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Hey all, I’d like to distance myself from Spotify, but I really enjoy their discovery features. I’ve learned about a lot of bands both new and old that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Do you have any suggestions for a service that could replace this aspect of it?
How about FM radio waves?
So you can hear the same 5 songs on repeat interspersed with tons of commercials?
I discover more ads than music that way
Radio fucking sucks, amigo. Literally the most homogeneous playlists ever unless you are close enough to a college radio station or a major city that can support anything other than top 40 or the same 100 classic rock songs.
Ah yeah I love hearing the same 30 songs over and over again with 60% ads, great idea
This seems to be the standard music streaming experience
This is why I’ll never feel bad pirating any music found on the radio.
I find last.fm’s “similar artists” feature more accurate that Spotify’s. But that’s just for finding new stuff and tracking your history. Not really for actually playing the music. I linked it to Spotify and use them both together
There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time, used to love last.fm and pandora etc
If you like modern rock, theres a free app (no ads or any bullshit either) or listen via website. Former radio DJ quit the industry and started his own online station. Im definately biased here as i used to listen to him all the time when i would drive all day long, but as its literally free and not supported by ads.
No account needed also
Anyways if you like modern rock whatwasthatradio.com
It is dedicated to only playing new music
He didnt like all the amazing music that exists to continue to go completely unnoticed by commercial radio so hes doing it himself
Hes supported by subscribers on patreon etc
If i remember correctly all songs are 36 months or newer
This is a proper SOCAN licensed service (canadian broadcasting license I think) so hes doing it proper.
I personally have found at least a dozen new artists to listen to because of this free service
heres some of the bands he has done interviews with to give you an idea.
I use Yandex Music for discovery. For some reason, I can’t get Spotify to recommend the same amount of new stuff I like. You might need a proxy though because the content there is region-locked. Also I used both Yandex and Spotify for free, it’s just fine on desktop with Ublock Origin.
Bandcamp is pretty good. They do writeups that I think are written by real people. When you look at a band you like, it tells you about stuff other people who like them have. I’ve found a lot of stuff there.
It is more about buying music than renting it, however. Most albums it will ask you to buy after a certain number of plays. I think the band can configure those details
Bandcamp was bought out by Epic Games, fired half of it’s staff to make the bottom line look better, and is now owned by some private corporate music licensing company that refuses to recognize it’s employee union and fired even more employees that were all involved in their unionization effort. I wouldn’t recommend supporting them anymore.
This all happened in September btw so any enshittification of the service has yet to come to fruition.
Not that it’s any better in terms of ethics or artist pay, but YouTube Music has relatively decent auto playlist generation with settings for discovery. Plus you get ad-free YouTube without having to use piped or vanced or whatever people are using these days.
Yeah I know it’s not a popular position these days but I have been a Google Music subscriber since the early days.
IMO YT Music doesn’t disappoint when it comes to finding what you’re looking for.
And not having to worry about fighting Google on ad-blockers with YT is a convenient add-on.
I’ve used Spotify, Apple music, YT music and nothing beats SoundCloud stations for discovering new music based on a song.
and their “More of What you Like” playlists are just stations based on your recently most played songs and they just don’t miss.
for someone like me that has songs from a lot of different genres in my regular rotation of 10-15 songs every month or so, it’s perfect for discovering music.
Search your favourite artists. Wiki them etc. and learn about them whilst simultaneously finding where they’re members play in other bands or have other projects. Also, it can illuminate what they’re influences were/are and you can listen to that too. I find a shit-tone of new music this way.
Deezer. Interface/UX is a little jank but it’s private and discovery is good.
Radio Paradiso. Berlin based radio. Weird and wonderful.
How do you deal with discovery?
That’s the hard part for me, the only way I find new music is by it ending up on a continuous playlist or something similar.
I have broad tastes, which makes it difficult to not be boxed into a recommendations genre on many platforms (Spotify included).
I just quit Spotify too and went back to mp3s I’ve downloaded with Limewire. I got sick of playlists, messy UI, etc. I also got tired of people talking about their top music of the year. I honestly don’t care what you listened to the most.
All my mp3s are on my phone and on my Mac and work great
I also am not guilty not giving artists the $.0003 per play every time I play a son. Less guilty than the $1 per song in the 2010s or $20 per album in the 2000s…
I quit Spotify too though still in Apple Music. Hopefully later I’m able to buy non-DRM music (from something in Bandcamp to CD or even Vinyls). Actually I went to Vinyl store yesterday, it was such a refreshing experience.
Honestly I got sick of subscription. I know I’m not alone with that. I want to actually own my own music. I don’t want to pirate either 'cause I still genuinely support those artists.
Try qobuz. They’re a streaming service and an online music store. Obviously bandcamp>qobuz when it comes to supporting the artists, but anything you can stream, you can buy and download in flac, mp3, etc. They also have a fair amount of high-res stuff too.
Qobuz was such a great discovery for me a couple of years ago. I’ve bought so much more music lately because of it.
Combined with my Plex server and plexamp on my phone, I have all the streaming benefit from Spotify, with my own music collection that I’ve built up for more than 20 years at this point.
Just a heads up, Bandcamp has gotten a little shady in the past year or so. I honestly forgot what happened, but I think they got bought out by some shitty label that’s known for treating artists like shit.
But tbh I don’t remember correctly
I know what happened–they got bought by Epic (yes, Fortnite’s Epic), then I think sold just last year, and now their situation is I think in limbo, not sure
You’re shitting on Spotify and use that to defend that you’re stealing from artists?
Spotify is stealing from artists too. I’m just not lining that corporations pockets. I still buy albums from band camp and go to shows and buy merch — all much more direct impactful ways of supporting the artists.
Spotify pays a fraction of a penny per play to artists. Who’s really the one stealing?
So, because Spotify doesn’t pay much to artists, it’s okay that you pay nothing?
Ugh, spotify soot again?
At least according to spotify (it would probably be illegal for them to lie anyways), Spotify pays almost 70% of revenue to rights-holders (whoever distributes the thing, e.g. record labels), which means they take about the same cut as Steam. Good luck complaining about that.
You often see people citing the $.003 per stream for rights-holders figure for Spotify. That’s not exactly what Spotify decides! Spotify pays rights-holders share of the 70% of the revenue based on how much they were streamed. TL;DR: Spotify pays rights-holders slices of pie based on how much their artists help bake. So, if artists aren’t getting payed enough, Spotify simply isn’t getting enough revenue despite reinventing radio for its free tier!
Not to mention how certain rights-holders (fortunately not DistroKid) gobble royalties away from artists. And, the author’s solution to (insert @Nougat’s comment here)?
(On a side note: I hate Tidal free, because it “doesn’t” have ads! Every single interruption I’ve encountered so far is the generic Tidal announcer telling me to subscribe to premium. Sometimes I even get a freaking video “ad” on cellular data telling me the same thing, and there are only 4 “ads” in total! There’s no variety! It’s just repeating! Aaaaaaaaa (dw just yelling me name
For what its worth (and its totally fine if you dont see it the same way) a free service that is promoting itself is a special type of advertisement and should be excluded from talking about ad supported content or when using just the phrase ads
That being said it is still equally disruptive but its not trying to schill you something you arent already committed to using and for free service thats an entirely fair way for them to try to get new subscribers and seems more like promotion than advertising
Agree to disagree but i do think its an important distinction when discussing ads
I never got into Spotify. Soulseek is all I need.
Give nicotine+ a try some time.
Spotify has always been a pain in the ass. For the longest time you couldn’t listen to a single song someone shared because they forced you to create an account.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
I don’t know why I feel like this is okay for Spotify to do but not YouTube.
My thinking is clearly flawed
Yup, either require an account to use the service, or don’t. Don’t do some weird middleground. It totally makes sense for saving playlists or whatever.
Companies that force you to create an account to do the simplest action are assholes.
OOT but Instagram does this and IT SUCKS
Worse, they don’t even show you properly like “Sign In to visit this account”, they just says the error message “Please try again”. I thought there was something wrong with my Firefox or adblockers… But, nope it’s like that in other browsers IIRC
I use the “Lite” version of spotify that isn’t strictly available for download in the states. It still has real shuffle and isn’t as bogged down with bloat features. Literally the only downside is no sleep timer.
I switched to Tidal from Spotify because as secure my password is, I would always be intereupted mid-listening by my app putting on a shitty random music (often RAP) and discovered that there was an underground operation of people using pirated accounts to inflate stream numbers to get into the popular playlists. And with Tidal I can use Tidal-DL to download flacs to my Navidrome server which is cool.
this happened to me as well and i have no idea how. fascinating
If your account is linked to your Google, Apple or Facebook account that might be the culprit (I think you can see this in yout account settings). You need to check that because the consequences could be way worse than just having access to your Spotify account. You can use HaveIBeenPwned to look for leaks matching your e-mail address or password.
Another possibility is that your browser/OS or spotify client was infected by a token stealer which can automatically steal your access tokens as you log-in after changing the password.
The weird thing is that it’s linked to my Facebook account, which has MFA…
Then it may be a token stealer.
Does it work with JellyFin as well?
To enlighten our android-using brothers and sisters… https://xmanager.app/ is a good way to enjoy spotify if you insist on using it.
I use Spotube, which avoids their app entirely. not super stable, tho
That’s an interesting approach! Using Spotube to bypass their app entirely sounds innovative. Though it might not be super stable, it’s great to see creative solutions being explored!
Do you know if it it works with Android Auto?
Yes, this is an installer for modded Spotify.
For Android Auto though you need to turn on developer mode and enable unknown apps to be shown – it won’t recognise the modded app by default.
After that it’s fine in my experience.
For our fellow Android users seeking an alternative, consider checking out https://xmanagerapk.pro/ for a fresh way to indulge in Spotify.
Unlike Disney, Netflix, etc, Spotify is the only streaming service where I never think oh this is missing let’s find a torrent.
Music streaming (at least for the consumer) is so much better than video. Where it’s super scattered over multiple services all wanting money.
Maybe you don’t listen to many international songs, I always find grey songs on the playlists I like.
Probably most artists I listen to are European or American.
I find that I can only find about 90 percent of what I want to listen to. That’s more than enough of a burden to opt out entirely. Live albums, demos, collabs, and obscure dead bands you can’t really find with great success
Yeah I’ve never fully switched to Spotify because of that but I do like their library and ease of use, the playlist function we use for parties a lot and it’s just easy and everyone understands it already.
As a Phish head and purveyor of bootlegs, and sometimes specific masters of classic albums, my personal music collection has always been a sacred space.
I frequently can’t find songs. I will say they generally are obscure though.
So OP has posted this everywhere, even getting it flagged on Hacker News. Article is weak sauce:
I would agree with author that there are many problems with Spotify but concentrating on the artist revenue per stream and then publishing your top hits of the year as YouTube links? Really? Go and find out what the artist share per stream is on YouTube (regular YouTube video) for soundtracks. I’ll wait. Hint: there’s a reason that soundtracks using unauthorised copyrighted work get muted or taken down rather than revenue being redistributed.
Recommending a paid desktop MacOS music app for local content? There are hundreds of local music players but OK… but none of the criticisms of Spotify were about the client! Foobar2000 (mentioned for mobile playback) supports Spotify streaming…
Article seems to boil down to ‘I got tired of Spotify recommendations and I am an aspiring musician at an early stage in my professional career so I am recommending Bandcamp and soap boxing about artist revenue share’ . There’s a reason that people, some with local music libraries in the TeraByte range listen to Spotify. There’s also all the competing services - Apple Music; YouTube; Deezer; Tidal; Amazon; etc…
Recommendation to OP: If you are trying to persuade people on something, then decide what point you want to concentrate on, consider the pro’s and cons for your position, and make your point based/reinforced on that. Don’t meander around a bunch of inchoate personal gripes and affections that don’t really relate to one another or any particular point.
Adding our Boys Qobuz to the list of competing services Paying in 2018 13 times more than Spotify And yu get to own the musics you buy on Qobuz and can put it on your NAS for example
I’ve been using Qobuz for a while now and it’s pretty good. Good sound quality, good library, all that. I used Tidal before and it has good quality too, but it didn’t have as many albums or artists that I listen too, it seems more geared towards hip hop.
Sadly Tidal doesn’t have Rammstein which is my second most listened group so it’s a no for me, if I’m not wrong Tidal was made by Hip Hop artists
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What was the main point he missed?
They went back and read it and edited their comment apparently lolz. What an ass.
I down voted because you added nothing to the discussion. It was just a completely empty criticism. On top of that, I read the article, and it’s clear to me that this poster read the article too.
But I’m curious as to what your actual criticism is.
Not going to give substack any views, so I’ll pass on this one
What’s wrong with it? (I never heard about it, just asking)
They outright won’t ban Nazi content from their website. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
It’s not just “won’t ban”.
They collect money from subscriptions to Nazi authors, and pay those authors.
They are a Nazi publisher.
They commodify and profit from Nazis on their platform. When called out for it, their response was “We don’t like Nazis either, but we won’t do anything about them and we’ll continue to take our cut from their presence on our platform”
That sounds an awful lot like them quietly liking it
Turning a blind eye for profit is complicity.
Oh I remember hearing that quote. That was them? I had a conversation about it like a week ago. I read “substack” in the article but all tech names are pretty interchangeable to me. They all have the same groupings for the type of thing they are and substack sounded like image hosting or something to do with coding or some template bank for some kind of necessity like invoices or something. Point is, tech names are stupid and I didn’t even put the name to the site as I read it. Good to know, though.
If you’re so petty about it, use archive.org or archive.is to view the page
Fellas, is it petty to refuse to support Nazis?
If you have an adblocker, and you’re not visiting any of those nazi sites directly, but do derail a comment section about a totally unrelated article? I say it is, yeah.
Then again, I can be pretty petty about circlejerks.
I wouldn’t really call it a circlejerk to be against people who publish and profit from Nazi material.
The person who wrote the article we’re supposed to be discussing in here is at least 2 degrees away from the nazis. At what point does it become circlejerk?
The Lemmy instance you’re on is linking to a substack and is collecting donations, but you seem to be fine with that. So I guess the threshold is 3 degrees?
I have nothing against the author of this article. I do have something against Substack. It really is that simple. If this article is posted somewhere else I’ll read it.
If this Lemmy instance had a bunch of Nazi content and the admins said they wanted to keep it up, then I’d block this instance. I wouldn’t try to rationalise it by saying “oh well it’s not like all the content is Nazi content…”
Again, it really is that simple.
If you’re fine with supporting a platform that welcomes Nazis with open arms, fine, you do you. It’s a personal choice.
If you’re fine with supporting a platform that welcomes Nazis with open arms, fine, you do you.
Now you’re basically implying that I’m a Nazi-sympathiser. I find that a cheap tactic and highly offensive.
That’s my issues with these kind of oversimplifications and guilty-by-association-fallacies. Before you know it, everyone is Hitler. I’m not supporting anyone here. I read an article about Spotify on a blog, nobody gained any measurable financial worth from that.
I don’t think we’re going to find a common ground here. Have nice day.
If I’m going to travel to a certain city I’m not going to stay in the hotel that’s hosting the Nazi convention. Here you are saying “yeesh it’s not like the convention will be inside your room!” But there are other hotels - simple as that.
You act like a person needs some much better, really, really good reason not to read this article. If the site hosts Nazi content, that’s quite enough for me to just scroll to the next post. Why do any of us need to convince you or anyone else why this small act of conscience is valid?
You definitely don’t have to. But if you were actually trying to, let me assure you that equating the reading of a harmless blog post to paying a hotel would not have done the trick.
Then you can’t understand analogies. Because you patronize a hotel by staying there, and you patronize a website by visiting it. The differences in their business models are immaterial to the comparison. But I can tell quite clearly you’re determined not to understand any of this so I’ll just stop there.
Viewing a website doesn’t mean supporting the website. Especially if you use an adblocker.
Linking to their content and posting it here does, because it spreads that garbage around
I agree with her arguments about Spotify overall, but this amused me-
To celebrate my newfound freedom, I downloaded a 13-minute long Taylor Swift megamix, and CAN YOU DO THAT ON SPOTIFY? I didn’t think so. I also then went on to Bandcamp after I got paid the other day and bought some music. It felt good.
As if Spotify somehow prevented her from doing those things anyway…
Don’t ya know if you have prime and Netflix you can no longer legally purchase a blue ray ever
Obviously this is presented in the sense that being a Spotify user means you’re not pursuing other methods of music acquisition, and to be fair that’s probably the case for most people, you’re paying for a service that’s supposed to meet all your music listening needs after all. Personally I also use other means like vinyl, YouTube, and a large local collection but that’s because I’m deep into music, also as a maker of it.
Spotify used to be good but now they charge you the price of buying an album outright.
Might as well buy an album monthly and actually own it.
That works if you listen to just a small number of albums, but I average about 15 unique albums per month and probably 60 per year.
lol yeah I listened to over 150 new genres and thousands of artists this past year (according to Spotify wrapped), buying all those albums would be thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands.
Just to add, I do buy albums but more as a way to support the artists. Tidal is for convenience.
If I was really strict about paying for all my media (which I cannot afford now), I’d buy the albums gradually anyway, starting from ones I like most.
Also how do you discover so much?
To be honest I simply find Tidal + Plex integration to be more convenient than piracy. I’ll pay my $10 per month for the ease of use and still buy an album or two per month from artists I want to support.
My discovery is a combination of Tidal and last.fm similar artists/recommendations and people on various forums. It’s one of the few things I still go back to Reddit for. The other thing is that I like to listen to a band’s full discography when I discover them. I recently found The Ocean and all 9 of their albums are solid. That’s a lot to buy.
Good that it works. I use a free tier of a streaming service for discovery, but I cannot imagine not having my actual collection I listen to the most often depend on a streaming service. You’re locked into only using their player, cannot use a dumb mp3 player at all, can lose all your collection if you’re in a situation when you’re unable to pay, and also the tracks you like might be gone because of copyright shenanigans. The on-disk DRM-less collection is just FAR more comfortable.
I’m not locked into their player. Tidal integrates through Plex and I manage my music library between Tidal and local files there. And again, I still buy albums but we’ve both acknowledged we can’t buy all the music we would listen to.
Wait, you have all your collection local and DRM-less this way? Neat.
No, anything from Tidal is still DRM controlled but it integrates seemlessly with everything I have locally.
£10 = the price of every single album you listen to in a month, combined?
Yup. When I was kid and teen in the the CD era, I was buying 2 or 3 CDs a month for at least 10 to 20 bucks a pop. Or I would temporarily have my parents sign up for something like the BMG record club when there was a good promo where I could get 10 albums for cheap and then cancel. Fast forward to today and I can get unlimited access to all music for cheaper than a single album per month back in 2005. I don’t know how these economics can make sense even if you factor out physical media and physical distribution.
It was 9.99 for many years and now it’s 10.99, a ~10% increase. Not sure how a single, small price increase in years turns something from good to bad. Sure, there are many reasons to dislike Spotify, but pricing?
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Last year I’ve listened to more than 6k different songs. If you’d be generous for the math and say 12 songs an album, 9 euro per album it’s still over 5k a year. Spotify is just cheaper for me, even the high seas would cost me too much in terms of time
Everyone who listens to the same downloaded 50 song playlist everytime they open Spotify premium is paying for you to use the service
But I use it much more similar to you than those people so I am also winning lol.
Not to mention that if everybody listened like thak guy spotify would just increase prices.
I spent >100$ on concert tickets to listen to artists I found on Spotify. Probably would not have spent this money nor discovered those artists by listening to 50 songs downloaded 10 years ago from Limewire.
Over a hundred? Must have been half a ticket then? Pre-fees of course.
I find it most useful as a radio replacement for this reason, you can’t find a service with more quantity. Personal music collection is still my main source though.
I listened to 6k songs, just because spotify has them.
Do i need it? Absolutely not.
I cancelled when they increased the price and i went back to buying an album for life from the discount bin and putting it on repeat with the other 20 albums i still owned.
Back when I had an ipod I spent days downloading songs. I don’t think my listening habits changed all that much, now I just don’t download them via “legitimate” routes anymore
