Many of my friends use it. I’m old school and just keep a collection of mp3s on multiple devices for backup.
It’s all but impossible to purchase an mp3 anymore. Anywhere you can theoretically buy music does everything it can to lock you in to their ecosystem and prevent you from accessing your music outside of it.
Can anyone tell me how to cancel Spotify service? I went to their website, but it wouldn’t let me in without installing or logging into their app. And from their app I can’t find a way to cancel!
Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.
Tidal has decided to sunset it’s app, which means it’s basically on maintenance mode now. Somewhat off putting.
Its app on a specific platform? Or do you mean the entire service? Seems weird that they would sunset their only product.
I just use ViMusic or RiMusic or one of those types of forks. I believe it uses YouTube and other sources. It is ad-free and has the usual stuff you’d expect like suggestions, playlists, genres etc. Occasionally the source platform will make a change that breaks it, an update comes out fixes it.
That and there are still (probably ancient at this point) desktop clients that scrape your Pandora and download local copies of all the tracks. That’s another good way to never listen to ads.
https://spotube.krtirtho.dev/ is another alternative, but it uses the Spotify api (you can hook up your account) and backends it by playing music from yt.
Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.
I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.
Really hated when they started adding auto play of another unrelated podcast when my current podcast ends, like I don’t want your shitty podcast selection Spotify. The enshitification of the web continues.
I deleted the app the day the day they implemented this. The podcast they started playing was a 30 minute podcast advertising mattress firm or sleep country.
If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it
We can do this with crypto now.
Ideally you want to use a hardware wallet though so the payment money doesn’t have to sit in a hot wallet connected to the internet, but that means pressing a physical button to initiate the payment, but it could just sit beside the computer, and eventually be built into computers.
Alternatively, you could have a hot wallet and it’s all seamless, but you risk the loss of funds from a compromised browser.
It’d include a permanent record of your ownership of what you purchased as well as long as you keep that seed phrase around, so you could redownload it if you lost the files.
Edit: And if the system was built around something like IPFS then the files would always exist.
For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.
What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
I’m just amazed they haven’t tried to use AI to write and record their shoddy muzak, cutting out the musician all together.
the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it’s a great watch if you understand german!
it’s called Dirty Little Secrets
EDIT: here’s episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call “ghost musicians”
Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations
So instead of the cents that artists get from streaming you propose they get nothing at all? You can buy from Bandcamp if the artists are on it and use ListenBrainz.
Exactly, they aren’t losing anything and there’s hope a better system will come along.
Agreed on Bandcamp though. The very few artists who use it get my money through there.
Didnt bandcamp get bought by some big company a little while ago? Sp bandcamp just doesent have the library yet. I do like it though in its current form (until it gets enshittified)
Can I import my history from Last? I’ve had my lfm account for like… almost 20 years, and I really don’t want to have to start off blank…
yes, you can connect them and you can import from last.fm. I was in the same situation as you, first I had both simultaneously running for some time, because I needed to get comfortable with the idea of removing last.fm. I also have data since 2008 so I felt a bit insecure ‘risking’ that. But after a while I concluded there was really no need for me to keep last.fm so I removed it. Haven’t had any regrets. ListenBrainz isn’t perfect but, despite it’s small development team, it’s sgnificantly improving every year.
https://listenbrainz.org/settings/music-services/details/ Here you can “Connect to your Last.FM account to import your entire listening history and automatically add your new scrobbles to ListenBrainz.”
Thanks! I didn’t want to make an account just to find out if I could or not. I’ll poke at this soon :D
“Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians.”
Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection…
What’s the equivalent for the movie and TV streaming?
I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.
Yeah. Didn’t work on Librewolf (only stock FF), the UI was slow, the recommendations (the reason I wanted to try) were pretty bad, the ads couldn’t be blocked properly and left a few seconds of silence in their place (the only site I encountered that behaved like this!), and logged me out repeatedly (sometimes mid-session), presumably due to me using a proxy.
An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre). How was that even possible?
LOL a couple obvious reasons are that Spotify listeners don’t get to vote for grammy awards - only a few thousand people do - and to be eligible for a grammy an album has to be released in the United States. The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality. Jimi Hendrix never won a grammy. Neither did Bob Marley or Diana Ross. There’s a lot already wrong with the grammys.
The fake musicians and possibly AI-generated songs are more interesting. If the music industry is trying to eliminate musicians it wouldn’t be to avoid paying them - they’ve already figured out lots of ways to do that - it would be to have complete control over the music.
The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality.
Do you know who Jon Batiste is?
The album won on quality. The sales spiked after the win.
Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I’d love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.
In my experience, the same fake albums show up on Deezer as Spotify. Frankly, I think the best way is Bandcamp. For for an album, download it forever. Stop paying to listen to the same music over and over and get DRM free tracks you can listen to your way while giving the money to the artists selling their albums directly.
Bandcamp the union busting company that laid off like 75% of its staff over 2023…?
Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
I couldn’t find any info on this. Do you have an article?
Not about the removal of said songs. But basically it’s a rapper known to use lot of controversial metaphors often using lot of etnic stereotypes in his lyrics about pretty much every communities including his own. Some anti antisemitic association compiled lyrics they took issue with on a video they published on twitter and it reached the prime minister. He then tweeted about starting an investigation on said rapper for terrorist and nazi apology in his texts. It went nowhere cause there is simply no such things in those lyrics but apparently deezer didn’t need a conviction to decide some songs had to go. If you want to search for more details rapper name is freeze corleone, be warned tho, he like to play with controversy so a lot of his lyrics contain conplotist bullshit and dictator/terrorist namedroping. But it’s never about their ideology that’s why talking about apology is stupid imo.
I was recommended RiMusic from Lemmy, using the YouTube music selection.
It has a radio function but it makes wierd presumptions: say I radio off a synthwavey film soundtrack song, it’ll favor more show music that has little in common with the original selection. Maybe it’s just me.
I’ve been using Deezer for almost a year now.
Things I like:
- Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
- Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.
Things I (we) don’t like:
- As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows (“hits” in other word).
- My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don’t have servers.
I find Flow fantastic for discovering new songs.
i use it with deemix-gui to download my music. works like a charm (using your ARL as login method still works)
I have now used Deezer for a bit over half a year after Spotify.
The song selection is pretty equal. The playlists can even automatically be imported/exported with TuneMyMusic.
I think Deezer’s best feature is the song radio which finds songs of similar genre, and it really does find songs and artists I have favorited after hearing them. I always found that feature in Spotify to work pretty poorly.
However, if you don’t have an exact song in mind, finding music by theme is terrible in Deezer. There are few set categories, but the amount of user-created playlists is very small, compared to Spotify.
I’d recommend giving it a try, but I wouldn’t say its better or worse than Spotify. Just different.
I’ve been using Deezer since Tidal dropped Plex support. So far the library seems to be the same as Spotify, at least I wasn’t missing too many songs when transferring my Spotify playlists in.
I like the built-in song identifier and radio station support. The song quizes are a little gimmicky, but kinda fun. I probably haven’t used it enough for recommendations to get me down, but so far nothing crazy has popped up there.
I’m not sure if it’s just my phone, but every couple days when I first launch the app, I need to close and reopen it to get it to load, my desktop app constantly throws up a banner saying the app is offline, but it doesn’t actually effect functionality, so it’s just annoying more than anything.
Using it for four years or so, very happy with it.
From the article:
"…journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
…
"Now she writes:
‘What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.’
In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels."
Once they get maket shared they start extracting…
To normal people this is called enshitification
This should theoretically at least be illegal, as they abuse the power of the platform to favor certain tracks unfairly.
Any action would require a government that pretends to care for the pedons.
Spotify is AFAIK Swedish, so there you go.
PS:
I guess you mean peons.
Pedons is apparently types of soil: https://www.britannica.com/science/pedonSpotify is AFAIK Swedish
It was started in Sweden where its operations are still based, but it’s headquartered in Luxembourg and it chose to IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.
Luxembourg screams “tax efficiency” to me, so their list of pre-IPO investors must be quite the thing.
All western regimes sold out us out, mate
Exploiting us is the MO as workers and customers
I disagree, I live in Scandinavia in one of the best democracies in the world.
EU is mostly OK IMO. Democracy can never be perfect, because it’s about compromises. But without the compromises you’ll have a real dystopia.
But here is just about as good as it gets at our current level of development.
So get real why don’t you?Well put. Cheers, gallons of glogg and a Merry Christmas to you.
Sweden has regressing with the rest of the west.
Sure they have it better than most of oecd but the corporate take over is underway, they botched the immigration policy which resulted with serious crime rates…
A tiny foil wearing person would think that this was done on purpose to undo Swedish strong socio economic policy
Time will tell but the trend for Sweden is not looking good same way as other countries…
Published in January 2025, seeing the URL, huh.
The article is an excerpt from the full report, which comes out next month.
So basically Payola 2.0
Can someone explain why this is bad? It seems like normal behaviour of corporations.
Or has spotify previously committed to being a fair market?
I’m just surprised that anyone didn’t assume this was happening. If most people are using playlists generated by Spotify, how are they not expecting Spotify to choose songs that are also in their interest? Furthermore, how would this be different from the practices of a radio station? Seems like manufactured outrage to me.
This is like a soup joint that’s trying to see how much they can piss in the broth before customers notice.
This is a completely disingenuous comparison.
yeah, it’s more like they piss directly into peoples mouthes, but it turns out a few people are into that and can’t get enough of it
According to the RIAA, Spotify is a leading contributer to music revenue going up over the past decade plus https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-Year-End-Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf
Prior to spotify, people bought songs or albums, and were locked into their favorites or pirated music, which obviously contributed nothing to artist’s pockets.
Spotify is not the evil entity here, in my opinion. Record labels are.
Edit: Unsure how reliable of a source this is, but steaming reduced piracy levels by ~20% https://www.alliotts.com/articles/streaming-has-a-consumer-and-a-piracy-problem-the-answer-lies-in-the-music-industry/
I do think that we have become far removed from the old days, because music piracy was extremely prevelant before these services came out.
A couple of years ago we reached the tipping point where artist are paying more for Spotify to promote their music than Spotify is paying the artists. Spotify is more evil than even the record companies at this point.
Streaming only reduced piracy because it presented a more convenient option. This formula has already changed with their predatory behavior.
The reason artist create has little to do with money. It was never about that and those that think it make shitty music and are owned by corporations.
Technology has set us free from corporate control, but we have to shun commercial platforms. We will never be free running to the wide open arms of business ready to fleece us and lock up our culture behind their pay walls.
Enshitification is here for every corporate platform. There is no escape. The days are 0% interest aka free money are now long gone.
That would be a health hazard, so it’s not really comparable.
It seems more like a soup joint using cheaper ingredients in their dishes, which is just… normal? I don’t get what the big deal is.
It’s normal if you accept it. You do not have to accept it. There’s also a good chance that it’s illegal in Spotify’s case, if not in the US then likely in Europe.
Under what law?
Likely antitrust.
That said if you’ve gone down the path of reasoning that says things that aren’t illegal are okay, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I suppose you could argue that Spotify can abuse its position in the same way that Walmart bullies its suppliers and Microsoft freezes out competition, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here. Like I said, it sounds like they’re just preferring cheaper sources.
This is behavior is anti competitive under both US and EU and member states’ law.
Issue is the regulatory capture along with strong corporate lobbying on these issues.
If you are with it, that’s cool. But behavior has historical precedent and it requires the state to set boundaries on the extraction practices
Better check the TOS doesn’t include acceptance of various concentrations of piss…
The normal behavior of corporations IS bad. By definition.
IANAL but it seems akin to the antitrust case against Microsoft for bundling their own web browser in with Windows or movie studios also owning theaters and giving preferential treatment to their own films.
You seem to be saying that something normal and legal cannot be bad.
Just because it’s normal doesn’t me it isn’t bad.
Unfair competition.
There’s a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it’s Spotify, on top of your label
Yes and…
Lily Allen and Kate Nash are on OnlyFans and make more money there…
Yeah, but that’s probably partially due to their existing fame.
Well, yeah.
They make more money from OF than from Spotify… and they are not doing porn.
I mean they paid Joe Rogan $100 million dollars so they have already wrecked their reputation.
Yeah, I switched to deezer then, haven’t had any trouble with it.
Ngl, I canceled them and haven’t gone back since. Don’t really miss it much, I try to use the same cost as my subscription to buy music every month on CD when I can.
I have recently discovered Qobuz (French company). You can purchase digital music. They aren’t cheap, but they have selection and hi-res music (sometimes 24 bit).
But good on you for the CDs, too!
I heard they pay artists a lot more. Need to double check.
Try bandcamp too. Almost all goes to the artist and you get FLACs.
I’ve used them plenty but…
They recently got acquired by a turd company and if I remember correctly, already issued a round of layoffs.
Don’t recall the details. Check.
I cancelled it the second I found out how easy it was to get it for free.
I still buy FLAC releases individually from artists I like, I just use Shittify for discovery. Fuck 'em.
I just want to remind people that you may still have a used CD store in your city, also 2nd hand stores for CDs. They tend to be quite cheap these days.
