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Everyone always gave me shit for sticking with Pandora. It can basically do all the shit that Spotify can these days albeit a little different. You can even make your own playlists and listen offline if you have premium. It has a more limited library but it’s barely noticeable except maybe once or twice a year I can’t find a song I wanna listen to. It’s simpler and cheaper than Spotify with most of the same features. My favorite part is that I can literally pick any song I want and it will just continue playing after it’s over with similar songs. I’ve discovered so much music I would have never tried if it hadn’t shown up. And so far it hasn’t been overrun by AI slop like Spotify. Sure they pay artists less compared to competitors but at least they aren’t just straight up trying to replace them.
I’m not saying Pandora is objectively better. I’m just saying Spotify is falling into the world of enshittification and there are many alternatives out there. You could even just buy music and support artists directly like we used to.
Problem is Pandora is US only. They stopped streaming to the rest of the world years ago.
Damn I didn’t even know. That’s pretty dumb on their part as they could have been a bigger competitor. I’m sure they made the decision before Spotify took off as hard as it did.
I think they cut Europe out before then, but kept Australia along until a few years back.
It was a shock when the suddenly announced end of service in Australia, as quite a few Businesses were using their corporate plans for in-store radio, one of the biggest being Woolworths Supermarkets.
I still prefer Pandora, it’s great for music discovery and it pays artists more than Spotify. I also feel like its recommendations are better or maybe I’ve just had better luck with them.
I’ve Definitely found new artists and albums after listening on Pandora that I went off and purchased CDs or albums thanks to it.
Apple Music’s recommendations were fairly good as well, and they also pay more than Spotify, but not tons and I abhor how it integrates music I don’t own with my actual library.
I need to try Tidal, but I also just don’t get the “you’ll stream everything and own nothing” idea. I just like “radio” services for discovering new stuff.
I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify’s weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!
They pay artists better and it’s been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn’t easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.
Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you’re into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn’t pay as much as direct support.
This reads as an ad but I’m genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.
As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.
That it all-around sucks? That I’ve been telling people this since it’s creation? That nobody fucking listens to me? Or that this preview picture looks like ET and Titanic had a mash-up. Or all of the above.
It’s all of the above, duh.
I agree with most of this, but how have you never come across Munch’s “The Scream” before? (Have to admit, I lol’d at your description of it tho)
Seriously. I’m not at all an art guy so I feel qualified to observe that The Scream is probably one of the top 5 (and definitely top 10) most well known paintings, somewhere shortly after Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Devils advocate moment… If people keep listening (or sort of listening) and they are OK with music that seems to lack any soul, is it not just giving the audience what they want and deserve?
Devils concierge moment… What a bunch of shitbags.
An artificial effect is not the same as a natural cause.
Sure, but can you explain what you mean by that in this context?
Just because people consume music slop, does not mean that that is a natural demand (given the supply is explicitly artificial, so certainly there’s an economic incentive to generate demand), or something they deserve to consume or have to be given to consume (you shit every day; does not imply you want shit).
Yeah, I suppose, in a closed system that might he true.
But this isnt a closed system.
Bandcamp, for example is rife with wonderful small scale artists. There are local music scenes. There are loads of ways of choosing to stream music.
The thing is that people choose to listen to Spotify despite this. And that is a choice.
We have to be careful when talking about things when we start suggesting that people are not smart enough, or motivated enough to know what they want.
Demand is not generated here, but fulfilled. People just want background music. The properties of that music, and its artistic integrity, isnt a factor in that decision, so it is a demand based upon other properties… Brand recognition, user experience and ubiquity.
Again, I’m not defending this, and it isnt something that appeals to me, but it is easier to understand how these revelations will probably not make much of an impact of spotifys business model.
The only people who make money on Spotify is Spotify. Support artists directly if you want them to continue to create.
Is there a streaming model that better supports artists, has a large catalog of music, and is reasonably affordable?
Apple Music pays over double per stream to artists and is better quality audio than Spotify.
The best thing you can do for artists is pirate everything (cutting out Spotify etc), and purchase an album a month from a band/artist you actually want to support. Buy direct for the artist, or Bandcamp (especially on Bandcamp Fridays)
Also merch and concerts, if this fits you.
All of the above, ideally.
I’m pretty sure Tidal pays artists better than Spotify or Apple Music.
2 x 0 at least
From what I recall it’s better but not much better. They also shilled for their snake oil MQA format but thankfully they are moving away from that.
I switched to YouTube Music a long time ago and I’m glad I did.
I switched my corpo daddy for another corpp daddy 🤡
Hey we all need the service but let’s be real YouTube music ain’t a flex here, just a different poison.
If you want to flex, host some local content and deny the parasite that sweet profit
It’s crazy every corporate platform is made shitty after time. It is like the whole system is designed to get you to buy under false pretenses and then later pull the rug out from under you.
Oh wait, did you hear about the new corporate music platform!? Yeah it is great, they pay artist a ton and pinky promise to never turn evil. Let’s all go there!
Trust me bro, we are not acquiring market share to fuck everyone over 🤡
I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.
Once something gets critical mass and becomes “default,” it doesn’t even matter, people just use it and take it.
Yeah. Didn’t work on Librewolf (only stock FF), the UI was slow, the recommendations (the reason I wanted to try) were pretty bad, the ads couldn’t be blocked properly and left a few seconds of silence in their place (the only site I encountered that behaved like this!), and logged me out repeatedly (sometimes mid-session), presumably due to me using a proxy.
Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I’d love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.
I’ve been using Deezer since Tidal dropped Plex support. So far the library seems to be the same as Spotify, at least I wasn’t missing too many songs when transferring my Spotify playlists in.
I like the built-in song identifier and radio station support. The song quizes are a little gimmicky, but kinda fun. I probably haven’t used it enough for recommendations to get me down, but so far nothing crazy has popped up there.
I’m not sure if it’s just my phone, but every couple days when I first launch the app, I need to close and reopen it to get it to load, my desktop app constantly throws up a banner saying the app is offline, but it doesn’t actually effect functionality, so it’s just annoying more than anything.
I’ve been using Deezer for almost a year now.
Things I like:
- Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
- Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.
Things I (we) don’t like:
- As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows (“hits” in other word).
- My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don’t have servers.
I find Flow fantastic for discovering new songs.
Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
I couldn’t find any info on this. Do you have an article?
Not about the removal of said songs. But basically it’s a rapper known to use lot of controversial metaphors often using lot of etnic stereotypes in his lyrics about pretty much every communities including his own. Some anti antisemitic association compiled lyrics they took issue with on a video they published on twitter and it reached the prime minister. He then tweeted about starting an investigation on said rapper for terrorist and nazi apology in his texts. It went nowhere cause there is simply no such things in those lyrics but apparently deezer didn’t need a conviction to decide some songs had to go. If you want to search for more details rapper name is freeze corleone, be warned tho, he like to play with controversy so a lot of his lyrics contain conplotist bullshit and dictator/terrorist namedroping. But it’s never about their ideology that’s why talking about apology is stupid imo.
Using it for four years or so, very happy with it.
i use it with deemix-gui to download my music. works like a charm (using your ARL as login method still works)
In my experience, the same fake albums show up on Deezer as Spotify. Frankly, I think the best way is Bandcamp. For for an album, download it forever. Stop paying to listen to the same music over and over and get DRM free tracks you can listen to your way while giving the money to the artists selling their albums directly.
Bandcamp the union busting company that laid off like 75% of its staff over 2023…?
The best way might not be a perfect one. Still a little bit better than most other options.
I have now used Deezer for a bit over half a year after Spotify.
The song selection is pretty equal. The playlists can even automatically be imported/exported with TuneMyMusic.
I think Deezer’s best feature is the song radio which finds songs of similar genre, and it really does find songs and artists I have favorited after hearing them. I always found that feature in Spotify to work pretty poorly.
However, if you don’t have an exact song in mind, finding music by theme is terrible in Deezer. There are few set categories, but the amount of user-created playlists is very small, compared to Spotify.
I’d recommend giving it a try, but I wouldn’t say its better or worse than Spotify. Just different.
I was recommended RiMusic from Lemmy, using the YouTube music selection.
It has a radio function but it makes wierd presumptions: say I radio off a synthwavey film soundtrack song, it’ll favor more show music that has little in common with the original selection. Maybe it’s just me.
There’s a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it’s Spotify, on top of your label
Yes and…
Lily Allen and Kate Nash are on OnlyFans and make more money there…
Yeah, but that’s probably partially due to their existing fame.
Well, yeah.
They make more money from OF than from Spotify… and they are not doing porn.
The last and only truth I needed to know about Spotify was it’s 250 million dollar deal with Joe Rogan, who is antivax incel cancer, and that was it for me. No need to learn or know any more about them.
Normies love some Rogan he shills Russian propaganda to them!
Just like Fuckface 45 is the normal man’s idea of a rich man, Rogan is the normal man’s idea of a smart man.
And wrong on both accounts.
I understand that it’s a different model that will not work for everyone. But check out Bandcamp’s payout model. Find new music via internet radio/MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that)/yt and buy it via the model that is straightforward and at least seems to put the most money in artists’ pockets
Bandcamp also has a “discover” feature where you can set which genres you are interested in. I did find some interesting albums this way too
MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that
I’m a bandcamp user and buy stuff regularly there, only because they are the lesser of all evils… but what is their current status? I thought they went bankrupt and owned by tencent?
Are they still fighting the good fight? Or heading toward enshittification?
They are still doing the Bandcamp Fridays where everything you pay goes to the artist, so that’s nice.
I imagine they will inevitably enshittify since the buyout but they seem to be good still for now.
The nice thing is I get to download the files so I’m not fucked when it happens.
Bandcamp was owned by Epic Games, not Tencent for a short while, and now owned by Songtradr which does not have anything to do with tencent.
At least, this is what i found.
Wow, and they didn’t even get into the seperate streaming numbers.
I just recently discovered a band on Soundcloud that has amazing tracks but they all have the familiar feeling of good songs being listened to decades ago, with the voice of the singers similar to that of famous singers of all genres. This is the band in question. [(https://soundcloud.com/flowerpunkhobo)]
I think it’s AI generated music from previous songs from the past.
Have known this for years, just look at any sleep or ambient playlist
Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.
I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.
Really hated when they started adding auto play of another unrelated podcast when my current podcast ends, like I don’t want your shitty podcast selection Spotify. The enshitification of the web continues.
Don’t use Spotify for podcasts. They’re actively trying to kill off what we know as podcasting and trying to lock the media into their own service.
Instead, use any app that supports Podcasting 2.0.
I deleted the app the day the day they implemented this. The podcast they started playing was a 30 minute podcast advertising mattress firm or sleep country.
If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it
We can do this with crypto now.
Ideally you want to use a hardware wallet though so the payment money doesn’t have to sit in a hot wallet connected to the internet, but that means pressing a physical button to initiate the payment, but it could just sit beside the computer, and eventually be built into computers.
Alternatively, you could have a hot wallet and it’s all seamless, but you risk the loss of funds from a compromised browser.
It’d include a permanent record of your ownership of what you purchased as well as long as you keep that seed phrase around, so you could redownload it if you lost the files.
Edit: And if the system was built around something like IPFS then the files would always exist.
I’m not sure how IPFS is different from torrents. I don’t think it’s solvable with blockchain too.
It’s nice that someone’s made electronic distributed gold, but that doesn’t include a payment system.
EDIT: in any case, I’m aware of various systems covering small pieces of what I’ve described.
Maybe I’m thinking of a different distributed system, but there’s one out there that replicates it’s files to different hosts if one ever goes down. With torrents people need to actively keep it up and it could be just one machine that eventually turns off, or one machine that the FBI raid and take down.
Edit: and crypto was for the payments and tracking of ownership. If you want it to be that easy to pay as pinging an IP, it can’t be credit cards or other similar methods. There are barriers all over the place to sending and receiving with that and it’d be rampant with fraud.
