491–500 of 661 posts
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I’m sort of surprised it’s considered a good thing. Some of my favourite programs use electron, like visual studio code. I haven’t used Spotify though, so maybe that is one of the many electron apps that suck? I was very unimpressed by flutter when we PoC it at work, but that was years ago, so maybe it’s gotten better since.
Spotify Desktop also doesn't exactly use Electron, but 1 layer below: CEF
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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…
> 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. It being legal doesn't do much about its unfairness. > For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription serv…
Oh well if this is truly the point you wanted to make, then we're in agreement.
Earlier I was responding to:
> > jsnell: In the plan where you buy music and only listen to the music you bought you don't need [YouSpot] at all.
> drewdevault: I feel like pretending that you're supporting your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison [to not supporting the artists]
I wasn't saying either of these things are better, simply pointing out that paying for spotify is going to support a broad selection of artists a little bit, while paying through bandcamp is going to support a narrow selection of artists a lot, and that both are desirable:
> You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though ... you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp.
Aka both is better than just buying the music of a few artists through bandcamp while listening to everyone through piracy or YouSpot. That doesn't mean I disagree with anyone choosing to go the piracy + focused bandcamp patronage route.
You jumped in with:
> Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber.
Which I took to mean "no actually, just paying Spotify is theft".
If the 80% of people with a limited entertainment budget pick their top 5 artists to support every year, the virtuosos of music are going to benefit, while the "B-tier" and "C-tier" artists who people still like to listen to are going to suffer a lot more.
Paying for Spotify, or more aptly, Tidal (which seemingly pays artists the most) is probably the most realistic way that's accessible to a lot of people, to support the artists they listen to in a way that tracks their actual listening preferences. Yes, buy music in addition to that if you can, but if everyone chooses a few artists to support directly, it's still going to result in many musicians getting unfairly compensated despite lots of people enjoying their music, so I disagree with the idea that it's better to spend $90 on bandcamp in a year vs. $90 on spotify in a year, if it is a choice of one or the other.
Better in some ways sure, because you're disintermediating the streaming platforms, but worse in equitable distribution, which will disproportionately impact artists who are liked by many but "top-10"ed by few
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They wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their algorithm works ( https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their approach has changed or that it does not perform well under certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.
I agree with you that it seems to work fine on playlists of less than 50 or 100 songs. The problem seems to be that on larger playlists they will only use 50-100 of the tracks to shuffle through. Most times I'm listening to music I just want to put on a shuffle of all my favorites and listen. It's been that way since I got my first CD changer. Maybe that's a super unusual use case, but it's my primary one, and I get…
So I started clearing the Spotify client cache more often, and it looks to me there is more diversity, at least on the auto-generated "recommended songs" playlists. But still, no hard proof of this.
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> PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point. What IS the point, though? You seem to be criticising people who don't purchase a Spotify Premium while also admitting Spotify barely pays them anything. Yes, this client gives nothing to the artist, Spotify gives next to nothing, both are bad in different ways. If anyone genuinely wants to support musicians - buy…
The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route and not pay anything at all.
Pirating doesn't support the artists, but it's also not weakening their expected rights for future business contracts, which supporting services like Spotify does; after all, if all these other artists are getting paid 'x' much, and all these consumers think this is what it's worth, how is anyone but Beyonce or Swift or Kanye gonna have any hope of arguing against that?
There is no way to inform Spotify that you don't endorse their business practices, except to not subscribe. Subscribing is an endorsement.
Personally, I purchase my music individually on iTunes (and download and convert to mp3). Apple still takes a cut, but it's much lower than the near-100% cut that streaming services take.
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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…
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If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp, by going to the physical shows and buying merch, ordering physical copies of their music at the label, patreon, or whatever form of direct support they have set up. Spotify is just leeching of the culture and as drew pointed out you will be 10000 times more effective if you use one of those options. Spotify is more or less just a signal boos…
> 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.
Seriously, I would rather visit Bandcamp a 100 times than use Spotify, even though the website player of Bandcamp sucks and I need a user script to regulate the volume of it.
Nifty. Please be aware that this is not a "spotify client" per se. It gets the data from Spotify, and plays the audio from YouTube. It's an interesting invention, and worthy of the first page, if you ask me.
What I really want is a converter from Spotify abomination to standard podcasts which I can read from any podcast client.
Last I checked the podcasts are DRM encumbered. So you’d have to spin up a client pretending to be chrome and use the Wivedine extension to decrypt every mp3 frame. No hacking required. But Life is too short. So instead I refuse to listen to fake podcasts on Spotify.
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> PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point. What IS the point, though? You seem to be criticising people who don't purchase a Spotify Premium while also admitting Spotify barely pays them anything. Yes, this client gives nothing to the artist, Spotify gives next to nothing, both are bad in different ways. If anyone genuinely wants to support musicians - buy…
The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route and not pay anything at all.
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Okay, THAT is Hacker News worthy.
To be fair it would be more HN worthy if they managed to reverse engineer the DRM of Spotify to create a custom client without the Spotify library (which only works for Premium users)