Spotify is absolutely affordable especially there's a family plan and a student plan. I also stop pirating music (well I do work for a music company but that's not even a factor at all) because of Spotify.
Spotify Form F-1
321–330 of 382 posts
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not lossless, you're right. I'm an audiophile too (E10K driving DT770s) and I've never done any A/B testing between a Spotify track and a FLAC equivalent. I'm curious how much the difference is.
Be careful that it may be hard to match levels 100%, and it's hard to do a blind test with audio coming from two different applications.
There may also be mastering differences between different versions of an album.
So the best thing is actually to do your own Ogg Vorbis encodes of a lossless album you have, and do the a/b testing on those files instead, so you're certain of the provenance.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#323They've gone from 28 million to 71 million premium subscribers in 3 years with a declining, single digit, churn rate. I'm impressed. I'm a happy Spotify customer, I hope they continue their growth and become a pillar of the music industry.
I was a Spotify lifer until I butted up against their 10,000 song limit. [1] Now, I'm using Google Play Music. There's no doubt in my mind that everything else outside of this limit is better on Spotify. Please, Spotify, fix this! Let me help inflate your valuation! 1. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Library-Song-Limit...
Instead of saving full albums (which adds every single track to your saved tracks list), focus on saving your very favorite tracks, and add the full album as a playlist instead.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been a Spotify premium user for years now and have never used my Library, but have a ton of playlists organized and nested into different genre/mood/etc directories. I'm sure there's a good reason why people want to use their Library instead and why the "playlist" way is inefficient since I've seen a lot of users annoyed with the limit, but anecdotally I've never had a problem with the playlist-first way of usin…
I use spotify in a lazy way, but essentially if I like a song, I press the check mark. If I'm doing my normal listening I just have all of my songs that are in my library on shuffle. I imagine if I hit the 10K limit this inability to use shuffle on ALL of my tracks at once would annoy me.
I only save my very favorite tracks, for full albums I add them as a playlist.
That way I can still shuffle my collection of favorite awesome tracks, but I also have easy access to my favorite albums, where I still consider the whole album to be good, but only a few of the tracks stand out as absolute favorites.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like google play, also converted from spotify. But I don't like that albums disappear from google play. This happened at spotify too and I assume it's due to legal issues. When an artist released a certain album on one label and only that album disappears. It's very annoying and is pushing me back to good old piracy.
I've experienced all of these issues before, the 10k/disappearing albums is really debilitating for music lovers who like to collect full albums. I switched to Spotify from Google Music a few months ago, and my experience is mostly the same--mediocre, but functional enough. At least Spotify has an open API, so you (maybe) can solve your own problems given some time. (10k is really not that much at all if you're into…
Instead of saving full albums to your saved tracks, save only the very favorite tracks, and add the albums as playlists instead.
I have a playlist folder called "favorite albums" specifically for this.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
10K songs is limiting to you?! Wow, how/for what do you use Spotify? At a (low!) estimate of 4 minutes per song, if you listen to Spotify for 3hrs/day, it would still take you 222 days to listen to all of them once. Is this a form of data hoarding? If not, how do you use that many songs?
10K songs is restrictive when it comes to digital music collections. I have 15k songs in my iTunes library, and that doesn't include the music I listen to via Apple Music and SoundCloud. Given that I've been building up this music collection for about two decades now, there's quite a bit of stuff in the long tail, though I do listen to near all of it over the span of a few years. If Spotify want to be around for anot…
But you don't have to save every single track to your collection, there's no reason to be a hoarder. They're still there on Spotify even if you don't save them, it's not like saving MP3s to your hard drive.
Use playlists as well. Each playlist has its own limit of 10K tracks AFAIK. So I save only absolute favorite individual tracks (and take some stuff off the list once in a while), and I save favorite full albums as playlists.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand - I thought you could stream any audio from their collection that you wanted on Spotify? Do you have to add audio to your library first? Otherwise why does it matter what is in your library and what isn't if you can stream anything?
It allows you to quickly look through music you like, rather than having to manually search for the artist/album/song every single time. It's still streamed (unless you save it for Offline, which it supports) but it's waaay better for organization. Have you ever forgetten the name of an artist or forgot an artist exists until you scroll past them in your music library?
Use playlists, they each have their own limit of 10K songs AFAIK.
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Has this payout structure been conclusively documented? I mean specifically the part about obscure artists getting absolutely nothing. I know a couple of relatively obscure bands personally, and they do get something from Spotify. It's not much, but they do get a little bit. They consider streaming more as advertising that gets their name out there and their music easily accessible, but they make most of the actual m…
It's not as simple as I made it out to be, of course, because the music industry is a confusing and terrible thing, but the point basically stands: no one except Spotify and record label execs makes anything more than rounding errors from Spotify streaming. You need millions of plays to make minimum wage.
There used to be a FAQ entry on spotifyartists.com about royalties and the complex formulae by which they are divided amongst the various parties entitled to slices of those precious fractions of a cent, but I can't find it now.
(That's right: on a promotional site directed towards artists, aimed to encourage people to make their work available on Spotify, there is nothing anywhere about how they intend to pay you. Because honestly, they don't.)
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#329Spotify 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…
Yeah, Spotify is great, the only downside is that sometimes they pull my favorite albums :(
Re: Spotify Form F-1
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Isn't distributing each subscribers fee individually and distributing all of them collectively by listening habits the same thing? Made up example: $100000000 * 0.0000001 of all listening activity = $10 Or $10 * 1 of all my listening activity = $10 Or are you saying that Spotify cuts off at a certain point and doesn't pay anything out, or that they take a fixed cut after allocation?
Let's say Artist X has their music on Spotify but is currently making $0 a month. Now, for the sake of argument, let's say I spend an entire month listening to only Artist X a thousand times; I personally think it's fair in that case that whatever scraps of my Spotify fee are left for the artists should then go 100% to Artist X because they're the only ones I've listened to. So, in this utopian scenario, they might make $5.
With the current model, if I do that, Artist X gets paid near zero. So you can see how the models are indeed different.