Couple weeks ago I did a cleanse and found my subscriptions had ballooned to nearly $150/mo. They should not be able to charge on auto pay when they switch the terms and raise the prices.
My rule for a while has been to limit myself to one major subscription at a time. It really curtails the rampant streaming costs.
I made an exception for spotify for a while (so I’d have spotify + one streaming service + maybe one small low-cost one) but with how expensive they’ve all gotten I’ve reverted to only spotify and low-cost stuff.
Right now I just have spotify and dropout TV so I can catch up on Dimension 20.
After a purge I’m left with YNAB, Microsoft 365, GitHub Copilot, and a YouTube membership to City Planner Plays (s/o).
I’m particularly annoyed with MS365 because of how intertwined with Windows it has become, making it harder to get rid of the subscription… and it is kinda nice to reinstall Windows, login, and everything is just … there. Just as it was 20 minutes ago.
I hope it eventually switches from “give out the secret number to take your money” to “use the secret number to spend your money”. Then I can use a script, a third party service, or whatever to handle recurring payments.
100% agree with you. It’s why I use Privacy.com and set a limit to what it can charge. Stuff gets more expensive without me noticing, welp. I gotta decide if it’s worth it to keep paying.
(Sorry, sounds like a shill. It’s just saved me multiple times in the past.)
Wow if there’s one thing I really want to pay extra for is to have a computer randomly pick my music based off what I like. That’s way better than what Spotify has already been doing: randomly picking music based off what I like! True innovation. Will the service also come with some sort of slider or bar that I can use to change how loud or quiet a song is? Maybe some other buttons that can let me skip or go back to a song, even pause and play it to my liking?
They don’t think these features are compelling. The purpose of this is to create a new pricing tier so that later they can make it the (not-actually) ad-free tier and make the current (not-actually) ad-free tier have (more) ads.
Their AI DJ feature keeps touting music I might love from my high school days, then playing country music, for some reason. No, I don’t like country music. Also Spotify didn’t even exist until I was like 28 years old.
I've been a paying subscriber since 2007 and it's given me so much new music I'd never have heard of without it.
Oddly enough, regardless of the station, it'll play me some Johnny Cash. Metal station? Johnny Cash. Punk station? Johnny Cash. Funk station? Believe it or not, Johnny Cash. I have the best Pandora in the world thanks to Johnny Cash.
So has Spotify, and off and on the enable or disable easy access. In the past it was Spotify stations (standalone app), for a while you could create recommendation playlists based on artists, genres, or decades. Now they do it for you by making playlists like those themselves, “mix” playlists, “day list”, suggestions in shuffle, never ending playlists, and a bunch of other similar things that attempt to select things they think you’ll like.
Every Noise at Once shows some of the linkages using a ton of their dynamically generated genre playlists: everynoise.com
Would be cool to tell Spotify “make an angry Playlist I would have like in 2012” or “play music from fantasy films” or whatever. But worth that much more per month? Hmm
You pay for no ads through Spotify, but a podcast is sponsored they place ads in their cast unrelated to Spotify. I know how shitty that sounds and is, but it’s probably the only way those pods are making money.
Spotify has bought out some podcasts and injected their own ads into them. You can tell which ones these are because the “now playing” bar switches from the podcast to the title of the ad. I find I’m unable to skip these in my car with my infotainment controls too which has lead to me unsubscribing from some of them.
Nope. Spotify recently started adding adds before my podcasts. So now I have to sit through three ads before the podcasts starts and the I have to sit through the ads the podcasts add. It’s unbearable.
A little bit of searching and I found this…Spotify Premium reserves the right to insert ads on exclusive podcasts, and ones that they produce/own. Ads will never be inserted into music streaming.
My best guess would be that since they allow ads for podcasts, they are throwing in Spotify pushed ads on podcasts they own. Do you happen to know if it’s specific podcasts? I would probably unsubcribe if I was randomly getting ads. The only other thing I found was people still getting ads when they were using air play, but that was a desync bug.
Spotify does actually push me ads for random podcasts or album releases a couple times a month. I know that isn’t what the original commenter was talking about, but it would be nice if they could knock that shit off.
I’ve been listening to podcasts through Spotify for a while now, and they’re definitely inserted by Spotify from my experience. I’ve had personalized ads show up during defined ad break times, or the ad starts rolling mid sentence/doesn’t roll when they say it’s ad time.
As if Spotify wasn‘t bordering bloatware territory already. Just give me a music subscription service without the dozenth of functions I will never use or „recommendations“ that are clearly just paid ads and don‘t fit my taste at all.
To be fair, Spotify’s recommendation system is the only algorithmic content feed that I feel actually gets me the kind of stuff I want rather than just exploiting my psyche, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Spotify’s AI integration is likewise the only of it’s kind that has real benefit.
I used to really enjoy the Discover Weekly lists but for the past few years it just pushes what sounds like AI generated music. It’s like a bunch of covers of popular music done by people I’ve never even heard of (who probably cost Spotify less $ per play). I’ve had better luck with stuff like Spot-a-like recommending new/similar music that I actually might like.
There’s a lot of commotion about how so many Jazz tracks that pop up in Spotify playlists come from clearly made up bands with one or two songs, millions of views, and no internet presence anywhere outside of Spotify.
Even that’s a fairly new standard for calling something AI. Video Game enemy algorithms have always been called AI, for instance, regardless of their underlying technologies. That’s part of why people tend to use ML (Machine Learning) as an alternative term: AI has meant a lot of things over the years and the term is so general that using it to refer to e.g. LLMs (Large Language Models) is just confusing
… nothing, because people on the internet complain about everything. Every time. I mean, this service isn’t even out yet, so there hasn’t even been a chance to evaluate their music discovery algorithm.
I understand and relate with the frustration regarding the whole “more streaming services, higher fees” thing that’s still continuing in the industry, though. I mean, $20 a month for just music?! There are competing services that offer lossless audio at a lower price. But yeah—streamflation sucks!
IDK I think it’s pretty cool to have a voice that knows my name and tells me the theme of the next few tracks. I really wish I could give it some more feedback but as it is it’s a small but nice addition sometimes that isn’t possible without the recent AI advancements. I wouldn’t pay more for it though.
There’s way too much emphasis on a few songs from each artist that seem to make them more money, or are otherwise pushed by the record companies. AI or not, if it gets me deeper tracks in my daily mixes and artist radios, I’ll pay the extra for that and lossless.
My comment was in the present tense. I thought that much was self-explanatory.
Tidal offers their “lossless” audio at their lowest tier, for Spotify it’ll cost $20/month. The article we’re all here commenting on mentions how Spotify previously announced and then failed to launch their Hifi service.
Suffice it to say I don’t think this is as clear cut of a case as you’re making it out to be
Tidal’s pretty good, they cost the same as spotify but all accounts have access to lossless. The playlists it makes for me are no worse than spotify’s and I can sleep happy knowing the artists I listen to get compensated better than on either Spotify or Apple Music.
I also feel the app’s design helps me see music in the context of the album it was released in instead of as random tracks, which has made me reconnect with some kinds of music I’d grown apart from after I got Spotify.
InnerTune is what finally got me to ditch Spotify. It's free, no account required, uses YouTube Music (so imo, a wider range of content) AND shuffle is genuinely random.
So they’re using our data and also getting paid for it
Yeah? Isn't that the point of paying for a music service? I pay, they give me access to music and curate it in a way that would be enjoyable to me. How could they do that without some information about me? This is a prime example of what a company should use your data for.
I’ve been using Apple Music for a couple years now and I’m pretty satisfied with it. I moved because Spotify pays artists atrociously and Apple is at least a little better. There hasn’t been much I haven’t been able to find, since there are a lot of services out there that will handle the release of music to multiple platforms easily.
I went from flac hoarding to Apple Music because they have lossless by default, and I love it. I still hoard flacs, but now when I’m not at home I have most all of the songs I love, lossless.
I’ve had a Spotify sub for 10+ years. I’m getting really close to ditching it because imo the app design is getting worse as prices increase… I was super disappointed in the car thing too. Spotube is a really nice alternative that’s foss. Checkout spotube.netlify.app.
Yesss, it's UX was the main selling point it had over competitors and why I also kept with it. It has slowly started going down hill with all these library and playlist changes they have seemingly made for no reason at all, while they keep ignoring user requested features. Will check out this spotube.
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