I’m looking at the reviews and they’re not good. Apparently tracks just disappear from one day to the next, searching doesn’t work, bad UI, hi res downloads often don’t work, cancellations are being ignored, etc.
They arbitrarily mute playing albums instead of Spotify playlists and you can’t unmute them until you skip forward or backwards.
Downloads are a total shit show to SD cards even though it has been logged as a bug for around 8+ years.
They insert AI-generated bullshit slop into Spotify playlists to avoid having to pay royalties. Especially in ambient music playlists or jazz where people are less likely to notice.
They pay artists one of the lowest (Pandora is lowest) in the industry and have arbitrary threshold to not pay artists until they hit a certain amount of streams per month. Then when they hit that threshold, they don’t back-pay them for total streams, but instead begin counting streams for payment after that threshold that resets monthly.
They partner with AI “battlefield tracking” companies trying to build the tracking machine from “the dark knight”. Hmm, I wonder if they will use their app in the future to further their partners’ goals?
They give a bunch of money to very right wing organizations.
Really the only good thing about Spotify is Spotify connect.
Funny, because I have all those problems with Spotify! I mean, search works, but only for well known music, and every once in a while one of the tracks in my playlist will just be grayed out and unplayable.
Ok but serious question, I don’t want to personally manage my music library on a server. For movies and TV this is fine, I consume a couple of these a day but if I want a steady stream of new music streaming apps have made all this very easy and very convenient.
When my 4 year old yells out in the car for a specific song, will these cover it?
Buy directly from the band to support them because streaming services pay pennies. That’s my excuse to buy merch from artists I love. Concert ticket sales don’t have very high margins, either.
Duder, you are not wrong. But I also am a) lazy b) busy with a tiny kid c) unlikely to fairly apportion my patronage if left to my own devices.
I hear you. I agree with you. But, in a perfect world, I need to find a service that at least ostensibly aligns with my ideals and allows me centralize my expenses in this area.
Edit: on second thought, my uneducated position is that I’d rather pay cents to everyone whose music I enjoy than 20 bucks to one band whose shirt I wanna wear. I haven’t thought this position through deeply, but this is my first impression of the sitch atm.
I’d rather pay cents to everyone whose music I enjoy
I listen to a lot of music. a lot a lot. a few years ago, according to Spotify, I listened more than 99.5% users in my country. and when out of curiosity, I took my listening stats and used the publicly available info on Spotify’s payouts to estimate how much I contributed, it turned out that my most listened artist barely got a dollar from me during that year.
If your are talking about Spotify, my understanding is that you are not directly contributing cents to each artist you listen to based on plays, but rather based on overall popularity pool. Your subscription money then mainly goes to Taylor Swift. You do increase the popularity of the artist, but if you for instance like some hard-to-digest music you listen to once in a while, that does not really do much.
I can survive using a different service for my podcasts. So this sounds like a good shout. But I’m impressed by the fact they supposedly have as many tracks as Spotify.
Serious question. Who’s the alternative to Spotify?
The french Qobuz. Has close to perfect 1 to 1 match with content in my experience, and it has a service to help you transfer all playlists
I’m looking at the reviews and they’re not good. Apparently tracks just disappear from one day to the next, searching doesn’t work, bad UI, hi res downloads often don’t work, cancellations are being ignored, etc.
Spotify is also not good.
They arbitrarily mute playing albums instead of Spotify playlists and you can’t unmute them until you skip forward or backwards.
Downloads are a total shit show to SD cards even though it has been logged as a bug for around 8+ years.
They insert AI-generated bullshit slop into Spotify playlists to avoid having to pay royalties. Especially in ambient music playlists or jazz where people are less likely to notice.
They pay artists one of the lowest (Pandora is lowest) in the industry and have arbitrary threshold to not pay artists until they hit a certain amount of streams per month. Then when they hit that threshold, they don’t back-pay them for total streams, but instead begin counting streams for payment after that threshold that resets monthly.
They partner with AI “battlefield tracking” companies trying to build the tracking machine from “the dark knight”. Hmm, I wonder if they will use their app in the future to further their partners’ goals?
They give a bunch of money to very right wing organizations.
Really the only good thing about Spotify is Spotify connect.
Funny, because I have all those problems with Spotify! I mean, search works, but only for well known music, and every once in a while one of the tracks in my playlist will just be grayed out and unplayable.
Never had any of those problems
If true, disturbing.
They have a free trial, so it’s easy to find out. :)
Ooooh, didn’t know about the playlist transfer, I’ve got to dig into that!
Lidarr, Jellyfin, and Music Assistant
Ok but serious question, I don’t want to personally manage my music library on a server. For movies and TV this is fine, I consume a couple of these a day but if I want a steady stream of new music streaming apps have made all this very easy and very convenient.
When my 4 year old yells out in the car for a specific song, will these cover it?
I might be in the wrong place for this sentiment, but I also seriously want to pay for my music.
Buy directly from the band to support them because streaming services pay pennies. That’s my excuse to buy merch from artists I love. Concert ticket sales don’t have very high margins, either.
Duder, you are not wrong. But I also am a) lazy b) busy with a tiny kid c) unlikely to fairly apportion my patronage if left to my own devices.
I hear you. I agree with you. But, in a perfect world, I need to find a service that at least ostensibly aligns with my ideals and allows me centralize my expenses in this area.
Edit: on second thought, my uneducated position is that I’d rather pay cents to everyone whose music I enjoy than 20 bucks to one band whose shirt I wanna wear. I haven’t thought this position through deeply, but this is my first impression of the sitch atm.
I listen to a lot of music. a lot a lot. a few years ago, according to Spotify, I listened more than 99.5% users in my country. and when out of curiosity, I took my listening stats and used the publicly available info on Spotify’s payouts to estimate how much I contributed, it turned out that my most listened artist barely got a dollar from me during that year.
If your are talking about Spotify, my understanding is that you are not directly contributing cents to each artist you listen to based on plays, but rather based on overall popularity pool. Your subscription money then mainly goes to Taylor Swift. You do increase the popularity of the artist, but if you for instance like some hard-to-digest music you listen to once in a while, that does not really do much.
I’m going to look into this. You come bearing dark news if this is true. Thank you for typing this out.
Qobuz !
Not available in my country (eu)
It’s french so that’s weird, what is your country?
Yeah, I was surprised as well, I’m in Hungary. Based on their TOS it’s not available in a lot of eastern EU countries unfortunately.
🏴☠️
Qobuzz?
I can survive using a different service for my podcasts. So this sounds like a good shout. But I’m impressed by the fact they supposedly have as many tracks as Spotify.
Will chase this down.
I think using anotger service for podcasts is important. Podcasts are free, but Spotify has been trying to hijack the scene and ruin it for everyone.
Personally I like AntennaPod.
AntennaPod is great, been using it for about 6 months