Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

blog.raed.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 511 posts

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#461

Post by Talanes »

jjjjj55555 wrote: post #413
saveferris wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head.... -How was the labor sourced for those services? -Child Labor, illegal immigrant labor? -What are the working conditions for the labor?, is it sweatshop -what inputs go into the goods/services? -what do they do with their waste? -where do the inputs come from? My country, another country, my town, a town in my state... you may think the government plays a role to enforce some of these, and th…

I'm curious, do you personally buy any goods or services? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever purchase or use anything.

I'm curious, do you personally make any decisions? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever consider or decide upon anything.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#462

Post by anderber »

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.

Deezer is really great, not enough people talk about it. It has a simple and great homepage, you can upload your own MP3s, playlists are still mostly human curated, it has a shazam-like feature built in, the playlist management is the best, and the recommendations are second only to perhaps Spotify.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#463

Post by jjjjj55555 »

Talanes wrote: post #461
jjjjj55555 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, do you personally buy any goods or services? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever purchase or use anything.

I'm curious, do you personally make any decisions? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever consider or decide upon anything.

I do make decisions and often times people many degrees removed get hurt or exploited as a result of it.

I choose not to focus on that though, whereas the person I replied to apparently does. I was curious how such a person manages to live a just life in the modern world.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#464

Post by thwonp »

I canceled Spotify in favor of Plexamp.

I was sick of the algorithmic content funnel, and have been collecting albums for better part of 20 years. I find myself listening to and enjoying music from my own curated collection much more than I valued having every song at my fingertips. It helps that the plexamp app is slick and feature rich, I especially like the exploration features made possible by discog tags and sonic analysis.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#465

Post by Cub3 »

Triphibian wrote: post #317

Reading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they deal with. That notion, that the algorithm is more concerned with cash savings than serving you the songs you want to hear, really changed the way I think about these services -- and the idea of music recommendation writ large. I currently subscribe to Apple M…

I swapped to Apple Music recently too (as I got 6 months free) and the UI is horrible compared to spotify + painfully slow to load on my phone.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#466

Post by EchoChamberMan »

jjjjj55555 wrote: post #463
Talanes wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, do you personally make any decisions? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever consider or decide upon anything.

I do make decisions and often times people many degrees removed get hurt or exploited as a result of it. I choose not to focus on that though, whereas the person I replied to apparently does. I was curious how such a person manages to live a just life in the modern world.

Apparently those decisions don't include answering the question at hand.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#467

Post by crossroadsguy »

srndsnd wrote: post #378
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.

W.CD had everything. Literally (almost) everything. But the replacements are not even close to it. So unless you’re from a certain geography and looking for a certain language you’re just out of luck.

And community is downright, well, let’s not get into that.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#468

Post by npunt »

CaptWillard wrote: post #310
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.

I feel like the biggest loss from the days of big record companies is that no one is going to front a promising young band enough to go away together and make their 'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'OK Computer' * I know both bands probably could've self-financed those projects by that point in their careers, but would they have? And would their role as investors have changed their artistic decisions?

I'm not so worried about humanity's loss of peak works like these since I don't think any young band has it in them at the start anyways. What young artists need is an on-ramp and a way to stay in the business long enough to hone their craft and build a following while turning out a couple Pipers at the Gates of Dawn. Works like Dark Side and OKC are developed, not born, and we need that pipeline.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#469

Post by ethbr1 »

kristianbrigman wrote: post #448
ethbr1 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Bandcamp, now owned by Songtradr, that promptly fired half its employees.

As bad as this is...as this thread points out, more of the money needs to go to artists, and supporting fewer employees should let them do this.

As long as it remains a viable platform. Hopefully the cuts weren't a "gut because we want to run this down on life support" move.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#470

Post by esafak »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #107
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…

When you were born I was a teenager in France recording music from the radio to a tape praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song. And that the song is not cut. Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it. Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy. This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discove…

I turned into Shazam doing that; I could recognize any song I liked by the first note.
Post reply on HN