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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#501

Post by scinerio »

My biggest peeve of Spotify is the feature discrepancy between mobile/desktop. Two examples:

    1. On mobile, you can see the top trending podcast episode.

    2. On mobile, you can filter liked songs by *some* genres.
Why? These seem like fairly trivial features to implement across both platforms. You have hundreds of devs. Wtf is going on over there?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#502

Post by janaagaard »

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…

> But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole.

But doesn’t that even out?

Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica.

If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener.

But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month.

What am I missing here?

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#503

Post by pas »

cm11 wrote: post #387
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.…

I agree, 20% sounds about right. But designers are rarely high in the food chain—they receive requirements, they receive feedback, they receive timelines. A lot of the bad "design" comes before the interface gets worked on. These aren't really two way conversations. Much of the arguments engineers lose to non-technical leaders have the same dynamics. Except that the engineering function, if not an individual engineer…

that simply means someone else a non-professional designer is acting as one. with the results being as they are, and that's how unsurprisingly we end up with bad design. but usually the company - for a while - ends up with a lot of revenue.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#504

Post by artdigital »

anderber wrote: post #458
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…

You might like Deezer, it's very similar to Spotify but with the added bonus of being able to upload your own MP3s.

Apple Music also lets you do that

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#506

Post by ThinkBeat »

I love to buy Cds.

I am not eustatic about returning to vinyl. I remember how grateful I was with Cds came out since they were far easier to care for and durable¹.

I like collecting them, I love listening to them, and I like owning them. Letting friends borrow them, and the rest of the freedom that comes from owning a physical object.

I liked going to the store, browse through shelves of cds to find something I wanted to listen to. Buying it. Going home, getting chores done, and then sit down and play from start to finish.

Spotify with increasing regularity remove some of my favorite songs and artists from their collection. Due to licensing, I presume.

Plus, the artwork is nice

Now it is nearly impossible to buy cds. The selection in the few stores that still carry them in Norway is atrocious, even when you try to order them from records stores in Norway. I dont listen to anything near the Top 10, and that is usually most of what they have. -

Amazon carrier a lot more but even their selection leaves out most of the cds I want to buy. (Plus the shipping is a killer)

For a while ordering them directly from the "merch" store the bands had (some) to buy cds, but even that is fading away as bands dont event produce/print cds.

It seems the best way to buy them now is to see the band live. But bands like selling vinyl at inflated prices. I presume because the demand is higher for those.

I can buy the digital tracks, with all the problems that entails. I have started to use them to burn cds with the artists' album. It is not the same with the lack of artwork and connection.

¹ Vinyl records can last a long time. If you are careful in how you treat it, do the maintenance, clean it, and have a deck that makes it easy to lower and raise the head. I was not good enough to ensure the longevity of my records, so they would eventually get scratched .

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#507

Post by Innervisio »

usrusr wrote: post #202
Innervisio wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although true in comparison, it is still relative. I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time. But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself. I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is…

How do you deal with availability overload? First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did…

Very much similar! I started taping cassettes when i was like 8-10 years old. I erased some music from my mother’s cassette and she was furious hahah.

What do you mean with availability overload? I would say i am an active listener, my mind is rather a bit creative and i would dare to say that 80-90% percent of the time, i know what to listen. Even if it means to discover something new.

I used to like the Spotify recommendations but i disabled them since 2 years at they became like ads network “whoever pays more, gets more recommended”. I discover music now through personal recommendations, magazines (online), forums, references from artists i usually read about, or music produced by a producer i respect. How do you deal with?

But for example, right now i just wanted to listen some salsa/merengue (you can begin to guess where i am from) i always liked and made my own playlist with own songs.

Cheers!

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#508

Post by boxed »

KaushikR2 wrote: post #309
boxed wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local files in Spotify is extremely iffy. It has forgot them many times for me. The worst is on iOS where you have to be on the same wifi and wait randomly. And sometimes without warning the files just go away. This is unacceptable. People need to play music for dance, yoga, exercise classes for their job. You can't just randomly throw away the files to have them discover this when the class starts.

I wonder if it would be possible to setup a folder on a remote server, and use that as the directory for local files. Wonder if Spotify would play nice with that.

It doesn't play well with the Files system on iOS afaik..

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#509

Post by inferiorhuman »

ssl-3 wrote: post #439
inferiorhuman wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise. For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Gar…

CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had. They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular. In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX syst…

That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#510

Post by nusl »

Scarjit wrote: post #47
nusl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which services would you recommend as alternatives for higher quality audio at similar price points?

I have Tidal HiFi-Plus (19.99 Euro/month [up to 24-bit, 192 kHz]), but i can't really say that i would recommend it. There is also HiFi (10.99/month [up to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz]). My biggest problems with Tidal (except for the price) are: - Music suddenly becomes unavailable (greyed out), only to be become available under the same name later again (but you need to manually re-add it to playlists). - Sometimes it just sto…

Thanks. I tried Tidal for a while. The experience was pretty good and audio quality too. Not quite worth the price for me though. Will try Apple Music since I have that with Apple One.
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