65 points

Do the people who wrote those lyrics get a cut of Spotify gatekeeping them?

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75 points

hahahahaha spotify and paying someone lol

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15 points

Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.

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11 points

The majority of their investors are record labels now, so there’s also an incentive to prevent competing streamers from taking Spotify’s position

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21 points

Spotify purchases their lyrics from Musixmatch

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4 points

Musixmatch has a free, public database where lyrics are displayed. To contribute to the database, users can sign up and contribute lyrics, synchronizations, translations, and structuring to get points and move up levels. Musixmatch’s points have no redeemable value, but are instead a marker of a particular user’s contributions.

So no?

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37 points
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You as an individual can go access the public free database. Spotify as a corporation is a customer of musixmatch.

https://about.musixmatch.com/business/customer-stories/Spotify

I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to say?

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64 points

I’ve never used the free tier on Spotify and I don’t understand how anyone can. The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust. So yeah, not going to affect me, and I do enjoy reading the lyrics a lot.

That said, I am experimenting with swapping over to Apple Music because I feel Spotify has become too expensive.

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16 points

The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust.

For a mobile, there is a modded apk,I’ve never heard ads there. For a PC, web player in Firefox with uBlock Origin, there are no ads at all there. The same goes for Tidal, I’ve never paid for these apps.

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5 points
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https://lemmy.ml/comment/3223099 For both PC and Android.

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4 points
  1. spotx - well, I tried, but honestly, I don’t need one more app especially when everything works in the browser. Plus, I prefer portable setups and there’s no portable version of spotx, so, it’s pretty useless for me.
  2. It’s explicitly said on the Spowlo GitHub page that they use YouTube for downloading, so, there’s no way to get 320 kbps tracks or flacs. Instead, I’d recommend to try some Qobuz/Deezer-based solutions, there are quite a few of them there. Or use slavart or something like this, or good old soulseek, there’s even an Android client for it.
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4 points

Doesn’t solve the offline mode/taking a 13 hour flight use case, unfortunately.

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8 points

Well, that’s very specific case to be honest. In that case you can just download whatever you want beforehand, from soulseek, for instance. Generally people make preparations in advance for such things.

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2 points

Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you’ll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it’s an incredibly easy way to download music.

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0 points

I use an iPhone though and I’d prefer not to use YouTube for music, or anything, really.

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2 points

Oh man, you shouldn’t be using iphone in the first place, the most useless device piracy-wise.

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13 points

With xManager, the free tier comes quite close to premium. No ads, play whatever music you like. The only issues are lower sound quality & no downloads, which are really non-issues since you can just find other sources to download the music from, at flac quality

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9 points

The ads aren’t even for anything. It was just really patronising ads for Spotify Premium.

Their business model is genuinely to just annoy you into paying.

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5 points
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It only annoyed me into stopping using their service

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8 points

You either pay or you leave. Spotify wins, in both cases

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4 points

Spotify gives me ads and when I complain they tell me they’re not ads and that they’re offers lol. My only complaint.

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3 points

I recently flipped to apple music and apart from seeing a few songs missing on albums i don’t really listen to anyway, it’s only been an improvement. the lossless audio is quite nice

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56 points

I just love watching everyone freak out about Spotify’s shitty business practices while I’m casually looping YouTube videos with an adblocker.

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45 points

Eh, I switched to Spotify last year (++, of course) and there’s a lot to be said in favour of the Spotify algorithm when it comes to music recommendations, as opposed to YouTube.

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17 points

This. You get actual bang for your buck

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10 points

Anyone who uses spotify just to listen to their own music isn’t using spotify correctly.

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6 points

I have gotten good recommendations from both but of course Spotify more often

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1 point

Spotify algorithm pushes artists that pay them to push them to you. Get your recommendations via more organic means if you can. That means blogs, real people. Screw the spotify recommendation slop (and I say this as someone who has spotify premium.)

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23 points
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YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.

Edit: or better yet vimusic

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6 points

I finally got a sub to Apple Music when I learned I get lossless by default. Yummmmmm.

I still hoard flacs, but Apple Music is dope.

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5 points

Waiting for Spotify lossless to ditch flacs, I really want to like Tidal but I’ve had major issues every time I try and stick with it.

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3 points

YouTube’s sound quality is comparable to Spotify’s - IIRC it’s 128kbps AAC versus 160kbps MP3. Also, a static video’s bitrate is around 300-400kbps, so you’re not wasting that much bandwidth

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5 points

YouTube supports 160kbps opus, which should be pretty much transparent to our ears. But the audio is reencoded in the uploaded video, which then gets reencoded by YT again.

These multiple lossy reencodes are probably why YouTube audio sounds worse then Spotiy. Artists upload there songs as lossless wav/flac, which the gets reencoded/compressed a single time.

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2 points
Deleted by creator
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4 points

ublock origin blocks spotify ads well. I have found a lot of new artists using spotify, I avoided it for a pretty long time. When I find artists I like I usually buy their stuff on bandcamp cause i can get flacs

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4 points

There are some add-ons that turn off the video to avoid wasting energy.

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5 points

But they still waste the bandwidth. The YouTube music either premium or revanced is still the “most economical” way.

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1 point

I’m not sure if the bandwidth is wasted or not with those add-ons.

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48 points

To be fair, Spotify is unsuable without premium.

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40 points
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Spotify is unusable without premium Xmanager

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7 points

Is what someone would say if they didn’t know any better.

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3 points

Using Spotify without premium, as Spotify offers it, is unusable. There might be other options than paying, but the vanilla Spotify experience is horrendous

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1 point

That’s fair

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31 points

It does make sense though since Spotify has to pay musixmatch for the service.

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35 points
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Deleted by creator
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7 points

That’s true. But to be fair, I have added one song and synced a few. I didn’t do it because I wanted pay, I did it because I wanted the song’s lyrics to be on Spotify and on the app.

They built a service and people seem to like it, so I don’t mind.

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