I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.
Plexamp is better than any other music app I’ve tried.
Finamp for anyone using Jellyfin https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
Plexamp I’ve only gave subsonic a try. But I’ll look into Plexamp.
AOL profited for over a decade on people who signed up for the service and simply lost track of it, paying month after month for something they’d forgotten they even had.
Crazy that these services can just raise premiums whenever they please without even reaffirming that the customer still wants the service. I guarantee that if you needed to re-verify your account on a price increase, firms with big client pools would never raise their rates again.
Gyms exist solely because of people like that.
And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that’s somehow legal.
Does the CVV number on credit cards not change when they’re renewed in the USA? Or can companies still somehow charge cards without an up-to-date CVV?
They sometimes have an agreement to update the card after expiry
iTunes Match is $25/year if you have an iPhone.
Oh so only $100+ a year*
How does $25 become $100+
you need to buy a very expensive phone to “enjoy” the sale
Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
You can influence things with your wallet.
Any good way to transfer playlists?
I used TuneMyMusic when I moved from Apple to Tidal.
Now this isn’t without its own stupid system.
So to transfer all your music and not just a limited amount you have to sign up to pay for it. Now I’m fine paying a one off fee for this service as it was seamless, what in against it the only options being an annual fee or a recurring payment.
It cost me like £3, maybe less in being lazy. But I had to sign up, do the transfer then immediately cancel. I understand some people might be bougie and use multiple services, but not having a one time fee irked me.
If you go this route, as it is easy as tidal will send you there, please do what I did and send them a complaint afterwards about the ludicrous system and that they should add a one time fee to make it even easier. Heck I would have paid £5 for this as I have so many playlists and liked albums and songs etc.
I mentioned it on here previously and someone alluded to free services but I can’t confirm.
There were apps out there to help with this when I switched from Spotify to Tidal. I can’t remember the name anymore though. It just sucks up all your saved songs and playlists, matches them in the other service then adds them. Almost everything I had moved over without a problem. I do miss the social aspect of Spotify, being able to share links with friends. No one I know has tidal except the people on my family plan. There are services that will turn your song link into a linktree like page with links for Spotify, tidal, YouTube music, deezer, etc., but that’s clunky.
Tidal now has built-in transfer of playlists, at least from Spotify.
I used Soundiiz and it works pretty good. Gives you an overview after the import so you can see what’s missing or wrong.
If you can, and they have it on there, buy your favorite albums on Bandcamp, then they are yours forever
I thought that Bandcamp was shutdown?
It has been purchased by EPIC and a large portion of the staff was layed off. But it is still up and you can still buy music there.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/16/23919551/bandcamp-layoffs-epic-songtradr
I dont think so? As far as I can tell, my account still works and I bought an album there the other day.
It looks like the company has been sold around a few times in the last few years and i think its gotten worse, but I honestly cant tell lol
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
On paper. But in practice…
On February 27, 2016, Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele from the band The American Dollar launched a $5 million class-action lawsuit that claimed Tidal had to compensate the band for any of the royalty payments accrued from the streaming of the band’s 116 copyrighted songs. The suit also accused Tidal of using faulty numbers to payout artists while also having undercut these same individuals by 35%. A response from Tidal stated that they were indeed fully up to date on all royalties for the group and had removed said intellectual property from their servers.
Hollywood accounting and pirate profiteering undercut what artists would normally be paid.
You can influence things with your wallet.
You can influence how you feel about your consumer habits, but capitalists are still going to capitalize.
After watching how similar business practices torched Twitter, I think this dude is underestimating the general public’s commitment to just sail the high seas.
For anyone out there, I recommend giving Tidal a shot and for podcasts, I recommend a FOSS app called AntennaPod. This is the combo I use myself, I’ve been using Tidal for a bit over two years now and just recently switched to AntennaPod.
AntennaPod is great, I used it for years. I eventually switched to self hosting AudioBookShelf which does audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts. One main reason was because podcasts more and more yank the old episodes and put them behind a patreon. AudioBookShelf downloads the episodes to your server so you always have them. About 5 months after starting using it another one of my podcasts pulled that stunt and I was super happy to have all of the old episodes still.
I’ll have to keep that in mind, thanks for that. I honestly had no considered some BS like that happening.
So is there an alternative that’s comparable? I am done with their price increases.
I assume Apple Music?
I got grandfathered into YouTube Music since I was using Google Music when it got shut down. While not as good as Google Music, YT Music works well for me and has been building playlists suited to what I want to listen to. Plus, some lesser known local artists that only have their music on YouTube as video uploads will still show up on YouTube Music. I haven’t really tried any other serious streaming platforms, and only YT Music and Spotify natively sync to my car with maps.
I am an audiophile with thousands worth of gear. As far as streaming services go, I find Apple to offer the best bang for the buck. The second best would be probably YouTube. Tidal was unique years ago with hires lossless but that’s not uncommon anymore. Apple offers it as standard. Apple and YouTube also offer music videos which is a nice perk.
https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/best-music-streaming-service-subscription
Not really. They all cost about the same amount. In that article is right around $11 across the board.
I got Tidal since I read they pay artists a bigger share per track played.
I like it’s hight quality audio but don’t like it’s suggestions much. I did discover a few good songs but mostly I build my own playlist. To discover music I prefer to start playlist based on a song I like rather than their suggestions but it’s not perfect.
I got Tidal since I read they pay artists a bigger share per track played.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
Not a significant amount and they, along with all streaming services, have massively cut artist payouts in recent years. There aren’t really any good platforms for artists. Only labels get any amount of meaningful money.
Depends on if you care about making set playlists. That’s the feature that generally costs more - Pandora is like $5 a month without that option, and $11 with it. I only listen in the car and don’t care about picking exactly what songs are on my stations, so I have the cheaper one, but for other people, that wouldn’t cut it.
I have never understood playlists as a ‘feature’ of these ‘services’. If someone wants that, why the hell don’t people just download the music and make local playlists? But the entire idea behind playlists has always baffled me - ‘yes I want to listen to the same songs in the same order every time I select this’ bro you’ve just made a mixtape from the 80s. And paid for the privilege. Good job.
For me the one and only appeal of any of these ‘services’ is to take what I currently like, blend like 3% of ‘similar songs/artists’ that I likely don’t know about, and get the hell out of the way otherwise. I’ve never had a decent experience with ‘let’s throw random shit at you and pray you like some of it’ ‘discovery’ systems. I don’t care what is popular with the masses, I don’t care what your ‘djs’ have ‘curated’, I don’t want to listen to your reinvention of radio, I don’t want to listen to someone talk between tracks, I don’t want to even be aware of talk show ‘radio’ oh my christ. Just give me fucking music, that I like, with a hint of weird. I give you my imported data from X prior service, I give you my entire last.fm data, I cannot make it any easier for you to do this. Just, do, it.
deep breathing
Sorry, I went to a place there. After like 20 years you’d think someone would get the formula right.
Counterpoint, I love the Spotify Discover Weekly feature. I’ve found some great gems. As for random playlists, I like to find lists that other people have made based on different genres I may be in the mode to listen to. Finding and downloading songs, to me, is way more inconvenient than using Spotify.
I would suggest anyone bothered by this to look into xManager.
This is the way.
Kind of love and hate that their website doesn’t explicitly say what it does. Like, if you can’t figure it out, you probably shouldn’t do it, even their GitHub is a bit dodgy on what the software is for, you can figure it out, but it’s never explicitly stated what it’s specifically meant for. “We help you install old versions of the app who must not be named” kinda bullshit.
I think it’s intentional to avoid eyes on taking it down.
I’m so grateful, I have thousands of songs and just hit shuffle and made my own playlists. I always thought internet radio was overpriced 😅
Glad I moved away from Spotify to Apple Music years ago (for different reasons tho)
Welp, gonna try Tidal tonight.
Isn’t this also on the Publishers? They get paid first before the artist.
Spotify is usually reported as one of the worst paying for the artists.
They also don’t distribute the value by time listened, but pool in and award the largest artists (don’t remember the specifics, you might need to look it up).
They were also found/accused of using their auto generated playlists with made-up artists who’s money goes to ‘noone’, just shady stuff.
I upgraded to a decent set of headphones with a dedicated DAC, then realised just how terrible Spotify’s sound quality is, even on maximum. I hung on a while for the empty promise of lossless audio then ditched them.
I’m now increasingly glad that I’m giving money to their competitors.
Spotify’s encoding (vorbis 320kbps) should be transparent at the maximum bitrate. However, it’s possible that the files uploaded on there are mastered differently, for average consumer consumption instead of the full dynamics of most source material. I know SoundCloud enforces “loudness” mastering with presets when uploading for example.
The real reason Spotify’s quality is inferior to others is that, if you have the music files, you can apply in-app parametric equalization on every platform and compensate for imperfections of your output device.
My problem was by the time it had been through normalisation for equipment and hearing correction, it sounded very artifacty. Maybe a lack of bits and low sampling rate.
innovate its product features
What. It’s meant to stream music. Tf do you mean?
If anything, they’ve taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they’re making record profits, and jacking up the price
This is why they have record profits. They attack at both ends. Strip features, increase prices.
Spotify actually doesn’t make that much profit, if any.
But the record labels are major shareholders and definitely influence the pricing structure. Spotify is essentially a marketing frontend for the record industry.
I am literally looking at their financial report for 2024 Q1 and it shows a profit.
They’re reporting 1.00 billion in gross profit as of Q1 2024 so yeah, they make money. It’s kind of impossible to compare much though since they’re the only freestanding music competitor that’s popular.
The closest comparison I can make is using Apples reported figures of making around $9.2 billion in revenue for its 93 million user base.
Meanwhile Spotify is making around 2.63 billion in revenue for its near 3x subscriber base estimated around 240 million. So I wouldn’t say they’re not making money, but maybe you can see why they think they can squeeze a lot more. Best to just unsubscribe honestly, they’ll keep doing this
So they’re leaving a lot of money on the table and getting criticized for their greed? I’m not sure how that’s a coherent position.
AI generated music based off your likes and listening. It lines up with his statements. There was no innovation here. The same as every “disruptor” technology that just cheapified everything and one it was ubiquitous attempt to remove the core of the business.
The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that’s the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.
the playlist saved for offline playback that will still try to connect to the internet for like 30 seconds when you open it while actually offline. the Discover Weekly playlist that will serve you the song that you’ve marked as “not interested” over and over and over and
The UI that gets progressively worse with each update, ruining what was perfectly fine before. The attempts to create the audio focused equivalent of TikTok.
The way shuffle constantly shuts itself off even when set within the settings to be the default. The shitty Smart Shuffle that adds in songs that break up my playlists terribly. The way it plays the same song again the first time you enable shuffle and hit next.
The “repeat” option that activates itself is probably the most frustrating bug. I can’t recall the last time I legitimately wanted to listen to a song on repeat but it enable itself very often.
If I could simply remove the feature I would.
Yall are noting not even the reason why I went to Apple Music: no ability to actually consistently sync an offline library across devices, your own files.
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I use Tidal and get annoyed because the shuffle clearly has a recency bias to it, and it keeps trying to recommend show tunes to me in my Daily Discovery, and the suggested albums for me has become considerably worse since the last update, but everything i hear about what Spotify has been doing has made me glad i switched over a couple years ago.
How good is tidal? Is its catalogue as good as Spotify?
Tidal does have higher bitrate songs, also atmos and sony’s 360 audio and when done right the spacial audio sounds nice. Amazon music is decent too and it comes with prime.
Yeah, get a trial and see though.
I’ve recently switched from Spotify to Tidal and I’m happy with it…
The cache part pisses me off. I’m fucking paying you to stream me music. Not the same fucking shit over and over and over again.
I really don’t get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It’s not a hard thing to implement.
True random shuffle would be a terrible idea. No one wants the same track showing up multiple times in a row, which would not be uncommon in true random shuffle.
I think the idea is that the play order for the entire playlist is shuffled on each loop, so you play all songs in one order, then it shuffles, and you play all songs again but in a different order.
^this - why is it so hard to implement sigh
You can make a truly random shuffle that doesn’t do that in like five pibes of code. This is the most pointless objection to random shuffle that I’ve ever seen.
Lines of code. Lines. Not pibes.
In unrelated news, I hate autocorrect. Pibes is not a fucking word.
I disagree that that’s what it means, IMO “shuffle” explicitly means each track exactly once. Pedantry aside, what I meant was a truly randomized order when you shuffle a playlist. It’s a major critique of Spotify among users and has been for a very long time.
They did add audiobooks.
Though the interface for audiobooks sucks, so I hope they improve it.
Their podcast and audiobook integration has been so sloppy.
The last thing I ever wanted from Spotify was audiobooks or podcasts. We’ve had excellent apps available for several years already, we don’t need half assed bloat added to (very poorly) replicate the same features
It’s the dumb goal of tech bros to create an “everything app” that does everything you want.
Without podcasts I am not sure I’d still use Spotify
Why not use a free/cheap pocketing app designed for it specifically? All the podcast apps I’ve tried are far better than spotify. UI-wise at least.
The part is what drives me mad. Podcasts and audiobooks are not that hard to do properly. You could very easily separate them into distinct apps or at least a special tab that acts like a proper player. Instead audiobooks are basically albums.
There’s a shuffle button.
On an audiobook.
Yup this is what irks me most. I don’t think of audio books and music in the same context. Why the fuck are they mashing them together? Wrapped includes podcasts…
Nah, what’s worse is that it’s only 15(!) hours per month!
Which for most people would give you a week of audiobooks to listen to in your commute to work.
Sure, but it also only counts book time. If you listen 2x it’s only 7.5 hours.
They haven’t ever been profitable with just streaming music.
I never did get a music subscription of any kind. Guess I am glad about that now. I just host my own server. Spotify never had a quarter of what I want to listen to anyways so I guess there is that.
Listening to Legion of Mary 12-10-1974 right now.
I left when I saw how much of our money they gave to Joe Rogan to punch down on trans people. Already paying for YouTube pro for years and finally took advantage of their music app. It’s been great. My car and every Google screen in the house have native support. The only disadvantage is everything from tinder to open source crap I run at home only integrate with Spotify.
What open source stuff? Asking for a friend
Already paying for YouTube pro
lost me in the second half
Anyone have an alternative with the same content, offline play, and integration into Android Auto? I would love to switch if something meets my needs.
I’m downloading Tidal to give it a shot but I would also like to hear other options. Tidal seems promising from a 30 second glance but that doesn’t tell me much.
I went with Tidal, not sure about Android Auto tho, what is that?
Android auto is pretty much when you plug your phone into your car stereo and it runs like it’s own os from your phone. Google maps, music, etc. It just doesn’t run all apps though. Spotify is currently the key to any music playing in my car, so it’s important that whatever I use works with it. Apparently tidal does work with it so I might give it a shot. I will lose all my playlists though. 😔
