Spotify has raised prices for the second time in a year, with no new benefits, after its CEO sparked outrage by claiming the cost of creating 'content' is 'close to zero'

The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that's the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.

If anything, they've taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they're making record profits, and jacking up the price

AI generated music based off your likes and listening. It lines up with his statements. There was no innovation here. The same as every "disruptor" technology that just cheapified everything and one it was ubiquitous attempt to remove the core of the business.

They did add audiobooks.

Though the interface for audiobooks sucks, so I hope they improve it.

They haven't ever been profitable with just streaming music.

Spotify is less vulnerable to customer churn compared to TV/movie streaming services, as users are less likely to switch music streaming providers due to the hassle of rebuilding playlists and losing personalized recommendations.

And as long as people keep subscribing to them, they'll March right along collecting that sweet money.

And they don’t offer music videos like Apple does

Spotify has over 200mill paying subscribers and over 600mill total I believe. They an afford the peel off unfortunately.

From what I can tell Tidal won’t even publish their subscribers so it must be pretty small.

The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer. It's very obvious that it only improves, at best, the next quarter's returns for the investor. Once that husk of a company stops "line going up," the money goes elsewhere and we repeat.

If the line can't go up through creation it'll go up through destruction.

They fucked it up for premium users too, though, since they've done that. Half the songs that I knew to have lyrics either no longer have them, or they constantly "fail to load."

Seriously, damn, that's feels like such a basic thing

I remember I used to have an add-on (at least I think it was an add-on; didn't Spotify officially support those at some point?) that synced the lyrics of a song to the timestamp. It used user submissions to figure out the timestamps and edit the lyrics. It was pretty cool.

Btw, thank you for creating. It makes my world a little nicer experiencing new art.

Free for Spotify. Not for you. They don’t care about you.

If you can, and they have it on there, buy your favorite albums on Bandcamp, then they are yours forever

Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.

On paper. But in practice...

On February 27, 2016, Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele from the band The American Dollar launched a $5 million class-action lawsuit that claimed Tidal had to compensate the band for any of the royalty payments accrued from the streaming of the band's 116 copyrighted songs. The suit also accused Tidal of using faulty numbers to payout artists while also having undercut these same individuals by 35%. A response from Tidal stated that they were indeed fully up to date on all royalties for the group and had removed said intellectual property from their servers.

Hollywood accounting and pirate profiteering undercut what artists would normally be paid.

You can influence things with your wallet.

You can influence how you feel about your consumer habits, but capitalists are still going to capitalize.

Any good way to transfer playlists?

Pretty sure you can see their email address. This should give you the opportunity to message them stating you'll be canceling the subscription. They'll still be able to subscribe on their own.

AOL profited for over a decade on people who signed up for the service and simply lost track of it, paying month after month for something they'd forgotten they even had.

Crazy that these services can just raise premiums whenever they please without even reaffirming that the customer still wants the service. I guarantee that if you needed to re-verify your account on a price increase, firms with big client pools would never raise their rates again.

Plexamp is better than any other music app I've tried.

iTunes Match is $25/year if you have an iPhone.

Kind of love and hate that their website doesn’t explicitly say what it does. Like, if you can’t figure it out, you probably shouldn’t do it, even their GitHub is a bit dodgy on what the software is for, you can figure it out, but it’s never explicitly stated what it’s specifically meant for. “We help you install old versions of the app who must not be named” kinda bullshit.

This is the way.

AntennaPod is great, I used it for years. I eventually switched to self hosting AudioBookShelf which does audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts. One main reason was because podcasts more and more yank the old episodes and put them behind a patreon. AudioBookShelf downloads the episodes to your server so you always have them. About 5 months after starting using it another one of my podcasts pulled that stunt and I was super happy to have all of the old episodes still.

I mean they do have one good thing going for them: you can separate the art from the more controversial artists, because you know for sure the artist isn't getting a damn thing from spotify

You should list some.

What are some alternatives? I've heard Tidal is one of the better ones. I'm not necessarily opposed to piracy/ripping my CD collection + self-hosted streaming, but if I can pay someone else for the convenience I'd rather do that.

Do any services have a comparable family plan too?

Opus at max bitrate is only like 1/4th the size of FLAC. At that point, why not just store it in 10GB while keeping the full quality?

Where do you download them from?

Same here, been collecting since the iPod Mini days, 18,000+ songs and 100gb+ of data (almost all mp3 though)

Serve them up with Airsonic and i've got my own streaming music service i can use anywhere.

Spotify's encoding (vorbis 320kbps) should be transparent at the maximum bitrate. However, it's possible that the files uploaded on there are mastered differently, for average consumer consumption instead of the full dynamics of most source material. I know SoundCloud enforces "loudness" mastering with presets when uploading for example.

The real reason Spotify's quality is inferior to others is that, if you have the music files, you can apply in-app parametric equalization on every platform and compensate for imperfections of your output device.

ViMusic has not been updated in quite some time. RiMusic is actively being developed.

Just FYI, Napster’s family plan is only $14.99 CAD

Unfortunately most android phones are slowly phasing away the SD card slot. The only flagship that still supports it is Sony with their Xperia. I don't know of any major mid-rangers models that still support it. The only low end phones now. But the overall experience is painful.

I was telling people to try music on spotify and youtube, and then buy it on bandcamp etc. Download a copy. There sometimes comes a time when labels crumble, or streaming sites go bankrupt.

"lacking podcasts" is a plus for most people, I think. But Tidal's interface is a bit worse for me in one thing: it lacks the "remote control" Spotify has: controlling playback from any device on any device (e.g. playing on the computer and using the phone as a remote) and also the ability to transfer the playback from one device to another - like pausing it on the computer, picking up the phone, connecting it to car and resuming playback.

what do you mean 'although', that's an added benefit!

I also switched to Tidal after learning about Spotify's dystopian future war AI powered killer robot plans. It's also bullshit how little they pay artists.

I wish Tidal had podcasts, but I'm happy enough with AntennaPod.

I was satisfied with Apple Music myself (until I no longer had need for it), but I keep hearing that Tidal is one of the better services if Apple doesn't quite cut it for you. Supposedly they have a reasonably fair cut for the artists compared to Spotify, and also good audio quality (to be fair, Apple has high quality available too, if you enabled it in the settings)

Already paying for YouTube pro

lost me in the second half

What open source stuff? Asking for a friend

I don't consider this apples to apples.

Walkman/Discman/MP3 Player. These you need to acquire music yourself, then inject it.

Spotify/Tidal/YTM/Deezer etc, these are services that add recommendations and allow you to listen to practically anything under the sun. They are no the same thing.

I got grandfathered into YouTube Music since I was using Google Music when it got shut down. While not as good as Google Music, YT Music works well for me and has been building playlists suited to what I want to listen to. Plus, some lesser known local artists that only have their music on YouTube as video uploads will still show up on YouTube Music. I haven't really tried any other serious streaming platforms, and only YT Music and Spotify natively sync to my car with maps.

Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That's the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don't care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn't cut it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/best-music-streaming-service-subscription

Not really. They all cost about the same amount. In that article is right around $11 across the board.

I am an audiophile with thousands worth of gear. As far as streaming services go, I find Apple to offer the best bang for the buck. The second best would be probably YouTube. Tidal was unique years ago with hires lossless but that’s not uncommon anymore. Apple offers it as standard. Apple and YouTube also offer music videos which is a nice perk.

Spotify is usually reported as one of the worst paying for the artists.
They also don't distribute the value by time listened, but pool in and award the largest artists (don't remember the specifics, you might need to look it up).
They were also found/accused of using their auto generated playlists with made-up artists who's money goes to 'noone', just shady stuff.

I'm downloading Tidal to give it a shot but I would also like to hear other options. Tidal seems promising from a 30 second glance but that doesn't tell me much.

I went with Tidal, not sure about Android Auto tho, what is that?

If it's worth anything, Tidal has had great offline support so far. I'm missing a handful of tracks, but the offline support might be enough to move to Tidal. It's either generally better quality, better offline, better shuffling, and a dollar less per month, or a console/tv app and a few more albums.

In the modern era, that's not exactly true. This number is only relevant if you're outsourcing tracking, mixing and mastering which are all things that can be done in a bedroom nowadays. How do I know? Because I did so myself a number of years ago.

If you're not learning how to do these things yourself, you're simply wasting money or you're rich enough/your band is supported enough to not give a fuck.

The only thing we paid for was album art and mastering simply because I wanted one specific engineer to do it just cause. All in all we paid less than $2k for a full release. We could have paid zero if we did our own artwork and I mastered the album myself which is not exactly impossible for the average person to do.

I get your sentiment, but money is not necessarily needed en masse to release music any more. If you already have your instruments and associated gear, a REAPER license is $60 and you can use the included plugins to create a full professional quality release.

I had a plethora of plugins a while back but I've wiped them from my drive in favor of REAPER's stock plugins, the available JS plugin libraries and a few choice free plugins along with a single drum VST. That's it. I have pro quality mixes and masters with just that.

The days of the studio as a necessity are over. Studio time is a luxury, not a necessity.

I want to end this comment with a big "fuck you" to Spotify anyway because streaming services are cancerous to the music creator scenes.