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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#221

Post by vibrio »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #123
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…

CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise. For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Gar…

Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#222

Post by Astraco »

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…

Piracy, It works. You can even keep using Spotify without paying them or listen to ads.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#223

Post by occz »

blackSnake wrote: post #103

The worlds music at your disposal, and not satisfied... LOL You can spend the rest of your life listening to all sorts of music, just by using the search bar and clicking around. Thats incredible! I feel like after a while, we can take things for granted that are incredible and weren't even possible not too long ago. Not that we shouldn't strive for a better ideal.. Reminds me of a fortune cookie note I read a long t…

>I do agree that artists should get a bigger share. Im sure if Spotify were super transparent about cost allocation, we would see room for improvement. Where there's money, there is greed.

What are you referring to that is not transparent from Spotify's side?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#224

Post by usrusr »

vintermann wrote: post #179
usrusr wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 metr…

Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled. It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about i…

Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize.

Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#225

Post by infinitedata »

rajishx wrote: post #219

I moved to youtube music lately after being like 10 years i think on spotify (or since when it started in the UK)... the youtube premium + youtube music was too much of a deal for me to take... I still use spotify sometime with an app that remove the ads... but I don't get the attraction anymore

In YT music, is there a way to spot regurgitated videos as ‘music’ versus actual tracks that provide a decent streaming quality? My problem has been that their bitrate is so bad, like their videos. Thanks for any advice

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#226

Post by boppo1 »

All I know is I pay for ad-free spotify and it fucking serves me pop-ups for things I'm not interested in. That's an ad you assholes!

As soon as I figure out how to export playlists in a aay that I can import to apple music, I'm gone.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#227

Post by vintermann »

bko wrote: post #203
vintermann wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I may be in the minority, but I just don't really find the "support the artist" argument that compelling. I have artists I like and I grew up with. If I saw them in public I'd get giggly and maybe try to say an awkward hello. But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist. I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically a…

> But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.

What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future.

For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#228

Post by vintermann »

strken wrote: post #200
vintermann wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label. The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.

> You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.

For fringe metal music? Not likely!

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#229

Post by __alias »

bamboozled wrote: post #42
fabioborellini wrote: post #25

Spotify's suggestions are horribly bland and insultingly unoriginal compared to Apple's. I keep getting Black Sabbath's Paranoid, the song, in various "deep cuts" and "new music" themed lists and suggestions. It's from 1969. Apple's lists and suggestions may actually have new music.

I feel the same like, I cannot get away from some songs even when I dislike them. I got some AirPods and have a few Apple Music subscription I’ll try instead. I’ve also just started listening to some good radio stations like FBI in Sydney Australia. Best way to find new music in my opinion. I add what I like on Spotify and it spices it up a bit.

I had never heard of FBI radio but it's right up my alley, and I've actually lived in Sydney for many years. So cheers for the inadvertent recommendation there

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#230

Post by projektfu »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #178

Let's hear it for the slightly less sucky Apple music! https://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-... I'm a fairly content Apple music subscriber. The apps (iPhone and MacBook) suck - although it keeps podcasts and audiobooks elsewhere, but there's a good chance I can find even obscure tracks and I can also listen to the old CDs and unpublished music I uploaded with iTunes Match on any Apple device.

I was reading a book by a bassist (View from the Bottom, by Harvey Brooks) and it was nice that pretty much everything he talked about was on Apple Music. Some things, even famous things, just eventually get lost. It is nice that lots of music has been digitized and will be preserved both because of profit motive and by the Internet archive.

I'm eager to try the Apple Classical app but it's iOS only. My iPad is not my typical listening device.

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