As apparently, this move is made to target audiobook listeners and podcast listeners, can I recommend https://audiobookshelf.org
I call on all small artists to boycott Spotify.
You will make no money on it but they depend on you for their business.
Do not perpetuate or support the continued impoverishment and humiliation of musicians and the degradation of artistic culture.
How will small artists get to make themselves known, though? Not everyone has the option to play live.
I got off Spotify like a year ago it’s been nice
And this is where i hop off spotify, stayed too long
Hmm, I use Spotify to stream a wake up mix (approved by my SO,) to an Amazon Echo via Home Assistant. Currently, I know of no way to stream arbitrary music files to an Echo. And I know of no consumer grade device that can accept the command to “Shut your cake hole” when we’re tired of listening to stuff while being compatible with HA. This is … inconvenient.
Could this help? https://github.com/rosskouk/asknavidrome
Spotify is making bank on musicians who get jack squat in return. Don’t use Spotify.
Should probably suggest an alternative.
Why? Streaming has become a scam and everyone seems okay with it. Like everything online. Everything is an expensive subscription to rent entertainment. My suggestion? Buy CDs. Buy directly from the artists. Or pirate it, at least Spotify won’t make any money from it.
How is Spotify a scam? I can probably at most buy one CD per month for the same price as Spotify. Yet Spotify gives unlimited access to good quality versions of almost every song out there. Even with raised prices it’s still a way better deal for most consumers than buying music directly.
Personally I tend to also buy a few albums a year, because I like owning them and I like supporting the artists. But the convenience of having every track at your fingertips is hard to beat
It’s a scam for artists. They make a pittance. Meanwhile, Spotify is raking it in. It may be an amazing deal for you, but musicians are making nothing from it.
that is why spotify is a scam. it may be a good deal for you, the consumer, but it has made it even harder for artists to make money off their work.
at least Spotify won’t make any money from it.
And the artists still won’t. So given in either case, the artist don’t make squat; using Spotify is easier. So, use spotify.
Bandcamp Fridays.
Especially if you are a musician. Musicians need to boycott it. 99.9999% of musicians wouldn’t even notice if they weren’t on it but it would destroy Spotify.
It’s not even worth indie and small artists time to put it on there. Spotify has now officially demonetised all songs with less than 1,000 streams: https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-has-now-officially-demonetised-all-songs-with-less-than-1000-streams-3614010
I remember hearing about this. And I bet you the reason they ended up with so many songs with less than 1000 plays is because of their own algorithm. Apart from creating money problems for most musicians, they have been actively narrowing our artistic culture by effectively inbreeding modern music. Its really bad. We need musicians (and all other artists) to express and reflect who we are and what we’re about. They empower us. I feel like contemporary music has become narrowed down to nothing but hedonism, vanity and self-loathing; largely thanks to the likes of spotify.
BTW if you’re interested in something which is good, check out https://radiofreefedi.net/ It’s music from artists on the fediverse. I’ve had some great sessions listening to their comfy channel and discovered some awesome new artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
I’m familiar. I have some tracks on there. I do metal though, and I have no clue when they actually play it.
Nice, what is your artist name? Maybe I’ve heard you on it!
Harbinger of Storms. I’m also here: https://darkphotonstudio.bandcamp.com/album/all-of-the-stars-are-dead
I’ll believe it when I see it- Spotify lossless was announced years ago. I don’t believe them.
Hope I don’t have to pay for audiobooks I don’t listen to because that’s a waste. Spotify should just stick to what they do OK which is music. I’ll stick to music only.
Apparently you can opt out and forego the charge.
i already pay for youtube premium, I will just start using music and say fuck it.
Cool, I already use AntennaPod and it’s great!
Spotify has plans to raise prices and still no plan to pay normally the artists the platform lives on.
They recently just changed to stiff the artists even further.
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Can someone recommend kid/family friendly alternative? Is Tidal easy to use/navigate?
If the raise prices too much I’m going to finalise my plan to move to YouTube Music family plan. Additional bonus will be no more adds on YouTube.
Don’t fall for this self hosting stuff. It’s well meant and great for single tech enthusiasts, but with family, you won’t have enough time to do the required upkeep and the whinning you will here from dependents when stuff goes wrong isn’t worth it.
You can try NewPipe, which is free. IIRC I downloaded it from F-Droid. Maybe someone else can reply and confirm that’s the best place to get it.
You can also get the APK from their GH. Great app, doesn’t solve the family support problem though, and I’m not sure that it works on Apple devices.
Just a heads up to everyone, quitting Spotify and buying / “procuring” your own music and playing it via a music player makes reading this quite cathartic. Do it for the moral superiority and self esteem boost for no effort you come to the internet for anyways.
I feel like piracy and moral superiority don’t really belong together
I always try to buy my music first, digital only though. I don’t have space for CDs or the like. If the option is not available (not common), the tricorn goes on. And normally I would go through any loophole I can find to get it legally. But damn, the Japanese really don’t like doing business with foreigners.
What kind of japanese stuff do you listen to? I might be able to recommend a place
How do you even buy music anymore?
There’s quite a few ways actually:
- Bandcamp (preferred)
- just google it
- Artist’s official website
- contact artist via social media
If none of the above has worked, this is no longer an issue about whether you want to pay for the product or not, it’s a supplier problem.
Also, when it comes to specific platforms, Apple Music is quite good, though they make it rather painful to buy music if you use Linux
It is to be noted that while iTunes is DRM-free at this point (which is very nice and surprised me when I found out) it is unfortunately still lossy compressed audio which the perfectionist in me really doesn’t like :P
Come on Apple, sell me your funny ALAC, you have it for Apple Music anyway
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. It doesn’t bother me that much, since I personally can’t tell the difference in audio quality, but that’s still unfortunate to know
I mean same, but I’d still like to have lossless audio regardless :P
I’ve never seen an artist on Bandcamp that I actually recognize.
Telling anyone to “just Google it” is proof that you have no interest in a good faith discussion.
Telling anyone to “just Google it” is proof that you have no interest in a good faith discussion.
How on earth you could read what they wrote and say it’s in bad faith means either A) you don’t know what that term means or B) it’s become so diluted and repeated that it’s lost all meaning. Perhaps both idk.
Like come on. They gave 4 suggestions, you pretended it was 1, and you’re also ignoring other means suggested prior.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Please elaborate. Because they’re right, and you are wrong. And they reasoned in what way.
Just Google it.
Bandcamp is good for indie artists and if you want to discover new artists. I’ve found quite a few diamonds in the rough on there. A surprising amount of metal / punk artists sell via Bandcamp if you’re into that.
How is 'just Google it" not a valid option? This is literally how you can find 99% of all problems about the internet especially for finding where to legally buy digital products within the first few websites. You know what is good for business when you’re trying to sell a product? Making sure its one of the first few, if not the first choice the customer gets when looking at the default search engine.
Moving on from that I’m guessing getting in contact with the artist is not an option? Y’know the other 2 points?
Can I play devil’s advocate a little bit here, because I was really unaware that this ever worked for anything except indie artists on Bandcamp. So Bandcamp works for them or for discovering new music obviously.
I didn’t know artists ever sold digital music on their websites, but that does make sense, so I checked - if I google Taylor Swift and go to her website, there it is, digital music purchase. Great.
I went to U2’s website, and the only music I can buy there is vinyl. I don’t want vinyl, I want digital. You can buy merch, but I’m after music, not merch. Looking further, there’s all sorts of galleries and information about each album and song, but you still can’t buy the music.
Other mainstream artists I googled didn’t even go that far. Googling them brought up a wikipedia link, social media links, tours. All stuff I don’t want. Now your list has “contact artist via social media” - setting aside the fact that it’s unlikely a popular mainstream artist will even reply to anyone at all about anything, this is a real point of friction. I don’t want to have to contact an artist to find out some alternative way to get their music. If I’m buying something online, there needs to be some way to buy it online and ready to go. If we have to wait a couple of days or weeks for a reply that may or may not come - the process failed.
If I had to guess, they would probably say something like “it’s on spotify”.
So yes it probably is a supplier problem, but it seems to me that this is happening for the majority of popular artists if a majority of music people like is mainstream. I assume if you like the majority of indie music then that’s probably not the case.
I suspect that big artists are making so much from streaming that they’re not concerned with direct to consumer. And that’s fine because they are the easiest to torrent.
Bandcamp or whatever downloads website for small and torrent for big.
No worries, I’ll take your U2 example and try it from my end (I don’t listen to them so I can’t decide on what album(s) specifically you are looking for). I’m going to be frank, it was a pain, but I did find zdigital (7digital outside of Australia) selling their albums without physical media. But getting there, I had to see that the U2 website/publisher website did not even advertise it. It was like the 5th option on duckduckgo after searching for
u2 digital download
I’m sure you would have better luck if you slide in the specific album that you were looking for.
Important to note is that you aren’t googling for that artist or album, you’re googling
artist album digital download
I do agree with you that mainstream artists and publishers are going down this route probably due to some deals with streaming services, but unfortunately that is the reality we live in now. Additional work will be required by the consumer to get what they want. If the publishers start completely stopping this at some point all I can say is that I have the disposable income to buy the products I want and I am going to get it. Whether the publishers sell it to me or not is their decision to make.
