81–90 of 269 posts
I think Apple is being abusively extractive here. I also believe that Spotify's audiobook play will be bad for consumers and worse for artists.
Could you expand on this?
I love apple products but I hate this stuff. They're cynically kneecapping competition and hurting consumer choice, like they're not rich enough already. Would class action be a to do thing here?
Does it save position now on an audiobook? For example if you listen to music inbetween? Cause if not, it's still useless
Good grief, that URL. These companies are ridiculous. Leave us out of your corporate drama.
Does anyone else take issue with Spotify branching out into other arenas (e.g., Podcasts, TV, Audiobooks, etc.)? I'm honestly kinda tired of all of these services trying to gobble up any slightly related industry. I subscribe to Spotify to listen to music, not podcasts. My podcasts arrive using a different app with the backing of the RSS standard, not Spotify's internal standard. I don't want to get a subscription co…
Yes, as far as I concerned Spotify was basically perfect in like 2012, and most all of the features added (and _REMOVED_) since then have made the app experience worse. I want to listen to music. That's it. Anything that gets in the way of me doing this is a net bad afaic. I'm still particularly offended by their near deprecation of support for local files. When I first got into Spotify the seamless integration with…
Used to be if you long pressed a song (iOS anyway) it would jump in a little and play for as long as you held it, going back to the music you were listening to when you let go.
Great for checking you've found the song you were thinking of and impromptu remixes to make friends laugh.
Annoyingly it was removed for "low engagement rate"[0]. I mean yeah, I found it by accident lmao. Maybe tell people about it?
[0] https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Touch-Previ...
Does anyone else take issue with Spotify branching out into other arenas (e.g., Podcasts, TV, Audiobooks, etc.)? I'm honestly kinda tired of all of these services trying to gobble up any slightly related industry. I subscribe to Spotify to listen to music, not podcasts. My podcasts arrive using a different app with the backing of the RSS standard, not Spotify's internal standard. I don't want to get a subscription co…
I know a lot of people will disagree, but I think Spotify did a good job of handling the problem of "premium" podcasts.
There's no way to make a "premium" podcast (one you charge people to access) that is fully compatible with the original open vision of podcasting. You can either pervert the original RSS enclosures system by using obscure / personalized URLs for individual subscribers (a leaky abstraction that both discourages open sharing of feed URLs and fails to properly close off access) or you can pervert it by wrapping files in DRM (Apple's approach in the Apple Podcasters Program).
Instead of perverting the RSS feeds, Spotify opted to pervert (slightly) the term "podcast" to not strictly mean "in an RSS feed and listenable on any client." I think this was inevitable and arguably had already happened and is far better than corrupting the open ecosystem. It also happens to be far easier from a UX perspective to tell someone to just use the Spotify app.
For all the people upset at Spotify, consider the counterfactual: Why would they tell people to listen to their premium podcasts by copying a custom premium URL and pasting it into some random client (which 99% of the time on iPhones will be controlled by their bully Apple)? It is much clearer, easier for the user, and better for Spotify's premium creators (who don't want to lose listeners to a complex setup system) to just tell them "Listen to Spotify podcasts by downloading the Spotify app".
Under Spotify's system, some podcasters rake in Spotify money they wouldn't otherwise get, growing the premium ecosystem, while the open ecosystem remains robust and not polluted with more DRM and URL hacks. Keeping closed systems clearly closed and separate is much better IMO than trying to awkwardly jam it into the open ecosystem, undermining what makes that ecosystem great.
Does anyone else take issue with Spotify branching out into other arenas (e.g., Podcasts, TV, Audiobooks, etc.)? I'm honestly kinda tired of all of these services trying to gobble up any slightly related industry. I subscribe to Spotify to listen to music, not podcasts. My podcasts arrive using a different app with the backing of the RSS standard, not Spotify's internal standard. I don't want to get a subscription co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does anyone else take issue with Spotify branching out into other arenas (e.g., Podcasts, TV, Audiobooks, etc.)? > I subscribe to Spotify to listen to music, not podcasts. My podcasts arrive using a different app with the backing of the RSS standard, not Spotify's internal standard 100%. I will never touch Spotify Podcasts for that reason and that a number of the podcasts I listen to have specifically talked about…
> They don't care about the open nature of podcasts and they want to lure people in then put a wall up around them. This is key. "Podcasts" and "podcasting" were created to refer to an open medium, but Spotify's intentional adoption and perversion of those words to refer to their proprietary platform has worked brilliantly. We're further down the embrace/extend/extinguish path than most people realize.
And if you support paywalled podcasts, what, in your mind, would be the correct way for Spotify to implement them?
(I'm genuinely curious your answer, but to lay my cards and biases on the table: I prefer paid podcasts to the ad supported ones; I'm tired of hearing all the Casper and Squarespace ads woven into the content. And I have trouble imagining a typical Spotify listener (interested in, say, Joe Rogan podcast) properly moving a personalized premium RSS feed into another client without a ton of chaos and confusion.)
Does anyone else take issue with Spotify branching out into other arenas (e.g., Podcasts, TV, Audiobooks, etc.)? I'm honestly kinda tired of all of these services trying to gobble up any slightly related industry. I subscribe to Spotify to listen to music, not podcasts. My podcasts arrive using a different app with the backing of the RSS standard, not Spotify's internal standard. I don't want to get a subscription co…
>My podcasts arrive using a different app with the backing of the RSS standard, not Spotify's internal standard. I know a lot of people will disagree, but I think Spotify did a good job of handling the problem of "premium" podcasts. There's no way to make a "premium" podcast (one you charge people to access) that is fully compatible with the original open vision of podcasting. You can either pervert the original RSS…
https://subscriber-id:subscriber-token@podcast.host/feed.rss
In what way does this "pollute" or "pervert" the open standard? Apple and Spotify are companies, not people, this is not high school, Apple is not "bully"ing Spotify, they have a business relationship.
In general your comment is loaded with emotional language that seems to muddle the issue rather than clarifying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> are not, by definition, a podcast because they don't have a valid rss feed Does a podcast need to have a rss feed? All I see in definitions is that its an audio format made available over the internet. > And of course there's zero chance they will embrace podcast 2.0 features What is Podcasting 2.0? All I see is a bunch of people doing podcasting differently, namely adding ads and crypto.
Podcasting 2.0 is mostly about removing ads, shifting to a direct streaming monetary support model via crypto. The bonus with this model is once advertisers are removed free speech is no longer a problem. Also a big focus on decentralization in order to prevent censorship.