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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#161

Post by alejoar »

bowsamic wrote: post #100
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…

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.

Ok, but what is your point?

I'm also curious what do you/your generation consider amazing nowadays?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#162

Post by jchw »

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…

I think you've over-complicated this, or at least missed the point by quite a lot. The question is extremely simple: Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? I don't care how much money top performers want. If I am going to spend money on music, it should go to artists that I actually listen to. And it does, because I buy music on CD and via Bandcamp and other websites, instead of streaming it.

And that's kind of the thing. If I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator. It's Literally only music that works this way, to my knowledge.

There's plenty of problems with music licensing, and to me this is just another one of them.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#163

Post by [deleted] »

kugla wrote: post #141
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…

All of this is because of the technological change (MP3, internet speed) not because of the streaming service.

[deleted]

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#164

Post by troupo »

tjpnz wrote: post #145
mgoetzke wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

Sometimes Spotify swaps them for others by the same artist. One of my favorite instrumentals got swapped out for the version with vocals which I can't stand. I can't for the life of me understand why it could be a licensing issue.

It's a multilayered issue:

- licensing could be expired, could change hands, could be removed, could...)

- naming and attribution:

A single song by a single artist will have a gazillion versions (ep, lp, original, re-recorded, re-released, re-mastered, re-re-mastered, best hits, best songs, essential, released for the European market, released for the Japanese market, Christmas special...).

On top of that distributors and rights holders have very shitty metadata that also varies between rights holders.

So if a song changed to a different version, it's quite possible both that the contract for that song changed hands between rights holders and the new rights holder uploaded incorrect/invalid/mangled metadata that Spotify disambiguated in this way.

Or, even simpler: original metadata pointed to the incorrect version, but now points to the correct version. Which is incorrect from your point of view :)

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#165

Post by number6 »

NoLinkToMe wrote: post #49

Long 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…

I quit Spotify for the exact same reason, but I did not blog about it. I tried to host my own alternative, but I realized that it's hard to get the songs nowadays since everything is streamed. So, I switched to Deezer. It's nice that they have some support for local files for songs I already bought elsewhere and that are not on the platform.

However, there is something annoying on the Spotify homepage that drove me away...

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#166

Post by Heloseaa »

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 ?

They do yes. But it seems pretty rare. The most recurrent case I've seen, is for remixes of popular song. Probably that labels can signal these.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#167

Post by madeofpalk »

shmageggy wrote: post #135
madeofpalk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think Apple Music's playlists and algorithmic recommendations are much better and have more variation. Unfortuantely, Apple Music is terrible at playing music. OP can rightfully complain all they want about homepage customisation, but Apple Music, even on iOS, will just regularly refuse to play music files. Even worse with their embarrasing web or Windows clients.

I think Spotify's problem may stem from their quest from incresingly precise taxonomy for music https://pudding.cool/2023/10/genre/

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#168

Post by kreco »

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…

> That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent.

Interestingly, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ so you could actually do whatever you want and listen to your music the way you want.

The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#169

Post by usrusr »

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…

Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account).

If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#170

Post by tallanvor »

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.

Sadly they all seem to be in a race to the bottom.

I switched to YouTube Music when Spotify made it clear they were going to spend a lot of money on podcasts, which makes it even more annoying that it looks like You Tube is planning on doing the same.

I end up missing Pandora (not available in most countries).

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