There are literally two albums that I love that I can’t find on Bandcamp or piracy, but they are literally the only thing keeping my Spotify subscription alive right now.
I think I’m just going to have to stream them into my DAW and do a poor man’s rip, then cancel this shit ass.
No, development is still stalled. You need to pay if you want the really high bit rate flac downloads. I pay and can use Deezer as a backup to Jellyfin in the event there’s a song I don’t have and I’m driving. I was looking at music fab, but it’s expensive, the Spotify downloader has worse quality, and doesn’t grab the cover art, which is probably a deal breaker for me.
They are on the internet, but only streaming on the Big Bads. If you can find me a hookup I will be forever grateful.
The first Album, and the toughest case is an album by a band called Porter from Guadalajara. I have all of their albums except for my very favorite, Las Batallas.
The second album really should be on Bandcamp, and probably will eventually, since the band has a page there. It’s the most recent and self-titled release from an awesome little band called Mo Lowda and The Humble.
All else aside, I highly recommend these bands to anyone who likes good rock music. Both albums are no-skip for me but two standout tracks for each: for Las Batallas you have got to check out “Himno Eterno” and “Hombre Maquina”. For Mo Lowda, “O.O.Y.O” and “Dog At The Pound”
The irony of these being the two I haven’t been able to add to my Plex library is that these are probably the two most prominently featured albums on Spotify Wrapped last year.
Amazing! Thank you so much. I said F you to Spotify earlier this afternoon with the help of you and another Lemmy user. I hope I can help someone else as much as you’ve helped me.
Going overseas makes so many albums disappear due to “muh licensing” and “technology and convience stinks” (cough japan)
So many musics are not available beyond catching limited sales and/or physical only.
Newer stuff isnt as bad but the <2010s are often pretty hard to find.
No kidding. Consider the possibility that this was the first avenue I pursued and was nevertheless stymied in my efforts.
One of the bands only sells vinyl outside of Spotify (I have the record on Vinyl, but the process of digitizing it is similar to recording straight from Spotify but harder), and the other band is based in Mexico and doesn’t have a digital marketplace. In both cases I’ve literally emailed the bands offering to overpay for raw digital files but haven’t heard back yet. I am seriously considering flying to Guadalajara to catch them live and pick up a CD there. They don’t really tour in the US north of Texas.
That does seem like a pickle. There is a band that is (well, WAS) LOCAL to me and I still couldn’t get digital files. I was bitching about on reddit a while back, and I got a DM from someone who sent me an email with the files. They’re in 320mp3, but better than what I had before.
Good luck with that, and have fun in Guadalajara if you go!
Well you just hooked me up with the album I’d all but given up on, so thank you tremendously. Since I at least have the other album on Vinyl, I think I am going to pull the trigger and cancel my Spotify now. Now I don’t exactly need to go to Guadalajara, though I hope to see Porter live one day.
I know I will eventually. I also just really want to support them, and will buy a copy of all of their albums whenever I am able to. I don’t even speak spanish but their music just lights me up.
Thanks! I wrote off Tidal as an also-ran like a decade ago and haven’t heard of the others so these were not on my radar at all. I will check them out. I didn’t even know Tidal was still a thing!
Yeah I never used Google Play music and I only started Spotify because my car had integration for it. I used prime music for a while just cause it was free.
If YouTube premium becomes shit I’ll have to look into options
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’m all for going sailing but if there are features you want that that can’t quite replicate, it’s also a great time to look at a VPN service with a server in Turkey… Sign up on a Turkish IP and the exchange rate puts you under $2/month USD. This works for a lot of other things too.
I believe a dude on YouTube for a very popular streamer used an IP from Argentina to get 50 subs for YouTube premium to giveaway for only a couple bucks.
I’ll add the old school method of scrobbling to last.fm for discovery still works pretty well too, and you can play music directly there now using Youtube (probably been there for years I assume). Just found some pretty obscure stuff that isn’t even available on the mainstream streaming services, so that’s a win.
I forgot last.fm existed. I sort of used them years ago.
They did not handle separate artists with the same name gracefully at all. The page for a riot-grrl adjacent band and an Australian rapper (?) got merged and the fans were going at it on the page.
Do those things give you DJ and radio options? I’m too lazy to go find the songs I want. I’d rather just let the app put on tunes and learn what I like based on feedback and behavior.
You would have to be living under a proverbial rock to have no inkling that Spotify is a product still in use, or be willfully ignorant.
It’s like saying:
People still use Google?
People still drive cars?
People still use Windows?
People still go to churches?
…etc
Not that I agree that we should use Spotify. But playing pretend that they are small, irrelevant, and have no effect on the industry they are in isn’t doing us any favors when it comes to pushing back against it.
Don’t argue with morons. They will bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Instead of actually arguing the topic at hand you are trying to drag all repliers down to your level, act in bad faith, and beat them with personal attacks 🤣
For anyone who hasn’t checked their Spotify subscription for a while, I recently discovered a new basic tier created underneath the premium one that is a little cheaper simply by not including the ‘free’ 15 hours of audiobooks. I’ve never used it and don’t intend to. YMMV.
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.
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