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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#481

Post by suddenclarity »

Hartgeld wrote: post #208

I'm genuinely surprised why noboby is mentioning online community radios as a source for music. Why would an algorithm of a billion dollar company provide a better selection of music than a real human being who dedicated his life collecting, playing and producing music? When listening to music I want to be surprised and discover new music. Spotify and its competitors only please you with stuff u already know or sound…

Why would an algorithm be better? Because it has 15 years of my listening history and can offer music based on my personal taste. You can even get the radio experience with human public playlists with the added advantage that you can skip songs 10 seconds into them if you don't like them.

Start a niche human curated playlist with death metal and Bieber. No ads and you can skip a song whenever. 10 minutes later you can change to a playlist with movie music and 90s rap. All in one app. You can even add your store purchased music.

Spotify does everything a radio station does, just better. The one exception is having a living person talk between songs about his day. They do have an AI generated DJ though if you're into it and want to hear the names of the songs.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#482

Post by rldjbpin »

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 had different experiences with music, partly due to the time frame, but i share your perspective.

however i don't think spotify helps with discovery for me any longer. it did play a major role until last couple years, even when my tastes changed drastically. now it is hard to find something new that is closer to what i like and is not pushed by the artists trying to promote their work. even using shuffle on a large playlist results in same set of tracks playing every day.

i think these sorts of sentiments are shared by the others here. from price perspective, i actually started spending on music with spotify premium. i still feel that it is worth the money after entering into a much better economic condition.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#483

Post by rldjbpin »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #467
srndsnd wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the level of curation and diversity was second to none. i recall that a popular album had regional vinyl rips, which was mind boggling for me.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#484

Post by boraoztunc »

Vorh wrote: post #480
boraoztunc wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX def sucks. I don't understand how a design-focused company that invests so much into its design teams (www.spotify.design) can create a user interface so cluttered and hard to navigate to find music. After years of using it, I've recently discovered (on mobile) that they've hidden the search and sorting on top of the playlists. My home page is full of things I'm not interested in; there is no way to customize whic…

Was going to try this out, but the permissions required are too much for me. View your email Add and remove items in Your Library Create, edit, and follow private playlists Create, edit, and follow playlists Manage who you follow on Spotify Stream and control Spotify on your other devices

I understand. It seems like too much, but I've no intention of storing or doing something with the data. Spotify API lets us follow artists, like songs through the app, and create playlists. Also, there is a built-in player that we can listen to the songs and playlists directly without opening the Spotify app.

You should try, pretty cool.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#485

Post by aheckler »

boppo1 wrote: post #226

All I know is I pay for ad-free spotify and it fucking serves me pop-ups for things I'm not interested in. That's an ad you assholes! As soon as I figure out how to export playlists in a aay that I can import to apple music, I'm gone.

> As soon as I figure out how to export playlists in a aay that I can import to apple music, I'm gone.

SongShift[0] is the gold standard for doing this I believe, so much so that Apple is beta testing an integration with it.[1]

[0] https://www.songshift.com/

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/apple-music-spotify-playlists...

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#486

Post by skydhash »

speedgoose wrote: post #478
skydhash wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the best test possible. I transcoded the Flac version to AAC VBR, load both inside audacity, invert one of them and play the mix. I also made sure to align the samples. The result was some high frequency sound from the instruments, and the vocals sounded like the artist was whispering. I don't keep lossless just for listening, but storage is cheap, and I like the fact that I can switch transcoding profiles as I…

I don't know if you are testing for the same thing. Your test consist of highlighting the losses with some audio processing. But could you do the difference in a blind test? Take your lossless files, convert them to lossy audio, and back to lossless. Mix the new files and the original files randomly with a script or by asking someone else, don't look at the sizes or spectrograms, play the couples and see if you are s…

It does not really matter to me, I enjoyed the songs either way. I even have a few 128kbps mp3 albums. Storage is cheap and my collection is only around 500gb. I still keep lossless just I have perfect rips of my favorite movies. Because lossy is lossy and I prefer to have something as close as possible of the original release. I still remember being happy about radio quality song and vhs, now not so much. Maybe they’ll discover a way to repair and enhance hearing, and we’ll look at lossy codec the same way we now look at 360p videos.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#487

Post by nullandvoid »

spdif899 wrote: post #250
nullandvoid wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 discover weekly consistently delivers a few new songs to my like list - I actually look forward to it each Monday when I start work.

My main complaint with Spotify's recommendations algorithm is that you cannot provide any clear negative feedback to it anymore. I played a single Christmas album from an artist that my mom wanted to hear over the holidays, but I don't like that artist or style of music otherwise. Now, every time they release a new song it comes up in my release radar, and random similar things pollute my discover weekly. There's no…

Yeah fair enough, I have had the occasional few months where it goes a little haywire (too skewed to a genre / style I was just curiously listening to, rather than wanting more of).

It does seem to fix itself - although a negative feedback mechanism would be nice!

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#488

Post by xnx »

vintermann wrote: post #130
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…

> 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…

Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#489

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

ethbr1 wrote: post #395
vintermann wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Classic Hacker News. “Companies shouldn’t spend money, except if it’s on developers!”

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#490

Post by ochronus »

I'm not hyped about Spotify (don't dislike it either) - but there's one feature I haven't found in any other service - it's recommendation engine (e.g. Discover Weekly) which I'm enjoying a lot. I've discovered great music using it and that's almost the only thing keeping me there.

Hivemind, do you know of a good alternative?

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