Hope I don’t have to pay for audiobooks I don’t listen to because that’s a waste. Spotify should just stick to what they do OK which is music. I’ll stick to music only.
Why? Streaming has become a scam and everyone seems okay with it. Like everything online. Everything is an expensive subscription to rent entertainment. My suggestion? Buy CDs. Buy directly from the artists. Or pirate it, at least Spotify won’t make any money from it.
When the suggestion is to pirate it, so spotify doesn’t get any money I don’t see how your follow-up comment matters. In either case of piracy, OR using spotify, the artist still doesn’t make money. Problem is that piracy comes with a lot more hoops and headaches.
Of course, buying the artist CD or songs directly is much preferable to either.
How is Spotify a scam? I can probably at most buy one CD per month for the same price as Spotify. Yet Spotify gives unlimited access to good quality versions of almost every song out there. Even with raised prices it’s still a way better deal for most consumers than buying music directly.
Personally I tend to also buy a few albums a year, because I like owning them and I like supporting the artists. But the convenience of having every track at your fingertips is hard to beat
It’s a scam for artists. They make a pittance. Meanwhile, Spotify is raking it in. It may be an amazing deal for you, but musicians are making nothing from it.
Especially if you are a musician. Musicians need to boycott it. 99.9999% of musicians wouldn’t even notice if they weren’t on it but it would destroy Spotify.
I remember hearing about this. And I bet you the reason they ended up with so many songs with less than 1000 plays is because of their own algorithm. Apart from creating money problems for most musicians, they have been actively narrowing our artistic culture by effectively inbreeding modern music. Its really bad. We need musicians (and all other artists) to express and reflect who we are and what we’re about. They empower us. I feel like contemporary music has become narrowed down to nothing but hedonism, vanity and self-loathing; largely thanks to the likes of spotify.
BTW if you’re interested in something which is good, check out radiofreefedi.net It’s music from artists on the fediverse. I’ve had some great sessions listening to their comfy channel and discovered some awesome new artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Hmm, I use Spotify to stream a wake up mix (approved by my SO,) to an Amazon Echo via Home Assistant. Currently, I know of no way to stream arbitrary music files to an Echo. And I know of no consumer grade device that can accept the command to “Shut your cake hole” when we’re tired of listening to stuff while being compatible with HA. This is … inconvenient.
Just a heads up to everyone, quitting Spotify and buying / “procuring” your own music and playing it via a music player makes reading this quite cathartic. Do it for the moral superiority and self esteem boost for no effort you come to the internet for anyways.
Do you hate when people break in and steal from stores, etc? Because that’s you.
Break? What have I broken? And what are they missing?
Also, if EA, Ubi, etc. are so shit, why are you stealing their games?
I am pirating, not stealing, some of their games if they are worth playing. They can do good games, when if they have shitty behaviors. What’s so hard to understand?
You are clearly not aware of the windfall profits corporations are making, and that they are then passing exactly none of it on to the workers generating that profit
I always try to buy my music first, digital only though. I don’t have space for CDs or the like. If the option is not available (not common), the tricorn goes on. And normally I would go through any loophole I can find to get it legally. But damn, the Japanese really don’t like doing business with foreigners.
Telling anyone to “just Google it” is proof that you have no interest in a good faith discussion.
How on earth you could read what they wrote and say it’s in bad faith means either A) you don’t know what that term means or B) it’s become so diluted and repeated that it’s lost all meaning. Perhaps both idk.
Like come on. They gave 4 suggestions, you pretended it was 1, and you’re also ignoring other means suggested prior.
Bandcamp is good for indie artists and if you want to discover new artists. I’ve found quite a few diamonds in the rough on there. A surprising amount of metal / punk artists sell via Bandcamp if you’re into that.
How is 'just Google it" not a valid option? This is literally how you can find 99% of all problems about the internet especially for finding where to legally buy digital products within the first few websites. You know what is good for business when you’re trying to sell a product? Making sure its one of the first few, if not the first choice the customer gets when looking at the default search engine.
Moving on from that I’m guessing getting in contact with the artist is not an option? Y’know the other 2 points?
It is to be noted that while iTunes is DRM-free at this point (which is very nice and surprised me when I found out) it is unfortunately still lossy compressed audio which the perfectionist in me really doesn’t like :P
Come on Apple, sell me your funny ALAC, you have it for Apple Music anyway
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. It doesn’t bother me that much, since I personally can’t tell the difference in audio quality, but that’s still unfortunate to know
Can I play devil’s advocate a little bit here, because I was really unaware that this ever worked for anything except indie artists on Bandcamp. So Bandcamp works for them or for discovering new music obviously.
I didn’t know artists ever sold digital music on their websites, but that does make sense, so I checked - if I google Taylor Swift and go to her website, there it is, digital music purchase. Great.
I went to U2’s website, and the only music I can buy there is vinyl. I don’t want vinyl, I want digital. You can buy merch, but I’m after music, not merch. Looking further, there’s all sorts of galleries and information about each album and song, but you still can’t buy the music.
Other mainstream artists I googled didn’t even go that far. Googling them brought up a wikipedia link, social media links, tours. All stuff I don’t want. Now your list has “contact artist via social media” - setting aside the fact that it’s unlikely a popular mainstream artist will even reply to anyone at all about anything, this is a real point of friction. I don’t want to have to contact an artist to find out some alternative way to get their music. If I’m buying something online, there needs to be some way to buy it online and ready to go. If we have to wait a couple of days or weeks for a reply that may or may not come - the process failed.
If I had to guess, they would probably say something like “it’s on spotify”.
So yes it probably is a supplier problem, but it seems to me that this is happening for the majority of popular artists if a majority of music people like is mainstream. I assume if you like the majority of indie music then that’s probably not the case.
No worries, I’ll take your U2 example and try it from my end (I don’t listen to them so I can’t decide on what album(s) specifically you are looking for). I’m going to be frank, it was a pain, but I did find zdigital (7digital outside of Australia) selling their albums without physical media. But getting there, I had to see that the U2 website/publisher website did not even advertise it. It was like the 5th option on duckduckgo after searching for
u2 digital download
I’m sure you would have better luck if you slide in the specific album that you were looking for.
Important to note is that you aren’t googling for that artist or album, you’re googling
artist album digital download
I do agree with you that mainstream artists and publishers are going down this route probably due to some deals with streaming services, but unfortunately that is the reality we live in now. Additional work will be required by the consumer to get what they want. If the publishers start completely stopping this at some point all I can say is that I have the disposable income to buy the products I want and I am going to get it. Whether the publishers sell it to me or not is their decision to make.
I suspect that big artists are making so much from streaming that they’re not concerned with direct to consumer. And that’s fine because they are the easiest to torrent.
Bandcamp or whatever downloads website for small and torrent for big.
Doesn’t seem so bad, if you don’t want the price hike just change your plan to not include audiobooks. A little scummy that you need to opt out but not the worst.
I can’t recommend Navidrome to people who aren’t necessarily big on self-hosting, it’s simply far too big of a project. Gonic is very narrow in scope and it’s a drop-in binary; just works.
Navidrome + Feishin (Web) - Tempo (Android) - Jellyfin (Android TV) here! I wish there was a solution for casting though, sometimes Jellyfin doesn’t work properly
Works fine on Android as well (which is weird considering how bad Apple software can be on non-Apple devices). Just need to create an Apple ID and you’re set.
Testing out the trial right now and it’s pretty great so far.
UI is way better than Spotify as well (IMO), plus lossless for the same price as current Spotify Premium. (And it also has a max cache size limit option, so even playing a shit ton of lossless isn’t going to eat up more space than what you select.)
Getting my fucking Spotify library and playlists I’ve built over the years on here is going to be a long nightmare, though.
The Music client for Mac is still an excellent music manager and player and beats Spotify by a mile despite how visibly much they’ve let it bitrot* since it was iTunes. It’s a shame neither the mobile app nor the web client has anywhere near the capabilities.
for example, what the fuck is that stupid unresizable header that takes up half the window with mostly empty space and doesn’t scroll off the screen anymore if you set a playlist view to “as Songs”
They’re all pretty straight forward and Tidal has a better record of crediting and paying artists than Spotify. But ultimately, I would suggest self hosting.
The revenue from streaming services always pales in comparison to buying the music directly from an artist. The streaming model has been hijacked by record labels who take the majority share, such are the deals they force artists to sign.
A decent number of artists offer digital downloads of their music directly either for a flat fee or in a pay what you wish system.
It is nowhere near as convenient unfortunately. Benn Jordan mentions some options in several of their videos about their experience with Spotify, but i’m admittedly not certain I just linked the right one.
I often buy albums on Bandcamp and supposedly artists get a good cut of that. They have an app too, so you can stream content from there (or self host the files you get when you buy)
If the raise prices too much I’m going to finalise my plan to move to YouTube Music family plan. Additional bonus will be no more adds on YouTube.
Don’t fall for this self hosting stuff. It’s well meant and great for single tech enthusiasts, but with family, you won’t have enough time to do the required upkeep and the whinning you will here from dependents when stuff goes wrong isn’t worth it.
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