So OP has posted this everywhere, even getting it flagged on Hacker News. Article is weak sauce:
I would agree with author that there are many problems with Spotify but concentrating on the artist revenue per stream and then publishing your top hits of the year as YouTube links? Really? Go and find out what the artist share per stream is on YouTube (regular YouTube video) for soundtracks. I’ll wait. Hint: there’s a reason that soundtracks using unauthorised copyrighted work get muted or taken down rather than revenue being redistributed.
Recommending a paid desktop MacOS music app for local content? There are hundreds of local music players but OK… but none of the criticisms of Spotify were about the client! Foobar2000 (mentioned for mobile playback) supports Spotify streaming…
Article seems to boil down to ‘I got tired of Spotify recommendations and I am an aspiring musician at an early stage in my professional career so I am recommending Bandcamp and soap boxing about artist revenue share’ . There’s a reason that people, some with local music libraries in the TeraByte range listen to Spotify. There’s also all the competing services - Apple Music; YouTube; Deezer; Tidal; Amazon; etc…
Recommendation to OP: If you are trying to persuade people on something, then decide what point you want to concentrate on, consider the pro’s and cons for your position, and make your point based/reinforced on that. Don’t meander around a bunch of inchoate personal gripes and affections that don’t really relate to one another or any particular point.
Adding our Boys Qobuz to the list of competing services Paying in 2018 13 times more than Spotify And yu get to own the musics you buy on Qobuz and can put it on your NAS for example
I’ve been using Qobuz for a while now and it’s pretty good. Good sound quality, good library, all that. I used Tidal before and it has good quality too, but it didn’t have as many albums or artists that I listen too, it seems more geared towards hip hop.
Not going to give substack any views, so I’ll pass on this one
They outright won’t ban Nazi content from their website. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
They commodify and profit from Nazis on their platform. When called out for it, their response was “We don’t like Nazis either, but we won’t do anything about them and we’ll continue to take our cut from their presence on our platform”
Oh I remember hearing that quote. That was them? I had a conversation about it like a week ago. I read “substack” in the article but all tech names are pretty interchangeable to me. They all have the same groupings for the type of thing they are and substack sounded like image hosting or something to do with coding or some template bank for some kind of necessity like invoices or something. Point is, tech names are stupid and I didn’t even put the name to the site as I read it. Good to know, though.
If you’re so petty about it, use archive.org or archive.is to view the page
Viewing a website doesn’t mean supporting the website. Especially if you use an adblocker.
If you have an adblocker, and you’re not visiting any of those nazi sites directly, but do derail a comment section about a totally unrelated article? I say it is, yeah.
Then again, I can be pretty petty about circlejerks.
A while back I realized my phone has 256GB of internal storage and since I don’t take pictures or put anything else on it, I was running around with 256GB of free storage wherever I went.
And that’s pretty much when it clicked for me that I was paying Spotify for access to music I already have from the pre-spotify days for a convenience that no longer is valid.
I dove into my box of CD’s and DVDs and put the 30 something gigs of music I collected since the mid 90’s on my phone and haven’t used spotify since.
EDIT: and, yeah, I’ve re-instanced my music, movie and series downloaders and went back to sailing the high seas.
I switched to Netflix/Spotify, because of the convenience and timing of release they provided, they were also more reliable in terms of quality (“free” versions labeled ass 1080p often aren’t actually 1080p, etc).
But the sheer cost of Spotify, Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, etc, etc, etc to listen to and watch what I want, has made the convenience/cost calculation move from being acceptable to being even more than what it used to be buying CD’s and DVD’s.
On top of that the audio and video quality have deteriorated over the years, availability has become spotty, at best (like certain services removing movies and shows, even some removing movies and shows you paid extra for), we’re also dealing with these services pushing ads on top of us already paying subscriptions and fragmenting their market to the extent everything has become entirely unaffordable.
I used to buy maybe 2-3 CD’s in a year and a boxset of a show and a movie once a year.
Now simply subscribing to every service that has something I want for just 1 month costs more than what I spent per year previously.
Gabe Newels words are still right on the money.
Piracy is a service problem and the service provided these days makes Piracy the better option, again.
Unlike Disney, Netflix, etc, Spotify is the only streaming service where I never think oh this is missing let’s find a torrent.
Music streaming (at least for the consumer) is so much better than video. Where it’s super scattered over multiple services all wanting money.
Maybe you don’t listen to many international songs, I always find grey songs on the playlists I like.
I find that I can only find about 90 percent of what I want to listen to. That’s more than enough of a burden to opt out entirely. Live albums, demos, collabs, and obscure dead bands you can’t really find with great success
Yeah I’ve never fully switched to Spotify because of that but I do like their library and ease of use, the playlist function we use for parties a lot and it’s just easy and everyone understands it already.
As a Phish head and purveyor of bootlegs, and sometimes specific masters of classic albums, my personal music collection has always been a sacred space.
I agree with her arguments about Spotify overall, but this amused me-
To celebrate my newfound freedom, I downloaded a 13-minute long Taylor Swift megamix, and CAN YOU DO THAT ON SPOTIFY? I didn’t think so. I also then went on to Bandcamp after I got paid the other day and bought some music. It felt good.
As if Spotify somehow prevented her from doing those things anyway…
Obviously this is presented in the sense that being a Spotify user means you’re not pursuing other methods of music acquisition, and to be fair that’s probably the case for most people, you’re paying for a service that’s supposed to meet all your music listening needs after all. Personally I also use other means like vinyl, YouTube, and a large local collection but that’s because I’m deep into music, also as a maker of it.
