The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust.

For a mobile, there is a modded apk,I've never heard ads there. For a PC, web player in Firefox with uBlock Origin, there are no ads at all there. The same goes for Tidal, I've never paid for these apps.

With xManager, the free tier comes quite close to premium. No ads, play whatever music you like. The only issues are lower sound quality & no downloads, which are really non-issues since you can just find other sources to download the music from, at flac quality

The ads aren't even for anything. It was just really patronising ads for Spotify Premium.

Their business model is genuinely to just annoy you into paying.

hahahahaha spotify and paying someone lol

Spotify purchases their lyrics from Musixmatch

Eh, I switched to Spotify last year (++, of course) and there’s a lot to be said in favour of the Spotify algorithm when it comes to music recommendations, as opposed to YouTube.

YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.

Edit: or better yet vimusic

Spotify is unusable without ~~premium~~ Xmanager

I don't get why anyone would use the free tier - not being able to choose songs would actually drive me insane, let alone the ads - but $11 monthly for essentially all the music anyone could ever want, plus solid playlists and recommendations, is a perfectly good value for me. Admittedly, I listen to music all the time and it's a pretty big part of my life, so it's an easy sell.

I guess the free tier is still an improvement over radio, but regardless, producing and distributing music has costs, and I'm more than happy to pay for it. Given that Spotify isn't even profitable, having lost about a billion dollars last year, I'm not sure how long this situation will last, but for the time being, I really don't mind it.

It's convenient. It's where all my playlists are... that said, I'm open to alternatives?

The only reason I don't pirate music is because of discovery. I haven't found a good way to find new music without using a streaming service. And then, I'm already using a streaming service, so why bother.

It's all about having the .lrc file, it gets read automatically (as long as it's named like the song file) by mpv player and many android players.

It's a simple text file containing the lyrics with timestamps. You can get them from deezer for example with certain downloaders. Or look for them on Soulseek.

Spotube.

Note that it's not really a Spotify streaming app, rather it uses your (free) Spotify account for playlists, search, recommendations, etc. and then goes and find the song you want to play on YouTube, and the lyrics from scraping websites I think. Pretty clever.

The lyrics source that Spotify uses is free with a few caveats, like ads. The normal synced lyrics are free though.

The source is musixmatch and they have a floating lyrics window on Android which is neat.