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Goodbye, Slopify

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Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#211

Post by scojjac »

albertsondev wrote: post #200
antigeox wrote: post #89

My Spotify experience was poisoned as soon as I signed up some 8 years ago to try it; I realized there was no way to remove the popular but garbage music from the dashboard. It was essentially advertising space for slop. So I cancelled my subscription within 1-2 days. I instead ended up going with Youtube Music which doesn't try to push propaganda on me and instead either shows me what I have in my library already th…

Personally I've had loads of issues with YouTube music, largely in that it regularly makes a point of inserting various popular songs into playlists and radios of otherwise very niche genres (which they have nothing to do with) I strongly prefer to listen to. The more niche the genre, the higher the percentage of what follows is typically in line with it... for a while. Sooner or later everything gets infested with t…

What was your experience with Tidal? I felt like it was better at recommending new albums and artists I want familiar with and there was much less of a focus on playlists.

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#212

Post by discardedrefuse »

TLDR; Bandcamp + Beets + Navidrome + Symfonium

Long time paid Spotify user. Soon to be ex-paid user. This resonates with me. For a while now, I have been pretty unhappy with the way I consume music. Yes, because Spotify has become shit. The UI is hostile. Their business practices makes me feel bad for using it. And everything else already mentioned in other comments. But there's something else.

My spotify Liked has about 2400 songs. And I can't name most of them. If you played one for me, chances are I wouldn't even know the artist. It all feels so... disposable. How did I get here? I hit like a few times on Discover Weekly, each week. And now...I have this mess! Spotify recommends me songs that sound exactly like other songs...that I can't remember the name of. I can't go back to check. Weeks later I hear it! Or is this the new one that sounds like the old one? I don't know. It's all so surreal and so different than the before times.

In my yutes would buy albums and absolutely devour them whole. Every track. I would listen to just that album for days or weeks. I couldn't afford to buy all the music, so I squeezed every drop of enjoyment I could out the music I had. I think I enjoyed the music much more, back when I had much less.

So, with that nostalgic feeling in mind. I'm starting a new system of music consumption. I'm going back to the old ways! Instead of paying Spotify $12/mo to shovel all the shit in my face, I'm going to spend $12/mo on Bandcamp (or equivalent) to buy an album and pour over it for the whole month, until I buy the next album.

I don't know if this will work. I don't know how I'm going to handle discovery. But I have to do something; And this is something. A few weeks ago I bought some music. Threw it into a Beets.io library. Setup a Navidrome server inside my vpn. I listen with Symfonium on my phone (good offline features there).

Now I'm trying to really listen to the music again; not just mindlessly consume it like disposable content. It feels like this muscle has completely atrophied. Lyrics don't stick like they used to. I don't instantly remember the track order. Listening to an entire album takes some effort. Maybe though, that's the way it should be.

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#213

Post by amanzi »

mastazi wrote: post #111

Even before the rise of AI music, they started "customizing" playlists based on the algorithm, so that you see different songs compared to someone else who subscribes to the same playlist. This was one of the reasons why I left Spotify. There are hundreds of posts about this issue on the Spotify community site, e.g. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Option-to... https://community.spotify.com/t5/Conte…

This is why so many playlists I look at all have the same songs in them! I have had to start marking songs that I like to not be recommended. Although I just looked at Spotify to figure out how I've done this in the past, and I can see no such option. So I don't know how I did this previously!?

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#214

Post by mfkp »

numbsafari wrote: post #107
antigeox wrote: post #89

My Spotify experience was poisoned as soon as I signed up some 8 years ago to try it; I realized there was no way to remove the popular but garbage music from the dashboard. It was essentially advertising space for slop. So I cancelled my subscription within 1-2 days. I instead ended up going with Youtube Music which doesn't try to push propaganda on me and instead either shows me what I have in my library already th…

My wife continues to mourn the loss of Grooveshark and brings it up at least once a year. It was pretty amazing.

I still wear my grooveshark startup T-shirt from time to time, one of my most prized possessions.

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#215

Post by 1oooqooq »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #206

I want to focus on non-AI complaints for my question. Each time Spotify comes up on HN, the sentiment is dominated by nitpicking negative comments. To be clear, I am a musical normie that looks forward to daily Spotify to listen to popular music. I also don't mind the phone app, web app, and even Linux desktop app (what a blessing). My question to the haters: If Spotify is so bad, as you claim, why haven't we seen a…

outright monopoly. i think it decided around 2008ish. pandora and all the others lost deals with labels, labels bougth into spotify, and apple promoted them left and rigth so its a dopoly.

its not a space i follow so i have all the details wrong.

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#216

Post by wwweston »

vintagedave wrote: post #164
wwweston wrote: post #141

Years ago, I saw a sign at a junkyard mechanic's shopyard: "We screw the other guy and pass the savings on to you." I laughed, as one does. A little dark humor goes a surprisingly long way, though the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial as you realize that maybe the laugh is meant to take the sting out of the truth that you may never know if you're the other guy or not. This is what Spotify was from t…

> you may never know if you're the other guy or not The older I’ve got, the more I think on kindness. With kindness, there is no ‘other guy’. Sure, this was funny. It is funny. It really is! But it’s _not that funny_. And I feel I couldn’t have said it wasn’t that funny until I’d seen enough (got old enough?) to understand. Like you I think I’ve thought about being the other guy or not. As for Spotify — I don’t subsc…

> I edited to add: what extraordinary wording.

Thanks for the kind words!

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#217

Post by jacobjjacob »

I just quit Spotify because they kicked my family off the family plan without hardly any warning. Apple Music has a family plan and they don’t require that you live at the same address

Never looking back!

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#218

Post by therealfiona »

numbsafari wrote: post #107
antigeox wrote: post #89

My Spotify experience was poisoned as soon as I signed up some 8 years ago to try it; I realized there was no way to remove the popular but garbage music from the dashboard. It was essentially advertising space for slop. So I cancelled my subscription within 1-2 days. I instead ended up going with Youtube Music which doesn't try to push propaganda on me and instead either shows me what I have in my library already th…

My wife continues to mourn the loss of Grooveshark and brings it up at least once a year. It was pretty amazing.

If this is the dead music service mourning sub-thread, I'm gonna say trance.fm. Nothing has replaced it.

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#219

Post by beart »

romanhn wrote: post #195

I really don't understand the product decisions at Spotify. Some really basic functionality is missing like shuffling across all tracks in my library or treating Liked Songs as a playlist but not really (can't share with others). I keep using it for its discovery features, but even that is so much worse than ten years ago. Back then I would easily keep half of Discover Weekly. These days I'm happy if I find one or tw…

Yeah.. what the hell do they actually work on all day?

I have a very long list of features in my head, that seem incredibly obvious and simple to implement. Some of these features were present in other music library applications ~25 years ago (Winamp et al.).

For example, "following" an artist doesn't actually seem to do anything useful as far as I can tell. I've followed a million artists, but I often find out they released new albums and I had no idea. Even something as simple as a notification badge as I scroll through my followed artist list would do wonders for discovery.

And when I consider that the features they do have in their applications don't work all that well to begin with... One egregious example is saving music for offline listening on my phone. I can't tell you how many times I've boarded an airplane to find out the app just decided to purge it all.

Another super fun issue I ran into that actually cost Spotify money since I canceled my family subscription - There are no parental controls or any other method for blocking podcasts. And the podcasts now include videos! So I go through all the trouble of locking down youtube, etc on every device in my house and suddenly find my kid watching Logan Paul videos on Spotify!

They just feel like a company that has the velocity of a snail.

Re: Goodbye, Slopify

#220

Post by beart »

turbojet1321 wrote: post #148

I recently ditched Spotify for Qobuz. Spotify has always been a bit of a letdown, even though I've been using it since Rdio went bust (so ~10yrs). The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the amount of shit content they push at my kids. I want to me able to give my 10yo an app on their phone to listen to music, and not have to check to see if they're actually watching videos, or listening to (possibly wildl…

I just mentioned in another comment that I canceled my family subscription because of that video podcast nonsense with my own kids.

I've not heard of Qobuz before, thanks for the recommendation.

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