Live data from Hacker News

Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

github.com

251–260 of 661 posts

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#251
post #179

The lengths that literal engineers will go to to not have to pay $10/mo for music or $3 to rent a movie in 4k immediately. Can't believe I have adult friends who make 70-300k and they still pirate based on money, not quality/directors-cuts/anti-cheats, etc. I quit pirating when I got a real job and could afford to pay developers and movie teams for their effort. I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why sh…

Am I able to pay Spotify in cryptocurrency or a SEPA transaction? If not, then that's a big convenience issue for me and thus not worth it.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp Not everyone is on bandcamp. Seems like some sort of north american website.

Please connect to reality.

If that implies connecting to Spotify, no thanks. If your reality is based on catering to VC funded tech companies I pity you.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this. If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best. You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you…

> a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp. This is false. And I mean, dramatically. > Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify. It's roughly 200$. Number of songs per hour: 60 minutes / 3 minutes per song = 20 songs Total listening hours per year: 8 h…

This computation is assuming streaming fraud though. If they see an account doing that, they'll flag it.

Assume the album has 10 songs, is one hour long and costs $20. Ten songs means they get $0.04 each time you listen to it. So, you need to listen to the album 500 times for the artist to be paid for the album. I mostly listen in the car; call it under 2 hours a day, but lets assume 4 hours a day of listening to Spotify.

A Spotify subscription is $11 a month. I can fit 4 non-fraud plays of the album into each day, so that's 4 * 30 = 120 streams. It'd take 4 months of listening to nothing but this one album for the artist to break even, and it'd cost me $44.

Bandcamp + bittorrent would give the artists about twice as much money on average. Buying merch also pays artists more, assuming the cost of the item plus shipping is under half what they charge.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#254
post #179

The lengths that literal engineers will go to to not have to pay $10/mo for music or $3 to rent a movie in 4k immediately. Can't believe I have adult friends who make 70-300k and they still pirate based on money, not quality/directors-cuts/anti-cheats, etc. I quit pirating when I got a real job and could afford to pay developers and movie teams for their effort. I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why sh…

I used to pay for Spotify but canceled because the player experience was so bad, not because of the cost.

I usually keep my opinions on software to myself, but I struggle to understand how the audio playback code path is not rock solid at this point.

It's a state machine. That's it.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#255
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has not been my 99% experience. I'm sure one or two of those stories are handy to have to justify a lifetime of unnecessary theft, but the bottom line for me is that I don't mind playing by their system on principle. This is how the artists asked us to do it, by selling their rights to distributors. Similarly with Spotify. I'd love to pay more to artists, I do go buy songs when I love them, and I'm happy to pay…

[flagged]

You can feel free to use any legitimate platform you like. I was arguing against piracy not arguing for exclusively Spotify.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#256
post #247
post #179

The lengths that literal engineers will go to to not have to pay $10/mo for music or $3 to rent a movie in 4k immediately. Can't believe I have adult friends who make 70-300k and they still pirate based on money, not quality/directors-cuts/anti-cheats, etc. I quit pirating when I got a real job and could afford to pay developers and movie teams for their effort. I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why sh…

Living in Germany, but I'm an american. Signed up for Crunchy Roll. Most the shows my friends are recommending are region locked. The remaining ones are mostly German-dubbed only, with no subtitles. Most don't have original Japanese either. Only a handful I want to watch actually have subs or English dubs. It's not like I don't want to pay for this stuff but when it's a huge conditional tree of if I'm going to have a…

The anime situation in Germany is years behind. Germans are famously moralising against piracy but this seems to be a case where they do it anyway because it’s just impossible to find anime otherwise

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#257
post #247
post #179

The lengths that literal engineers will go to to not have to pay $10/mo for music or $3 to rent a movie in 4k immediately. Can't believe I have adult friends who make 70-300k and they still pirate based on money, not quality/directors-cuts/anti-cheats, etc. I quit pirating when I got a real job and could afford to pay developers and movie teams for their effort. I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why sh…

Living in Germany, but I'm an american. Signed up for Crunchy Roll. Most the shows my friends are recommending are region locked. The remaining ones are mostly German-dubbed only, with no subtitles. Most don't have original Japanese either. Only a handful I want to watch actually have subs or English dubs. It's not like I don't want to pay for this stuff but when it's a huge conditional tree of if I'm going to have a…

Wouldn't a VPN solve this for you?

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#258
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue. When Netflix's streaming platform rolled around people were largely happy to stop pirating, when Netflix's catalog fragmented across two dozen different services that forbid account sharing then piracy became a thing again for many people who stopped pirating. I had a Paramount+ subscription (alongside Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV) and wanted to…

I mostly agree, but this tool is for spotify. Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets. That being said, most people (including me) happily pay for spotify, so your point still stands. I refuse to pay for a streaming platform that's not Netflix or prime. The former benefits from being grand fathered in and the latter is a free bonus on something I would buy anyway. It also sucks that cancel…

>Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets.

Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find artists who are content with the payments they get from Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard.

I'm huge into music so I'm "OK" with Spotify for the sake of convenience and all that, but if people are really digging a piece of music then please buy it directly from the label, the artist, etc. via other means, if possible.

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#259
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though. If you and I listen to 1000 artists over the course of a year, and you spend $1000/year on album purchases (let's say $10 each) while I subscribe to spotify, I pay $90 a year while supporting all of the artists I listen to, loosely based on how much I listen to them, while you much more significantly support up to 100 of the artists you…

You say that it is better to pay 90$ for 1000$ worth of goods than to pay nothing. This is a false dilemma, there is a third choice that is paying only what you can afford. Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber. A lot of people here would rather blame those who steal better than they do, than question the industry that allows artists work to be sold off. Furthermore, I would say that…

These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the part of the consumers anyway).

If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them.

So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people.

Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there.

edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of.

Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism?

If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow

Re: Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

#260
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70-300k is a crazy wide range to lump together. Quality of life and flexibility to pay for things is extremely different across it. That said, the reason is simple, there’s no good product out there so people pirate. I haven’t pirated music in ages because Spotify solved that industry with a single reasonably priced offering. On the other hand the dozens of streaming services have gotten out of hand by now. Same with…

Most of us who make 100k-300k made 70k at one point. I made 70k (5-8 years?) a lot longer than I've made 235k. I was absolutely not broke at 70k. In fact I thought that was the most money I'd ever make and that I was killing it for 25 or whatever I was.. lmao I made quite a bit more money than everyone my age I knew, most were still in college or in the 35-50k brackets.

>I was absolutely not broke at 70k.

I'm genuinely glad that you weren't. Your experience is not everyone else's. I know people who have made around that salary who, for various reasons, were essentially broke.

Much of the rest of your comment just sounds... braggadocious.

Post reply on HN