https://medium.com/brain-labs/why-spotify-struggles-to-make-money-from-music-streaming-ba940fc56ebd
For anyone wanting to rage at Spotify, I'd remind you that Spotify has never actually turned a profit. They lose money on every single paid user, and even more on free users. Tl;dr of the article (sorry for the account-wall) is that Spotify is contractually obligated to give around 70% of every dollar it makes to the labels, who then eat most of it and give a few crumbs to the artists. If you want to support artists, buy their merch, their physical albums, and go to their shows. If they're independent, they may actually see some non-trivial revenue from streaming as well.
Spotify may also be contractually restricted in what level of access they can offer for free - licensing can be very messy - and they also do need to create enough incentive to actually make the paid tier worth it. Given that a month of access to essentially all music ever costs about as much as a single CD did back in the day, it feels like pretty incredible value to me, personally. Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all. If the cost of streaming or buying music is genuinely a burden, I wouldn't blame you that much for pirating, but if you can afford it, I do think the value really is there, if only to avoid the sheer hassle of pirating and managing a local library. And if you really think that streaming is just uniquely corrupt and terrible, CDs haven't gone anywhere.
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free and you don't care about anyone involved in creating it getting paid for it, without dressing it up as some kind of morally righteous anti-capitalist crusade. It's normal to be annoyed about having to pay for things; we all are, and we all want to get things for free. Just admit that instead of pretending your true motivation is anything deeper.
Holy shit, an actually reasonable take on Lemmy regarding subscription services. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was reading and was waiting for the "LOL, JK! Pirate everything, they don't deserve my money and fuck every ad and paid service ine the universe."
Thank you!
ngl, I was expecting to enjoy roasting in downvote hell, so this has been a pleasant surprise haha.
I think a lot this stuff winds up people taking the bad feeling of paying for a thing, which is course completely normal, and twisting it into them somehow being personally wronged rather than simply accepting that yeah, spending money feels bad.
That said, if there is an obvious bad guy in this story, it's pretty clearly the labels, and given how unimportant radio and traditional music marketing is becoming, I would love to see more and more artists operate independently or with small labels and see the oligopoly of the Big 3 fall apart. They may have been somewhat necessary 80 years ago, but nowadays, they simply don't provide anywhere near as much value as they suck up.
its not the subscription service that's bad its the implementation of the subscription services that suck and you 100% should pirate and adblock every piece of media you consume unless its directly profiting a small creator otherwise youre setting a precedent that 18 subscriptions should be required for me to follow a tv show.
pirating was dying down in popularity until this rise of the current shitty corporate media garbage. money is the only thing that matters on this god given earth do you really think your money is better off in a corporations mega stock with a super small portion actually being given to a creator?
and if you say more things in life matter than money then go on without money, youll be completely unable to enjoy anything. solely off the basis of youll starve because low and behold we've monetized eating and drinking. two fundamental requirements of survival.
welcome to earth where ur either bombed by powerful people or youre blackmailed by the cost of living (designated by powerful people) enjoy your stay (or die the world doesnt actually care they just want your money, and dying is pretty lucrative for funeral homes anyways)
The difference is that music streaming services actually offer a better experience to most people compared to movie/tv show streaming services for example.
Choose whatever music streaming service you prefer and you get pretty much the same huge selection of songs across the board. You can pick based on features and user experience. With movies and tv shows, most content is exclusive to a single platform. So you have to keep adding/removing subscriptions unless you want to pay north of $100 a month to have all of them at the same time. Every streaming app has a different interface and different features, and some might not work on all your devices. Piracy isn't only cheaper in this case, but actually more convenient. It's the better product, even when you leave pricing out of the equation.
Sure, some people will always resort to piracy, but there's a direct correlation between the quality of service offered and the amount of piracy.
I can completely understand tv content piracy for convenience alone (and sure, it's cheaper/almost free, that's definitely a factor), but I never even thought about replacing music streaming with pirated content, because it's just super convenient.
This is a type of comment i hoped would die with reddit. They are fucking awful.
Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all.
This is bunk. If people pirated the record labels out of business we would have less music sure, but there will always be people who make music for the love of the craft, rather than just to line an executive's pocket.
I'm all for directly supporting artists (and I buy albums and merch directly from the band wherever possible), but let's not pretend like the people pulling the strings aren't also responsible for the shitty situation they're in.
Fuck the recording industry and how they treat artists. And I say that as a premium streaming service customer.
The amount of it would still be dramatically reduced. Those people who are making music solely for the love of it already exist today and people are perfectly welcome to listen to them; nothing is stopping them at all.
I think it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of music that is listened to today would not exist if the artists couldn't financially support themselves from it. Do you really disagree with that?
Agreed, I have Spotify premium for the convenience, but I have no illusions about where that money goes, which is why I go to concerts and buy vinyl records when possible.
we have a family subscription (12€/mo.?) in our household, and i would probably not go back to pirating music anytime soon. they offer genuinely great features and from your post, they don't seem to be the bad guy here. anyway, if it's not shutting down in the next couple of months, i'll keep using it. but they do neet to get some FLACs onto there soon.
if there existed something like spotify for video streaming, i probably wouldn't even pirate movies right now.
I personally would never pay for music it it weren't for Spotify.
Yeah, Spotify has supposedly been working on a lossless option, but it's been in the works for years now. Don't have a clue what the hold-up is, especially given that other services have it already. Tidal and Apple Music have it already if it's something particularly important to you.
Supposedly they have a hifi service on the way that will offer lossless streaming, potentially pretty expensive though - https://www.techhive.com/article/790882/spotify-hifi-release-date-when-is-spotifys-lossless-tier-coming.html
These aren't the only options. I've gotten into Bandcamp and it's great because I can listen to an album multiple times before deciding if I want to buy it. Then when I do, I get a DRM-free FLAC copy to keep forever, and a much larger portion of money goes to the artist.
Sure it doesn't have the extreme catalog of Spotify or things like social playlists. It's very album-based (which I like personally) and takes a little more effort to choose what you listen to. But I've had no difficulty discovering new artists and great tunes.
Of course the company has problems too. The new buyer just laid off half the staff and says they won't recognize the union, so we'll see how it fares. But even if it goes under, I keep the music I bought.
I seriously do not believe that companies running major online services continuously for over a decade have not made a profit. This must be Hollywood accounting.
It's not at all a coincidence that this happened at the same time interest rates were rock bottom. Lyft has never had a profitable quarter, nor has Spotify. I think Uber has had a few, but they've also heavily struggled. Netflix does well, but no other video streaming service has been profitable. Disney+ has already started to dial back on production as a way to cut costs. Reddit has been around for a long time and isn't profitable.
Capitalism isn't actually as easy as a lot of people think it is. To make sense of this, you have to realize that in extremely low interest environment like we had, the primary business objective is not profit, but rather, growth. Especially in the tech world, you're trying to sell a story to investors that you're creating an entirely new market that you're poised to absolutely dominate, and that if they simply give you money now, rather than getting some profit in the short-term, they're going to wind up owning a lot of extremely valuable shares in the next Microsoft, or Netflix, or whatever. Debt is very cheap, and so tapping into that stream of investor money doesn't cost you much at all, and you can build some cool new thing that people like a lot. The problem comes when the chickens finally come home to roost, and the investors expect to get something for their money. That is currently happening, now that debt is much more expensive and investors are much less willing to take big risks, which means that those services that were living off of investment money now need to either establish that they can actually make the numbers work or perish.
Spotify, for instance, is sitting on nearly two billion dollars of debt. Now, they're not in the worst position, because for better or for worse, the labels need some streaming services because that's simply how people consume music today, so the labels will have to keep it alive on way or another. But it doesn't change the fact that the numbers need to add up eventually. Reviewing Spotify's sheets, they're not in a terrible position though. They lost $453 million in 2022, but they also spent $1.48 billion on research and development. They've been doing a lot of development on podcasts and ML-based recommendations, which is probably where a lot of that went, and the kinds of engineers that work at Spotify don't come very cheap at all.
Now, you'd probably say that they could simply not do that and content themselves with being a perfectly adequate music streaming service, but if they announce that they're doing that, it opens a huge opportunity for a competitor to go guns a' blazing to try to develop a bunch of flashy new features to steal customers. Additionally, the labels, and indeed musicians as well, don't want music to be cheap. They want it to be valuable and so desirable that people are willing to pay a decent amount for it. Musicians aren't exactly selfless saints either; no one really is. Plenty of artists, of all genres, could easily make their music completely free to access, play free concerts, and personally cover all associated costs with doing that. But they don't, because at the end of the day, everyone wants a slice of the pie.
It's still not a good justification for making the free version completely useless. Those limitations are just ridiculous; I miss the days where paying for a product only meant getting rid of ads and gaining some exclusive features. Maybe they should also reduce the label share instead of always making the customers pay more. I refuse to pay a subscription for non-trivial things like music; they can still make money off me with ads when I use the free version. They can increase their profits with other features like they are already doing by allowing people to buy merch from Spotify.
I assure you, Spotify would love nothing more than to reduce the label share - it's not as if they love giving away almost all the money they make - but they also have next to no real leverage, since the labels have all the power here.
Again, Spotify loses money with every single free user. There may exist some balance point where they can actually reach financial stability by converting a large chunk of them into paying users, and I don't think can really blame them for doing what they can to achieve that.
That doesn't mean it doesn't suck to lose features you liked, but an individual not liking something doesn't make in immoral.
I definitely did NOT post a comment, read this comment, then delete my comment for feeling foolish.
Jk i did.
Great take 12/10
This is ridiculous. Spotify has been effectively doing dumping as an economic policy, and now that they have a sizeable portion of the market share, they're turning to enshittification to make a profit. I see nothing defensible in that. The fact that they can't turn a profit means that they're trying to drive out competitors with less VC money.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps, and especially not ones engaged in anti-competitive behaviour, and it's embarrassing to defend that. I've never used Spotify and I never will, but the idea that they lose money on every user tempts me. I second the other guy in the comments: If it isn't economically viable, it shouldn't exist. It's just wannabe monopolism otherwise
Fundamentally, no industry can survive on VC money forever, so there simply has to be some kind of crunch eventually, either by reducing the product, increasing the price, or both.
We as consumers are not obligated to ensure healthy profit margins for random megacorps
I mean, this is a nice sentiment in the abstract, but in actuality, we kind of are if we want the product to continue to exist. Spotify is not going to be able to operate at a loss forever, and while there is a discussion to be had about what level of profit is warranted, I don't think it's a particularly wild thing to say that the answer is at least non-negative profit.
If it isn’t economically viable, it shouldn’t exist.
What I genuinely don't understand is how you can simultaneously say that Spotify shouldn't exist if it's not economically viable, and at the same time, you'll also criticize them for any attempt to make it economically viable. If Spotify shouldn't offer the free tier because it's not viable, and you'll also attack them if they stopped offering it, what do you actually want them to do?
If it isn't economically viable, it shouldn't exist.
If you're claiming this as an axiom, I disagree. Public transit isn't economically viable. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens aren't economically viable. Increasingly in the modern world unbiased news isn't economically viable. If you're handicapped in some way you're probably not economically viable. Honestly the human race isn't really economically viable. Some things are objectively good and should exist at any price.
Now, I'm not under any delusion that Spotify is one of those things. Lol nope. But the statement on its own isn't really a defensible one, and I think only the most strident Randian libertarians would try.
If you're not claiming this as an axiom, and just saying that if Spotify in particular isn't economically viable it shouldn't exist, then I can probably get on board with that. But for my family's mental health, I think a service like Spotify should. Or the return of a plurality of online mp3 storefronts.
Who would have thought that good old dumping at a large scale and inadequate economic regulation would lead to companies basically "starving" themselves in a Mexican standoff?
And it's not just Spotify it's a major chunk of the tech companies, because no one learned anything from the dotcom crash.
As a pirate, I approve of this take.
Yeah this isn't Spotify's fault really. It's a cringe over prostitution of the industry with increased server cost, record studios asking more in premiums, and growing pains from increased salaries. It's unfortunate we can't ever just let something exist for the sake of general good without the greedy asking for their take when it becomes popular.
Spotify thanks you for defending our platform and more importantly the investment portfolios of our shareholders. Share this email for one free month of spotify premium.
based take
But if you can easily afford to pay for music and you still refuse to, at least have the honesty to just admit that you want to get things for free
Of course I just want things for free
Yes, you can of course always pirate if you want to deal with the hassle of that, but you should at least keep it in the back of your mind that, if everyone did that, we wouldn't have any music to enjoy at all.
That is probably the stupidest thing I've ever read.
Happy to have made an impact on you!
Well, if you don't pay with money, you're paying with your attention. Do you think they create this huge service just for funsies?
Tbf, out of all media streaming services across movies, series, and music, Spotify has the highes bang-for-your-buck. It's still like Netflix at that time when there was only Netflix and you could watch almost everything on one platform. I still buy records that I like on physical media like vinyl, but Spotify is such a great deal for convenient listening to all music out there.
Man these people forget the days when a month of Spotify would afford you 1 CD. I remember cause I would spend half my paycheck on music. I'm just sitting here happy for services like Spotify and YouTube in my life. I remember a time when music and information was much harder to obtain (even illegally).
But if you bought the CD you actually owned something. Stop paying for the services and you have nothing if all you used was spotify/YouTube/pandora. I gave up on paying for streaming years ago and spend the same amount monthly on purchasing music. I get CDs, either new or used. I’ve amassed a collection and I don’t need Internet or monthly charges to play them.
You owned the music when you buy it. With multiple backups the risks of losing it it very minimal but with spotify or other streaming services, if you have to reduce your expenses you completely lose the access to the music till you pay again. Spotify always grey out songs too so even when you pay you may not have access to the some of the music you want to listen to
I feel you, the value from Spotify is enormous. I can sift through ten different bands in no time just because I decided that I want to look up a new genre that I may or may not be totally into by the end.
Kid: goes to school
Police: THAT'S ILLEGAL
💀
Yeah don't use it if you don't want to, idc. But you might accept the thought that there are people that think the deal Spotify puts on the table is good.
Spotify is not profitable nor ever has been. It accrued $4B in additional debt last year. The business is subject to high royalty fees. As a competitor, I just leave free Spotify running all day on mute since they lose money from every subscriber. The royalties are the same whether they make money or not on the customer. It is wise of them to more aggressively convert people to paid plans, but I’m sure that their margins are razor thin.
I know not everyone will agree, but I think YouTube premium is the better bang-for-buck service. $3 more per month than Spotify and includes YouTube Music premium and YouTube Premium. So all the music and ad-free YouTube.
YouTube is basically the same price as Spotify in my country (only 12 cents more actually), so even more bang for my buck, specially for family plans.
I'm currently in a three month trial due to the value (music streaming and ad free you tube), but coming from Pandora YT Music's radio algorithm sucks sooooo bad. One of my first plays was a foo fighters album and now all the stations I create have alt/grunge in them. It's making it really hard to consider staying.
I'd rather vote for Deezer. Costs the same, but you also get lossless (16-bit 44.1kHz FLAC) audio.
By the way, free-mp3-download.net rips songs from Deezer. And if you don't like spending storage, you could self-host your own Navidrome server, though I get that may not be convenient.
I need 48-bit 96kHz raw PWM otherwise my ears can't tolerate it. I can hear the difference in the waveforms.
Careful, this same take when discussing YouTube ads will draw the ire of the internet
What a shame it would be if this drove more people into using those awful cracked versions of the Spotify apk that give you most of the premium features without a premium account. Truly the godless heathens over at xManager (https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager) must be rejoicing over this.
I have the family premium plan and honestly love it. I haven’t downloaded an mp3 in years because Spotify is so convenient. As far as subscription services go, this one is top tier for me.
Now when we look at movie streaming.. well that’s what the music streaming could have been like. What an absolute mess.
Now if only they'd pay the musicians worth a shit. Maybe they should strike next.
Full disclosure I am on Spotify family plan and I love it because
It would be nice if companies didn't slash features and would offer music for free with features beyond that of broadcast radio.
It would be nice if we didn't have the mechanisms demanding infinite growth from companies because sometimes that's just not possible or even necessary.
Imagine if Spotify could just be like ok, yeah we're good no need to make major changes, everyone is happy, life is good thanks. Versus: oh shit we need to boost the quarterly numbers who can we fuck over to get there? I know, customers and musicians both! Yay!
if only they’d pay the musicians worth a shit<
afaik that's mainly the fault of the music labels, they charge quite good money, but they don't give it to the artists: https://blog.groover.co/en/tips/loud-clear-spotify-2/
In this case, it's a good thing that Spotify is an European and not an US company. Less incentive for enshittification. At the same time, the main reason they fuck over musicians so much is not so much Spotify but because of record labels and ads themselves. The record labels are the ones with the financial power, holding the copyrights. It's not that Spotify doesn't pay labels, they do, then in turn the labels keep most of the money and fuck over the artists. At the same time, the record labels came last to the streaming game. Blinded on the madness that was the Napster and peak P2P era, a war they lost, they didn't want to even sell digital copies. Many awards and labels didn't considered digital sales, legitimate sales. An many rogue artists sold or gave their digital albums for free to protest this. So they were always behind the curve. When Apple forced the labels to sit at the table for iTunes, they had no bargain leverage and were forced to accept shit terms in exchange for the hope that streaming would stop piracy. As a result, the tech giants got to keep most of the revenue bag and that's been the status quo ever since.
On the other hand, adverts don't pay. We tend to forget this because the likes of Google and Facebook are so massive. But the only reason they make any money is because of how massive they're. Adverts are a shit form of payment. Too expensive and no one wants to advertise with you, too cheap and you can't cover even the platform maintenance, it's a delicate balance. The result is you need millions of eyes to make any significant amount of money from an advert. There's a reason cable and open air TV has devolved into 15 minutes of advertisement per every 20 minutes of entertainment.
Spotify pays a fraction of a cent for every play. It takes 150 plays of a song to make a dollar from advertisement, and most of that dollar is gonna stay with the record label. This is significantly worse for indie and small up and coming artists. They simply can't make a living out of Spotify unless they are already big and have a massive following. This hurts the whole industry as it becomes harder and harder to nurture new talent.
The up side is that, although they are getting shafted by Spotify and the labels, a subscription play is worth more than a free play. Up to ten times more than a free user play. So your subscription does help pay artists more. The down side is that less than 25% of Spotify users pay for a subscription.
As someone who was once a small artist on Spotify, they do actually pay really well. Better than most places.
oh shit we need to boost the quarterly numbers
It's actually "oh shit we're lighting hundreds of millions on fire every quarter and not even making enough to come close to covering our costs"
because Spotify is so convenient.
I used to think the same, but these days it seems like most songs from my favorites/liked list are no longer on Spotify, as I hear the same 10 or 20 songs over and over again when I have it on random play, and when I manually try to go through my list it'll skip over songs and not let me select them.
I guess the competition with the other music delivery companies is coming down to certain companies have exclusives for certain songs and artists.
I've never paid for any streaming music plan and I love it. I never have to pay to listen to music because I already have MP3s of all the good music
To each their own. For me, I really like the Discover Weekly/Daily features to discover new music and I can’t see how I would ever “already have MP3s of all the good music” since that’s an ever changing set. Heck, I still have a ton of old mp3s I used to rip and/or download, but I haven’t listened to them in a while.
I would gladly pay for a similar AYCE movie subscription, but I refuse to sign up for a ton of different services and play the “which service is that movie on again?” game. Instead it’s a very different approach for me.
Yeah me and my SO have a Spotify duo account plan. It's great. I could never use the free version even back in it's heyday. I don't know how people still use the free tier to be able to complain about these changes.
Looking forward to when you wake up and realize that you're just emptily shilling for a company that would happily take your money while refusing features.
Not sure how this is emptily shilling though. Am I paying for a service? Yes. Will I stop paying for a service if they start “refusing features?” Also yes.
Like I said in another comment, I was happy with Netflix back in the day, but now, nope. I have self hosted alternatives.
If a service is not worth it for me, I stop paying. Different people have that line at different levels, and for me, today’s Spotify Premium is worth it. In the future it may not be.
No need to be so hostile.
/Iam14andThisisDeep
See how they down vote you.
Let me try to give a voice to the people down voting.
I hope that in the future they make a separate subscription model for each of these services.
$2/month I get the pause feature.
$5/week I get to control my own volume.
$4/month I don't have to loudly shout the brand name of the commercial to go back to my podcast.
This is how websites keep the lights on and you shouldn't be so ungrateful. We all know the pursuit of infinite profits means all these companies will continue to find more ways to squeeze customers. So I'll go down with this ship even though just 5 years ago it was crazy to see a 2 minute unskippable ad but now there's 3 of them and you're an asshole for wanting to remove that.
What would the internet look like if we got rid of how companies advertise to us.
In the future you should consider what you're saying before speaking out against enshitificatin and encroachment of mass marketing into our lives. It feeds. It never stops feeding and I am meat.
Enshittification everywhere. Selfhosting forever
Generally I agree, but spotify has just recently started to reach the point of profitability. And with high interest rates and reduced venture capital, its now or never for them. I, as a paying customer, haven't felt this enshittification. But if they make that turn, then I'll quickly resort to self-hosting digital music purchases, Lidarr, and Plex.
Also as a service I think it’s much more polished and better working than its competitors, even if it is shiftier for free users.
This is just for the free tier. The subscription is still a fair price and good service right now. They haven't fucked it up yet, tho I don't care for all the audiobooks and podcasts. But, there's definitely worse things they could be doing and be getting away with.
I've been using Spotify for almost 2-3 years. The only thing I can say is the app gets DEGRADED EVERY YEAR!!!! They do their best to bring more and more bugs with each update. I'm done with Spotify shit, also they removed a lot of regional songs from my country. The only reason I pay for Spotify is because I can download/rip their music and store it on my Plex Server.
pirates are the FIRST to complain over a product rhwy dont pay for lmao
Pick someone who doesn't pay for a product to unleash your own corporate bootlicking whine on, because the person you actually replied to said:
I pay for Spotify
Literally the opposite. Pirating takes time, effort, resources, and I lose access to "everything" - I only get what I take the time to download and store.
If a product I pay for provides a great service, I'll keep using it. It's worth the money for excellent user experience and convenience. It's when they keep upping the price while reducing the features or content that bothers me, and that's when I'd rather spend the time pirating than paying them for a worse product.
I switched from Spotify back to Bandcamp and Apple Music. Fuck Spotify.
I pay for a service. They jack the price. They remove features. They add restrictions. They punish paying users.
The result is that I stop all of the above and do what's best for me. Fuck them. They did this to themselves.
Spotify in on itself is worth paying for BUT...
Their app for android sucks blue donkey balls and I'd happily pay more if I'd get to use a slightly less retarded cousin of this app.
The other but:
Spotify in on itself is not very bad right now and basically could and SHOULD continue as-is forever.
However, the economic system as it currently is requires it to continually come up with new crap that nobody needs nor wants (see also all Microsoft software that went from absolute shit thirty years ago to absolute slimey shit with lots of useless but pretty ding dong bells attached to it with a nice camera hidden inside to spy on the insides of your butthole) and it only a matter of time before...
Some exec gets hired there that promises to double their revenue, then implements some shit that will double their revenue once, gets this exec his bonus upon which he immediately quits to go to the next company to fuck over with a pineapple, leaving Spotify with a huge exodus of users, a dwindling service, and two years later it's dead.
I've seen this cycle with too many large companies, and it's the same story over and over. Be it Boeing, Disney, just about all large game companies, etc etc..
Putting all the best features behind a paywall, opening up ad space as well as sponsored song spots... Where have I seen this before?
The free version is completely useless on smartphone. I hope the limitations won't come to the desktop version
I don't mind paying for music
When I was a kid, I would go buy a CD basically every paycheck/allowance, for probably around $15-$20 of '03 money. 12ish tracks. I would add basically about 30 tracks to my collection per month for $30-$40. And even though I owned those (as long as my little brother didn't fuck up the disc), I could only access the handful that I could carry with me. If you told 15-17 year old me, that for $11 a month I could access basically any music I could think of instantly, anywhere, I would've been like "sure, and then we'll listen in our flying cars, right?"
There are lots of things that absolutely suck about modern life and the enshittification presented here, but music fans have it pretty good.
Spotify is garbage, last time I used it it was missing basic features like sleep timer, play count, song rating, and history. I buy my music and use poweramp instead.
Spotify has sleep timer and listen history. I don't see the need for song rating and play count, that sounds like old UX to me. Doesn't actually add functionality for me.
Love power amp.. I'm on Spotify thou.. so I don't get to use it too much
I would love for power amp to be able to connect to the main online storage services thou.. that's where most of my music I own is nowadays
I've been using pulsar for years now with all of my old music files. That, and Amazon music and Pandora. I love Pandora's randomness tbh.
They just need to add commercials for Premium that have horns or police sirens and they'll be all set
And Netflix and other streaming services, despite supposedly saving us from cable, re-invented cable.
But the good news is, maybe it's time to get the good old iPods/DAPs back into the mainstream again. You can have a big SD card with all the music and podcasts you could ever want without tying yourself to a specific service.
All these companies want to control what content you consume. Just walk away.
I tried it free once, and found it generally unusable.
Like it was filled with annoying adverts, but it wasn't adverts for other people. It was adverts for itself. All overly chipper voice actors going "Wow, is it true that Spotify Premium is just £9.99 a month?" as if that's how anybody has ever talked in the history of humankind.
The free version is funded by paying customers. The only purpose it has is to annoy you into paying.
I was happy to use Amazon Prime's version for a bit, and then they decided that merely paying for Prime wasn't enough, and I had to pay special extra fees to listen to albums. So I got Spotify instead, because fuck giving more money to Amazon.
Yeah for a few months there I was starting to like the Amazon player too and then they made it worse for more money and I realized.... I am so done with Amazon and paying them $180 a year for barely getting things (mostly scams and garbage) shipped from them, a weird mess of a video player and radio.
I actually have YouTube premium because at least it helps me get rid of the onslaught of YouTube ads and helps pay my creators of choice slightly better, and the music player is I guess just basically YouTube which isn't that bad. Not perfect but not bad.
For a company worth over a trillion dollars, there's this unmistakable layer of couldn't-give-a-fuckness to all their products.
From a store that ships blatantly fake products, through the video service that misses subtitles on like half the movies, or looks like it's been transferred from a well used VHS, to the music service that used to let you listen to full albums, but on playing you notice that a bunch of tracks are missing from it.
And the race to the bottom ain't even over yet.
Use Spotube. It isnt have these limitations. You get premium spotify for free 😆 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=oss.krtirtho.spotube
Plz spread the word, it is the only way we can move them to right way, if they feel it...
Try this instead
This looks good. I'll try it later this week.
Spotify is very easy to crack, at least on Android
Even cracked I didn't like it, I swapped to YT Music ReVanced. The Spotify algorithm used to be good for me but lately it kinda sucked.
YMusic
My biggest issue with Spotify was that they were changing the main screen layout what seemed like every other week. Like bro I don’t do podcasts so keep them off my homepage.
I ended up canceling and going to Apple Music because we were already paying for their other services and it was cheaper with their bundled membership. I also have a Plexamp server with all of the music I have ripped over the years and actually prefer that to Apple Music
Just listen to the radio then instead of complaining here?
You can actually do both, at the same time too
I thought complaining about corporate greed was the guise under which we here on Lemmy collectively demanded everything we want for free?
If you're using Android, check out xmanager. It's basically a free cracked version of Spotify Premium.
Lmao that website is terrible. Doesn't even tell anything what the app does just gives a link to apk in github. Also github page doesn't explain anything.
It doesn't, but that's where most of the Spotify mods come from. The app will let you download the modded versions of Spotify.
xmanager
Good excuse to plug ListenBrainz. On ListenBrainz you can track the music you listen to whether you listen to local files or services like Spotify. ListenBrainz also supplies you with playlists to discover new music based on what you've listened to so far. It's a great solution for music lovers that don't want to depend on companies like Spotify.
Spotify kind of sucks. I've been using Bandcamp for years (though they sold to epic and then got sold to some vultures, so they might be doomed)
If I buy one album a month for a year, that's about the same as a subscription except I get to keep what I bought. And after a few years I have a big library and don't need to buy as much. And the musicians get a bigger cut.
If you're listening to stuff that's not on Bandcamp I don't know what to tell you. Probably buy it from elsewhere, or if it's old just pirate it because it should be public domain anyway.
This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.
We do not care that we don't own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it's almost a perk that I don't because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify's library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.
I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don't want to go pirate it, I don't want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.
And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I'm a member at our local zoo. I don't expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I'm a member at our museum. I don't feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don't own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.
Spotify is the exact same for me.
Thanks for a well written reply. I'm glad that you have a model that works for you. I'm bummed that I don't think Spotify really does right by the artists (and other issues with them). I guess in your analogy that would be a zoo mistreating the animals? Not the best metaphor I'll have to think more on how to work that.
I also really want more people to consider other options. A lot of people I don't think really consider that they could buy instead of rent. I'm confident there are many people who listen to like five albums and are paying Spotify for that every month.
For me, another benefit of Spotify is the music recommendations. I have found a lot of music that I would never have found without letting Spotify just recommend things after an album or playlist has finished. Finding new music is something I have a hard time with on my own.
"Product X sucks because I use Product Y. If you like something else just steal it." Bout sums it up.
That's not how the "because" was in my original post. Spotify sucks because it's renting, they don't pay artists very much, they (as far as I recall) platform some awful people. Probably other reasons I can't think of right now, too. Other alternatives such as Bandcamp avoid or mitigate those problems
The point about piracy and public domain is somewhat related but you didn't really engage with that.
If I buy one album a month for a year, that’s about the same as a subscription except I get to keep what I bought.
That would mean you only get to listen to one new album each month. And getting to keep the album only matters if you eventually stop paying, but then you won’t get to add any new albums to your library until you pay for another one.
Spotify has provided me access to so much music, it’s incredible. I will never be able to go back to such a limited library after being able to experience the ability to listen to almost any music I want whenever I want.
I don't know why anyone would give Spotify money when they pay Joe Rogan to spread vaccine disinformation and union bust.
I use YouTube music. It's far inferior to what Google Play Music was, which was literally perfect, but it's not Spotify and I really think it does mixes best of all. Apple Music is so very Caucasian, I gave it a shot but it just comes back to the whitest music possible every time.
Seems I've picked the perfect time to get back into Mini-disc!
Deezer+Deemix -> Jellyfin -> Symfonium
I don't mind having ads while listening to plain radio. But on Spotify there were more ads than songs lately, so they forced me to buy a subscription. They did not reinvent the radio, they made it worse.
on Spotify there were more ars than songs lately, so they forced me to buy a subscription
Aah, so their tactic is working 100% as intended.
But they didn't force you to do anything. you willingly chose to reward them for their shitty method instead of ditching them because of it.
So are limited free demos a shitty method because you then have to pay to get the full experience? I don't understand why people are so upset that the free experience gets worse, economically it makes sense and any company would do it. They do not need to offer a free service at all, but they do it to help cultivate a premium user base. It's pretty consumer friendly they offer a free version to let you make sure you want to use Spotify before you pay. I just don't think offering a free product to entice paying for the full thing is a "shitty method".
Wow, you subscribed because they made their service worse?
Is that weird somehow? You like a thing. Then the thing changes into something worse but there is a paid version of the thing which is still good. You decide whether you liked the thing enough to spend x amount of money on it.
Funkwhale is pretty cool to those who use spotify. I love this playlist: https://open.audio/library/playlists/596
Immediately upon opening the playlist "You sent too many requests and have been ratelimited"
We gave it the lemmy hug of death. Its a very small server right now.
Spotify has been like that for years now on mobile devices. At least here in Germany
One think that idgaf about paying for is Spotify or any music streaming service. We use a family plan anyway but even full price isn't great value for money.
It’s the price of a single/couple CDs and you get access to almost every single music
@alphacyberranger This is why I still use my 160GB iPod Touch + Soulseek
Truly amazing. 2023 really is the year for less for more
- Pay $0 to use a product from a business that is losing money
- Business makes a policy change to try to convince you their product is worth paying for, but still let's you use a version of it for FREE
- Wow this company sucks, I've given them nothing and they're taking everything away
In a capitalist society you speak with your money. It's the only language businesses speak. If you're not giving a company any money they're not going to cater their product to you, plain and simple.
Yes, but I hate capitalism, and at the same time, want to be a consumer whore without paying for anything because I'm entitled to a service I think I need. I also require the newest iPhone every year, but will keep complaining about never having enough money.
I mean, it's radio but you pick every song they play on the station. Still an upgrade
GOT IT
Miss the radios and CDs? Blame record labels.
Thanks record labels!
You're welcome, dumdum.
So Spotify couldnt become profitable just by hawking my personal info and invading my privacy? What kinda shit company are they?
I pay for Spotify but my dad has the free version. They don't even have the ability to queue specific songs. Oof.
Looks like this is India only?
The things listed in the screenshot have been like that for years at least here in Germany on mobile devices. I thought it was like that everywhere.
Ah, I couldn't find any recent news articles for this, so I was just trying to figure out why this was news to op.
Oh did they remove the 5 skips per day maximum?
Neat!
What alternatives to Spotify exist? Any recommendations?
InnerTune is the best alternative I've found. Uses YouTube music, is free, no account required, and it has a really great UI.
YouTube clients like NewPipe.
I'd use YouTube Music clients like ViMusic instead
Deezer
Try ViMusic
I’m a huge fan of Apple Music. I’m an avid flac hoarder but when I learned Apple Music has lossless, I bit.
Another vote for Apple Music. Lossless audio included in the standard plan, the lyrics feature is great as well.
Give Vimusic a try!
Slightly disappointed that this wasn't a music player with a vim interface...
At least the radio has someone that talks and occasionally interacts with the audience
This isn't always a good thing, like most "morning zoo" shows.
True, but I'm not a fan of those shows too. I've got some really good radio stations that I follow though and I find it hard to switch to any streaming services but I guess it's just my age showing.
Morning zoo shows got us TJ and the Wombat, so it was worth it.
Spotify has an AI DJ that I actually quite enjoy. It says your name, asks how's it going and does it a pretty good job of mixing up music I like. It thinks I like country music every once in a while though. I have a couple of songs, but can't stand new country music.
Dude, I thought for a second that the voyager app for Lemmy is showing me this
You dont have to pay for radio receivers just ads for listeners.
no fucking way you have to pay to select specific songs in playlists? 💀
spotube
Another lost of reasons to use YouTube music. Not that they don't have the right, or good reasons to do this, but the free experience is much better over here. Especially if you use an app like Innertune
I personally use Stingray music Its free, ads are under 5 seconds if there are any
Does xManager not work anymore or do you use apple?
Oh sheesh I hipe this doesn't change on the Web browser.
I already canceled and started sailing the high sees.
I'm just looking on from the sidelines to see them burn.
No.
Informative and Unfortunate.
Fuck Spotify, tidal is the way.
Isn't tidal's free plan only slightly better?
Oh I have no idea I went straight to the paid plan since I was leaving Spotify's paid plan. I probably should have stayed out of this one.
Ah yes that's where their development resources for all the last 5 years went: fucking up the paid experience with minor tweaks and fucking up the free experience with major tweaks.
I pay for this shit for my whole family and don't know a service with anywhere near the same library, I'd jump ship in a heartbeat to a service with both a complete music library and a first-class podcast listening experience for web/PC users.
Are you complaining or its just an FYI?
Very fair.
Literally none of those were options on the radio unless you were recording it (and cassette tapes still cost money.)
That’s the point
Spotify would be a good deal at ten times its price, and then maybe they could actually pay people something.
As an artist, though, this shit is infuriating. And as a human being. It's like having a fucking Tesla or something, a car that gets nerfed by software updates and corporate greed.
Stream music are fucking trash in quality compared to flac, so give me flac or go fuck yourself
When you’re listening on a shitty bluetooth speaker or earbuds it really doesn’t matter.
The Amazon Music that's included with Prime is bad enough that it sounds noticeably worse than my music from the iTunes store even on Bluetooth earbuds. Free Spotify might be the same.
Bluetooth sound quality is better these days than it used to be.
And if someone cares that much about sound quality, decent speakers are available.
My child will have each of his tracks be nearly half a gigabyte
I have a 1 terabyte micro SD card in my (2022) phone that holds my entire music collection in flac format. This isn't the early 2000s and storage space hasn't been an issue for years. The only reason I see this not being more common is the mainstream phone manufacturers decided that you didn't need expandable storage and would rather pay an extra $100 for each measly 128gb of storage they care to give you.
Some streaming services like tidal offer flac if you want it.
Apple Music has lossless on the base tier, Spotify is supposedly going to put it on an extra-expensive "Supremium" tier.
I can not program, but I am really going to start pushing myself to learn. But, my idea, and anyone feel free to use this, is an open source self hosted (like p2p or torrent) music, movie, fuckitanything app. This has to have been thought of already. Essentially we need to figure out how to decentralize everything. Yes, we need a central exchange kind of like a bazaar or market, but the actual exchange happens from individual to individual. And yes, there are more intricacies like group orders.
There are also intricacies like copyright law.
It does exist, see qbitorrent and similar apps. Torrents already fill the usecase you've defined: decentralized sharing of arbitrary files. The main problems being the central exchange and the need for seeders.
The bigger the central exchange (torrent tracker) the more susceptible you are to both internal and external threats, but you need to be big because bigger means more seeders and more content.
So…limewire?
So glad I have an ancient crack that still works great with no ads and unlimited skips. Transfered that crack along with flappy bird between like 5 phones now.
Yay, more enshitification. Glad I dumped them 2 years ago.
EDIT: enjoy licking those capitalist boots @Blackout, you fucking oxygen thief.
I don't think they miss your $0 per month. Let me call them and ask.
Isn’t this how it was since, like, five years ago?
Fuck your streaming music and cuck my pirate torrenting flag into your throat. Btw, pls support indie music with your money, buy their album and share them with your friends and circles. Streaming services is never going to be profitable and music industry fucking sucks hard.
Just bought the Bejeweled 2 soundtrack - probably my favorite album ever
So you're simultaneously arguing that you should steal music, but also pay for it because the artists get shit for pay?
At least be morally consistent about it - if you pirate you kind of have to be ok with the artist getting stiffed in the process.
I'm a pirate with proper moral compass, unlike those music label people
Yeah! Fuck you artists! Instead of a pittance provided to you thanks to the music labels you get nothing instead. Music should be free and if they want to make a living from them they are stupid. I'm cool and always right!
I bet you all don't even know what ROI means.
If you are smart enough to understand what ROI means, you should also be smart enough to understand that these business moves happen at the expense of the customers.
That doesn't mean people aren't allowed to complain about anti consumer practices.
If they can't manage their money AND make a worthwhile product, that's not our fault.
What does it mean
