It's kind of crazy that everyone freaked out about "piracy" in the 2000s but every form of music filesharing in that era was materially better for music artists than what is by far the dominant platform for streaming music today, and that this is legal because it's been done in cooperation with the entrenched monopolies who own the right to make money off of music instead of in spite of them
The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#112I’ve felt similarly for many years, but remain trapped using Spotify due to a lack of decent alternatives. Tried Tidal, but it wasn’t really any better. Would love to hear what leavers migrate to.
I switched to https://qobuz.com, mainly for the high audio quality (it goes up to 192kHz 24bit, which is worth it for me as I have the necessary equipment to make use of this), but it also supports "Spotify quality" i.e. mp3 quality/320 kbps, but I stayed for the experience.
It does not really have an algorithm, there is one playlist "My weekly Q", which updates each week with songs that you could like.
The only other algorithmic thing they have are song/artist radios like Spotify has, which also work relatively good.
Their front page features handpicked songs from people at Qobuz and songs that are trending on qobuz (these won't look at all like Spotify charts most of the time, as the audience is different). But you can customize the front page by filtering the genres you want to see.
But as mentioned I stayed for the experience, and this includes for some (by far not all) albums you can download the whole PDF of the CD inlet or see a description/history/backstory about an Album provided to you by Qobuz, also the choices that Qobuz handpicks are very often excellent picks which I immediately add to my favorites. And as these picks are not some algorithm that decides this, I don't end up in a rabbit hole of recommendations like on Spotify, but more often discover really new things that I would've never through Spotify. They also have their own magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine.
You can also buy songs, and they will be yours to keep forever, as you can get the songs directly as FLAC, WAV, ... without DRM and whatnot.
There is also an unofficial qobuz downloader, which is against their ToS, but works.
Though I still have not stopped using Spotify, as I'm in a family plan and don't pay anything for it, and sometimes Qobuz does not have some songs.
FWIW I also use https://last.fm for recommendations, and Qobuz can automatically scrobble to it.
All in all Qobuz has more of the "sitting in a Living Room and listening to vinyls/CDs vibe" rather than the TikTok/Instagram vibe that Spotify gives to me.
Otherwise, I found Deezer to be quite a good alternative to Spotify.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#113I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…
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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#114I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…
Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?
I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#115They have technical problems: Offline doesn't work sometimes when you seem to have a connection but it's not really working. The popups sometimes do not close and requires a restart. The client is heavy and can show videos and display lyrics, which is nice when properly implemented but it's a buggy mess.
They have algorithm problems: Suggestions became useless since a long while. The silly podcast push. All those generic placeholder playlist...
They also have conflicting interests with their users and the non-megastar artists.
Therefore I also cancelled Spotify a long time ago.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#116I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…
If you were basically born with Spotify, like many of us here (or at least, had it or something like it from a young-ish age), then unfortunately there's no way we will ever appreciate it. It's like someone from a century go saying how amazing it is that we all having flushing toilets in our houses and refrigerators. It's just life now, it's the new normal, not amazing.
Although true in comparison, it is still relative.
I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time.
But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself.
I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me.
Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other.
Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#117As a mostly happy Spotify Premium user I expected to disagree, but OP is actually on point. I realize I only use "search" and "like" and basically ignore the rest of the app. Spotify on mobile probably has the worst UX out of all the apps that I use regularly. This might sound harsh but it is actually bad. The home screen is beyond useless. I literally have a three year old album under "Popular new releases" and it's…
I think the feeling that it's bad is made worse if you've been a long time user, because I remember that it used to be better.
I dislike that they pushed so much for the liked playlist thing, and that it's now a bit tedious to navigate into just looking at my playlists.
I also really dislike their annoying push for podcasts, and this would really be a super quick and easy opt-out section in the settings of the app. And I think from here it's a good transition into what this makes me feel: I feel like Spotify doesn't give a shit about me anymore and they are just trying to squeeze me. And that really rubs me the wrong way.
But I also have no alternative lined up.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#118> It keeps pushing playlists that feel generic, bland, more based on demographics than my years of consistent listening history. I don't really agree with this point. The personal playlists (both Discover Weekly and the Daily Mix ones) are very close to what I usually listen to and have made me discover dozens of artists I didn't know before. Maybe they work better for some than for others, but they don't feel like b…
I feel like both of you are correct. It feels to me that Spotify's recommendations easily gets stuck in a 'local maxima' where it just keeps recommending the same music over again with little variation. I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated. Music just ends up feeling a lot more bland with Spotify, in my experience. I don't even know…
The "local maxima" thing is interesting, because while with Spotify it is noticeable sometimes, it was a lot worse of a problem with Google Play Music which I previously used. By the time they shut that down, I almost felt trapped into listening to nothing but Tycho.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#119I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…
The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.
I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise.
I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#120Long article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in. For me I navigate my music via My Liked songs + my own playlists for particular moods. If I open the app and press play it defaults to where I left off. The fact there is a home page which shows options similar to what I like is fine, sometimes useful. Yes I’d prefer to cust…
> The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal. But you can, if you have the audio files you ca…
Local files in Spotify is extremely iffy. It has forgot them many times for me.
The worst is on iOS where you have to be on the same wifi and wait randomly. And sometimes without warning the files just go away. This is unacceptable. People need to play music for dance, yoga, exercise classes for their job. You can't just randomly throw away the files to have them discover this when the class starts.