this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Potential bias: I'm a developer at Spotify.
"Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it."
I don't think the company forces you to do anything. It is their business model, how they can provide copyrighted music to you and have a share of the pie too.
I'd say the very idea that Spotify is forcing you to pay with time and attention or money so you can have music conveniently streamed to your devices is a testament to the company's success. It created this business model and fulfilled an apparently basic need to the point you think that charging for it is unfair.
But "forcing" is too much. You can always buy discs, digital downloads and so.
I mean the streamers have to get paid too, you might hear artists complain about how much money Spotify takes but as someone who has released lots of music on Spotify they do pay you, pretty decently too! Lots of artists are making hundreds of thousands a year from just Spotify and the business itself is profitable, which allows pretty much anyone to upload their music and try their dream.
That is valuable in it of itself, without services like Spotify many of the artists I listen too would probably have given up on music for a boring IT job, like I did.
Thanks to you and/or other Spotify devs for the linux desktop app that I understand you develop in your free time
Of course they don't force you to use spotify, but it's one of those "soft monopolies" many other companies have. It's not the only option, but they basically are, because everyone thinks so: it's like whatsapp, if you catch my drift (everyone use it because everyone's on it)
And when a company realizes they're in that position, they will prey down on their users without fail, and I'm talking about:
Privacy invasive app: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.spotify.music/latest/
Investing in military AI: https://mixmag.net/read/spotify-daniel-ek-ai-defence-investment-criticism-news
Patents for extremely invasive technologies: https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/spotify-tech-emotion-manipulation/
Allowing disinformation during covid, not paying properly the artists and many other things I'm not going over for sake of brevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Criticism
What I don't like about spotify and all the companies who are in a similar position in the market is that, as usual, their share of the pie it's unfairly big, which is why I try to drive people away from them. Not saying YouTube is better, but at least with vimusic you don't have to listen to ads (which I think heavily harm people's mental health, among other things)
Of course music can be bought, but people only buy what they like nowdays, and use online services to discover new music. Few have the money to buy music and listen to it for the first time afterwards. Many people don't even have the money to meet their basic needs, let alone buy music
Not to argue against any of the points against Spotify, but YT Music (and it's parent, Google) are much worse; leaving only Apple Music with a much smaller library as a realistic alternative to streaming music.
I do miss the old days of Google Play Music though - it is a shame what Google did to a neat app with a standalone subscription.
Spotify really isn't a "Soft monopoly" though. There are a lot of competitors in the music streaming business. Youtube music, Apple music, and Pandora, just to name a few. Sure, Spotify is perhaps the most commonly used, but it's also unfair to punish a company because they're successful.
Spotify took an existing thing and made it convenient and worse at the same time. How long before we are just listening to AI music? Since their cost is the artists...it's only a matter of time.
I'd also add that I wish Spotify paid the musicians better. Even relative to other platforms Spotify is pretty bad about that. Of course if you want to support the musician it's always better to buy merch and music and stuff directly from them, but that isn't really an excuse for streaming platforms to pay them so poorly. And I'm not suggesting that Spotify should just give the musician everything of course. They should get their cut too. But perhaps something even slightly more reasonable would be appreciated.
I like Bandcamp because of this, and their app has really improved over the last year with the addition of ques and playlists.