391–400 of 511 posts
I know this isn't a practical option for many, but there are still many simple audio players for self managed music collections. I use VLC on Android, and Amberol on Linux. They're both folder oriented, and stay out of the way.
They have technical problems: Offline doesn't work sometimes when you seem to have a connection but it's not really working. The popups sometimes do not close and requires a restart. The client is heavy and can show videos and display lyrics, which is nice when properly implemented but it's a buggy mess. They have algorithm problems: Suggestions became useless since a long while. The silly podcast push. All those gen…
The ui design and the business model always reflected that prerogative: poor discoverability, poor user-favorites, poor classification, absolutely no blobs, credits or liner notes. An artist uploading is just another entry in the database - the service sells access to the DB, it doesn't sell music. By extension, the user is also more and more a "yet another entry" in the whole process of "consuming" the data.
It's just dehumanizing, yet consumers would rather this than having to deal with the friction of purchasing records (which are outrageously expensive, which also points to the record industry's responsibility in this...) or pirating under they eye of copyright trolls. Long story short: they'll fail, sooner or later.
The Author doesn't understand how the streaming business works, and as far as I can tell, no one in the comments here has shone a better light on it. There is and there isn't just a pool of money that goes to beyonce, the weeknd and taylor swift... i say there is because what actually happens is, the collecting societies will collect the money, then distribute it based on streams correctly to the artists/writers/prod…
Since you seem to understand how it works, can you explain the following to me: Let's say I pay $10 to listen to my favorite indie band, for 1 hour each week. Let's say another user listens to Taylor Swift 24/7. Does my favorite band get my $10, or do they get $0.12? You see, when I pay $10, I don't expect $9.88 to go to Taylor Swift. Or does my favorite band actually gets my $10, like it used to be when I bought CD'…
"i pay $10/month to listen to {obscure band}, but only $1/month is going to that band and the rest is going to {popular band}!"
this is a technically true statement that seems to fuel a lot of anti-rich-getting-richer / popular-thing-is-bad-but-my-taste-is-good backlash. but the fact that is always overlooked is that while you are only sending $1/month to the obscure band you love, the millions of listeners that are into {popular band} will also be sending a tiny fraction of their monthly payment to your artist as well.
determining whether pro-rata payments or user-centric payment systems are more equitable is complex and is studied in the academic literature (e.g., [0]) but ALSO internally by streaming providers (i know from firsthand experience[1]).
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517652...
[1] it's interesting to note that the difference between the payment systems affects how payments are distributed to artists but not the total amount, so theoretically the streaming provider isn't biased toward one system over another for business reasons. the streaming platfroms don't really care one way or another and it's 100% driven by what the labels dictate during licensing negotiations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ 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.
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…
Comparing a product to what it was like decades ago and declaring it good is not the same as discussing it on merit and as is.
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…
You could use Discogs to find similar music. Then you could use SoulSeek to find this music. Or simply join a metal channel/server on SoulSeek or IRC or DCPP and find other fans of similar music. But even before that you could also just look at a label catalog and travel to a vinyl or CD store (where you can listen before you buy...). Or you could use shortwave radio to catch a pirate station. Yes, this even worked for obscure genres like the one you mentioned. I have a broad taste of music and at times I've been into subgenres of the genre you mentioned.
Have I discovered new music via Spotify? For sure. Did different methods exist before? Yup. Is the Spotify method high signal to noise? Nah, the previously mentioned methods also worked very well. And I have virtually and IRL met tons of people, including people within the core of music subgenres. Thanks to Discogs, DCPP, and SoulSeek.
I do like one feature about Spotify showing shows near me (even though I have passed the age / time of my life where I went to artists as I have only time and money to do things like go to theatre with my kids). However that feature as well as buying merchandise also existed outside of Spotify long ago.
The shocking thing about Spotify's UI was that it was never modeled to be a record collection or a record store. It was always modeled to be a database front end. The ui design and the business model always reflected that prerogative: poor discoverability, poor user-favorites, poor classification, absolutely no blobs, credits or liner notes. An artist uploading is just another entry in the database - the service sell…
they've got misaligned incentives now because one half of the company is trying to make the best audio streaming platform that they can, and the other half is creating content and trying to get it injected into as many ears as possible.
the big round of layoffs in january included pushing dawn ostroff and de-emphasizing the podcast moves, which (fingers crossed) will lead to less emphasis on the content creation side
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 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 tol…