Laughs in Navidrome, again.
Music artists absolutely fucking hate music streaming services! It’s too big to not participate, and in a lot of cases, their record label won’t let them not do so. But the pay is absolute shit! If you care about tbe artist behind the music, buy their music. If you don’t want to have all your music stored on device because it takes too much room, there are self-host options.
Going solely with streaming is actively screwing artists over, especially in the case of Spotify, which pays out to the tune (pun intended) of 0.0001¢ per stream. Even an artist as well known as Weird Al barely makes enough to buy a sandwich from what Spotify pays! Other platforms are better, but not by much. I don’t say this to guilt trip; many big names make good money from record deals and will be just fine, while most of us don’t make much. Indie artists are the real losers here.
That said, music had gotten cheap! Most of your favorite indie artists will sell FLAC versions of their albums for $10 an album, or $1 a song on Bandcamp, and prices are between $10-20 for major artists on platforms like Qobuz. It might take time to build your library back up, but the average person can make a huge difference here by taking the money you would spend on Spotify or any other platform, and buying your music directly. You’d be paying the artist more than they’d get from you streaming nothing but their album every day all year, eventually you’ll be paying less in the long run by not being subbed to a greedy music platform, and you’ll get better quality!
Reality check here. If morals or personal philosophy means the most to you, then self hosting is really the only honest choice, assuming you then buy merch from artists. If features and library size are most important then you probably need Spotify. All the other worthwhile options might come with a good USP but they’re usually flawed in comparison to Spotify.
Screw AI music, but it is on every platform. Spotify is just a victim of its success in this regard.
Edit: not a fanboi btw, just a dad with a family who likes to use Spotify. I have to pay for YT premium as well so the kids don’t get ADs on their stupid iPhones. If the YT music app wasn’t so shit I’d dump Spotify and make everyone switch, proving my point.
This figure mentions Spotify on a side note. You must be joking.
Indeed. It should be at the top as the defacto music streaming platform based on popularity.
I tend to wear a special hat that allows me to consume music in any format or device I like.
and then go donate to, or purchase music directly from the artists that I like.
yar har har.
Can’t ungoogle myself this time. YT music has probably the best catalog of all and it’s easily moddable
This graphic seems to put Spotify in a “less shit” category than the other big players based on national origin or something.
From a quality and fairness perspective Spotify is just as bad. A large list of credible musicians and content creators have detailed the poor compensation, shift towards fake artists and AI filler tracks, and other moves Spotify has made that harm the artists and provide a worse listener experience.
If you want to fairly compensate artists, you’d be better off pirating 100% of your streams using alternate frontends for YT music, then making a list of your top 10-20 artists and buying an album or T-shirt from each of their official websites. They will make a lot better margin on that and its better for their career than any amount of streams you can give as one individual. (Also go to shows when available locally)
Some of the categories for this infographic are arbitrary within the context of the music streaming market. Spotify is literally a more “incumbent” “monopoly” than the “big tech incumbents” if you only consider the segment of those companies’ operations related to music streaming. Spotify is probably the worst choice of all, both using the ethos provided by the infographic and by other metrics too. Tech companies with 150B capitalisation are big tech regardless of how much bigger others are.
I’ve been considering this and although I’m not one to pirate anything (my skills for this stayed in 1999) I’ve been buying CDs out of thrift stores and ripping them :)
i decided to self host my library in as high of a res I could.
I had a FiiO X3 anyway so i already had a FLAC capable player.
in the end, even if i know it’s not for everyone. selfhosting is the only way to never lose what u love. so many of my lesser known tracks are just gone on spotify.
Never lose as long as you have a good backup strategy.
Very True, that is one of the few things people don’t realize enough when starting selfhosting. Backups and documenting what you did.
I have a raid NAS keeping my data in-house which has an encrypted backup in the cloud (Infomaniak kdrive) and my FiiO X3 SD card which is an additional portable backup. So on that front, I don’t worry too much.
I did this but I am not able to find new content.
That is indeed quite a gap and nothing that fills the “discover weekly/release radarr” that spotify gives you once you use it for a while, I tend to go to tons of music events and I pick up music here and there.
Browsing what’s popular/trending on beatport also helps a lot in adding fun tracks you wouldn’t know from the radio.
Yeah it sucks that the Spotify algorithm for both automated playlists and “shuffle” is a mess now. It used to be half-decent, but now from what I’ve heard from insiders, though no official confirmation or anything, is that the algorithms were modified to heavily favor sponsored artists, and so only really works with popular genres with lots of sponsored artists from major record labels, and “popular” songs, which means the more a song is played, the more often it gets played which becomes a self-fulfilling popularity cycle that excludes less well known songs. Really does a bad job for me with interests across many genres and wanting to hear more “b-sides” from artist I follow.
To be fair,i switched to Tidal for a bit because i got a several moth discount for talking with a product manager about what I thought the app needed (though they didn’t seem to take any of my advice anyway), and it’s no better than Spotify with finding new music. It paid artists better at the time and streaming quality is a bit better (not sure about now), but it was also missing a lot of artists I listen to, unfortunately.
I really miss the early days of Pandora when it used to use the “components” of music to cross genres and didn’t rely as heavily on how popular a song was and had just about all artists I could possibly want. Sure, I did a lot more skipping of songs back then, but now I just hear the same 50 or so songs over and over. I get really tired of it and don’t have the time to make my own playlists, not to mention even if I make a list, I want it shuffled, and even that just plays the same songs over and over way more than “random” would.
I’d love if there was a service for finding new music that allows me to hear new songs and then choose to purchase them if I want to hear them again.
And even better if it gives me a list later to review if I want to purchase so when I listen in the car I don’t have to touch 4 or more buttons to “like” a song. Never understood why Spotify, Tidal, etc., car apps always bury the like button and instead present a back button that doesn’t work if you aren’t in a predefined playlist anyway, and a shuffle button that I’m not going to want to turn off and on on the fly anyway. The like button should be immediately after the next and pause buttons in priority order. Such bad Ux design.
I also really miss Aimee Street that Amazon bought and killed. It was a cool way to get less popular music for cheap as well as getting the artist more exposure and more money the more often a track was purchased. Got so much stuff for pennies that I ended up really liking and buying a lot more from the artist.
Anyway, that’s my rant about music apps for today.
You could scrobble to listenbrainz and last.fm and pull suggestions from there
I listened to this one band’s music a decade ago, pretty small, just two guys in college making music. Looks like they broke up and took all their music off streaming platforms, really sucks that can happen
if only deezer didn’t have data breaches
Some of these services don’t offer themselves in turkey (tidal)
Is there a way to get a list of all the songs I like on spotify for archival purposes? Not the file, just a list. Like a shopping list.
You can check out Soundiiz
If you are moving to deezer they will take over all your playlists. They have a third party service on teir website that does it. It moved thousands for me with minimal issues. A couple live tracks and very niche local sonfs missing. I would say easily 99.9% transfer accuracy and it listed the outliers.
The service works regardless of who you move to or from.
If you’re paying for music, stay away from any music publisher that doesn’t give you the option of keeping a DRM-free copy for yourself that can be played back in perpetuity, unconditionally.
A glance at this makes me happy to just keep playing my mp3s.
Tidal is owned by Block, the owners of Square, which is the biggest POS vendor in the US. If that’s not big tech I don’t know what is.
Part of the reason I just shifted to a fully self-hosted setup.
Left Spotify because of all the bullshit they pull, tried out Tidal because of the higher quality and higher artist pay, but even if it is a substantially better platform, its ownership is questionable to say the least.
I dusted off bandcamp and learned to use slskd to build a full local high quality library powered by a Navidrome instance.
