start earning at a low threshold for our creative works, those 3-5 dolors may be more important to them than you appear to value them. To me it’s more important than taking 1000 from a big creator…
He’s complaining over
*she’s
Your 3c (or $3, whatever) might not be much but they’re saving that across thousands and thousands of small artists so for them it’s another lucrative way of skimming the profits of the actual creators for themselves.
From what I read, it’s more about stopping people using auto generated songs and uploading thousands of songs
Spotify has always been a pain in the ass. For the longest time you couldn’t listen to a single song someone shared because they forced you to create an account.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
I don’t know why I feel like this is okay for Spotify to do but not YouTube.
My thinking is clearly flawed
Yup, either require an account to use the service, or don’t. Don’t do some weird middleground. It totally makes sense for saving playlists or whatever.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
OOT but Instagram does this and IT SUCKS
Worse, they don’t even show you properly like “Sign In to visit this account”, they just says the error message “Please try again”. I thought there was something wrong with my Firefox or adblockers… But, nope it’s like that in other browsers IIRC
Spotify used to be good but now they charge you the price of buying an album outright.
Might as well buy an album monthly and actually own it.
That works if you listen to just a small number of albums, but I average about 15 unique albums per month and probably 60 per year.
lol yeah I listened to over 150 new genres and thousands of artists this past year (according to Spotify wrapped), buying all those albums would be thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands.
Just to add, I do buy albums but more as a way to support the artists. Tidal is for convenience.
If I was really strict about paying for all my media (which I cannot afford now), I’d buy the albums gradually anyway, starting from ones I like most.
Also how do you discover so much?
To be honest I simply find Tidal + Plex integration to be more convenient than piracy. I’ll pay my $10 per month for the ease of use and still buy an album or two per month from artists I want to support.
My discovery is a combination of Tidal and last.fm similar artists/recommendations and people on various forums. It’s one of the few things I still go back to Reddit for. The other thing is that I like to listen to a band’s full discography when I discover them. I recently found The Ocean and all 9 of their albums are solid. That’s a lot to buy.
Good that it works. I use a free tier of a streaming service for discovery, but I cannot imagine not having my actual collection I listen to the most often depend on a streaming service. You’re locked into only using their player, cannot use a dumb mp3 player at all, can lose all your collection if you’re in a situation when you’re unable to pay, and also the tracks you like might be gone because of copyright shenanigans. The on-disk DRM-less collection is just FAR more comfortable.
I’m not locked into their player. Tidal integrates through Plex and I manage my music library between Tidal and local files there. And again, I still buy albums but we’ve both acknowledged we can’t buy all the music we would listen to.
Wait, you have all your collection local and DRM-less this way? Neat.
No, anything from Tidal is still DRM controlled but it integrates seemlessly with everything I have locally.
£10 = the price of every single album you listen to in a month, combined?
Yup. When I was kid and teen in the the CD era, I was buying 2 or 3 CDs a month for at least 10 to 20 bucks a pop. Or I would temporarily have my parents sign up for something like the BMG record club when there was a good promo where I could get 10 albums for cheap and then cancel. Fast forward to today and I can get unlimited access to all music for cheaper than a single album per month back in 2005. I don’t know how these economics can make sense even if you factor out physical media and physical distribution.
It was 9.99 for many years and now it’s 10.99, a ~10% increase. Not sure how a single, small price increase in years turns something from good to bad. Sure, there are many reasons to dislike Spotify, but pricing?
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Last year I’ve listened to more than 6k different songs. If you’d be generous for the math and say 12 songs an album, 9 euro per album it’s still over 5k a year. Spotify is just cheaper for me, even the high seas would cost me too much in terms of time
Everyone who listens to the same downloaded 50 song playlist everytime they open Spotify premium is paying for you to use the service
But I use it much more similar to you than those people so I am also winning lol.
Not to mention that if everybody listened like thak guy spotify would just increase prices.
I spent >100$ on concert tickets to listen to artists I found on Spotify. Probably would not have spent this money nor discovered those artists by listening to 50 songs downloaded 10 years ago from Limewire.
Over a hundred? Must have been half a ticket then? Pre-fees of course.
I listened to 6k songs, just because spotify has them.
Do i need it? Absolutely not.
I cancelled when they increased the price and i went back to buying an album for life from the discount bin and putting it on repeat with the other 20 albums i still owned.
Back when I had an ipod I spent days downloading songs. I don’t think my listening habits changed all that much, now I just don’t download them via “legitimate” routes anymore
I find it most useful as a radio replacement for this reason, you can’t find a service with more quantity. Personal music collection is still my main source though.
Hey all, I’d like to distance myself from Spotify, but I really enjoy their discovery features. I’ve learned about a lot of bands both new and old that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Do you have any suggestions for a service that could replace this aspect of it?
I’ve used Spotify, Apple music, YT music and nothing beats SoundCloud stations for discovering new music based on a song.
and their “More of What you Like” playlists are just stations based on your recently most played songs and they just don’t miss.
for someone like me that has songs from a lot of different genres in my regular rotation of 10-15 songs every month or so, it’s perfect for discovering music.
Bandcamp is pretty good. They do writeups that I think are written by real people. When you look at a band you like, it tells you about stuff other people who like them have. I’ve found a lot of stuff there.
It is more about buying music than renting it, however. Most albums it will ask you to buy after a certain number of plays. I think the band can configure those details
Bandcamp was bought out by Epic Games, fired half of it’s staff to make the bottom line look better, and is now owned by some private corporate music licensing company that refuses to recognize it’s employee union and fired even more employees that were all involved in their unionization effort. I wouldn’t recommend supporting them anymore.
This all happened in September btw so any enshittification of the service has yet to come to fruition.
I find last.fm’s “similar artists” feature more accurate that Spotify’s. But that’s just for finding new stuff and tracking your history. Not really for actually playing the music. I linked it to Spotify and use them both together
There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, used to love last.fm and pandora etc
Not that it’s any better in terms of ethics or artist pay, but YouTube Music has relatively decent auto playlist generation with settings for discovery. Plus you get ad-free YouTube without having to use piped or vanced or whatever people are using these days.
Yeah I know it’s not a popular position these days but I have been a Google Music subscriber since the early days.
IMO YT Music doesn’t disappoint when it comes to finding what you’re looking for.
And not having to worry about fighting Google on ad-blockers with YT is a convenient add-on.
If you like modern rock, theres a free app (no ads or any bullshit either) or listen via website. Former radio DJ quit the industry and started his own online station. Im definately biased here as i used to listen to him all the time when i would drive all day long, but as its literally free and not supported by ads.
No account needed also
Anyways if you like modern rock whatwasthatradio.com
It is dedicated to only playing new music
He didnt like all the amazing music that exists to continue to go completely unnoticed by commercial radio so hes doing it himself
Hes supported by subscribers on patreon etc
If i remember correctly all songs are 36 months or newer
This is a proper SOCAN licensed service (canadian broadcasting license I think) so hes doing it proper.
I personally have found at least a dozen new artists to listen to because of this free service
heres some of the bands he has done interviews with to give you an idea.
Search your favourite artists. Wiki them etc. and learn about them whilst simultaneously finding where they’re members play in other bands or have other projects. Also, it can illuminate what they’re influences were/are and you can listen to that too. I find a shit-tone of new music this way.
Deezer. Interface/UX is a little jank but it’s private and discovery is good.
Radio Paradiso. Berlin based radio. Weird and wonderful.
I use Yandex Music for discovery. For some reason, I can’t get Spotify to recommend the same amount of new stuff I like. You might need a proxy though because the content there is region-locked. Also I used both Yandex and Spotify for free, it’s just fine on desktop with Ublock Origin.
How about FM radio waves?
Radio fucking sucks, amigo. Literally the most homogeneous playlists ever unless you are close enough to a college radio station or a major city that can support anything other than top 40 or the same 100 classic rock songs.
I discover more ads than music that way
Ah yeah I love hearing the same 30 songs over and over again with 60% ads, great idea
This is why I’ll never feel bad pirating any music found on the radio.
This seems to be the standard music streaming experience
My current rules are that I’m gonna spend £10 a month on music (what I’d be paying Spotify) and try to buy directly from artists. I’ll allow myself listening to stuff on Youtube so I can gauge whether or not I wanna then go ahead and buy a song or an album if I’ve listened to it enough times and want it in my library.
So … it’s okay to listen to it for free on YouTube and maybe buy it directly, but not to pay a Spotify subscription and listen to it there (and also maybe buy it directly)? The whole rant about “Spotify doesn’t pay musicians very much” comes off as disingenuous.
Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck was interviewed on CNBN about the Spotify IPO and gets around to making a good point about it here, “stop whining… me.” Artists don’t have to use a label and get paid in these “pitties” from Spotify, ultimately its a bizarre consumption model and likely unsustainable.
The amazing mental gymnastics that these people go through to justify their piracy and inane behaviors.
Musician’s pay is just the excuse of the day for them to feel okay about what they’re doing. Honestly, if you are gonna pirate then just pirate, stop pretending that it’s for a good cause or higher purpose, other than to keep your own wallets stacked.
You could’ve replied to 100 comments on this thread about piracy but you replied to the one that had nothing to do with it.
Fai point, but regardless it seems to have struck a nerve with the piracy crowd.
I don’t have beef with piracy itself but I found it hilarious the number of pirates here standing on their soapboxes, pretending to be some kind of modern day Robin Hood and virtue signaling super hard.
Guys, you are still ripping off artists and content creators regardless of their deals with media company, just admit you want shit for free.
Probably pirated almost every artist I’ve subsequently bought from and go to shows average about once a month. Have professional musicians in the family and they work as studio musicians, composers for media, teaching, play in bands that do covers for corporate events, or as a backing band for a front person. That’s probably the majority of musicians unless you’re lucky enough to be in a band that gains any notoriety. Most bands are passion projects between musicians who have day jobs and might only play a few small gigs at local venues. So when we’re talking about piracy as if it’s the most significant thing impacting musicians, really it’s a small facet of a very difficult industry to work in.
I don’t really think piracy is the single most significant thing impacting musicians, my main point to the “Honorable” pirates is just to cut the shit and admit you rip people off because you want to, not because you are some incarnation of Captain Jack Sparrow out to serve justice while you loot and plunder.
To enlighten our android-using brothers and sisters… https://xmanager.app/ is a good way to enjoy spotify if you insist on using it.
I use Spotube, which avoids their app entirely. not super stable, tho
Do you know if it it works with Android Auto?
Yes, this is an installer for modded Spotify.
For Android Auto though you need to turn on developer mode and enable unknown apps to be shown – it won’t recognise the modded app by default.
After that it’s fine in my experience.
Down voted cause substack allows nazi content.
Blocking because irrelevant comments are annoying
Upvoted because this article was an interesting read.
I just quit Spotify too and went back to mp3s I’ve downloaded with Limewire. I got sick of playlists, messy UI, etc. I also got tired of people talking about their top music of the year. I honestly don’t care what you listened to the most.
All my mp3s are on my phone and on my Mac and work great
I also am not guilty not giving artists the $.0003 per play every time I play a son. Less guilty than the $1 per song in the 2010s or $20 per album in the 2000s…
I quit Spotify too though still in Apple Music. Hopefully later I’m able to buy non-DRM music (from something in Bandcamp to CD or even Vinyls). Actually I went to Vinyl store yesterday, it was such a refreshing experience.
Honestly I got sick of subscription. I know I’m not alone with that. I want to actually own my own music. I don’t want to pirate either 'cause I still genuinely support those artists.
Just a heads up, Bandcamp has gotten a little shady in the past year or so. I honestly forgot what happened, but I think they got bought out by some shitty label that’s known for treating artists like shit.
But tbh I don’t remember correctly
I know what happened–they got bought by Epic (yes, Fortnite’s Epic), then I think sold just last year, and now their situation is I think in limbo, not sure
Ugh, spotify soot again?
At least according to spotify (it would probably be illegal for them to lie anyways), Spotify pays almost 70% of revenue to rights-holders (whoever distributes the thing, e.g. record labels), which means they take about the same cut as Steam. Good luck complaining about that.
You often see people citing the $.003 per stream for rights-holders figure for Spotify. That’s not exactly what Spotify decides! Spotify pays rights-holders share of the 70% of the revenue based on how much they were streamed. TL;DR: Spotify pays rights-holders slices of pie based on how much their artists help bake. So, if artists aren’t getting payed enough, Spotify simply isn’t getting enough revenue despite reinventing radio for its free tier!
Not to mention how certain rights-holders (fortunately not DistroKid) gobble royalties away from artists. And, the author’s solution to (insert @Nougat’s comment here)?
(On a side note: I hate Tidal free, because it “doesn’t” have ads! Every single interruption I’ve encountered so far is the generic Tidal announcer telling me to subscribe to premium. Sometimes I even get a freaking video “ad” on cellular data telling me the same thing, and there are only 4 “ads” in total! There’s no variety! It’s just repeating! Aaaaaaaaa (dw just yelling me name
For what its worth (and its totally fine if you dont see it the same way) a free service that is promoting itself is a special type of advertisement and should be excluded from talking about ad supported content or when using just the phrase ads
That being said it is still equally disruptive but its not trying to schill you something you arent already committed to using and for free service thats an entirely fair way for them to try to get new subscribers and seems more like promotion than advertising
Agree to disagree but i do think its an important distinction when discussing ads
How do you deal with discovery?
That’s the hard part for me, the only way I find new music is by it ending up on a continuous playlist or something similar.
I have broad tastes, which makes it difficult to not be boxed into a recommendations genre on many platforms (Spotify included).
