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.
No idea why you would think it's hard to buy MP3s. I've never had a problem buying any, just go to the big name FAANG companies' music store webpages or Bandcamp for FLACs. No DRM on any that I bought.
Used CDs (or local library). Ripping software. Super easy. Or just buy from Amazon and download your files to local.
Spotify was my penultimate subscription. Still have to bring my AWS Lightsail instances back in house. :(
Yeah, enshitification indeed. Was quite happy 4 years ago. Worth $10/mo. to get what I want and some new stuff occasionally thrown in. Suggested music tracked my tastes, easy UI, all that.
Then they upped it $1. Fine. Then I started getting all sort of bullshit when my playlist ran out. "Fuck was that?!"
Now that I cancelled the paid version, the ads are killing me. Look, I'm a GenXer, accustomed to ads for free TV and radio. I'm fine with that revenue model. But fuck me, just like modern radio, the ads became so thick as to be distracting. And of course I can't use it in the deep woods where my internet is sketchy.
I download all my playlists. FOSS I can use to upload and play that on my phone? Guess I'm back to pirating.
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.
Did they? Couldn't find an announcement on the fly.
They laid off 10% of their workforce last year, and like 20% of the remaining work force late this year with cuts to engineering expected. It is not in a healthy place, seemingly, and they cover a very small slither of the market.
Edit: Couldn't find the exact article I had read before but this one seems well formatted. https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/12/tidal-bets-future-artists-djs/
It doesn't help that their parent company makes so little from them compared to a series of crypto ventures, but what can really compare to that.
I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify's weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!
They pay artists better and it's been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn't easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.
Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you're into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn't pay as much as direct support.
This reads as an ad but I'm genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.
As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.
I don't think this is earth shattering news. These companies identify when the audience is barely paying attention (to content and ads) and spits out the cheap stuff. I watch fly fishing and fly tying videos on YouTube and often fall asleep with it on. Then I wake up to the third hour of a professional bass fishing tournament. It happens a lot
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.
Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
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 didn't know this, but it makes sense. One of my biggest complaints about streaming (Pandora is guilty of this, too) is that anyone with a copy of Ableton and a mediocre talent can crank out tracks barely modifying the base toolset. I tend to listen to a lot of variants of electronic music. 95% of the music is absolute crap. 4.5% is tolerable. And 0.5% might end up in my playlist. Less tan 1:100/songs. I have no doubt that “band” or artist names were made up to crank something out, abandoned, and started up under a different name to churn out more boring samesies hoping for a few plays in one of those “made for you” playlists.
So the service doing this for themselves and enabling it for profit isn’t surprising.
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.
Devils advocate moment... If people keep listening (or sort of listening) and they are OK with music that seems to lack any soul, is it not just giving the audience what they want and deserve?
Devils concierge moment... What a bunch of shitbags.
One of the best thing to do is to pirate almost all of your music and then reward the creators by going to their shows, buying them shirts or even CDs (you can also rip physical copy if piracy is not a thing)
Thats some pretty bad stuff: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3wLm5nlYrHkbd29ilMRq89?si=e6f3299113e34bb9&nd=1&dlsi=50e31b2329204ddd
its all the same song as the article states.
The chart showing how much money the CEO has made off selling the stock.. wouldn't he run out of shares? It appears executives have sold over a billion dollars in 2024.
Makes you wonder if they heard these investigations were ongoing and figured they'd sell shares before lawsuits came and any potential dips in the company worth.
If so.. insider trading charges would be nice
CEOs are often compensated with stock, AFAIK.
Insider trading is almost a joke now, and about to become way more of one under the next few years of the SEC.
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!
Everyone always gave me shit for sticking with Pandora. It can basically do all the shit that Spotify can these days albeit a little different. You can even make your own playlists and listen offline if you have premium. It has a more limited library but it's barely noticeable except maybe once or twice a year I can't find a song I wanna listen to. It's simpler and cheaper than Spotify with most of the same features. My favorite part is that I can literally pick any song I want and it will just continue playing after it's over with similar songs. I've discovered so much music I would have never tried if it hadn't shown up. And so far it hasn't been overrun by AI slop like Spotify. Sure they pay artists less compared to competitors but at least they aren't just straight up trying to replace them.
I'm not saying Pandora is objectively better. I'm just saying Spotify is falling into the world of enshittification and there are many alternatives out there. You could even just buy music and support artists directly like we used to.
I still prefer Pandora, it’s great for music discovery and it pays artists more than Spotify. I also feel like its recommendations are better or maybe I’ve just had better luck with them.
I’ve Definitely found new artists and albums after listening on Pandora that I went off and purchased CDs or albums thanks to it.
Apple Music’s recommendations were fairly good as well, and they also pay more than Spotify, but not tons and I abhor how it integrates music I don’t own with my actual library.
I need to try Tidal, but I also just don’t get the “you’ll stream everything and own nothing” idea. I just like “radio” services for discovering new stuff.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
