As soon as I need to subscribe to multiple services to find my music I’m going back to piracy. Fuck that anti consumer shit.
You should already be going back to piracy. Spotify is scamming you and artists.
fun fact:
Jellyfin works for music (and audio books) just as well as it does for movies and TV shows!
And being open source, there are apps specific to certain use cases. Like on ios there’s Finamp for music and Plappa for audio books.
It also streams in FLAC quality!
Plex also has Plexamp which works great for music, if you’re like me and got the lifetime Plex pass long ago.
Lifetime Plex Pass here too. I got it long ago.
I still migrated my server and uninstalled it once I tried Jellyfin for a few days because of the performance difference alone.
yee, so far I haven’t found anything close to Plexamp on features that I want, that lifetime license paid for itself a long time ago
Is there a FOSS music discovery service? I like to listen to 1920’ to 1960’, and the radios and discovery in those era on Spotify work extremely well.
I’m not sure. In my case with Jellyfin it’s fully self-hosted and not connected to any kind of discovery service.
I appreciate the value of automated music discovery services. I listened to so much last.fm in the early days of it. But like I have posted about before, I have been trying the old fashioned way lately and liking it a lot. I search for the best bands, best songs, best albums of a certain genre or period. It gives me some listicles on music websites and some discussions between what seem like real people, etc.
So then I just start downloading entire albums or discographies, and then work those in to listen at work. Maybe listen to albums as albums, or shuffle play all songs from the artist, or make a playlist, or just shuffle play my entire library.
When a song really jumps out at me, I’ll generally add it to my ever-growing playlist.
The piracy service still sucks compared to Spotify.
Another annoying part about this is how well everything is integrated.
- I can switch my playback between mobile phone, PC, and living room sound system at any time
- I can join a playback session on a Bluetooth speaker that a friend started to skip or queue songs
All of that is driven by monopoly which is bad, sure, but shit’s convenient af
Yeah I’ve trying to get away from Spotify for years. I still pay for Tidal and yt music too but Spotify service is unmatched by anything out there. It’s not even close.
I used an old ipod to put my songs on, as well as an old iPhone since Apple.has a decent default music player versus the free version of Spotify.
Because piracy is way better for artists
I would guess it has a healthier impact on artists as a group than Spotify does, yeah.
Probably I should develop other habits, but I find hard to improve the amount of good discoveries I got through Spotify with barely no effort… I do the effort to “obtain” those I like from time to time, yet still the effort is low, efficient and worth of it
My fear is, when do those turn into trashy AI music so they don’t have to pay artists.
I have doubts trashy AI music can trigger me at all… in any case nothing is forever, so I am paying attention to the drift in the offer and quality, at current pace my forecast is that within 5 years my musical habits will have drifted away from spotify to something I do not know yet…
The only continum in my whole life is my ever growing offline library, modernized with technology pace, and that is fed regularly and more likely will be preserved… and if someday I lost everything, I will still have my love for the music I find worthy to remember…
nummy treats
tbh you can get by with skipping whole pirate thing and just listen to local and internet radio there’s still a lot of good things out there
Boy, this band’s name sure made this headline confusing.
I didn’t realize this was band related until your post
I’m only vaguely aware of them because one of their songs was used as the House theme, and I still thought the article was describing an upcoming cyber attack on Spotify.
I wish more bands I like were on bandcamp
Tidal HiFi is really good, better sound quality, has most music.
They also pay the artists better.
Its also cheaper, somehow.
my only complaint with tidal is they such at properly assigning music to the correct artists. i’ve opened tickets by contacting their twitter and they sometimes fix the issue but only until the next release of a song
TBH if you’re an artist you’ll probably make more money by NOT being on streaming platforms and having people buy your music directly - spotify in particular pays fuck all, you might as well have your music on The Pirate Bay. Hell, putting your own music on pirating platforms is probably better for discovery, and people who like your music will buy the albums.
I had friends try to get me into Spotify, never liked it.
I use antennaPod for podcasts, highly recommend
Fellow AntennaPod user. All my podcasts I listened to elsewhere, no adds, no political bullshit, all good.
Yeah an amazing podcast app
Spotify must die
Have you guys read the article ? Spotify is denying the claim of massive attack and other platforms as misinformation, they are claiming that the firm the CEO invested in is only working towards military defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. I don’t know what is true and don’t have the time to check, but it looks to me like a decent response if true.
Not saying Spotify isn’t problematic, but that might be overblown misinformation.
Then again, if you want to cancel Spotify, good, I’m all for it, I don’t like the enshitification they are undergoing. But this reason might not be the one you should put on the resignation form, it might not send the right message to Spotify.
The company, Helsing, pledges to only sell towards democratic governments. I think it’s a very slippery slope. In my opinion, once you’ve taken a step towards the military industrial complex, you are the military industrial complex.
I’m not sure how much funding came from the profits of Spotify. It could have come from other investments. Ultimately, you have Spotify leadership involved in a defence company that makes drones. Ethically, I don’t like my money going towards someone who invests in this.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and our best ally ever, and really good at licking rocks in the desert too.
They’re more than an ally! According to Mike Huckabee, Israel is America’s wife.
It’s good to have sane and rational people running things, with yearly visits to lick rocks in the desert and everything.
The way we’re heading I sense warp drive and replicators are just around the corner.
Spotify has been shitty from inception IMO. I’ve tried it a couple times at different points and first off, just didn’t like the UX at all.
The “free” tier is unusable if you’re an active listener and not the type to just have something, anything, playing as background noise.
My biggest pet peeve with Spotify and most of the other big modern streamers: There’s a tenuous connection between the listed artist and a “real” artist, so there’s no way to tell if you’re listening to something intentionally created that can be found elsewhere, or just procedurally generated slop uploaded by some rando. Google is just as bad if not worse with this since merging Google Play Music with YouTube. Apple seems to get this part right, but I have no other reason to switch.
Anyway, that’s not even touching any political/ethics/business aspects of Spotify. It’s hard to imagine it becoming any shittier, and I’ve always wondered how they have the market share they do. At some point I realized that it’s kind of just the default option for the more casual listener who isn’t already slotted into Apple or Google for everything. Plus it has official, polished integrations with a lot of other apps/ecosystems (e.g. Discord, Xbox).
I’d sooner bring lossless versions of all my stuff local and tag every track by hand than give them any amount of money, but it’s clearly not made for me so that doesn’t mean much.
I’ve been driven more to web radio stations, even terrestrial radio (streamed or actual FM). there are some great free/non-commercial choices out there still with human DJs. (Shout-out to kexp). Human-curated radio is still viable for discovery and going out of your comfort zone musically, and human “taste-makers” still have a place, which is reassuring. There are a few newish low power FM stations around me which are actually good, which is an interesting and unexpected development.
You can put one of the other reasons, such as: a) they pay some podcasters a LOT of money and have one of the worst payouts to artists out of the streaming services b) they donated to the inauguration of a cheeto, c) they are just getting lossless audio, but at a lower quality than some other services
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I read it and also don’t know what’s true beyond the headline which, in my mind, was the key takeaway regardless of the bands motives.
I was a reasonably happy Rhapsody/Napster user until crypto bros bought it and turned it into fucking garbage. They literally broke the damn app (not phone, entire web app) for weeks after some weird change where they put crypto crap into it. It was entirely unusable.
After that I gave up. Spotify has far more support and integrations. I don’t care for Spotify and how little they pay their artists, but it works and support is far wider.
I’d go back to Napster if they weren’t ass as they did actually pay their artists better. Their app footprint is tiny and support is weak. I integrate a lot of stuff with my home assistant and other things; trying to do it with Napster would likely be a frustrating dead end.
Give Qobuz a try. I did the free trials on a few services and found it to be the most feature complete
Because fuck’em, that’s why!
Good. Streaming is for cowards
This news finally made me get off my fat lazy arse and do what I’ve been telling myself to do for far too long…
Hello Qobuz
I love it. The streaming services deserve to die, for their shady practices towards artists…
Because the record labels were so much better…
We are in need of a good alternative, where the money we give the service goes to the artists based on how much we’ve listened to that artist personally, not on some amalgamated metrics. I want to be able to open my account and see I’ve given £2 this month for bandwidth and management costs, £1.20 to Taylor Swift, £1.50 to Massive Attack, £1 to Portishead, etc.
If at any point you can make money by buying accounts and playing your own tracks over and over, then the service has fucked up.
The worst part is every little bit gets chopped up before it ever makes it a musician.
Have to pay a label/publisher, then you have to pay a Metadata distributor, and Spotify, plus any other royalties for samples if they’re used.
Fun times.
I wonder if something could be built based on fediverse technology. Artists could host their own instance of some music library software, and have granular control over how it’s monetized - pay per stream, buy a digital copy of a specific song/album, have monthly fees for different tiers of access, you could maybe even sell merch or concert tickets on it - kind of like Patreon, except the instance owner has full control over what’s offered and how it’s monetized. And then in the client for this new thing, you could have a list of all the instances and choose which ones you want to give money to, and if it spoke ActivityPub, you could integrate some sort of feed into Lemmy/Mastodon/etc clients.
Why bother with the federation if every artist is going to have to host their own instance to keep control of how content is played and monetized?
For the same reasons Lemmy is federated:
- Resilience - if one server goes down, only that one artist’s music becomes unavailable
- Control - if the artist owns the server, they can control it/moderate it as they see fit
You can’t really count on either of those things if you’re putting your music up on Spotify, Tidal, etc.
Edit: there would be nothing stopping several artists from handing together and hosting all their music from a single server/instance, if they wanted to. That’s the point though, there’s choice
Okay, so what I really meant was how federation the way it works here would be of any use. It’d actually make the artist lose all control, as everything gets mirrored.
If we use the federation as nothing but a discovery mechanism for other nodes, I guess it would accomplish those goals. But then you could do it without the federation too. Have a central discovery server so that any apps immediately know where to connect, instead of the user having to choose (federation is confusing for normies, remember?)
Right, ActivityPub would really just be the discovery mechanism, obviously you wouldn’t want the actual music to be mirrored to other instances.
If you use a centralized discovery server, you’re right back to where you are with Spotify - at the mercy of whoever controls the discovery server, and shit out of luck if the discovery server goes down. Federation is only confusing for normies because the clients for popular fediverse apps don’t do a good job of making that part clear (or hiding it away).
Agreed. fwiw Bandcamp is currently kinda like that for their digital tracks tho it was bought out a couple years ago so will begin enshittifying any day now…
Afaik that’s the system youtube uses for videos/streams with youtube premium (and twitch as well with turbo). You can’t see where your money went as the viewet, but supposedly (don’t have sources rn so feel free to correct mr, but I’ve heard multiple creators say this) it’s just the same revenue split as other purchases, applied to the price of your membership and distributed based on what you watch.
This is true. All of the points, and especially the transparency on who gets our money… We are in need of good alternatives, but I don’t think, that transparency is a good business model unfortunately :(
I’m waiting to see how this all will unfold.
Since at least the late 80s record labels sucked, not the streaming services suck. Time to just get rid of copyright on music and audio recordings.
Time to just get rid of copyright on music and audio recordings.
I’m sure the musicians will approve of this solution.
good
Protection
Shit. This is honestly the thing that’s going to make me cancel Spotify.
What’s the alternative? Spotify has almost all the music I want to hear. I don’t think the competitors do, and there’s no easy way to check.
Any new service I sign up for will need to have my favorite obscure band of all time: Splashdown. I don’t own a computer, so piracy is not an option. Where do I go?
I’ve been using Tidal for over a year now. I’ve been digging the FLAC streams. $17 a month for my family plan. Up to 6, including yourself. And yes, Splashdown is on Tidal.
That’s most likely what I’ll switch to then. Thanks for checking.
Another +1 for Tidal here. It’s been great for me. Especially with a good DAC and good headphones to take advantage of the lossless stuff, especially the high res lossless stuff
Can the family members be outside a single house? Or it does weird stuff like Netflix?
Uhh I haven’t tried password sharing with Tidal.
They would need to have their own Tidal accounts. You would then add their Tidal account to your family plan. Once done, they can use the service on their own personal devices by logging with their accounts.
Purchase the music. Spend what you’d spend on a monthly fee to buy the albums. Then you have them regardless of what the service chooses to do in the future.
I own the CDs. I can’t stream CDs to my sound bar or play them on my phone.
Others tossed out other ideas, but another, go to a library or an ecocycling place or a school or ask around to see if there is free hardware available. You do not need a very powerful computer to rip a CD. Something from 25 (or more) years ago would work. Then with pretty much any computer since USB was invented, you’d be able to mount the phone as a disk and copy the music to it. If you can afford a thumbdrive, store a second copy there. Might even be something you could do at a library if you live in a place that has libraries with older computers. (Not that I know your location background, or if you even have easy access to electricity, so I could be way off.) Tons of free software to do the work at this point, which is great.
Treat the whole thing as a random learning experiment to learn some random problem-solving skills. It ends up paying off exponentially over time, and saves money. Best part, the reward is your music! Where and whenever you want!
That would be good advice for someone with time.
I’m in my 40s with a full-time job and two kids. I’m not looking for new hobbies. I just want to listen to music.
It is very easy to make excuses and hard to get out of that rut. No reason to waste the time of others if one just wants to burn one’s money, let it burn by all means. Very easy to be in one’s 40s, raise two kids, have a full time job, and design myriad projects, hobbies, etc. Just down to will and time management. (And ripping CDs is as complex as a burp, no technical knowledge needed.) There’s always someone that has it tougher, and now more than ever is the time to figure out those skills necessary to survive, as things will not be getting any easier. Paying corpos for “luxury” just feeds into the failure that is humanity. This makes one’s children’s lives worse in the future.
I’ll refrain from saying this is a Wendy’s, so instead I’ll just say: you don’t know me, my struggles, or my successes.
If you have a PC you can rip them and use a service that lets you stream to a phone like Plex
Or if no PC something like YouTube music let’s you upload a collection and stream that to devices
I already said I don’t have a computer. I’m looking for a streaming service where I pay and then I can stream music.
Apparently external CD players do exist that are compatible with phones. So you could just connect that to your phone and copy the songs to your phone. Could probably get an old laptop with one built in for the same price though.
Qobuz is what i have my eyes on.
Only reason I haven’t switched over yet is me and my friends share a lot of music together so I’ve been working on a personal discord bot to share the different links, and I’ve yet to get it working 100% yet (it failed when testing with a rick Astley album of all things)
FWIW Apple Music has two Splashdown albums. Not really recommended per se, but it’s the service I have access to and was able to look it up for you. I think they have a 1 month free trial available?
Thanks for checking. I don’t have any Apple products, but it’s good to know it’s an option.
I do believe there is an android app if you get desperate 🤪
Youtube Music has two different bands called Splashdown, and each has two albums.
It’s definitely a step in the wrong direction as far as not supporting giant evil corporations, but the music is there.
I’m a huge splashdown fan. I was able to mail CVB records back in the day and get all manner of stuff.
Wonderful publisher to send me free content. Love those guys.
I ordered the CDs they had for sale, and they sent me a copy of Blueshift. They were never allowed to formally release it, but they were allowed to give it away!
Apparently they recorded two new songs a couple years ago. I haven’t listened to them yet. I’m saving it.
Yeah that’s what they said to me too that they weren’t allowed to sell it some sort of weird thing with the record deal of some contractual bullshit that went wrong. I really would have been willing to pay money for it but it’s really too bad things went South there.
Yeah, if I recall correctly their label screwed them over and just locked up their album. They wouldn’t release it, and the band couldn’t do anything with it. It’s why they broke up.
The worst part is that Blueshift is a masterpiece. More than twenty years later, it’s still one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard.
After they broke up Kasson Crooker went on to be one of the people responsible for Guitar Hero, so that’s kind of cool I guess.
Thank you! I didn’t know that about guitar hero.
Not having a computer doesn’t mean you can’t pirate, you could easily rent a seedbox for like €5/month (eg. https://ultra.cc/) and control torrents on it from your phone eg with transdrone or other apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.transdroid.lite
You can just torrent shit on your phone if you have Android lol
Yeah but there’s a lot of downsides to that tbh, certainly if you want to use any decent private trackers I wouldn’t recommend it.
Many of the torrent clients easily available in the play store are spammy/ad-filled or blocked by private trackers, and you’re never gonna seed anything meaningfully from your phone due to it going to sleep and using 4G etc. so if you’re trying to build up a ratio you’re gonna struggle.
For anyone who wants to be able to access all of the music in the world, in high quality (not just whatever popular releases end up on public trackers), I would say it’s very much worth it to use a cheap seedbox - seeding 24/7 from a fast connection makes it much easier to build up a ratio and if you just seed everything indefinitely, before you know it you’ll have a huge buffer and be able to download whatever you want without thinking.
For example the private tracker I use for most of my music (RED) has everything ever released by the obscure band mentioned by OP (“Splashdown”) whereas you probably can’t find much of that on public trackers.
If you need to set up a seedbox and shit, might as well pay for streaming because that’s more convenient. I thought you could still get music off public trackers like when I still pirated it. I got all my Eminem albums off thepiratebay lmao
I do sometimes use a private tracker for movies and shows, as those aren’t nearly as readily available as music (where you can usually get everything off one service), but for that I use my desktop which runs 24/7 and usually only get Freeleech torrents and let them seed for a few months (or over a year in some cases). I see little value in building ratio by autograbbing torrents nobody wants, that everyone’s only downloading to seed and build ratio.
All private music trackers ban mobile torrent clients.
You can pirate on your phone just fine, there’s libretorrent on f-droid, new pipe can stream and download stuff from youtube and youtube music, you can also download from deezer on telegram with @linemusicbot and @deezload2bot.
(Rimusic and kreator also exist but are buggy)
Uh huh. And don’t I need a PC to root my phone to install f-droid?
Not yet, at least
