I was born right into the age of streaming since I was born in 2008 (didn't this website exist before me?) and this is why I love CDs. I actually control decent quality music, I can pay the artist directly for their work and I control it without any ridiculous copy protection like AACS. I tried Spotify, Amazon Music, TIDAL, everything else and I cannot get used to it. I really hate subscriptions, and prefer to own things.
The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
261–270 of 511 posts
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 a…
What does that have to do with Spotify? If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. Just sell me something I want at a price I find reasonable. I don't need a story about how it's so hard for you to pursue your passion or how you can't continue in the future.
> If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in.
To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in".
I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely wo…
The share is determined by contract, not by some fair-minded algorithm. You would have to listen to that artist over 3000 times in a month for them to get $10 at the normal artist's $0.0032/play. Big artists don't see such low figures, though more obviously goes to the system that pays the salaries of the people who get those deals for them.
Well, sure, but whether an artist gets the full amount or a pittance from their label is not relevant to the question of whether Spotify's pooled numbers are unfair to some artists. The ultimate payout is not something Spotify has a say in.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? Well, you could simply bypass Spotify and just buy the music directly from the artist, no (which you indicate you do)? So Spotify isn't necessary for this, I'd guess? Spotify isn't a payment app for artists (again, I feel super weird defending them, I am not a fan myself!), it's a dis…
Even better, use Spotify to discover artists then buy their music! It's not mutually exclusive!
That's exactly what I wanted to say further up but you summarized it way better in less words. I still think Spotify is great to discover music, but yes, there needs to be direct monetization outside of it!
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount.
(And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely wo…
It's pretty easy to do some math on this. There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form. You don't get…
That's a good point and a legitimate reason to get rid of the pool, but I guess I was talking more about often-voiced worries that big artists are getting richer and indie artists are getting poorer due to Spotify's algorithm -- and those worries long predate the weird ambient stuff.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#267I 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 understand you - I am a bit older and did similarly, buying cassettes in the 70s
Yet, I miss the undivided attention of that first listening, listening to all tracks in sequence (picking the track sequence was an art in itself, creating an atmosphere across the album). Feeling the difference between Side A and B.
Those 10$ felt like great return. Exchanging tapes with friends, recording mixtapes, listening sit downs.
A lot of this is lost due to streaming in general. When you can get any song in history in a few clicks, it takes away part of the “mystical journey” of finding your new musical beat. More self reinforcing stuff, just like Social Networks.
About Spotify, I agree with the OP. Interface gets worse, price goes up, podcast content is irrelevant for me (but drives price up). I find it grating since I already pay for the Apple bundle which includes Music (which is somehow even worse than Spotify). If Apple had a better interface I could ditch Spotify.
Guess I must try Cider again.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there. You could give a more charitable interpretation by just treating Spotify as a music discovery service, that's not really what Spotify is marketed or intended for. Spotify is meant to be the ultimate end-game of online music streaming: it is meant to flat-out replace your giant MP3 library. And that's exactly how many people use Spotify. Not just Spot…
> I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there. So people here are complaining about how Spotify does not pay the people who create music enough. And there exists a zero friction option to pay the people who create music. But people don’t want to use the zero friction option to pay the people who create music because it would cost $1 or $2 per song. So yeah. My opinion? People are just really ch…
Sure I buy music, but that's really beside the point and not at all to do with the problem that is being raised. We (at least me and whoever wrote this article) are in fact choosing to not use streaming services. But even if people are "really cheap" there's no particular reason their money should be split across artists they don't listen to, and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply must work this way, if it doesn't have to work this way for any other industry, it doesn't have to work this way for music. If we have to fix it with regulation, painfully, over a long period of time, then fine. I don't like that, but that's what happens when industries fail to self-regulate meaningfully.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there. So people here are complaining about how Spotify does not pay the people who create music enough. And there exists a zero friction option to pay the people who create music. But people don’t want to use the zero friction option to pay the people who create music because it would cost $1 or $2 per song. So yeah. My opinion? People are just really ch…
Sure I buy music, but that's really beside the point and not at all to do with the problem that is being raised. We (at least me and whoever wrote this article) are in fact choosing to not use streaming services. But even if people are "really cheap" there's no particular reason their money should be split across artists they don't listen to, and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply mu…
> But even if people are "really cheap" there's no particular reason their money should be split across artists they don't listen to,
Listeners opted into buying a product sold by a business that does that. And the music creator also opted into it. That is where the market cleared. And people had and have the option to simply pay for the music directly, but they don’t want to.
>and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply must work this way,
Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).
>if it doesn't have to work this way for any other industry, it doesn't have to work this way for music.
Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.
The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money. So that’s how little people are willing to play (presumably because piracy is an easy alternative).
Edit to reply to below comment since I hit posting limit:
>Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries?
The biggest one is probably the ease of pirating music.
>And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested
The recent run up is still far from SP500 performance, which is basically break even. Since IPO, SP500 return is 11%+, and Spotify is 8%, which is basically a 3% per year loss.
Spotify’s biggest customers are the 3 big record labels (Warner/Universal/Sony) and exists as a negotiating tool against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.
Anyway, to conclude, I would blame the broad populace for not wanting to pay more for music. Surely, lots of them knew how to, and then decided they would pirate it, until a sufficiently cheap monthly legal streaming option came along.
Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription
#270Long 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…
It's a critique/criticism of a service that has degraded, and why the author understandably is unhappy. What is with the growing trend on HN of just being overly negative about posts that are shared here?
Criticism is welcome, wrapping it in LimeWire nostalgia and extra 20 paragraphs of fluff to make it long enough for a blog post is makes it harder to find.