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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#131

Post by wasyl »

mgoetzke wrote: post #108
wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I 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 ?

It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#132

Post by nicoco »

wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I 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 fact that you can say "Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever" when they basically pay the musicians nothing is amazing to me. Have we come this far into individualism? "It's good for me, so it must be the best thing ever".

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#133

Post by cuu508 »

thriftwy wrote: post #73
jamesear wrote: post #63

I know this isn't a practical option for many, but there are still many simple audio players for self managed music collections. I use VLC on Android, and Amberol on Linux. They're both folder oriented, and stay out of the way.

During the golden age of mp3/flac KDE's Amarok was awesome, later it had a subpar upgrade to 3.x and was forked off as Clementine, and now Clementine is also becoming creaky...

Aren't you confusing Audacity with Amarok?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#135

Post by shmageggy »

madeofpalk wrote: post #27
6581 wrote: post #10

> 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…

> I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated.

Like which ones? I tried Tidal and music discovery sucks just as badly there too. I'm really craving a music discovery experience that brings back the humanity. Even when an algorithm suggests a good song, it still feels hollow and divorced from any cultural context.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#136

Post by thriftwy »

cuu508 wrote: post #133
thriftwy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the golden age of mp3/flac KDE's Amarok was awesome, later it had a subpar upgrade to 3.x and was forked off as Clementine, and now Clementine is also becoming creaky...

Aren't you confusing Audacity with Amarok?

Thanks - edited

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#137

Post by piva00 »

devjab wrote: post #119
wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I 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, bu…

> 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 have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.

The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.

The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.

Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#138

Post by arthurofbabylon »

Spotify's virtues became table-stakes last decade. What was once deservedly lauded as top-quality design and an incredible, high-value product has become... well... just normal.

This phenomenon interests me broadly, beyond just Spotify. In the worlds of hardware, architecture, and human organization, innovations become iconic. They're remembered and studied for decades or centuries. There's an incredible staying power, where the implementation becomes the backing metaphor for the next iterative leap.

In the software world, this just doesn't really happen. For a few years a sizable portion of emerging consumer brands asked their design team to "make it look like headspace," and that gave way to the generic, faceless cartoons of corporate animations (ie, it just dissolved into the next trend). We've seen countless clever teams introduce clever tactics that quickly proliferated, leaving the original step in innovation largely forgotten. Spotify was (for an entire decade!) a shining star of impeccable product design, but now that's just normal. In software, culture just quickly and seamlessly moves on.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#139

Post by toyg »

exitb wrote: post #83

In modern capitalism, the larger the company, the more it needs to grow in order to exist. Some, like Apple, manage to continuously expand into new markets. For now, at least. Others, like Spotify, are not positioned for that - once they reach their potential, they start to franticly juice their market destroying their product along the way.

Spotify is actually trying very hard to expand in different markets - audiobooks and podcasts were big moves. Unfortunately, these markets really don't play well with their core proposition.

I honestly don't understand why certain giant companies are obsessed by integration; instead of trying to stuff everything in one UI, why not integrate backends (to leverage economies of scale) while keeping UIs separate? So you can cater for each audience in different ways, and keep everyone happy. It's basically "MVC for businesses", just build a different view for the the models you already have. The savings supposedly obtained by unified UIs are so often offset (or worse) by massive losses of core customers.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#140

Post by meonmyphone2 »

Couldn't agree more. I hate Spotify and its UI. Like many modern big apps, user experience seems to be an afterthought.

Recently it started showing me some related playlists that makes no sense - I now have to ignore a big portion of the UI because it's useless, feels like I'm using an app with ads.

But it's hard to go back to downloading albums after trying the convenience of a service like that.

I tried Google Music, but somehow it was even worse than Spotify, but that's about of what I expect of Google these days.

I'll be trying Deezer, Tidal and Apple Music soon.

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