Spotify Form F-1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#301

Post by rplnt » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

dirtylowprofile wrote: post #252

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.

Family plan is a bad name probably. It explicitly says it's for people living together, they don't have to be family at all. It's silly to take this as an issue.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#302

Post by einr » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:19 AM UTC

jakecopp wrote: post #214

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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…

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.

Does paying for Spotify actually help any artists meaningfully though?

No. Your monthly $10, after Spotify and the labels get their majority cut, goes by percentage to the most popular artists on the service, with absolutely no regard to which artists you have personally listened to, so if you have even remotely obscure taste you are effectively not supporting the artists at all.

Bandcamp, on the other hand, takes a 15% cut of digital downloads and 10% for physical releases/merch. If you buy an album for $10 on Bandcamp, the artist gets $8.50. If you play an album by an indie artist on Spotify 100 times, they might get $0.0002 or thereabouts¤.

¤ Not actual numbers, but the point is it is effectively zero.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#303

Post by welcomebrand » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

mancerayder wrote: post #219

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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…

I've found more recently that the discovery playlist that I also loved is churning up more and more of the same stuff now. Not even a good mix of songs from artists I definitely like - just a very small set of songs from them.

I do love it though, generally speaking although being a heavy daily user I'm not sure the discovery part is actually as good as it initially appears.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#304

Post by sethgecko » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:23 AM UTC

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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…

I noticed recently that the new discover weekly songs tend to sync perfectly with my walking speed. I wonder if I subconsciously leaked some bias into my training sample. BPM has to be one of the factors they are matching against.

Here is a blog post that describes one of their machine learning models using neural networks. http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#305

Post by svantana » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #183

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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…

Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.

Fun fact: bluetooth audio is not lossless (best case is 264kbps AAC, which is unlikely to be better than Spotify's 320 kbps Vorbis), so that's pretty much a moot point.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#306

Post by manish_gill » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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…

Am I literally the only person on the planet for whom Discover Weekly is broken? I once listened to some Spanish and Japanese music, but don't listen on the regular, and ever since then, all my Discover Weekly reccs have Japanese and Spanish in them, along with some generic techno.

I've reached out to Spotify's support over Twitter and they were like keep listening to more music and it will correct itself, but so far it hasn't. :(

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#307

Post by KozmoNau7 » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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 here. I wasn't in the scene, but I torrented a hell of a lot of music, I used to DDC a lot of stuff in the good old days of IRC and I built up a huge collection at LAN parties in the 90s and early 2000s.

Spotify provided an extremely convenient and inexpensive alternative, with the added bonus of curated playlists and automatic recommendations.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#308

Post by conradfr » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:32 AM UTC

conradfr wrote: post #101

kaftoy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't want to change this discussion into a "which is the best music streaming service" debate, but I am really curious, why haven't your considered Google Play Music? Interface? Songs count? Price? I am subbed to GPM for a few years now. I did it first because Spotify was and still isn't available in my country, but I don't think I would switch if they become available tomorrow.

I was using Spotify 3 years ago but it was killing the battery life on my Nexus 4 so I switched to Google Play Music (chose it because of the upload feature). I like the service but there is many things in the UI that I don't like: - No desktop app - Album listing is a mess: . It doesn't differentiate between singles and albums so the album list is sometimes very long for no reasons . You can't mentally filter them y…

(sorry about the formatting, couldn't edit it due to the noprocrast setting)

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#309

Post by KozmoNau7 » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:33 AM UTC

manish_gill wrote: post #306

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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…

Am I literally the only person on the planet for whom Discover Weekly is broken? I once listened to some Spanish and Japanese music, but don't listen on the regular, and ever since then, all my Discover Weekly reccs have Japanese and Spanish in them, along with some generic techno. I've reached out to Spotify's support over Twitter and they were like keep listening to more music and it will correct itself, but so far…

It would be a great feature to have your whole listening history visible, so you can go through and clean out some tracks here and there, and force a refresh of your listening profile.

I think it would be a good suggestion on their Community Ideas board, I would certainly vote for it.

Re: Spotify Form F-1

#310

Post by KozmoNau7 » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:35 AM UTC

mancerayder wrote: post #219

dopeboy wrote: post #96

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…

I think it depends a lot on your taste. The more poppy your listening habits are, the worse the recommendations seem to be.

I listen almost exlusively to hard rock and metal, and all of my auto-generated playlists are absolutely stellar in their selection.

It seems that once Spotify lumps you in with a specific segment, it's hard to get out of it again.