Laughs in Navidrome, again.
Music artists absolutely fucking hate music streaming services! It’s too big to not participate, and in a lot of cases, their record label won’t let them not do so. But the pay is absolute shit! If you care about tbe artist behind the music, buy their music. If you don’t want to have all your music stored on device because it takes too much room, there are self-host options.
Going solely with streaming is actively screwing artists over, especially in the case of Spotify, which pays out to the tune (pun intended) of 0.0001¢ per stream. Even an artist as well known as Weird Al barely makes enough to buy a sandwich from what Spotify pays! Other platforms are better, but not by much. I don’t say this to guilt trip; many big names make good money from record deals and will be just fine, while most of us don’t make much. Indie artists are the real losers here.
That said, music had gotten cheap! Most of your favorite indie artists will sell FLAC versions of their albums for $10 an album, or $1 a song on Bandcamp, and prices are between $10-20 for major artists on platforms like Qobuz. It might take time to build your library back up, but the average person can make a huge difference here by taking the money you would spend on Spotify or any other platform, and buying your music directly. You’d be paying the artist more than they’d get from you streaming nothing but their album every day all year, eventually you’ll be paying less in the long run by not being subbed to a greedy music platform, and you’ll get better quality!
Reality check here. If morals or personal philosophy means the most to you, then self hosting is really the only honest choice, assuming you then buy merch from artists. If features and library size are most important then you probably need Spotify. All the other worthwhile options might come with a good USP but they’re usually flawed in comparison to Spotify.
Screw AI music, but it is on every platform. Spotify is just a victim of its success in this regard.
Edit: not a fanboi btw, just a dad with a family who likes to use Spotify. I have to pay for YT premium as well so the kids don’t get ADs on their stupid iPhones. If the YT music app wasn’t so shit I’d dump Spotify and make everyone switch, proving my point.
This figure mentions Spotify on a side note. You must be joking.
Indeed. It should be at the top as the defacto music streaming platform based on popularity.
I just use OuterTune for YT Music. It works and it is less sus than ReVanced YT Music
This graphic seems to put Spotify in a “less shit” category than the other big players based on national origin or something.
From a quality and fairness perspective Spotify is just as bad. A large list of credible musicians and content creators have detailed the poor compensation, shift towards fake artists and AI filler tracks, and other moves Spotify has made that harm the artists and provide a worse listener experience.
If you want to fairly compensate artists, you’d be better off pirating 100% of your streams using alternate frontends for YT music, then making a list of your top 10-20 artists and buying an album or T-shirt from each of their official websites. They will make a lot better margin on that and its better for their career than any amount of streams you can give as one individual. (Also go to shows when available locally)
Some of the categories for this infographic are arbitrary within the context of the music streaming market. Spotify is literally a more “incumbent” “monopoly” than the “big tech incumbents” if you only consider the segment of those companies’ operations related to music streaming. Spotify is probably the worst choice of all, both using the ethos provided by the infographic and by other metrics too. Tech companies with 150B capitalisation are big tech regardless of how much bigger others are.
I’ve been considering this and although I’m not one to pirate anything (my skills for this stayed in 1999) I’ve been buying CDs out of thrift stores and ripping them :)
I tend to wear a special hat that allows me to consume music in any format or device I like.
and then go donate to, or purchase music directly from the artists that I like.
yar har har.
Can’t ungoogle myself this time. YT music has probably the best catalog of all and it’s easily moddable
i decided to self host my library in as high of a res I could.
I had a FiiO X3 anyway so i already had a FLAC capable player.
in the end, even if i know it’s not for everyone. selfhosting is the only way to never lose what u love. so many of my lesser known tracks are just gone on spotify.
Never lose as long as you have a good backup strategy.
Very True, that is one of the few things people don’t realize enough when starting selfhosting. Backups and documenting what you did.
I have a raid NAS keeping my data in-house which has an encrypted backup in the cloud (Infomaniak kdrive) and my FiiO X3 SD card which is an additional portable backup. So on that front, I don’t worry too much.
I did this but I am not able to find new content.
That is indeed quite a gap and nothing that fills the “discover weekly/release radarr” that spotify gives you once you use it for a while, I tend to go to tons of music events and I pick up music here and there.
Browsing what’s popular/trending on beatport also helps a lot in adding fun tracks you wouldn’t know from the radio.
Yeah it sucks that the Spotify algorithm for both automated playlists and “shuffle” is a mess now. It used to be half-decent, but now from what I’ve heard from insiders, though no official confirmation or anything, is that the algorithms were modified to heavily favor sponsored artists, and so only really works with popular genres with lots of sponsored artists from major record labels, and “popular” songs, which means the more a song is played, the more often it gets played which becomes a self-fulfilling popularity cycle that excludes less well known songs. Really does a bad job for me with interests across many genres and wanting to hear more “b-sides” from artist I follow.
To be fair,i switched to Tidal for a bit because i got a several moth discount for talking with a product manager about what I thought the app needed (though they didn’t seem to take any of my advice anyway), and it’s no better than Spotify with finding new music. It paid artists better at the time and streaming quality is a bit better (not sure about now), but it was also missing a lot of artists I listen to, unfortunately.
I really miss the early days of Pandora when it used to use the “components” of music to cross genres and didn’t rely as heavily on how popular a song was and had just about all artists I could possibly want. Sure, I did a lot more skipping of songs back then, but now I just hear the same 50 or so songs over and over. I get really tired of it and don’t have the time to make my own playlists, not to mention even if I make a list, I want it shuffled, and even that just plays the same songs over and over way more than “random” would.
I’d love if there was a service for finding new music that allows me to hear new songs and then choose to purchase them if I want to hear them again.
And even better if it gives me a list later to review if I want to purchase so when I listen in the car I don’t have to touch 4 or more buttons to “like” a song. Never understood why Spotify, Tidal, etc., car apps always bury the like button and instead present a back button that doesn’t work if you aren’t in a predefined playlist anyway, and a shuffle button that I’m not going to want to turn off and on on the fly anyway. The like button should be immediately after the next and pause buttons in priority order. Such bad Ux design.
I also really miss Aimee Street that Amazon bought and killed. It was a cool way to get less popular music for cheap as well as getting the artist more exposure and more money the more often a track was purchased. Got so much stuff for pennies that I ended up really liking and buying a lot more from the artist.
Anyway, that’s my rant about music apps for today.
You could scrobble to listenbrainz and last.fm and pull suggestions from there
I listened to this one band’s music a decade ago, pretty small, just two guys in college making music. Looks like they broke up and took all their music off streaming platforms, really sucks that can happen
A glance at this makes me happy to just keep playing my mp3s.
Tidal is owned by Block, the owners of Square, which is the biggest POS vendor in the US. If that’s not big tech I don’t know what is.
Part of the reason I just shifted to a fully self-hosted setup.
Left Spotify because of all the bullshit they pull, tried out Tidal because of the higher quality and higher artist pay, but even if it is a substantially better platform, its ownership is questionable to say the least.
I dusted off bandcamp and learned to use slskd to build a full local high quality library powered by a Navidrome instance.
I switched from Spotify to tidal then deezer and finally landed on qobuz. While the app still has some problems and the music selection is not as massive as on Spotify (but mainly in super niche content), the higher artist pay and amazing soundquality are definitely worth it
Spotify to tidal then deezer and finally landed on qobuz
Steps out of Time Machine from 15 years ago
WTF
Deezer is from 2007, someone from 15 years ago could easily have heard of it
tidal is from 2014, so not quite
Qobuz is actually new, 2023
ackshually
More of a fun fact, I didn’t think Deezer or Tidal were THAT old
Wipur is the next big deal, but Boodle is likely to replace it. Slove is already dying, but iMPUR and Doofz look promising as replacements.
Poob has it for you.
I really wish Qobuz would let me bookmark individual songs in my browser. That’s the real sticking point for me (I use it).
If something’s not on Qobuz I can just listen on Soundcloud.
I really want to like Qobuz, but it’s hard when there’s a bug that starts playing music randomly after I pause the music for any reason, including playing sound from another app, and I have to kill the app (Android) for it to not start randomly playing again. (It’s the “There’s a problem playing the current track”-bug.)
I still use it alongside Bandcamp, but it’s hard to love Qobuz for now.
I recently moved from Spotify to Deezer and I’m considering moving to Quobuz, how’s the UX on it compared to Deezer?
I didn’t use deezer that long but found the ux a bit confusing (maybe because I got used to Spotify). Had no problem with the qobuz ux.
I’m trying to get most of what I like on CD and then host a jellyfin server
Qobuz also does purchaseable music, not just streaming.
Same with Apple Music.
Edit: this is slightly misleading. When I used “Apple Music” in this sense, it included the “iTunes Store”, which most people do not realize is a separate store where you can buy individual songs or albums. Both Apple Music and iTunes Store purchases show up in the same iTunes library.
Yeah until they remove the albums and you don’t keep them anymore afaik
You are complaining about something that is not specific to Apple Music. It can happen, and it sucks, but Apple is no different from any other online music purchasing store in this regard.
iTunes Store purchases are free from DRM and can be backed up just like any other libre digital purchases.
All songs offered by the iTunes Store come without Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. These DRM-free songs, called iTunes Plus, have no usage restrictions and feature high-quality, 256 kbps AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) encoding.
https://support.apple.com/guide/music/intro-to-the-itunes-store-mus3e2346c2/mac
I dunno about the other two, but you absolutely own the music you download from bandcamp. Trying to gaslight everyone into believing that apple music isn’t shit is naïve at best, complicit at worst.
Bought music from iTunes (not Apple Music, the streaming service!) is DRM-free just as Bandcamp, and I’ve lost music from my Bandcamp profile as well because the artist deleted their account (which I luckily downloaded most of beforehand).
The effectively only difference is Bandcamp offers lossless downloads.
This can happen to any store unfortunately. If a publisher withdraws, you’d no longer be able to download it. Qobuz has this too. Some publishers are quite scummy with this and upload a slightly different version, which no longer qualifies as the album you’ve purchased. You need to download it asap after buying.
Is Apple Music the same as iTunes?
Apple Music is the streaming subscription service. iTunes Store is where you go to buy individual songs or albums. They both show up in the same iTunes library.
It’s written in the image
It is, but I found it strange not seeing it in the actual purchaseable music section
Some of these services don’t offer themselves in turkey (tidal)
