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A Note about Spotify Transfers

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Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#171
post #35

I switched to Napster when Spotify started to try hoovering up the podcast market. They've been getting increasingly poisonous, it seems.

100% love Spotify, was one of my favorite services. Family plan, wife and I get our own accounts, works with Sonos (each of us separately logged into different Spotify accounts on the Sonos so it remembers our playlists!) Now with Tesla adding spotify, I've got a 3rd user that is only used on the car, only problem is manually syncing playlists from one user to another, but you can 'follow' another user now at least.…

Well there you are - I enjoyed Spotify too, but I wasn't going to carry on giving them my money while they tried to disrupt an industry which I dearly love in its current form.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#172
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched to Tidal in protest of Spotify’s support of that nonsense app alliance and their constant attacks on the podcast ecosystem. I really miss when they were laser focused on music. If they drop their bad business practices, I will switch back. For now I’m really feeling the need for competition. Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately. Tidal is better overall in my experience…

> Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately That's funny, just a few comments up there's someone saying that Apple Music sounds better than Spotify

I've tried both and... don't actually hear much of a material difference between the two. If I understand correctly, Apple's using their old standby of 256Kbps AAC and Spotify uses 320Kbps Vorbis, so Spotify is slightly better on the technical merits -- but they're both at sufficiently high quality that audio nerds would be demanding anyone who claims a definitive difference do some blind ABX testing to prove it.

I ended up sticking with Apple Music after my Spotify Premium trial ran out, but I suspect that's largely because it's what I'm used to. I've seen lots of "Apple Music's recommendation engine is crap," but that's not actually been my experience -- their "New Music Mix" isn't great, but the whole of their "For You" page almost always has stuff I'm interested in and I really like digging through their curated playlists. It's been a much more rewarding service for just digging around exploring in than either Spotify or Tidal have been for me. (Although Tidal undoubtedly has the best sound quality if you're willing to pony up for the lossless/MQA tier.)

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#173
post #72

But of course it’s Apple who is evil in Spotify’s eyes...

Last time I used apple music I did not see any options for exporting playlists.

The publicly-documented Apple Music API lets you export playlists and does not, as far as we know, have a provision legally prohibiting you from moving to another service. SongShift still lets you get data both in and out of Apple Music.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#174
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and spotify would then sue SongShift. Because why not? Even if you can empirically prove that SongShift is in the right and the API keys belong to the end users, Spotify would only need to litigate long enough for SongShift to give in, settle and disable such a feature again. That's how this game works.

Anti-SLAPP is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

Not everywhere.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heads up, Apple Music doesn’t sound as good as Spotify, unfortunately That's funny, just a few comments up there's someone saying that Apple Music sounds better than Spotify

I've tried both and... don't actually hear much of a material difference between the two. If I understand correctly, Apple's using their old standby of 256Kbps AAC and Spotify uses 320Kbps Vorbis, so Spotify is slightly better on the technical merits -- but they're both at sufficiently high quality that audio nerds would be demanding anyone who claims a definitive difference do some blind ABX testing to prove it. I e…

256Kbps AAC and 320Kbps Vorbis both comfortably exceed the threshold of audibility for 99.999% of people 99.999% of the time. If you somehow cared about the difference between either of these (or uncompressed, for that matter) then you're not listening to music properly.

The days of 128 Kbps MP3s encoded with L3enc or Xing with horrific pre-ringing and squelched cymbals is long gone.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I use SongShift for :D Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst. Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months. BUT I do love how…

>Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst. Can I ask you how many songs are in your Liked playlist? It's a lucky week if I find 3 songs that I like in my Discover Weekly. The rest are forgettable at best, often terrible. I think I am not using Spotify the way I'm supposed to, because i find it really hard to discover new music I like.

My Discover Weekly was really garbage awhile back until I made an effort to listen to a bunch of music of different genres that I'm into for a week or two. Also make a point to favorite stuff you'd actually like to listen to again.

It really improved after that and it's typically pretty great (with some weeks being exceptions). For reference, I've got 1,272 tracks in "Liked".

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#177
post #95

I use Tidal and I'm very satisfied, the catalog is huge, and the playlist are really well curated, plus their music suggestions are always spot on. I would suggest anyone using Spotify to switch. On the plus side, Tidal also pays musicians a four times what Spotify does (last time I checked, I can't find the link), which I think is in itself a good reason to prefer it.

I can't support Tidal's endorsement of MQA[1] - an audiophile scam and an attempt to lock music into yet another proprietary format. While they still use it, I won't sign up and I'll continue to dissuade others from doing so. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated#C...

Bah! Based on other comments on this thread, I was strongly tempted to switch from Spotify to Tidal (mostly because Tidal apparently pays the artist more fairly and they’re not trying to appropriate podcasts). I had also just verified that Tidal support Last.FM scrobbling and that I can use my Squeezebox devices to stream music from Tidal. I was just about to investigate how I might export my Spotify list of artists and albums.

However, as a supporter of open, non-proprietary standards, promoting MQA would really put me off. I don’t have time for “audiophile” nonsense and hadn’t heard of MQA until now but it seems like another attempt at building a walled-garden for rent-seeking opportunities [1]. MQA is not something I want to support and while I don’t know if it’s a complete deal-breaker with respect to Tidal, I won’t be switching today.

Thanks for the info.

1. https://www.linn.co.uk/blog/mqa-is-bad-for-music

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#178
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I use SongShift for :D Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst. Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months. BUT I do love how…

Apple Music is shit. Period. I rage quit the 6 month free trial the other day after “Siri, play the US top charts” resulted in “Sure, here’s the top charts in Serbia”. I’m not in Serbia. Their discovery is crap, YouTube has better music recommendations, most EDM is missing. No value in it at all.

> “Sure, here’s the top charts in Serbia”. I’m not in Serbia. Their discovery is crap

That's exactly the sort of unexpected "music discovery" I'd be looking for. ;-)

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#179
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Spotify’s own site [0], their users have > ...the right to request a copy of your personal data in electronic format and the right to transmit that personal data for use in another party’s service... [0] https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/#s3 Why can’t a transfer service just use that file? Perhaps, it doesn’t include playlists or liked artists/albums/songs?

I've just requested my data. When I get it I'll take a look and see if it contains playlist information and either edit this comment or post a reply to myself if the edit window has closed with the results. They say it can take up to 30 days to process.

I got the results. It contains playlists.

Re: A Note about Spotify Transfers

#180
post #4

Seems like an obvious and sane target for antitrust legislation - compare with e.g. the mobile number portability directive in the EU way back in 2002. Related opinion piece: > Data portability: An antitrust weapon for the digital economy? (Le Monde, 2018) http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-... > In concrete terms, what would portability in the digital economy look like? Let us imagine we cou…

According to Spotify’s own site [0], their users have > ...the right to request a copy of your personal data in electronic format and the right to transmit that personal data for use in another party’s service... [0] https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/privacy-policy/#s3 Why can’t a transfer service just use that file? Perhaps, it doesn’t include playlists or liked artists/albums/songs?

It doesn't include any standardized/machine-readable identifiers.

For example, the Spotify API track-level responses always contain the ISRC [1], but the JSON files contained in the GDPR request don't.

Spotify clearly does only the bare minimum required by the law and even actively frustrates GDPR requests by taking the maximum allowed time to respond to them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...

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