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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#441

Post by avidiax »

stockhorn wrote: post #438

I once submitted a bugreport to spotify regarding a problem with the chromecast integration. The support-agent asked me the following questions in turn, which I all followed: - Can you reinstall the app and try again? - Can you describe step by step how to reproduce the bug? - Can you make a screencast showing the problem? - Can you factory-reset your phone and check if the issue persists? I've never heard back after…

> Can you factory-reset your phone and check if the issue persists?

This is a big red flag for organizational dysfunction. When the QA team puts up a big roadblock to even filing a bug, wants to play 20 questions for every bug report, it's a way to just avoid taking bug reports.

But why avoid the bug reports? Someone in QA is being measured on them, or a 2nd layer (the engineers) are being pressured by a 3rd layer (management) to ship new features at high quality and not "waste time" fixing bugs. Maybe the bug reports won't be fixed anyway.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#442

Post by Spivak »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #434
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…

Oddly enough, I feel like streaming music service algorithms only reluctantly serve up new music. To me it feels like a constant reversion to the mean, not a portal to endless possibilities. It’s closer to listening to the radio than digging crates in a record store.

I absolutely can't relate. The monthly streams for the first 10 artists in my Discover Weekly this week are 45k, 90k, 89k, 30k, 121k, 931k, 231k, 25k, 7k, 14k. I would have zero chance to discover these bands in the wild.

To be fair you have to push Spotify a little by listening to tiny bands before it starts recommending more of them because the "gravity" of popular music is too strong. Like what do you recommend to someone who listens to mega popular genre defying artists like Taylor Swift? She's so ungodly popular that they could be a diehard metal head and still listen to her. There's no signal. The set of music TSwift fans also listened to is all music.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#444

Post by crtasm »

StackRanker3000 wrote: post #337
crtasm wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. and it's $11 every month, forever.

> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. I can count on one hand the amount of times this has happened to me in the last decade. Is it fair to say that you have fairly esoteric taste in music? I don't think it's the norm among Spotify users to feel that there is a ton of stuff that's missing from the library. And if you are among the ones who can't find the vast majority of the music they want t…

I wouldn't say esoteric but a lot of non-mainstream stuff; small bands; unoffical remixes that can't be licensed; etc.

I'm sure a sizable portion of tracks I enjoy are on there and agree that for most people it has most of what they want - most people listen to what is marketed to them. This has no bearing on the fact there's huge amounts of music available elsewhere that is not on Spotify/similar.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#445

Post by crtasm »

elijaht wrote: post #325
crtasm wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. and it's $11 every month, forever.

If I bought an album a month for the rest of my life, I would have 600 albums. In the last MONTH I have listened to music from that many albums on Spotify. So the forever argument doesn't really pain me.

If it works for you that's great. The comparison could be made that we can listen to music from [as many albums as we want] for $0 on Bandcamp, then buy the tracks we really like.

There's things missing from both platforms, of course.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#446

Post by crtasm »

StackRanker3000 wrote: post #342
crtasm wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A win for availability and potential audience, but if it causes less people to buy your CD/USB stick/whatever at shows - perhaps a significant reduction on income for the majority of gigging bands? Do any of the streaming platforms let you direct fans to your own website/Bandcamp to make a purchase?

Are more or less acts making a living off their music now or back then? Absolute numbers and percentage-wise? How do we decide what number is "fair", or what we as a society want? Surely it's not reasonable that every band that's just started out in a garage should be making bank. I don't think that it's more difficult to be a professional musical artist or musician today than it used to be, although the business mod…

My understanding is that essentially zero DIY indie bands are making notable amounts from streaming payouts.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#448

Post by kristianbrigman »

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.

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.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#450

Post by crtasm »

this_user wrote: post #365
crtasm wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. and it's $11 every month, forever.

> and it's $11 every month, forever. So the complaint is that not enough money is being paid for music and that it costs too much?

There's no complaint here.

But for me, yes paying $132/yr to not own anything isn't attractive.

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