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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#151

Post by globalise83 »

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…

What I love about Spotify and think shows that their engineering culture is really solid, is their progressive web app. I only use Ubuntu on my different computers, and my first task after a fresh install is to log into Spotify and save their web app on my machine. It just works: the icon appears in my favourites, the app renders really nicely in a native-like window, etc. It is by far the best progressive web app experience I have had. I totally forget that it's just a website with the browser UI switched off.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#152

Post by input_sh »

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…

I'd also add that, in comparison to its competition, it's fairly "open" API-wise.

TIDAL: no API. Soundcloud: API registration disabled. Apple Music: paywalled. Beatport: API registration disabled. Etc etc.

That isn't to say you can get everything via the API (you can't get monthly listeners, only an abstraction of it on a 0-100 scale, or artist's pick you sometimes see on artist pages), but compared to whom they're matched against, kudos to them.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#153

Post by criddell »

nicoco wrote: post #132
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".

Would you say that the Spotify era is a worse time to be a musician than the UMG / Sony / Warner era?

I’m not a musician but it seems to me it’s always been difficult to make a living as an artist. I wonder if it’s easier to find an audience today than it was 50 years ago?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#154

Post by speedgoose »

Semaphor wrote: post #74
platelminto wrote: post #6

I'm also not a fan of the direction Spotify is going, but if I want to keep listening to music, I don't see a way around it - and I don't think other music services are materially different. I support the artists I care about most by going to their concerts and/or buying merch. I use services like last.fm for better discovery. Spotify doesn't have to be the only way you interact with music. The author doesn't say how…

> but if I want to keep listening to music, I don't see a way around it Buying albums works. It’s what I do. It is markedly more expensive than Spotify, though.

Playing them can also be expensive. A record player diamond tip can usually last 1000 hours, and they cost about as much as you are willing to pay, from a few € to idiotic amounts.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#155

Post by 10729287 »

mmmeff wrote: post #36
fylham wrote: post #5

I’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.

Been using Apple Music for months now after being a paying subscriber to Spotify for nearly a decade. Very happy I switched. The new windows app is well built, too

I Love how Apple Music is still the same iTunes interface, almost. It's a great app if you just want to listen to albums.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#156

Post by globalise83 »

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…

Not sure if it's a different team building the feature or maybe it is because they are more constrained by the actual choices of the existing playlist, but the recommendations I get underneath a playlist that I am creating are MUCH better than the generic playlists for the same genre that get promoted on the homepage / search results.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#157

Post by itsoktocry »

Kiro wrote: post #46
throwaway220033 wrote: post #3

I can't stand Spotify's redesign anymore. Looking for an improved Winamp-like app with very simple interface and playlists. What should I try? Apple Music is a joke as well. I can't even play some of my custom audio files (they're not music, custom sounds) because Apple thinks they are not allowed to play in my country. I can't play my own audio files because of some buggy software Apple doesn't care about maintainin…

I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp. Everyone says they hate the interface but apart from the suggestions or the front page (which I don't use), what are the problems exactly? I have playlists with songs that I can double click to play. What more is there to it?

>I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp

Say what? Have you ever used Winamp?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#158

Post by Semaphor »

speedgoose wrote: post #154
Semaphor wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if I want to keep listening to music, I don't see a way around it Buying albums works. It’s what I do. It is markedly more expensive than Spotify, though.

Playing them can also be expensive. A record player diamond tip can usually last 1000 hours, and they cost about as much as you are willing to pay, from a few € to idiotic amounts.

I have no interest in physical media, it’s all FLAC.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#159

Post by troupo »

vintermann wrote: post #130
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…

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...) But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article c…

That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).

However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease.

There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#160

Post by microtonal »

mittermayr wrote: post #32

> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. While the indie artist I have been obsessed with gets literally nothing because they don’t meet a certain arbitrary threshold. Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as…

Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically.

That's because a small number of streaming services monopolized the market. In the old days, the mid-sized city I live in used to have like 15 mainstream music stores and 3 that carried mostly indie music and they were well-visited.

Streaming could be fair if they cut up the royalties by subscribes:

https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-o...

But the labels with major pop acts simply will not let that happen, because it'll drastically lower their revenue.

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