Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify. I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - tha…
Same story with pirating. I had gigs upon gigs of original rips uploaded to what.cd back before it shut down and a dedicated (in-house!) seedbox with a couple of terabytes of music on it. Even before the shutdown I'd gone pretty inactive due to Spotify.
I miss the forums, IRC rooms, and insane collection of obscure music though. Not sure that will ever be totally recreated.
> My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.
I agree, but I also think it's probably the main reason we have a semi-official Spotify client on linux.
I quit Spotify just recently and transferred to Apple Music. Main reason is because of their new policy on Family plan. I paid for a Family plan since its inception. Recently they updated their policy where every member of the Family plan must have the same address. My brother is working in another town and that doesn't mean we're no longer fam. That is one stupid policy.
Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify. I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - tha…
Yep - I think their Discover Weekly is excellent. It's introduced me to dozens and dozens of artists and tracks which I've very happily incorporated into my full playlist(s). I'm routinely impressed by what it finds.
I also like the artist and song radio options which work well for office background music.
I quit Spotify just recently and transferred to Apple Music. Main reason is because of their new policy on Family plan. I paid for a Family plan since its inception. Recently they updated their policy where every member of the Family plan must have the same address. My brother is working in another town and that doesn't mean we're no longer fam. That is one stupid policy.
You know you don’t have to tell them you live at different addresses right?
By far the most interesting part of this is that they are doing a direct listing. There is no IPO underwriter (the bankers that the HN audience loves to bash). The shares will just start trading, pricing should be fun to watch. Update: This nugget from the F-1 [1] alludes to the interesting to watch pricing > Moreover, prior to the opening trade, there will not be a price at which underwriters initially sold ordinary…
Matt Levine has written about the Spotify direct listing in a few of his Money Stuff columns. Overall he seems to think it will be a really interesting experiment given that no one is sure how it will play out. Another point he makes is that Spotify is still paying investment bankers a bunch of money despite the fact that it is not IPO-ing. Even when you try to avoid paying bankers a bunch of money by skipping the IP…
Spotify is the reason why I don't pirate music anymore. I say this as someone who used to be involved in the scene (low level FXP couriering in the late 90s and early 00s) and has gigs of release from the RNS, EGO, etc days. It's much faster and convenient to use Spotify. I also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - tha…
also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes g…
Agreed. Spotify Discovery is hardly as good as many people tout it to be. Usually Indie music junk that isn't really my genre.
Also agree that Pandora is far superior when it comes to curating tracks. A trick I've learned from a friend is to never like a song Pandora; only dislike what you don't want to hear.
Spotify Radio is terrible as well. There's no good way to reseed a radio station. For example, when I first started using Spotify radio, I was listening to The National a lot. For whatever reason, 3-4 years since, whenever I start my 'Liked From Radio' station, it plays The National every fifth song or so. Ugghhh!!!
Finally, Spotify on Android has been kinda buggy for me. Once you have a lot of offline music on your device, the app takes forever to load on startup. It complains if there is no active internet connection, etc. When I wrote to Support, they suggested that I clear the cache and re-install the app (which caused me to lose all my prior downloaded music).
> Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar. My discover weekly playlist ALWAYS contains at least one song in Portoguese and at least two in German. I speak neither of those languages, and I've never willingly searched and played songs in those languages (except for "99 Luftballons" once). I also get some terrible variation of "Here comes the sun" at least once a month despite not listening to The Beatles at all. [0…
You may have had an auth token compromised. I used a dodgy third party Spotify Connect for Raspberry Pi library and had the same issue. Changing my password and expiring all current auth tokens returned my Discover Weekly back to normal after a month
So is there some library author out there, stealing people's auth tokens and playing German and Portuguese songs on our accounts, cackling to herself with glee, and waiting until we discover (today might be the day!) her utterly-harmless mischief?
As much as I love the notion, I have to conclude that Discover Weekly's mediocrity is just another piece of evidence that the world actually did end in 2012, and ever since, we've been living in a simulation. A simulation where the level of petty annoyance is carefully adjusted to a maximum, remaining ever so slightly within the bounds of believability. (In November 2016, someone spilled coffee on the controls.)
Really? My only experience with Discover Weekly (and any other suggestion algorithms, i.e. radios, etc...) has been pretty terrible... It doesn't seem to suggest songs I like at all, and recently it seized upon one single song in one of my playlist and only plays covers of that song and the other songs in the album for my discover weekly for the past several weeks... I love Spotify, but I use Pandora sometimes _exclu…
I think part of the online music discovery problem is that there is zero social context for it. Using Spotify to discover new music is, at least for me, the media equivalent of eating in a restaurant alone. Sure it's doable, and it's even preferable sometimes, but you're still missing one of the core elements of the experience.
I think that that's a nice idea, but in reality, my experience is that even people who like similar interests can vary _wildly_ in music choice... I think that social discovery of music just leads to less crystallization of tastes and more people liking a "mainstream" song instead of music choices that actually interest them...
Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though? I've been wondering whether paying for a Bandcamp album every so often to match the cost of Spotify, and pirating music otherwise would actually benefit artists more. I've read that Spotify pays fractions of a cent per play, where as Bandcamp pays out quite well, better than iTunes and Google Play.
Bandcamp is good if you know what you want and they do pay out really, really well. If you want a streaming service more like Spotify you might also check out Resonate Cooperative https://resonate.is/ which has a stream-to-own model. Discovering new music is low cost, repeated listens double until the ninth, upon which you own the track outright. You can then download or stream that track for free. Still ramping up b…
That's a brilliant idea and a reasonable way to stream and own music IMO.
I'm blown away that the solution for this has been the shitty "local playlist sync" solution for years at this point. I guess I'm in a niche? For me, there are tons of hiphop mixtapes that will never be on Spotify that I definitely need in my music player of choice. Hell, Spotify won't even let me import local MP3 files from my phone!
I just stopped listening to music that doesn't exist in Spotify. I fought it for a while with local playlist syncing and such, but just wasn't worth it over time. There's enough other music out there that I gave up trying.
You should give YouTube Music a try. It has both the "regular" catalog you'd expect from Spotify (high quality audio, organised by albums, etc.) + more indy bands that publish their music on YouTube.