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

Goodbye Spotify

coppolaemilio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 102 posts

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#31

Post by thejarren »

ducereiudicem wrote: post #24
thejarren wrote: post #6

I have music on Spotify that I will be removing as well because of their decision not to pay out small artist streams under a certain amount. I pay a distributor (distrokid) to send out music, and do not have a direct agreement with Spotify. As far as I'm concerned, monetizing my music without my consent is theft. Their argument is that the stream amount is so low it ends up not being worth the transaction. On a mora…

A small correction, from the article mentioned in the post, the $40m is not going to Spotify, it is going to the other artists with more than 1000 streams annually.

Updated my comment, thanks

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#32

Post by 1letterunixname »

baix777 wrote: post #20
readthenotes1 wrote: post #4

I like Pandora's music stations (playing music like an artist), and reports are apparently that it is better than others for that But they pay little to the artists. What do you use?

Tidal pays more for the artist and has a higher quality streaming option if that matters to you. Qobuz is another good artist friendly stream that historically paid the most to artists but it has a bit smaller catalog than Tidal.

Tidal is great for selection and quality, but not usability like Spotify where I can control it from any device. Tidal works on my receiver and Amazon devices.

Like many home/IoT services, Spotify uses mDNS to enumerate and announce its peers when they are L3 local but they are also controllable remotely by dialing-home to their API albeit with a slightly longer delay. Spotify is hilarious when playing from the Everywhere group (all devices) where desktops, tablets, phones, the thermostat, stereo receiver, and Amazon Echo devices all insist on playing out of time like a crowd of teenagers singing a song.

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#33

Post by thejarren »

oefrha wrote: post #22
thejarren wrote: post #6

I have music on Spotify that I will be removing as well because of their decision not to pay out small artist streams under a certain amount. I pay a distributor (distrokid) to send out music, and do not have a direct agreement with Spotify. As far as I'm concerned, monetizing my music without my consent is theft. Their argument is that the stream amount is so low it ends up not being worth the transaction. On a mora…

For those of us who don't know about the threshold and might think it's something outrageous -- it's 1000 streams, which translates to ~$3.

You're right, it's not outrageous, but I'd argue theft at any size is still wrong.

I think it's likely they kept this number very low specifically to keep people arguing about whether or not the amount was important, versus if it was OK to be doing in the first place.

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#34

Post by lucb1e »

Motivation: "Spotify doesn’t seem to have the artist’s interest in mind anymore" citing examples of minimum number of listens (1000) before paying out (at 1k, isn't that still in the realm of micropence anyway?), and the podcast thing funding questionable people and being pushed through UI changes.

Alternative: "For now, I’m just back to the weird p2p programs where I can try to find the music I bought or the ones that are just impossible to get."

Result: "listening to music feels more meaningful, not a thing that happens in the background"

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#35

Post by thefourthchime »

Funny, I finally ditched Spotify last week. I just can’t stand the pop up ads, the cluttered interface, and frankly I’m sick of the recommendations.

So far I’ve been trying Apple Music, and have liked it so far. I’ve tried in the past but didn’t stick around long enough to learn how to use it.

Also, I have HomePods as speakers for my living room tv and found that “streaming” to them using Apple Music isn’t streaming, it sends the channel over to the device so you can do whatever on your phone or leave the house and it still plays. Much like Sonos.

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#36

Post by thefourthchime »

nottheengineer wrote: post #8

The spotify app has become so ridiculously bad I can't use it anymore. I found out about Zotify [1], which can rip my entire collection from spotify. The API rate limits anything faster than real time listening though, so it'll take a few weeks to download everything. [1] https://zotify.xyz/

You can also use songshift, it'll move your playlists to whatever.

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#38

Post by cramjabsyn »

madmountaingoat wrote: post #23

Listen deeper, listen more and you will help artists more than cancelling your subscription. I don't know what artists at the new cutoff were making but its not a living wage, and I doubt it's even beer money. The unknown artists will never get paid if you don't listen and find them. That's what Spotify is great at. Once you find the small artist, seek them out, buy some merch, see a show. Drive an hour further than…

Honestly it should be both. Support artists deeply and ditch Spotify.

We shouldn't be complacent and let Spotify make earning a living even harder for artists.

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#39

Post by Tao3300 »

miunau wrote: post #9
lxgr wrote: post #5

> Funny enough, the only easy way I found to buy music nowadays is vinyls. Is there really a lot of music neither available on CD, nor for MP3 download, but on vinyl?

Vinyl and cassette are the most common right now for physical-exclusive stuff. CD sales are very mixed- you can do well or barely sell at all, even for established names, and the startup costs for a pressing are higher than with tapes. And if it's on CD it might as well be a download anyway.

> if it's on CD it might as well be a download anyway

Unless you mean FLAC or something, CD is still higher quality than other formats, and they keep longer than vinyl or cassettes.

Inb4 the "only audiophiles with high end equipment" arguments: if you were around in the days of Blade Encoder tweaking options and trying to fit mp3s onto a 32MB player the size of a cigarette box, you know what digital artifacts sound like.

Re: Goodbye Spotify

#40

Post by lucb1e »

LelouBil wrote: post #27

Even though I would like Spotify to pay artists decently, I'll keep paying for it mainly for their recommendations and discovery features. If you only listen to music you already know you like, then sure Bandcamp or whatever is amazing for the artist. But personally, I just launch my "liked" playlist and use their enrich feature to fill in titles. Or use their thematic playlist generations that use a genre but take i…

> I would like Spotify to pay artists decently

Using which funds? Afaik they pay out quite a lot of the income, they could try to cut costs (the most meaningful thing there probably being to lay off staff) in order to maximize payouts but the only alternative pushes people to competing services that are cheaper and can't pay artists better for the same reason.

One thing they could reasonably do is to offer for people to pay more for their Spotify subscription, where the surplus (anything you pay above the base subscription) goes 100% to the artists, proportionally to the ones you listen to. One can speculate how much that would help the problem. I just find it weird to see people always saying (look up any Spotify-related thread) that Spotify pays so poorly and that people should cancel their subscription altogether instead.

Edit: got curious and looked it up

> within the pie chart detailing the total revenue that Spotify generates through music streaming, “roughly 70% of it is going to rights holders ---https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-...

Post reply on HN