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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#371

Post by kjkjadksj »

Every time I get on an airplane and go to listen to my downloaded music on spotify, most of my downloaded library is gone and needs to be redownloaded. Sometimes when I play music on lte connection the app also would rather use my poor data connection to serve me a choppy buffering track of one I already downloaded locally, that apparently spotify app won’t chose over seeking a new download even on a cellular data connection. I have to put spotify into offline mode to force it to use downloaded music everytime, at which point you can’t search the rest of spotify because the switch is like an app specific airplane mode.

If I catch it dropping my downloads one more time, I’m done and going back to pirating flacs and transcoding that to my device. Convenience is king, I don’t care about being legal or not. The only reason why I was using spotify was that it was slightly more convenient than pirating music. If they keep dropping the ball on the one job the app is supposed to reliably do, play my music, I’ll just build a library myself over a weekend and save myself years of future headache.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#372

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

Pandora is much better at discovery (Spotify is actually really terrible by comparison), and cheaper too. Unfortunately, they refuse to implement high quality streams for whatever reason, or I could finally ditch Spotify. As it is, I just use Pandora's free tier for discovery to help curate my Spotify playlists.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#373

Post by Adrig »

freedomben wrote: post #346

> The lack of customization feels like a slap. Like Spotify designers telling me “you don’t know what you want, we know better,” but the problem is they don’t, and they haven’t for a long time. Warning: extremely broad stereotyping to follow. This is macro level stuff, not micro level stuff. Real individual humans are far more complex and nuanced than what I'm about to say and don't fit neatly into these categories.…

Sadly it's not only designers but sometimes the whole product org who is biased… I lost on a potential design contract earlier this year because the company wanted a paid case study. 3 hours to improve their onboarding and customer activation.

I showed an outline of the direction I thought was best, highlighted the core concepts to watch for, and opened to further tests we could do to achieve the target KPI.

They told me my concepts were not “bold enough” and I wasn't defending it as hard as they'd like. It seems that to them, a designer should be confident enough to impose his vision after 3h of work on one of the most important flows of a B2B app.

No hard feeling against them, I was probably not a good fit. But it's not the first time people expect me to come in and “do the design thing” like it's dark magic.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#374

Post by tekla »

freedomben wrote: post #346

> The lack of customization feels like a slap. Like Spotify designers telling me “you don’t know what you want, we know better,” but the problem is they don’t, and they haven’t for a long time. Warning: extremely broad stereotyping to follow. This is macro level stuff, not micro level stuff. Real individual humans are far more complex and nuanced than what I'm about to say and don't fit neatly into these categories.…

Knock off a 0 from that number

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#375

Post by marliechiller »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #371

Every time I get on an airplane and go to listen to my downloaded music on spotify, most of my downloaded library is gone and needs to be redownloaded. Sometimes when I play music on lte connection the app also would rather use my poor data connection to serve me a choppy buffering track of one I already downloaded locally, that apparently spotify app won’t chose over seeking a new download even on a cellular data co…

I experienced all of this on a recent flight, much to my frustration. Once fully exasperated at having the podcasts id predownloaded not actually play, I turned to my audible app. This too spent the first minute of booting clearly trying to contact servers to call home with a locked up, unusable screen, despite me having a large local library for access.

App developers clearly rarely test their code in airplane mode these days, much to our annoyance!

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#376

Post by freedomben »

akudha wrote: post #248
jbgt wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch? I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee. Now the baddie is Spotify.

Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website? Why don’t more artists do that?

Amazing, thanks for mentioning this! I had no idea. He looks to sell everything on there, not just mp3s, and they are well priced! Just bought a couple of videos of his performances, and it does indeed include DRM-free .mp4 downloads. Even includes a .srt file for subtitles!

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#377

Post by freedomben »

vintermann wrote: post #251
akudha wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website? Why don’t more artists do that?

They do. Bandcamp is a thing, and it's pretty much that, minus a fee for the infrastructure. But it's not a panacea. An old classmate of mine who's a decently successful Jazz artist now (by Jazz artist standard), had scammers upload her album to Bandcamp without her knowledge. They defrauded a lot of money from her actual fans, probably more than she ever made on Spotify.

Was your classmate already on Bandcamp?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#378

Post by srndsnd »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #110

Goodness, feels as if I could have written this post :) I have Spotify premium because I got a year long offer for less than 1/10th the price. Since I anyway used ad-supported Spotify I went for it. I really didn’t see any improvement: - The UX sucks, more so - there’s nothing much to say here really - They still push podcasts and different languages down my throat, more vehemently - The recommendations still drive m…

What makes you think replacements haven't filled the gap left by W.CD? The community is definitely not as fun or interesting, but it's definitely done the job for me.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#379

Post by jorvi »

vintermann wrote: post #228
strken wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

A lot of boutique labels are just sub(-sub) labels ran under the big three. Including metal.

Often they’re ran by artists under contract with one of those three big labels and their big sublabels, mostly as a perk/favor to those artists. They have a bit more creative freedom and leeway who they sign, but the money is still kicked upward and the marketing and recording budget still comes from upstairs.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#380

Post by Minor49er »

crtasm wrote: post #289
speedgoose wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do the difference between 320kbits/s OGG Vorbis, 16bits at 44100Hz, and 24 bits 48000Hz lossless audio? Using the same master, I don't.

Nobody can hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit. 24bit makes zero difference for playback purposes.

Recording, editing, and remixing with anything higher than 16-bit makes a big difference though, which is important in this digital music age where everything is sampled
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