I like them but not on my music service. It’s in my way all the time. I have audible and I use a different app for podcasts. At least give me the option, but they won’t because I’m sure they get an incentive.
BS. One new CD is at least 10$. A good band collection is then a year worth of subscription fees. So, do you only listen to a few bands?
Before Spotify I pirated everything. In lossless, ofc. I had 200GB of music, it wouldn’t fit on my ipod classic, and I still was limited.
I pirated at least a lifetime worth of Spotify premium and yet when I switched to Spotify I discovered so many more artists like the ones I already liked. If I now tried to buy all the songs I’ve listened to more than once in the last 5 years, I’d go bankrupt.
Spotify is way cheaper.
(now add ease of discovering new music, listening to whatever your friends want to listen to in a car, collaborative playlists, etc etc)
Hey if you find value in paying a subscription go nuts, I won’t throw shade
but i used spotify for almost 15 years. Averaged out to $8 a month that’s more than $1400, and how much of that music do you think I own?
You can do what you want with your money but I’m not paying another dime to subscription streamers. For discovery there’s still radio and youtube and ad-supported streamers, and I still find new artists at music festivals and local venue concerts all the time.
I don’t mind paying $10/mo for access to millions of songs on demand, even if the caveat is that I don’t own anything at the end of my subscription.
I understand costs have gone up, so I can accept a $1 increase in subscription. The problem is that Spotify wants to do a bunch of side projects at my expense. I have no interest in podcasts or audiobooks yet I must fork up the extra money to fund it. I have no say in what my money is being used for and I hate that.
It’s why I moved from it to Tidal and then to Apple Music (even though I’m on Android). Both have their own issues but at least they’re focused on music.
The problem is that Spotify is losing money each year. They aren’t profitable. And if they are keep focusing on music, they never will. Their deal with the music labels says that they need to give 70 % of each subscription to the music labels. So by getting more people to signup, they only marginally increase their revenue. Same goes for raising their prices.
Thats why they tried focusing on Podcasts and Audiobooks. Those are a lot more profitable, either by adding ads (Podcasts) or by charging a premium (audiobooks).
Spotify also has 236 million premium subscribers.
Let’s assume everyone paying US prices and nobody decides to cancel because of this - both of which are false - that $1 increase would mean Spotify users pay 2.8 billion USD more per year and Spotify gets a cool 850 million.
There is an episode of Tech Won’t Save Us (2024-01-25) discussing how weird the podcasting play was for Spotify. There is essentially no way to monetize podcasts at scale, primarily because podcasts do not have the same degree of platform look-in as other media types.
Spotify spent the $100 million (or whatever the number was) to get Rogan exclusive, but for essentially every other podcast you can find a free RSS feed with skippable ads. Also their podcast player just outright sucks :/
It’s amazing to think how incompetent their management must be that they’re charging more, delivering lower audio quality, and paying less to artists than competitors like Tidal, yet still aren’t profitable.
From the 10 Dollar, taxes will be deducted. Afterwards Apple or Google take their share (if you subscribe using the App). Of the remaining money the Music labels take 70 %, and Spotify keeps 30 %. The music labels pay a fraction of the 70 % to the artists, depending on the contract and the artist’s share of streams reported by Spotify.
Any particular reason you went from Tidal to Apple Music? I see a lot of people here recommending it, so I’d be interested to hear any negatives it has.
The simple reason is because I got a lengthy free trial for it (saving me money on the Tidal sub) and then stuck around.
Apple Music was hot garbage when I started using it but over the months of my trial it improved tremendously - to a point where there isn’t much difference between it and Tidal. App performance is good now, it provides song recommendations for your playlists, many bugs I was facing have been fixed.
The Android Auto experience is better for me compared to Tidal, it has Shazam integration (Spotify does too, Tidal doesn’t) and it has many of the Japanese city pop songs I like that Tidal was missing.
I can always jump ship if needed. Services like Soundiiz and TuneMyMusic make it pretty easy.
Prices will continue to go up until the number of subscribers lost due to the price increase outweighs the additional profit from the subscribers who agree to pay the higher amount.
About 10 years ago I got rid of most of my cd’s because I thought I would just use spotify. Now I’m slowly gathering a cd collection again from thriftstores (or buy albums in store if it’s newer music and I want to support the artist). I rip them all to flac and add them to my Plex.
I’ve noticed I listen to music more now. I find new cool songs by artists by listening through whole albums again. Because of the time commitment of ripping and physically flipping through cd’s, I actually care again about the music that I gather and listen.
There should be a app that worked with most music players and with the data suggest new things to try. Something that worked with local players, streaming players, etc. Something like the concept of last.fm but with good suggestions.
I can’t believe that these days we don’t get one app like that. Even streaming apps with all the data they got from listing hours and still fail around 40 to 60% with my suggestions, and rarely suggest something that I haven’t heard before.
Nowadays with the state of efficient AI in learning from patterns, and still nothing mind-blowing like a kind of MiniMe that has almost the same tastes but have heard more stuff than you and can recommend as a more educated version of you. That is something that I would want to, hell if it worked so well and to have it, I would have to pay , then I would pay up to a price.
Eh, I just switched to audiobooks. I get them from my library and listen while I drive, work in the yard, ride my bike, etc.
I’d really like a self-hosted smart speaker though that I could call out a song and it would play. So like Alexa, but all the AI is local. I’m willing to pay for the music service, but I need to own the platform and be able to change music services easily. The only time I really listen to music is when entertaining friends/family, and using my phone is getting old.
I was a Google Play Music person and loved it, and then they changed to YouTube. I got mad and tried Apple Music, but as a classical music lover it’s vastly less than ideal for several reasons, so I went to Spotify and realized they liked to shuffle Britney Spears into me listening to lieder, so I went back to YouTube because at least they didn’t do that. But it’s just so basic compared to the absolute perfection that was GPM, and difficult to navigate. I don’t know where to go next. I’ve been buying records on Bandcamp but I also like the streaming service to discover music with.
Just to let you know, Tidal is not that great either.
Frequently having issues with downloaded albums, where I go into offline mode, pull up an album, and it says “can’t connect” despite being in offline mode and the album taking up storage space on my phone.
Also, the discovery and new releases sections aren’t very well made.
High chance they’re all on Slsk as lossless files. That and foobar2000 and you’ll be back in control of your music listening habits. Then buy physical from the artists if you want to support them and they offer a way to obtain it.
You could check out deezer. It’s European and they have a classical music section. Not sure how good it is. It’s like $110 for a yearly subscription and they offer hi-fi streaming. Just another option for you to check out. 🤷
The app won’t let you without signing in, I don’t think, but i think the website does. Try this link or you can go to deezer.com and if you go to the hamburger menu at the bottom it has an “explore channels” option.
Edit: It’s odd they don’t let people browse I’m a more friendly way. And just so you know, once you sign up, you can search, make playlists, download for offline etc, the mostly same as spotify. When u first sign up, it also give you the option to migrate all your spotify plsylists over. Out of my thousands of songs saved, it did have 2 or 3 that didn’t transfer over due to just not having it.
You should get back to apple music, they launched an app dedicated to classical music, and it’s by far the best for this type of music. Also it’s lossless 24 bits
I was also a Google music enjoyer and also find the other streaming options pretty crappy. I’ve actually moved over to more curated options like internet radio for when I’m not in the mood for anything specific. Shout-out to NTS, I love you.
If you like to upload your own music (like Google music), iBroadcast is the tippy tops. You can still use bandcamp (with or without yt-dlp) for discovery, and then upload what you like to iBroadcast.
even apart from audio quality, Spotify is just plain terrible as a music library.
For someone who lives in playlists, it might be fine. But I like to pick and choose albums and songs, and be able to sort the whole collection on the fly. Spotify, and unfortunately a whole bunch of the competition, will have three separate lists for “liked” songs, albums, and artists. Only want to save the studio tracks, and not the demos and live versions? Fuck you, you can like the album or not, it’s all or nothing! And the special edition is the only version we have! enjoy the solid hour of shittier versions of the songs you actually wanted!
In the early 90s I used to pay around 10 to 15 euros (20 to 30 with current inflation) for each CD release.
And still we still complain nowadays.
We got a problem with the streaming industry but it’s not the price we pay. We must be reasonable, say that the price is 15 bucks, is that really unreasonable for getting at your fingertips and everywhere most of the music even produced? I don’t.
I think the major problem with Spotify isn’t Spotify problem, but an industry problem. If I remember correctly, Spotify gets around 30%, then there’s the distributor, and it gets around 40%. Whatever’s left of the cake is divided between the label and the artist depending on the contract. The industry created something that didn’t need to exist, another intermediate, the distributor. First apple used them cause of the work they do arranging all the needed metadata and keeping it tidy. The industry created them, now it can’t get rid of them, and they “eat” the most part of the money.
Then why does tidal for the same price as spotify with way less users pay four times as much to the artists than spotify? Spotify has the largest market share and now they are trying to milk the cow as much as they can because people are too lazy to switch. Most people don’t even know that you can transfer playlists. Same with Netflix (although they at least have more exclusive content).
I don’t really like Tidal, but this is why I have stuck with Tidal instead of switching back to Spotify. At least the artists get more money, and I get my higher bitrate. Now it seems that prices are getting even closer to parity, so that’s less of a reason to switch back.
I considered trying Qobuz or Deezer, but I’m too lazy to switch right now.
Then why does tidal for the same price as spotify with way less users pay four times as much to the artists than spotify?
I wonder why too. Spotify takes a 30% cut, but even if Tidal takes 0% cuts, how come it can pays 4x as much to artists? There must be more to the math to make it check out.
Well considering the last price hike got us gems like the music 8-ball/magic crystal thing, I can barely wait to see what banger they’ll come up with to bloat my music player with next.
I HATE these ‘made for you’ playlists, just repeats of my liked songs and songs it’s always trying to shove down my throat. Some of them barely fit the genre/vibe of the playlist too.
Part of the original appeal of Spotify for me years ago was the curated playlists.
I got Tidal for a month to try it out because I had gotten some XM4s and wanted to check out the 360 Reality Audio tracks, and I was disappointed to find just how few of them there actually are. 😕
Edit: I see not that they did away with that ultra premium tier and folded those 360 Reality Audio tracks into the regular plans…they really did make it cheaper. Looks like I’m switching back to Tidal.
I have used Spotify’s 15 free hours a month for shorter light novels, but beyond that, buying the rights to listen to a book, or buying more listening hours is very much not worth it through them.
Tidal is $11/mo for an individual and $17 for a 6 person family plan. I recently switched because they supposedly give a better cut to artists and serve flac files.
If i wasn’t paying for a family play on Spotify, I would have resorted to music piracy at this point. The quality is still garbage, the service is getting worse, but the prices are only going up every half a year
I tried sourcing my own music but man it’s a lot harder than movies and shows. Especially when you like to hear random recommended music how do you get enough
Yeah - credit where it’s due, Spotify did a really good job with their music recommendation engine. It’s just that recently, they’ve started to get into the sad part of the enshittification cycle. I kinda saw the writing on the wall when they started forcing Joe Rogan podcast promos fucking everywhere, without having a config anywhere to disable podcast suggestions (which I don’t use through Spotify)
I’m surprised you’re only getting these now. My recommendations have been mostly garbage for the better part of a decade so all this praise for finding new music confuses me a little. Spotify has many feats, but the algorithm never was one for me, quite the opposite. I find it more annoying than helpful, actually.
My beginning (about 6 years ago) was fine. Still miss the radio feature though.
They kinda brought it back but in a reverse form (former: 4 new 1 old, now: 5 old 1 new).
Playlist shuffle is atrocious but I am not picking them better any better.
You don’t need to be connected on the VPN to use it, I find it identical to my previous UK subscription.
Only difference is that your initial recommendations are for Nigerian music 😆 Those disappear quite quickly after you start listening to music you like tho.
I feel they’re all fairly similar. I won’t do apple music because I don’t do iOS, and I moved from Google play music when forced to the inferior YouTube music. I wonder if tidal or any other service has comparable pricing.
I use YT Music because I get it cheap (VPN shenanigans), you can upload your own music (hello Nintendo soundtracks), and I mod the Android app to stop it being a mess (ReVanced Extended is the GOAT).
I've been using Apple Music on Android for years, I definitely recommend it. The app is totally fine, I think it's still better than Spotify's crappy app. On desktop you can use the Cider app, which is much better than iTunes. It's even available on Linux.
I switched to AM a couple years ago due to the (better) privacy policy vs YTM. The app is ‘fine’ but it’s painfully obvious that they didn’t want to bother with the android UI guidelines. But it’s a small annoyance, and the price is… palatable, I guess? I think I’d jump ship at $14, but at $12, fine. I don’t use it that much.
Actually, it’d be nice if they would charge based on usage, not flat-rate. I doubt I’m using $3 of that $12 cost.
I use Apple Music, primarily because I need to pay for the higher tiers iCloud storage for my wife’s photo addiction and it’s basically “free” for the family plan.
If I didn’t already have the higher tier iCloud, I would probably prefer tidal for higher quality, or Spotify for the more diverse library.
Apple Music only raised the price by $1 since the launch in 2015 (9 years ago). But they added cool features like lossless audio quality and Dolby Atmos. They also had lyrics like 6 years before Spotify added them. I think you can even get it for $6 dollars if you're a student.
How does this work? Spotify has a deal with the music publishers, where they give 70 % of all subscription income to the music companies. The music companies (Sony, Warner, etc) then split the money based on the share of streams.
How can Apple pay out 2.5x70 %, so 175 %? Are thes losing with every subscription?
That whole article is BS, they even say it themselves:
Rates are rarely paid at a flat rate per stream
There is no payout per stream. Instead a fixed percentage of the subscription price is shared among each streamed song. So why does Tidal pay more then? Either their subscriber numbers are still incorrect (they have a history of publishing way higher numbers than in reality), their subscriber listen to less music (which is the main reason Apple Music pays more per stream on paper, since its often bundled) or their audience focuses more on a single artist (or a genre).
Sure. Obviously it’s more complex than that, but it helps illustrate where the math came from in the parent comment. I don’t know why Tidal pays more, but I’m hypothesizing its because most of their “co-owners” of Tidal are themselves, artists/musicians, which IMO is significantly better than the out of touch folks running Spotify.
engadget.com
Active