Can’t even seek through songs.
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Who tf uses Spotify without a premium account?
I’d rather pirate that shit that use it for free (I like to hit next all the way).
IMHO Spotify is one of the few services that it is worth to pay.
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Buying or even pirating literally thousands of albums just wouldn’t be feasible for me. Way too much cost, effort, and time. Spotify is well worth it for me as a consumer.
i listen to too much music to be shuffling around CDs while driving
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bluetooth is not on my car. also Bluetooth quality sucks. also id be spending thousands of dollars to buy all my music
I have a 1TB sdcard
can i borrow it for the forever
I buy the the digital release to support the band and just keep listening on Spotify. At that point the band won’t get more money out of me for the songs and I get the covience of Spotify
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Cough cough xmanager cough cough.
On github or xmanagerapp dotcom cough.
I checked that and still don’t know what it does…
That would enter the pirate subject wouldn’t it?
Anyway yeah using the free option provided by Spotify seems like the worst case scenario.
Yeah, it’s basically premium except you can’t download the songs and something else I can’t remember.
It also doesn’t include the car thing either.
I agree with you here. There may be a better service out there, but I certainly haven’t found it yet. I use Spotify in my car (via USB to my phone), in my kitchen, master bath, living room and kids rooms on Google mini’s or Amazon Echos… And I don’t have to go out and download anything, it just plays what I want when I want it.
those who listen to podcasts. i can download them and they’re commercial free.
Huh, I think Spotify is a poor podcast client, compared with the competition.
really? what am i missing?
Well, I use Pocket Casts and it has volume booster and trim silence options, as far as I remember Spotify had none of those.
I use it for podcasts. Those exist outside the normally restricted music playlist stuff.
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.
Cheers, I knew about ReVanced but this is a new one for me
might have something to do with their motto “don’t make us popular”
Real shame.
In terms of privacy is xManager safe? When I downloaded it I was faced with an ad which seems sketchy for a GPL licensed application.
Been using it for years. The ad thing is recent but it’s safe. They have to make money somehow and it was only an ad when I was downloading the app off of their updater. After that the actual Spotify app is add free.
You can also turn off the ad in the manager via a toggle.
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/
That article, while not necessarily wrong, is blatant propaganda and overlooks the most important issues until the final paragraph, and even then it only touches on it once.
As someone with expansive knowledge and experience in the indie music industry, with a lot of experience dealing with streaming services and Spotify in particular the biggest problem is not the % of value created paid out, it’s what the actual value is. They don’t touch anywhere on how much you get paid per play, how the value is created, how the money flows once it’s in Spotify’s hands, etc.
As said in the article, artists and indie labels/distributors have basically no ways to reach Spotify to negotiate a price, but Spotify itself paid literal millions to license a few major labels in the beginning. The ‘value’ of a play is extremely skewed, where you’d need upwards of 10.000 plays to equal a single play on a nightly radio show for a big broadcaster like the BBC or at a festival with 500 people. On top of that, if you work hard, network properly and prepare your release you can get quite good exposure through radio, dj and other live plays, whereas with Spotify you have to be lucky that they put your pitch towards the right ‘tastemakers’, they are actively working against user (influencer)-playlists, have piss poor customer service, blatantly favour major label tracks in their algorithms and don’t actual care about their listeners.
On top of that we’ve got the obvious subscription enshittification, classic outlandish manager/director salaries and bonuses, the need to have an ever-rising share price and more.
Thanks for the insights. No holy among the capitalist companies…
Yeah I work at a label we pay our artists about 30% of what we make off them, but that isn’t actually that bad considering the amount of overhead there is at a record label and the amount of services we provide for them. Just advertising alone makes up about 1/3 of a big label and we will spend more on advertising, distributing and actually allowing them to make music than we actually pay them, so in terms of end value it’s probably closer to 60 or 70%
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
what do you use for downloading from Spotify
Deemix and Deezer is better. Spotify streams in low quality.
I would also like to know if you’re PMing him
Likewise… haven’t found a good way to do this yet.
Me too, everything I’ve seen just finds a copy and rips it from YouTube
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
Why do you think they aren’t paying for it?
So many services pushing price hikes, increasing ads, diminishing features and libraries. No wonder people are seeking other options.
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.
Use tools to curate a feed that auto downloads. Work smarter, not harder.
I do. Still need to configure those too. Don’t get me wrong it’s not that bad, but there was a world 5 or so years ago where the streaming platforms were just easier for the cost. Not anymore.
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.
Putting all the best features behind a paywall, opening up ad space as well as sponsored song spots… Where have I seen this before?
Pandora, but at least they were honest about it.
When Sirius bought Pandora and started bleeding subscribers, that closed doors for Spotify. No way to increase revenues but by increasing ads.
Every tech company right now?
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.
I remember the early days when iPods were still a thing and you had to buy music on iTunes. I don’t miss that at all. Imagine the price of buying every individual song of your current Spotify playlist, you’re getting a steal in comparison now.
Precisely. Tbh I would be comfortable paying more but only if it went to artists. At some point there will come a time when I go back to the 7 seas for music (especially given hdd sizes and the ease of streaming from your own library) but I feel pretty far from that at the moment especially as it’s the free tiers mostly that have been getting enshittified. But I think that’s roughly the lessons of the 2010’s - free products on the internet are either a loss leader to get you subscribing, or they’re probably selling your data to everyone.
Even then, the free versions of Spotify/Pandora are miles ahead of radio when I was a kid. Pick one of three stations that caters entirely to mainstream normies and then have a third of your time spent listening to ads and shitty DJs.
Me neither, but I do mind paying a subscription for a shitty service that does not let me actually own anything and changes the rules every year.
That’s why we pay for a good service instead. The subscription is a fraction of a cost you’d get from paying to “own” the media, and it’s not like you still can’t combine the two either. It’s not one or the other.
And this is why I buy vinyl.
…for a reasonable fee, without ads.
Spotify matches that description.
For now.
E: y’all downvoters think Spotify isn’t gonna enshittify? Good luck with that.
Just curious, how much would buying an album cost you, and how big is your actual music playlist? Then let me know if it’s not a reasonable fee.
A CD cost ~$16-19 depending on how new a release it was. $6-12 used. Obviously not all songs are gonna be desirable on each CD.
I can buy a new album now for $12-15 on iTunes.
I spend ~$13/mo for my Spotify. About half of that time is listening to music I have saved as favorites (IOW not new), the rest listening to new podcasts and looking for new music.
No ads.
So I am absolutely getting my money’s worth in a per-month cost of new music/podcast vs what buying 1 old release or used CD would have cost. I get way more music and entertainment than I would buying one or even 2 used CDs a month.
I wouldn’t have the physical space for the amount of CDs that I would need
We are not the same.
Arrr, ye be jokin’, matey! Payin’ for tunes instead of sailin’ the seas?
This is literally just commercial radio.
This is enshittification 101
… Except they gather your data and use it to try and make profit.
Say least radio required them to give genuine value to you. Radio had to give away shit and run contests to get caller info to figure out how many listeners they had, to get advertisers etc. It was a real business.
Spotify just buys the music catalogue and then forces you into their ecosystem.
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Except it seems like you can still skip forward. That’s not something you can do with radio.
In addition, radio has those incredibly annoying station identification bullshit announcements like “You’re listening to JFRH, the cooooolest FM station in the greater Grumug metro area!”, often with annoying sound effects like lasers and so on. Even worse, they often interrupt the music to have an ad for the station, in which the station-ad claims that this is another hour of ad-free music.
It’s shitty, but it’s not as shitty as radio.
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.
I’ve been a happy paying spotify user for well over a decade, I love listening to new music all the time. Also, for counts/history I just scrobble to last.fm
Oh yeah, I should check out my last.fm, I set up scrobbling forever ago and then just forgot about it.
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.
The free version is completely useless on smartphone. I hope the limitations won’t come to the desktop version
They just need to add commercials for Premium that have horns or police sirens and they’ll be all set
It was already like this in Europe when I began to use Spotify in 2015. I do not hate it because the app’s free tier is already unusable to me due to the adverts.
Adverts set to 137pc volume is absolutely crackers.
Spotify is now a Pandora knockoff.
I’ve been using pandora this entire time.
Never really understood why people pay to stream songs when everything is on youtube for free.
Kinda tough on a phone. Screen goes off, music stops. I know there are ways to get around it that yt doesn’t want you to do but that is beside the point of “youtube is free”. Everything is free if you do it that way.
Newpipe!
I thought this was always how the free version was? Which bit of that is new? I remember only being able to shuffle play until I got premium
Yeah I’m also very confused here. Maybe it’s different depending on the country? I’m in the US and I’m pretty sure the mobile version has always been like this
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.
I own quite a lot of mp3s legally. Host them on a 50 dollar raspberry pi with something called Navidrome which uses a protocol called subsonic.
I can stream my own music from my home to my phone etc or anywhere. Otherwise yeah just having them locally is the other best option.
