I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”.
Why am I seeing ads if I’m already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
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so i should have like and hdd of 1000tb just to listen to musica and series?
Just like back in the day.
You don’t have to carry it all at once, swap playlists around. Carry 300-500 songs at a time, more than enough to really appreciate each song rather than bebombarded with choices
That’s cool, and I would pay a small fee for the convenience of not having to carry all that around
Same. Which is why Spotify exists.
I want FLACs!
I want WAVs.
Just convert it with FFmpeg
I know I can do that.
Have you heard about sarcasm? That’s what I was doing.
I thought maybe you thought that WAV was purer than FLAC
Nah, I just like to brag about how the file is uselessly bigger
Look, they ask me at the audio store how I listen to my music when I ordered two amps to try out, just to make sure I don’t just use Spotify.
So I guess it’s never out of question that people consider WAVs a completely different sound qualities.
You can download lossless with Apple Music and listen to it with no data connection.
Yes, but I want the files themselves, so I can back them up and not worrying about losing them in the future.
If you’re not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
But you’re paying for the GOOD recommendations now, not the free bad ones… /s
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
The lesson is that corporations will take, take, take no matter what. They will never honor any kind of social contract, and will always abuse anyone and everyone for profit to the maximum extent they are able.
So stop letting them take advantage of you.
And if they make a mistake, “my bad”. You make a mistake and it’s $100 in fees.
Unless, usually, they are a not for profit organization.
Or at least not a corporation that is expected to provide infinite growth for their shareholders.
Even then. Look at the way they pay people and treat volunteers…
I agree that there are also organizations from this kind
And push for legislation that doesn’t allow em to do this in the first place.
Cause it doesn’t make it right, but on some level it’s hard to blame them for pushing the limits, if there’s no resistance or repercussion. That’s how we ended up in this mess.
Tech moves fast. Government moves slow. Most of these issues boil down to legislative failures.
I go hard when it comes to this. Firefox + uBlock Origin, use open source alternatives, don’t communicate outside of Signal, 2FA on everything, you name it. And it’s exhausting at times, not gonna lie. But my effort reinforces my sentiment that it shouldn’t fall to the consumer to put in all this effort just to have some a basic, healthy blend of convenience, privacy, and security.
That is literally what non-Open Source/capitalism is like:
- You don’t pay, you are the product
- You pay, you are the product and you pay for it
Man you’re absolutely correct. But I’ve yet to find a simplified music streaming solution that functions as seamlessly across a wide range of devices as Spotify connect does.
I want an alternative… I also don’t want to manage a library as extensive as a streaming service’s offerings myself. I need convenience.
I have a pretty sizeable local collection, and it can be a pain to manage sometimes. Tagging can become a real pain as well. A real splinter on the scrot.
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After trying to find an app with something even close to Spotify Connect I gave up and switched to Apple Music and replaced my speakers with newer Denon that have Apple streaming support.
It was the choice between letting Spotify fuck me over again and again and spending a few hundred dollars on new speakers. Annoying but fuck Spotify and their relentless upsells, ads, podcasts, books, etc
(I feel pretty strongly about that because I used it daily since they released their beta version close to two decades ago).
I recently found Spotube. It uses the Spotify search API then plays the audio from youtube. Basically spotify premium for free.
Haven’t actually used it yet though.
Spotube looks really interesting. It says that you can use it as anonymous/guest, but it looks like it still requires a Spotify account. I don’t have an account, but I might have to make one just to test it out lol
Yeah, reading through the github issues it seems the developer meant you can play stuff logged out but you can’t use spotify search without an account so the search doesn’t work unless you log in.
What I really love about commercials is that if I click on them and order a life time subscription of whatever product they’re selling, I’m still gonna get the same commercials.
Or even worse you’ll get more. It applies to everything too. I got a vacuum a while ago and Amazon keeps recommending more. Who tf is out there buying multiple vacuums? Why does Amazon think that someone who spent $50 on a shop vac is now in the market for a $700 Dyson? For stealing so much of our data they sure are shit at advertising
Why does Amazon think that someone who spent $50 on a shop vac is now in the market for a $700 Dyson?
Because their “algorithms” suck. Their “ML/AI” recommendation engine garbage sucks ass. I have no idea why publications or companies think this is in any way a better form of advertising than just…recommending things related to what you’re watching / reading / listening to…but hey…I guess it at least allows them to spy on everything you ever do anywhere on the Internet and then try to join that up to what you do in real life through phone data, so the ends justify the means I guess.
EDIT: In addition to it sucking, it’s largely irrelevant and likely prevents some sales from occurring. If I’m listening to a lot of a certain rock band…I’d likely want to know if they’re touring and may be unaware of that fact…but nah, gotta push people to buy another vacuum or whatever instead.
Some people do use the strategy of buying a cheap product if you aren’t sure you need a higher end one and then getting the better one if you don’t like the cheap one. So people who buy a cheap x might actually be more likely to buy an expensive x than people who haven’t recently bought a cheap x. Especially if they know that cheap x they sold you sucks.
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Haven’t ads always been recommendations in some roundabout way? Regular ads are technically just a company recommending their own product/service to you (whether you need it or not).
I mean, real life recommendations are more often than not that too. I mean, ones you get asking friends.
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I would bet that on Spotify most people discover music by listening to personalized generated playlists and not by waiting for ads to guide them. Have you ever used Spotify?
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He fell for the classic blunder
delete Spotify. it’s toxic
I haven’t had any issues with Spotify. I’ve discovered a bunch of new artists since joining a couolr years ago. I even remember the very first. I had no idea who Token was. Now I’m a fan. What’s wrong with this kind of thing? I’ll admit it’s not as good as old fashioned radio used to be but it’s still great, and being ad-free when paid is pretty amazing.
Nothing wrong with discovery, though masquerading an ad as an algorithm recommendation is super shady.
That said, Spotify has a track record of treating artists horribly. It also has atrocious sound quality compared to every other service out there.
I’m using Tidal. Has one of the highest artist pay out rates, and top notch quality.
Man tidal is nice. It also seems to be curated by people who actually care about music. The recommendations it has given me have been amazing.
Honestly, I’m still just buying albums and listening to the odd thing on Youtube with adblockers and all that. Costs less than a Spotify subscription as long as I don’t go mad, and I like basically all the music I listen to.
You happen to know of a nontoxic alternative that doesn’t involve torrenting?
Modded Spotify Premium w/ gold theme by RockMods, download from Mobilism. Works really well, been using it for months. Checks out with all the antivirus scanners I use, and most stuff on Mobilism is safe (there’s exceptions of course, but I’m sure you know how to be safe if you mention torrenting). Create a separate spotify account for it just in case it gets “fixed” though. Seems well supported by updates. Much better to the alternative - torrent client for downloading ‘Linux ISOs’…
Apple music
I like Apple Music. It’s awesome even on Android, which is what I use.
I stopped using Spotify after I noticed that a song’s share URL contains unique tracking elements. Then they started trying to lock down the podcast market, which reaffirms that leaving was the right choice.
I switched to Deezer for the pod cast issue. My favourite pod cast kept being deleted from Spotify. Owner said it was Spotify at fault. Also had issues with offline mode.
Deezer is awesome.
Deezer nu-
Yeah, I dropped Spotify when they started plastering my home screen with ads for podcasts that I didn’t want to listen to. If there had even just been a way to hide them after the fact, but no. I guess they really needed to justify the deal with Joe Rogan.
I just cancelled Spotify and switched to Tidal a few months ago exactly because of shenanigans like this. I was getting popups to look at recommended eBooks that I had to buy.
That was it for me and I cancelled immediately. Between the ads and the countless bugs and issues I had while using their app, glad I made the change. Been a premium member with Spotify for almost 10 years.
I did the same, but it was because my card expired and instead of updating the details and having my premium plan continue as usual, they slyly took the opportunity and upgraded me to the duo plan which cost a few quid extra without my consent.
Since I never asked for this and because cards expire all the time, I decided not to take this punishment/con and decided to take my money elsewhere. Tidal has been great outside of voice assistant compatibility
To Spotify’s credit, when I cancelled, I forgot and did it 2 days after it renewed and asked customer service for a refund. They did it no questions asked
Made that switch two years ago, still absolutely love Tidal. Wish it had a WearOS app but I’ll take hot with the higher quality sound and no-bullshit app
In a similar boat but switched to Apple Music. I tried Tidal for a couple of months but it seemed like they are more interested in promoting Beyoncé and other friends of the owner than to help me discover music I love.
GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.
TLDR: You don’t need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.
I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn’t sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.
Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.
At some point I discovered that some record stores (I’m talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.
When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you’d even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore’s P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.
Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.
Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn’t I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?
And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.
So I got off. I’ve started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.
Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I’ve amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.
But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don’t stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you’ve got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn’t have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you’ve started to play the game of triaging.
In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don’t think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify “solved the problem” by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won’t believe (because someone’s been skinned to get that price, and it wasn’t the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).
Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.
I canceled after the first time they did this with the “Drake takeover” in 2018. Their customer support claimed it wasn’t advertisement, lmao.
Haha I also complained about that on their support forum. They claimed it was a recommendation.
Coincidentally this is the reason I quit Tidal after just a couple of months: they would push commercial hip-hop artists everywhere even though I am not into that.
xManager if you’re on Android.
I’ve been to their website and GitHub and I still don’t understand what the app does. Could you give a quick eli5?
It’s kind of like a hub, where you can download and update modded Spotify.
In the modded Spotify, you have all the benefits of a premium account and actually more because the modded version provides its own benefit, minus downloading.
I’m scared of using that tbh, cause last time I used a modde version of Spotify (simply the tablet apk on android so it would let me play individual songs), they found out and sent me an email saying that they have the rights to delete my account and my playlists if it were to happen again.
Make an alt account, and follow your playlists of your main account :)
Ah gotcha. Thanks!
