Technology

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.

Not going to give substack any views, so I'll pass on this one

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Down voted cause substack allows nazi content.

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?

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

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 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 use the “Lite” version of spotify that isn’t strictly available for download in the states. It still has real shuffle and isn’t as bogged down with bloat features. Literally the only downside is no sleep timer.

I switched to Tidal from Spotify because as secure my password is, I would always be intereupted mid-listening by my app putting on a shitty random music (often RAP) and discovered that there was an underground operation of people using pirated accounts to inflate stream numbers to get into the popular playlists. And with Tidal I can use Tidal-DL to download flacs to my Navidrome server which is cool.

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).

I never got into Spotify. Soulseek is all I need.

Last weekend I used https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic to copy my Spotify playlists over to YouTube Music, and the shuffle play is SOOO much nicer there! That was my primary gripe with Spotify, the shuffle play is idiotic