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.

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.

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

Thanks to you and/or other Spotify devs for the linux desktop app that I understand you develop in your free time

Oh I'm sorry, I skimmed through the rules and I missed that one. Ty for letting me know

It's true its last update was in November, but the dev(s) still monitor and reply in the issues tab. Most important, the app works flawlessly.

The project still seems alive to me, but if you prefer innertune by all means go with that! I followed it for a bit (when it was still called "Music") and it's a great app

It's not quite the same thing. ViMusic is a dedicated app for streaming music, which means better user experience. You're free to stick to revanced if it better suits your needs obv

Hmm I need more info on revanced

Yeah! You choose your songs, create your playlists and stream all the music you want. No ads or costs

Vimusic is free and open source software, just like lemmy

As long as you can acess an youtube music from the web, it should be safe to keep working (as long as google doesn't rewrite something on their end) there are a gazillion of projects that are able to stream/download from youtube (youtube-dl, newpipe come to mind now)

Musi (app on iOS for listening to YouTube without ads and allows background listening) has been working for several years at this point. So I don’t see Google doing much about it.

I too am weary...