I appreciate the move, bold for them and the fanbase.
Nowadays probably Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, Drake and Taylor Swift together could make an impact if they decide to leave (spoiler: no way)Boycott spotify +1
I’m out of the loop. Why is there a Spotify boycott?
I’m not sure if you’d call this a “boycott”, but many people have also just never used Spotify because they care more about supporting musicians than convenience.
They’ve been changing their terms of service over the past year with some shady stuff and have continuously screwed over creators. I’m planning on yanking my music out of there too.
I’ve been a Pandora subscriber for years because it’s just a better service for music nerds imo. Their “radio” function goes way deeper into catalogs than Spotify ever did. Someone please tell me they’re not run by fascists
The parent company , XM Radio, donated to Trump and gives fascists a platform. Also their pay out to artists are among the lowest.
Which is a real shame because I’ve discovered so many good non-mainstream artists thanks to Pandora’s algorithm.
D’oh!
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.
This is just not true. If I buy eggs from my neighbor who raises chickens, how is that unethical?
The issue for me is that AI generated music has ruined my experience with Spotify. It started recommending lofi beats (easy to generate with AI) and I didn’t want to spend weeks pushing the algorithm to not have it recommend me that crap.
Other users have complained about the downturn in quality of the weekly recommendations, which is what kept me there in the first place.
SoundCloud appears to have better recommendations for the type of music I like.
https://mashable.com/article/spotify-ai-generated-songs-dead-artists-pages
Yeah, +1 for SoundCloud, depending on your tastes their reccomendarions/stations have been pretty top notch.
Likely because of that old military investment drama where a company making drones for Ukraine and EU defence did an investment round and spotify joined, which prompted every russian bot farm to attack spotify because of it. As an European, I feel like paying them even if I don’t use spotify.
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Spotify: the company that continues to find ways to make YouTube play music not a horrible choice.
Like… How the fuck.
I mean yeah, I have a Revanced yt music app so I don’t have to worry about ads or anything. It works damn near identical to Spotify too.
Mine stopped working last week. Did they release new patches yet?
Not sure, I’ve been using one from a year or two ago, and it hasn’t stopped working for me yet. I do get some prompts to upgrade to premium, but I can just ignore them.
I just upgraded to .52 it seems to be workable again.
was probably just a specific patch level running on it.
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Honest question, how else do I easily discover music that matches my taste if I don’t use a streaming service?
I like mixcloud, my partner likes bandcamp. Both have pros and cons.
Spotify isn’t the only streaming service, it’s just one of the worst, like ethically.
and to answer your question there are sites like Rate Your Music that let you find albums similar to albums you like.
Which one is ethical and not shit? I left Google play music because it turned into a worse version of itself with a half baked rebrand. Didn’t care for tidal much.
The most ethical music streaming service is probably Qobuz, followed by Tidal. If those are too niche for you, the next best in artist payout would be Apple, then Deezer and YouTube Music. And the only one worse than Spotify is Amazon.
Spotify is like 3usd in my home country. Any app that does price matching?
Price matching?
What I meant is more like a competitive price, or at least a regional price. Residing in Turkey rn and the only affordable things are the ones with regional prices
I’ve made several efforts to try out Deezer, tidal and Qobuz. Their library just comes up short within 2-3 searches for some of the more niche stuff I want to listen to. Depending on what you listen to they can be great, I’m sure, I’d much prefer using Qobuz but for completeness… I assume the only ones that come close are Amazon and Apple and at that point, why even switch?
Apple is actually a much better choice than Spotify. My numbers are a few years old but iirc, Apple pays artists almost twice as much as Spotify. Only Amazon has a worse artist payout than Spotify. Of course, Tidal and Qobuz are still much better than Apple but they also have the limitations you’ve mentioned. Oh and Apple and the others don’t fill out playlists with AI generated music so they themselves can get the payout for the plays. You know, like Spotify does. Realistically, even YouTube Music is more ethical than Spotify these days and that’s saying something.
Spotify used to do that very well, but the last years it enshittified. Now it’s very difficult to find new artists or new music, heck even finding a playlist that isn’t auto generated by Spotify has become a challenge. Everything is now pushed by Spotify and they select which artists you listen to, the artists that make Spotify more money.
Personally I’ve been using SoundCloud for the past 10 years at least and it’s been great.
I’ve been using listenbrainz for a bit, and it’s pretty good.
Honest question: I discover at maximum 1 new song that I like per week. I listen to metal and hard electronic music. As soon as the song has 20 seconds of intro I skip it. Spotify only suggests songs with long intros or songs that are just growling, which I don’t like too much, or that electronic over saturated sound where you only have bass and nothing else.
How can I discover new songs that I like there?
Potentially I Heart Radio to listen to various artists, then internet search to purchase their albums.
Might have to bring back mix tapes and record favourite songs over digital radio!
People in here looking for less evil alternatives to Spotify and you suggest Clear Channel, the company that killed local radio broadcasting and enshittified the airwaves long ago?
Sorry, i didn’t know about that. We still have local radio here in Australia, so it’s not so dire down here.
Sorry, nothing against you personally I guess, but I’m getting a little tired of this question.
You’re on social media right now, there are music communities.
Most posts do NOT link Spotify.
Personally I can add a few more sources/habits, but that would seem like the first and most obvious answer.
Music communities/discussion is not the same as spotify music discovery.
Communities can recommend you music that is the same genre as the music you like.
Algorithms can recommend music that you will like as much as your input taste.
Music communities/discussion is not the same as spotify music discovery.
Well they specifically asked “if I don’t use a streaming service”.
Communities can recommend you music that is the same genre as the music you like.
They can, but you can also try something else.
Algorithms can recommend music that you will like as much as your input taste.
To some degree, but there are other ways (better imho) of broadening your horizon.
original comment:
Honest question, how else do I easily discover music that matches my taste if I don’t use a streaming service?
- Talk to other human beings about music.
Music is not meant to be a solitary hobby. Share what you like, they’ll share what they like.
- Like a piece of music? Look up that producer, or record label if it’s small. Look up the session musicians. Don’t just look up the artist.
Generally it’s not just the artist that makes the music top tier. There are other great professionals involved in the background and good people hire other good people to work in the background.
This is easy. Once you start doing this you end up with a queue of albums you want to get round to listening to. It’s easy enough to find too much music yourself without an algorithm. You start finding the artist radio a waste of your time.
The rabbit holes I’ve been down following a producer, guitarist, or bassist, etc. are usually very rewarding and often you pop up in another place you knew already after finding out about some lesser known great music on the way.
Number 1 is extremely slow, and I like so many tracks nobody I know likes. And if I look up similar artists on Spotify I instantly have the ability to listen to music instead of digging through record labels then manually searching for tracks on… I guess YouTube?
Spotify instantly gives you what the record companies paid for the algorithm to give you.
“Digging” isn’t hard. Give it a go.
But it sounds like you’re listed to “tracks” not albums. Frankly that’s your biggest mistake.
If you like lots of tracks other people don’t, you’ll always be struggling against an algorithm trying to feed you 3 minute songs nobody hates.
Listen to albums and every time you follow a rabbit hole you’ll have 40-80 minutes of music to listen to at least once, multiple times if it’s good.
You’ll find albums that are worth listening to as a whole and some you’ll keep tracks in playlists.
Personally I moved from CDs to Spotify to YouTube music, to buying CDs again, soon to have them on Jellyfin.
Once you get into actually listening to albums, 3 or 4 albums from eBay or charity shops are what I’d have paid for a subscription and if I need to take a break I’ve still got my old music and don’t have any more to pay.
You can of course sail the high seas if you’re strapped for cash or want things instantly. I consider the big 3 labels harmful and have only bought second hand copies. I try to buy from independents and smaller labels when I can directly.
The harm of the major labels is pretty big and frankly streaming has become their most harmful tool. I want to avoid supporting that model or supporting the big 3.
I don’t fully agree with your first paragraph. My release radar is always chalk full of new releases by artists I enjoy.
Digging? I’ve given that a go when I was a kid/teen. I don’t have hours to spend aimlessly surfing and finding music like I used to. I just can’t be bothered anymore.
I’m not struggling against an algorithm, quite the opposite actually. I like some music in different languages too andi get good recommendations based on those as well.
I get it, ra ra Spotify bad. But it’s been all right for me.
My Spotify library does end up on plexamp
Because fuck’em, that’s why!
TBH if you’re an artist you’ll probably make more money by NOT being on streaming platforms and having people buy your music directly - spotify in particular pays fuck all, you might as well have your music on The Pirate Bay. Hell, putting your own music on pirating platforms is probably better for discovery, and people who like your music will buy the albums.
good
Good on them, fuck Spotify
First band on my playlists that is actually removing their music. I’ll probably need to look at an alternate service now. Or build my own service.
Yeah, usually it’s some old hippy like Neil Young that I’ve never listened to anyway.
Bandcamp is probably the best for the artists. If you want something more similar to spotify, Deezer and Tidal both pay artists better than Spotify if I remember correctly. And neither of them have done anything like platforming Joe fucking Rogan. Though it’s possible that they have done something terrible that I missed. At least a good place to start looking.
Deezer’s largest shareholder is Access Industries, Inc which was founded by Len Blavatnik. He’s one of the ~50 individuals on whom sanctions were imposed in June 2024 by Volodymyr Zelenskyy and has been pumping money into efforts to sway public opinion in favor of Israeli genociders.
Well…shit. Good to know.
Anyone know if Tidal is affiliated with genocide, Russian oligarchs, or other atrocities? Or if there are other better options?
Not that I am aware. They were built around treating artists better. They will enshitify eventually as that is to be expected now with any company, but their payouts to artists being proportionally higher and their superior sound quality to almost anything short of quboz makes them a good choice for now. Also their new music recommendation algorithm is quite good.
Oh FFS. Guess I’m just going back to piracy, somehow the most moral option.
Yeah, I’ll probably look at Deezer (if it also has podcast integration). The Spotify app has become more buggy and shit over the years anyway.
Deezer does have podcast integration, though I haven’t used it for that yet.
Yeah, looks like it does, but it doesn’t appear to have all the podcasts I follow on Spotify.
I feel like i am seeing this more and more. I wonder when the tipping point will begin and we start seeing people leave in droves.
Tidal HiFi is really good, better sound quality, has most music.
They also pay the artists better.
Its also cheaper, somehow.
my only complaint with tidal is they suck at properly assigning music to the correct artists. i’ve opened tickets by contacting their twitter and they sometimes fix the issue but only until the next release of a song
Qobuz crew reporting in
Does qobuz pay artists more?
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Seconded!
OK but why would anyone drink a microphone?
It has lots of vitamins
micro-vitamins
Spotify must die
I love it. The streaming services deserve to die, for their shady practices towards artists…
Because the record labels were so much better…
We are in need of a good alternative, where the money we give the service goes to the artists based on how much we’ve listened to that artist personally, not on some amalgamated metrics. I want to be able to open my account and see I’ve given £2 this month for bandwidth and management costs, £1.20 to Taylor Swift, £1.50 to Massive Attack, £1 to Portishead, etc.
If at any point you can make money by buying accounts and playing your own tracks over and over, then the service has fucked up.
Since at least the late 80s record labels sucked, not the streaming services suck. Time to just get rid of copyright on music and audio recordings.
Time to just get rid of copyright on music and audio recordings.
I’m sure the musicians will approve of this solution.
The worst part is every little bit gets chopped up before it ever makes it a musician.
Have to pay a label/publisher, then you have to pay a Metadata distributor, and Spotify, plus any other royalties for samples if they’re used.
Fun times.
Agreed. fwiw Bandcamp is currently kinda like that for their digital tracks tho it was bought out a couple years ago so will begin enshittifying any day now…
This is true. All of the points, and especially the transparency on who gets our money… We are in need of good alternatives, but I don’t think, that transparency is a good business model unfortunately :(
I’m waiting to see how this all will unfold.
I wonder if something could be built based on fediverse technology. Artists could host their own instance of some music library software, and have granular control over how it’s monetized - pay per stream, buy a digital copy of a specific song/album, have monthly fees for different tiers of access, you could maybe even sell merch or concert tickets on it - kind of like Patreon, except the instance owner has full control over what’s offered and how it’s monetized. And then in the client for this new thing, you could have a list of all the instances and choose which ones you want to give money to, and if it spoke ActivityPub, you could integrate some sort of feed into Lemmy/Mastodon/etc clients.
Why bother with the federation if every artist is going to have to host their own instance to keep control of how content is played and monetized?
For the same reasons Lemmy is federated:
- Resilience - if one server goes down, only that one artist’s music becomes unavailable
- Control - if the artist owns the server, they can control it/moderate it as they see fit
You can’t really count on either of those things if you’re putting your music up on Spotify, Tidal, etc.
Edit: there would be nothing stopping several artists from handing together and hosting all their music from a single server/instance, if they wanted to. That’s the point though, there’s choice
Okay, so what I really meant was how federation the way it works here would be of any use. It’d actually make the artist lose all control, as everything gets mirrored.
If we use the federation as nothing but a discovery mechanism for other nodes, I guess it would accomplish those goals. But then you could do it without the federation too. Have a central discovery server so that any apps immediately know where to connect, instead of the user having to choose (federation is confusing for normies, remember?)
Right, ActivityPub would really just be the discovery mechanism, obviously you wouldn’t want the actual music to be mirrored to other instances.
If you use a centralized discovery server, you’re right back to where you are with Spotify - at the mercy of whoever controls the discovery server, and shit out of luck if the discovery server goes down. Federation is only confusing for normies because the clients for popular fediverse apps don’t do a good job of making that part clear (or hiding it away).
Afaik that’s the system youtube uses for videos/streams with youtube premium (and twitch as well with turbo). You can’t see where your money went as the viewet, but supposedly (don’t have sources rn so feel free to correct mr, but I’ve heard multiple creators say this) it’s just the same revenue split as other purchases, applied to the price of your membership and distributed based on what you watch.
Protection
evicting JOE rogan would be goodstart from spotify
Simple maths. How many customers does it cost us to platform assholes, conspiracy nuts and nazis, and how many customers does it get us?
Adding to that how much they pay the idiot, I feel the balance is tipping towards firing him.
if spotify is getting too much people dropping the service, because of him, they would terminate his role on the MUSIC PLATFORM.
The damage is done. Even if they declined to renew his contract (they wont because the fascists will threaten them) it is just too late. Unfortunately most music is owned by production companies and the individual artists do not have distribution rights to wield against Spotify.
