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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#421

Post by vintermann »

serjester wrote: post #412
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…

Spotify uses a weighted average - you can't abuse the system like that. The tough reality is that 10k fans paying $10 a month and spending 1% time listening to an indie artist only works out to $1k / month even if all the money went to the artists. Unfortunately that's not the case - Spotify has overhead, artists sign with labels and other middlemen creep in. As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change t…

It's not hard to find artists who abuse the system like that: algorithmically generated music, from algorithmically generated artists, hundreds of which have almost the exact same number of plays (and thousands more than real artists I've followed for years.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#422

Post by vintermann »

Reubachi wrote: post #271
vintermann wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label. For fringe metal music? Not likely!

By "fringe metal", they're likely talking about mainstream thrash and groove metal. And those bands where on these exact labels; Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)

Well, maybe. Around where I'm from, even the chain record stores would stock some unusual music (like metal) if it was locally popular, but the metalheads had their own stores. I think there's still one or two active in Oslo.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#423

Post by paledot »

whyoh wrote: post #295
maximus-decimus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Spotify share half its profits too? From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.

>From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share. If that is the case, the artists can easily sue the labels for violating the terms of the contract. But the fair share is just what the two signing parties agreed to.

Which is definitely a fair deal signed between equals, right?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#424

Post by vintermann »

jsnell wrote: post #287
troupo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song". This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.

I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.

Even though they just need a total plays sum to pay out to artists, Spotify for sure stores every play by person. You can request your data from them and see for yourself - it's of course necessary for their recommendation services, and even just providing the listening history back to you is a service many people want badly (it is the whole point of services like last.fm!)

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#425

Post by EasyMark »

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…

I'm a big metal and jazz fan. I don't use spotify (or haven't for a while) but on apple music I curate my own playlists and get most of what I would get from surfing the high seas and rearranging folders and albums in a fraction of the time. I know you can do the same on Spotify, so it's good enough for me.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#426

Post by ornornor »

number6 wrote: post #165
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 a…

soulseek has a looooot of music. Even obscure tracks or albums. Lossless, lossy, anything.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#428

Post by wbkang »

StackRanker3000 wrote: post #329
kreco wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Spotify allows you to play local files, add them to playlists, etc. So no you can't buy the files from Spotify, but if it's important to you, you can buy them elsewhere and import them.

It's an unreliable and jarring experience, I had to give up on it. The app gives no indication when the synchronization would happen, and doesn't explain why when it does not work.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#429

Post by ryandrake »

sweeter wrote: post #417
bko wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it's about voluntary exchange. Imagine if someone did that to you? I worked low wage jobs before. If some do gooder started lecturing me about how I'm being exploited I would rightly tell them to f off. If they wanted to throw me some money I may or may not be appreciative but I have autonomy about my choices and I extend that same belief to others

"artists deserve to be exploited because they chose it." Thats a very childish assessment of the music industry and how artists are taken advantage of. It has absolutely nothing to do with "being lectured by 'do-gooders'" either, you're injecting an emotional story as an argument where there is none.

Yea, a lot of the "it's a contract" and "it's voluntary" arguments fail to recognize the huge power imbalance between a label and a band, or any agreement between a single person and a huge company. These agreements are almost never between equals, and are often one-sided and "take it or leave it".

Yes, technically I voluntarily entered into my contract with my ISP, my cell phone carrier, and my employer. But in all cases, it's obvious I'm getting screwed over because of the massive power imbalance. It's a fact of life, but it should at least be acknowledged.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#430

Post by cyberpunk »

solarkraft wrote: post #45
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.

I do find Tidal to be a little better. I migrated due to comments on here and found it to not be the "no bullshit" experience that I hoped for, but it is a bit less obnoxious at least.

Are they still pushing MQA?
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