Spotify to raise prices in September
I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers...
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I guess some people are, as long as it’s a good balance of convenience and price. Ages ago, Napster, Kazaa and DC++ were considered more convenient than buying music. I guess torrents are used for that these days.
There's a P2P app from the same era as KaZaA, originally released the same year (2001), that's still in active use today: Soulseek. It's a great way to find obscure music, some of which isn't on streaming services and is extremely difficult to obtain otherwise.
Usenet is good for less popular stuff too. Torrents die once the last seed is gone, but some Usenet providers have over 10 years retention, and you always get full speeds over an encrypted connection with no uploading required.
Edit: Support artists where possible, but sometimes there's music that's impossible to find, and that's when these services come in handy.
Do I need an invite for usenet?
now I don't want to be that person but I'd like to give artists some money somehow. Like I dislike AI as it rips people off - there is a (difficult) middle line to tread
The problem is there's some 90s albums I can't find anywhere - not on Discogs, not on eBay, not on Marketplace. The record labels are usually long gone. But they're on Soulseek. I'm not sure what else to do to get them.
There's also things like DJ sets/mixes that were never sold, only ever distributed online for free.
And that Judas priest CD in the cellar somewhere, sometimes you have paid the artist already so soulseek comes in handy.
Of course... I mean you don't want them coming around your place to see you do you (Judas Priest that is)
Of course... not quite my point but yours is valid. I'd just like a more ethical alternative which I know is asking far too much in 2025
Bandcamp?
I buy merch or direct where I can. I generally pirate older stuff or stuff I would not pay for or cannot find anywhere. I got a rip of dogma and I wll buy the4k to encourage a sequel.
I work a desk job. I cant put pirated music on my work computer or ill get fired. Only real option is a pay service.
I don’t like to bring my personal stuff on my work computer, but I can use my phone for all that stuff instead. You could use a BT speaker to blast pirate metal in the office.
I thought about using my phone but I dont have unlimited data on my phone. I also dont have unlimited data at home so id run my phone and internet down faster. Phone is the real issue as its not much cell data at all per month.
An offline solution exists too, but then you would need to sync a few gigabytes of mp3 files on your phone. Not quite as convenient, but at least it wouldn’t use any mobile data. Actually, it’s still a whole lot nicer than dragging a CD player and a few discs with you. If you’re into retro, you totally can get CDs too…
Firefox & ublock and there are no publicities.
My 'ol android apk doesn't work any more thoug... and can't find a new one (Hint hint, blink blink)
I've been using a cracked yt music since the Spotify crackdown. I miss my playlists often :^(
must be hard paying 5 bucks for an exporter :^(
Can't be fucked looking into how to grab my playlists. I'm sure I will eventually
We have the duo plan, for me and my wife. Kids don't need one yet.
I don't no. But as they keep removing features from the free account, and here in the UK you at least need an account now to play anything people do
Their strategy has been for years to make the phone app very constrained if you're not paying, so to have any decent experience that was kinda required.
Yes. Go back to your bubble now.
the modded app chad bubble
Username checks out
Let's say it together: Enshittification
It's been long underway for Spotify; raising prices is just the lastest step.
Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and 'just works' with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It's French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you're trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
They don't have any other recommendations apart from those human made ones though? Couldn't find what I wanted.
The UI is awful and their artist pages are normally blank for indy artists.
The migration is pretty seamless though, and they apparently pay their artists way better.
They have the human made ones, they have the "artist radio" function that plays songs similar to a band you like, they have a weekly top 30 based on stuff you've been listening to. The headline 'albums of the week' are based on what they like, which I don't think is unfair - I've really enjoyed some of them.
I listen to a lot of metal and electronic, and I've always found the descriptions excellent - usually several paragraphs even for the most obscure of bands. Was well impressed that they had Lambrini Girls as one of their 'albums of the week', and their album at studio quality. Not that that's essential for punk. Admittedly I don't listen to a lot of indy, but they've always had what I've wanted to listen to.
My main complaint about the UX is that it's nearly identical to Spotify, but I suppose there's not much else you can do. Something particular about it that you dislike?
Thanks for the long reply.
Did not know the radio function existed. On mobile at least I can't find it on the artists page? I have to go into the ... Menu on a track in a playlist?
I listen to a lot of instrumental stuff while working, so I may be going too indy? Someone like soundcriters should should have something on their page?
https://open.qobuz.com/artist/5003476
I dislike that you have to go to a playlists page to play it in shuffle, you can't do it from the playlists menu.
Double clicking should play a track but doesn't.
At my PC now, where the radio option doesn't seem to exist at all!?!
"Go to Radio" on the app. Hmm...
Yeh, found it in the android app (on tracks, not artists). Not there on desktop though.
I can play the radio on the app to my desktop though.... Guess that works. Not exactly great UX though.
Thanks for pointing out that it exists though!
Strange, it has the 'autoplay more like this' option on the web player (which does basically the same) but not the explicit 'artist radio' option. Huh.
Ah, I turned off auto play because it would randomly start playing other music instead of continuing my massive playlist....
I also just switched to Qobuz. I like to listen to albums and playlists. The UI is more minimal than Spotify which I enjoy. I like the fact it's not constantly trying to push new things like podcasts, concerts etc. on me. I just want to listen to music and pay the artists for it!
As much I despise Spotify, I'm trying out Qobuz and it's just not really it.
No folder organisation for playlists or albums.
No Linux application.
No lyrics.
No support for smart speakers.
No information linking to artist tours and merch.
No dedicated classical music app.
Generally lacking when it comes to non western artists.
Prides itself on providing high quality music, yet still only has lower quality masters for some artists compared to Apple Music, Tidal, and even Spotify.
I want to love it, like the way it loves and respects the music industry, with it's special magazine etc, but it's just not it.
I'm on Tidal right now and currently considering the switch to Qobuz. There's no official (or unofficial) Linux client which is kind of a bummer. Tidal at least has a half-decent unofficial one...
Yeah, I could just use the web player or strawberry but I just prefer having a dedicated app.
Yeah, the web client works just fine on Linux. A good native client would be better, of course, but I'd rather use the web one than a half-assed native one.
For those using spofity connect: tidal has "tidal connect" as well, which is identical and exactly as supported.
Qobuz unfortunately lacks this feature, to my knowledge.Correction: Qobuz has released "Qobuz connect"! I don't know how widely supported it is vs. Tidal connect, though; iFi and Cambridge audio most notably seem to be missing, according to this list.I personally also prefer the tidal algo to Spotify and qobuz, but that is a matter of preference.
It's quite easy to download Tidal content on any device w/o the app as well—for educational purposes, of course.
For some, Tidal may be a better alternative. I've been quite happy with it. Others may prefer Qobuz.
Qobuz released Qobuz connect back in May
Thank you for the correction! I have updated the comment.
Im 90% sure they have an API, I've seen github projects that mention using it
might be possible to just build a TUI for it then. I'll look into it.
I’m glad to hear this! I’ve just cancelled our Spotify this past week and my partner is looking for a new service (I only listen to the same albums on repeat so I’m going to survive).
Qobuz catalog is extremely lacking IME.
Third one in a little over two years. They say it's to keep up with inflation as if they're a retail store operating on razor thin margins and people accept that. Meanwhile, they're donating to fascist political parties and shafting artists by leveraging loopholes to pay out fewer royalties.
Man, music is one of those things where file sizes, quality and performance all conspire to make both offline media and self-hosting so viable. I never understood Spotify's role.
I mean, you can like physical media and understand why Netflix was more convenient than digging through enormous TV DVD boxsets. But who the hell didn't have a MP3 dump of hudreds of CDs by the time Spotify started being a thing?
That is fascinating to me as well:
Movies > Big filesizes > many public trackers and seeders
Music > smaller and easier to store/play > less public trackers, only slsk is really viable
Books > even smaller > there are some websites like anna and a lot of small ones
But then: Sheet music > even smaller files > almost impossible to pirate
It is fascinating to me that there isnt one clear spectum along filesize.
I guess it has to do with the target audience and demand.
There are a lot of reasons for this but mostly because music streaming has been so popular that it wiped out the market for music. Its also a huge pain in the ass to sort and organize music when nobody follows a standard when they rip music so it makes automating things a lot harder as well.
I have several thousand songs I've downloaded over the last 25 years but even with modern tools like MusicBrainz Picard or Lidarr, there's no good way to organize your collection. You wind up with a bunch of singles or oddball songs from a compilation album, from a sampler, or you download an album and half of the songs come from the US version while the other half is from a UK version of the album and the uploader forgot to include a bonus track that comes on that version. Its just a huge mess that you dont see with movies and TV because apart from things like a "Director's Cut" or "Extended Version," you know what you're getting when you download them.
Additionally, playback isnt easy either. Are you going to manually transfer hundreds of files to your phone? Stream from your home media server to your phone and use a bunch of bandwidth? You're getting tired of 30% of your songs so are you going to go through your collection one by one and erase them?
There's a huge convenience factor for services like Spotify. With movies and TV the convenience factor definitely favors the self-hosted side of things.
Re: Transferring, I bought a 1TB sd-card for my phone and use Syncthing to transfer music from desktop to phone.
Nowadays people say it's advanced stuff for powerusers, but just a decade ago this was the way for everybody: download audio to your computer, sync some of it to mobile devices, listen on the go. Everybody did it, OSs had dedicated software that got activated as soon as you plugged the device in etc.
I hate the "convenience factor" or "non-technical user" arguments.
Since I already had a jellyfish server for TV/Films, I've been testing it for music recently. And the Finamp app is pretty great. I can create playlists and download them for offline listening.
That's definitely a nice feature for sure but getting Jellyfin to even recognize the album/songs means they all need to be properly labeled and filed correctly and that some database somewhere needs to have that album's metadata available which can be real hit or miss. SoulSeek seems to be decent for labeling and allows you to choose who you're downloading from but its still a clunky mess at the end of the day.
I'm all for self hosting as much as possible but for me personally its just much more convenient to use a streaming service for music, and these days I find myself listening to podcasts the most which aren't going to be available on the high seas (nor would I bother if they were because I'm not going to listen to them again).
Not trying to convince you in particular of anything, but for anyone who may be interested in switching to a different podcast app, I'd recommend trying Antennapod.
I'll weigh in since I started hosting my own subsonic server.
I dropped lidar because, like you said, its full album based and doesn't play well with partial collections. I dont want to collect music albums, I want to listen to music. I've not found a good solution for it yet, but I don't even think I even need it. Once I get music, I tag the files with a desktop app which uses musicbrains for data and then drop the files on a SMB share. Navidrome picks them up and makes them available for streaming in 2 seconds.
Bandwidth is free and file storage space is cheap. Any convenience I gained from spotify is lost when music gets removed from it. Most recently it was king gizzard who removed half their library from spotify and I actually purchased some of their albums from bandcamp before. I own the mp3s already, but used spotify for convenience. Now I host them myself. Now I'm in control.
Obviously though, I'm the odd man out. Not everyone will be able to do this. But if I can, I will. And since I can, I do.
I wouldn’t have subbed to Spotify on my own. I’m inherited into my wife’s family plan. For me the biggest benefit is just discovering new music. I used to have a big MP3 library, but after a couple computer upgrades, they’ve kind of disappeared over the years. Having Spotify there has been really convenient for just listening toto old stuff I’ve lost as well. This said, if my FiL cancels, I probably wouldn’t sub for myself anyway.
Yea it is a bit of a pain, but also I haven't found a reliable setup like rrsuite for music.
Ideally it should allow for noticing a song on Spotify and transfer direct to the server
A big part of it that finally made me pay for spotify is it helping me to find new music. Its not perfect, but when the app actually works correctly it will queue up music similar to the song or playlist you searched and it can help you find new bands or other songs by the artists you like. When i was just listening to my downloaded music I'd get stuck in a rut of the same few albums or artists.
I really like Bandcamps suggestions and weekly newsletter for music suggestions, might be worth checking out. I always felt like Spotify was pushing me towards the mainstream, whereas Bandcamp almost does the opposite. Ultimately, I greatly prefer it.
I was like 9 when Spotify was incorporated
Your parents failed you by not having an MP3 dump of hundreds of CDs to give to you.
Dummy
I obviously do understand why people use Spotify.
But you are correct; my phone has 128GB internal storage, my hard drive music collection is smaller than that. There has been solutions for syncing (a curated list of) music to mobile devices for a long time. There are many - and frankly much better - ways to discover new music outside of Spotify. There are some really cool music only internet radio stations out there.
And I'm not even talking about self-hosting, which simply cannot be recommended to everyone.
People defending Spotify always come back to convenience, and always dismiss the disdvantages of generated playlists, and downplay the suckness of AI content. And never acknowledge that alternatives exist, right down to NOT using a music streaming service.
Like a million songs come out every week. Can't keep up when it's mostly digital now, no cd to get. But you can rip Spotify!
https://github.com/justin025/onthespot
You could just be young. By the time I was old enough to start pirating Spotify had already existed for years and it's just significantly easier than getting into a tracker. My wife has yearly playlists she's been making since she was a teen and doesn't want to loose those.
“Youngins” dont understand that when Spotify came on the scene people had already stopped playing music on CDs and MP3s largely. It was when the ipod and iphones already existed and people were getting ripped off by apple for $1.29 per song that they wanted to listen to.
I vividly remember at the time trying to tell people to try Spotify instead of paying for literally every song they wanted to listen to, and people were skeeved by it because it sounded too good to be true
God this made me remember my parents getting me an iPod touch and a 50$ gift card. I listened to an owl city album for days on repeat lmao.
I actually know plenty who still hold onto them...
Friendly reminder that your “legally acquired” library of FLAC files never raises its subscription prices!
I will never part from locally stored music. I do, however, would love to have my collection run through a recommendation algorithm for discovering new music.
Would scrobbling to e.g. ListenBrainz (or last fm) be an option for you for discovery?
Yep. Hooray for self hosting!
I'm quite unhappy with spotify. I don't care about the price, but it keeps repeating the same and same music again, and the percentage of crappy AI music is increasing. You can clearly hear it. Their client isn't open source, and it's just a wrapped website. It sucks.
There are ways you can use a Spotify account registered in another country and you basically pay about £2 a month. I'm mainly into 80s and 90s music and used Spotify to discover music, and once I come across a song I like I add the album name to a list (i.e. note it down) and find the CD from a second hand shop or failing which obtain the FLAC files some other way. This way I now have an offline library that has most of the songs that I love. Spotify will be there as long as I can just pay £2-ish but the moment they try the age verification or raise prices, its bye-bye for them.
They age verify in the UK already...
For most people though they won't be hacking things to use Spotify. I agree £2 a month is OK but for me the issue is they charge a fortune yet pay artists a pittance
True. For me it hasn't come up so far, possibly because my account is registered in a different country. It's going to be a bit inconvenient but probably time to give them the finger and look elsewhere.
I ripped CDs to FLAC, put them on a Plex server, and use Plexamp on my computer and phone. Now I've got my own personal streaming service.
Not everyone will do that though... plenty of people I know have zero idea about that kind of stuff
Unfortunately true. It's the uninformed (and who don't care enough to get informed) that allow the violation of rights and privacy continue.
I have a 50TB library of movies and TV, Plex, the *arrs, a dedicated server, and even I dont bother with music because its a huge pain in the ass to deal with. I have a bunch of songs from before music streaming was popular and a few I've gotten from SoulSeek since then, but that's about it. Ripping CDs, labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure is just too much work especially when you get into thousands and thousands of songs. There are software solutions to this but they don't work very well because music is much harder to deal with when you can have 50 versions of the same song floating around out there.
Somewhere out there is a person with a single folder named "music", with zero sub folders, containing thousands upon thousands of tracks with names like "1.mp3" and "1 (1).mp3" and they're totally okay with it.
Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
IMO it makes more sense to rip and download music than movies. Music is small files that you listen to dozens or hundreds of times, whereas movies are large files that you might only watch once or twice.
You need to do the same thing for movies and TV shows though.
Lidarr will do this for you, mostly automated.
To rip CDs, I use abcde ("a better CD encoder") on Linux. It automatically tags the tracks based on CDDB or Musicbrainz data.
There's probably a basic app that'll move it to the right directory structure, but I find Lidarr pretty easy to use. I copy the album across to my server, then in Lidarr I add the relevant album then click the button to manually import it, and point it to the right folder. Lidarr will automatically sort it into the right directory structure. I have it configured to use the structure that Plex wants - folders per artist, then folders per album inside those.
That's assuming it has data on Musicbrainz. For MP3/FLAC files from albums that aren't on Musicbrainz, it's a bit trickier. I sometimes use kid3 (KDE audio tagger) as it can pull from other sources like Discogs and Amazon.
I think you do have a point about the replayability of music versus movies but at the same time I share my server with about two dozen friends and family so its good to have some variety in there along with having a good selection for when you get that random thought about a movie and want to watch it rather than spending 20 minutes finding and adding it to your server
Radarr and sonarr also handle the naming and organization but this all relies upon the files being properly named which can be a chore with music as you regularly see remixes, sample albums, compilation albums, singles, covers, extended play, radio play, censored, uncensored, etc not to mention the quantities of songs out there by artists of varying popularity, which is the root problem with music databases not always finding a match, matching incorrectly, or your downloaded album having songs from multiple different sources that the uploader lumped together. You very occasionally run into this with movies too but its typically because TMDB or whatever source not matching the studio on the release year when a release is delayed.
This probably isn’t much of an issue for you if you're ripping your own music but that's becoming more and more rare these days with the transisition away from physical media. I actually bought a blu-ray RW drive for my PC with the intention of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays but gave up because of the work involved (encoding in HandBrake) if you wanted anything but Remux quality.
I honestly wish the days of Napster came back, but I have had good luck with SoulSeek and have read that its possible to integrate with Lidarr but haven't tried yet. Im sure things will get better in time as these streaming services try to squeeze their customers more and more.
This is the way to go!
Also Daniel Ek is investing in AI war company:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html
And Trump!
So glad he didn't get his grubby hands on Arsenal FC in the end.
My main beef with spotify is their attempt to privatize and monopolize podcasting.
Spotify offers audio hosting and a large userbase, but does not provide rss. A few people I like are trapped in this, and I have no way to listen to their shows apart from using spotify. They refuse to understand that this is an issue, just like youtubers are ok with lock-in.
Podcasting infrastructure is not monopolized yet, like video is. It is even bigger problem for me than underpayid artists.
So boycotting, and if you undersrand that, you should too.
The podcasters that you are referring to being "trapped in this" chose to be "trapped". So don't just be upset with Spotify over it.
I choose to blame platforms for vile intents rather than users for ignorance. I don't see awareness of politics of technology as obligatory for all authors (even less for users), but creators of those platforms know damn well what they are doing.
Meh, their attempts at privatizing podcasting is why I'm mad at spotify, but same token there's been a few podcasters that definitely go to the spotify platform for reasons, some in the monopolized format...
Since I don't have a spotify, I don't listen to those. I agree with above don't just be upset with spotify, I blame the platform yes, but I also blame the people who got in bed with them.
It helps a lot that audio hosting is so much cheaper than video hosting
spotify pays me half a cent per stream, the profit margins for them must be fucking insane. and the music sounds like shit. I'd much rather people pirate it than support these leeches
if you want to support artists you like, buy the music, ideally on bandcamp. if you do have to steam it, Deezer at the very least won't vandalize the audio
What do you think about Qobuz as a musician?
Just leaving this here from the excellent [email protected]
From that chart Qobuz seems to be the all round best deal. Is there any catch?
I use Qobuz! It works well most the time. And it has a huge library. Some things are not as polished as some of the bigger companies. And there's a lot of Initial setup to get it working..
That said, I would say it's a great option. I do wish it had better continuous play options, as sometimes I listen to a playlist, and then it just stops. But that may be part of the learning curve. I'm not really a big "playlists" guy.. I'd like to start a radio and have it find similar artists (similar to Pandora 12 years ago) But that doesn't really seem to be the way companies are going anymore.
I have several Google mini devices (I know, I know. I'm working on it, but that's a whole other process) and they don't really seem to get along with qobuz all the time.
Overall, I like it, but it still needs work.
I just switched from Tidal to Qobuz and when using Soundiiz like 1/4 of my songs didn't transfer, and when I look songs up a lot of them aren't there at all. The personalized playlist is also disappointing in my experience, so I'm considering switching back.
I have noticed that the search function is very unforgiving. Like, you have to search the exact title, because it will not find a partial name.
That sucks that a lot of songs didn't come up. I've actually been pleasantly surprised with the content. Personally. A lot of my stuff that I thought was pretty niche I've been able to find.
Are you noticing any specific genres are more difficult than others?
The ones I've noticed so far were somewhere in between metal, hyperpop, and generally chaotic electronic music. Specifically:
DEATHWISH by poutyface
MONSTER ENERGY GUN! by KevinKempt
PIN CUSHION by Siiickbrain
Also:
Little Game by Benny
mi tawa lon pimeja ni
There's a bunch of others that I haven't looked through yet. I downloaded a list of songs from my Tidal library with soundiiz so I should do the same with Qobuz then do a diff.
Lol just say Joe Rogan
spotify lost me as a customer as soon as I learned that they gifted 150k to Trump for his inaugaration party
When I got tired of Spotify's shitty practices, I looked into other streaming services that could compare, and honestly I didn't like any other offerings. So I said fuck it, I'll just download everything and play it locally.
What made the jump easy was a service called Spotidown, I even paid for the ad free version it was so convenient. You literally copy the spotify link for songs and playlists and it let's you download it. There's a couple different services like this, that will make the switch easier.
I've settled for Qobuz. Its discovery features are terrible, but it's basically a music storefront with a streaming library. High-quality, had basically my whole library and I can buy albums directly for download.
Oh I didn't know you could buy music from Qobuz, is it a better system than bandcamp? I've never used either so Im at the perfect time to find a good one.
Both are great, and I think complement eachother nicely. Qobuz mostly focuses on label offered music catalogues, while Bandcamp has always catered to indies. If an artist offers their music through Bandcamp, I still prefer to make my purchases there, but if the artist is signed to a label then it's a good shot Qobuz has it.
Either service offers the music in the highest quality provided, though lossless versions through Qobuz do tend to be priced a few dollars higher than the regular album.
Looks like I'll be using both then lol, thanks for the input!
Does SpotiDown have a linux version? If not, do you know an alternative?
Nicotine+/soulseek. won't copy your spotify lists but you can manually download everything. will take time obviously as you'll have to search for everything.
You can use slsk-batchdl alongside a CSV of your Spotify Playlists to make quicker work of this.
Not that im aware of, sorry. There is a Windows based spotidown software, but no Linux. Spotidown is a web based service normally, so you could definitely use it in Linux. I actually downloaded all my music from it using my phone!
For Linux you can use ZSpotify. It runs in the command line, just use a burner account to run as in zspotify because it's against their TOS of course, and might get you kickbanned. It also requires premium, but you only need it for a day at most, in order to run the download. Then you can cancel.
I wrote a little python script to download all my YouTube music songs for my navidrome setup. I'm sure you could do something similar for spotify if you know python.
I mean, you could just pay the artists for their music.
I do! I go to concerts and buy merch from the artists I listen to, which gives them exponentially more money than the fractions of a penny Spotify gives them. I've paid for Spotify long enough to justify downloading the music I had saved, any future music I want I'll just purchase from Bandcamp or something similar.
Lazy doormat Spotify users: "Okay... but this is the LAST, LAST, LAST TIME FOR REAL. Do it again and there'll be a hashtag and a series of Tiktok memes!"
"I'm SO good at making money that I don't care when people cheat me out of it for no other reason than because they feel like it. This is something I am proud of."
I mean spotify is one of those things where it's harder to move away and the cost benefit is harder to argue against. It's not like the streaming bullshit that has happened where everything is fragmented and you'd need 200 substations to watch the movies you want.
The thing that sucks with Spotify is the money they gave fucking Joe Rogan
Look, I can't expect your assessment of value proposition to align with mine - we are different people.
But if I were a paying Spotify customer, and they gave $250 million dollars to pay someone I think is actively damaging the world, and then started charging me MORE to pay for it, there is ABSOLUTELY no amount of cost benefit and convenience that would keep me there.
I will sit in a dark, silent room motivating on pure spite before I would accept such an indignity.
Like I said, fuck Joe Rogan, but every big Corp has been responsible for awful shit. At some point you have to live and you have to give in somewhere.
This is coming from someone that self hosts and even I can't be bothered to self host every fucking random ass song in existence.
My value proposition is that my entire family doesn't have to listen to ads and I don't have to spend half my day tracking down songs.
Again, my larger point is that spotify for all its bullshit still isn't streaming video levels of utter bullshit.
Well, you're right. Everyone has to draw their own line. I'll agree with you this is probably less egregious than some, and I personally do make make purchases I shouldn't from institutions I shouldn't to get by.
But I do every single one of those holding my nose and acknowledging I'm contributing to a problem.
"I spend hours configuring services so I can have a second sandwich with lunch twice a month." - Proud little nerd with poor cost benefits analysis.
I'm very happy to skip a fast food trip to not extend my day job for .000005% of my salary.
Ohhhh maybe I'll save up for a bigger house now that I have opened up budget for that avacado toast!
You are so cool. I am very impressed.
I made a general comment, and my opinion has not changed. You didn't have to make it personally about you, but you decided to come defend your honor against a nonspecific shitpost. Just like MY opinion is mine, yours is YOURS, and you didn't need to jump in here.
Heck, I specifically addressed my initial comment to "lazy, doormat Spotify users" and for some reason you decided I was talking about you.
I dumped it months ago and went back to Deezer.
There is a ReVanced version of Spotify, for people who didn't already know. Block ads and get premium features for free: https://revanced.app/
(There's also YT Music ReVanced)
Can't I just go with piracy
This is more convenient than piracy.
Having the files locally is more convenient though
How is having any song you want being one search away less convenient than having to curate and organize a music collection, and then go digging though folders to find the song you want?
Look, I've been collecting music since 1998 and even I admit that streaming is a lot more convenient. Only reason why I still collect music is because I am a DJ and don't always have a reliable wifi or data connection at every gig. But even then I've culled the vast majority of 50k+ tunes down to about a 1000 of the best and most popular on the dance floor. Then swap songs in and out as needed. The modern era makes it easy to re-obtain a deleted track, and often in higher quality than I originally ripped it at (I use a spectrum analyzer on my collection to verify).
Often without internet access so having it local is pretty important.
On desktop install Spicetify in your Spotify client. It does many things, including block ads.
I heard the ReVanced patching stopped working recently. Is that not the case anymore?
Not sure cause I use YT Music ReVanced instead for the larger music selection.
Wow, thank you!
I used that for the longest time, but lately it stops working several days after I update it. I'm glad though, as now I have Navidrome set up.
If you are going to steal music you may as well just steal music
Blocking ads isn't stealing
Fediverse has quite alot of indie musicians. Check out LABR http://labr.online/ or the indie beat https://theindiebeat.fm/ and try some new music and support creatives directly.
You mean replacing a bunch of people with AI didn’t work?
Never will. All the tech bros can stomp and wine. But it will never replace real people with real skills. It’s fucking stupid that these business majors can dictate stupid decisions.
Spotify has a become a shit show lately. I don't like that the CEO is supporting a genocidal state, the platform is full of fake AI artists and playlists. Artists aren't getting paid enough. the price hikes and the app just feels so bloated with unnecessary bullshit. Because of this, I switched to self hosting my own music server (Navidrome, and Lidarr) and I use the symphonium app on Android. Really happy with that solution
Tidal seems to be a pretty good alternative.
Also, you can use some FOSS alternatives like SimpMusic, InnerTune (or some fork), ViMusic (or a fork).
For PC you can use the FOSS YouTube Music alternative.
Still no lossless?
Dropped it for Tidal years ago, never looked back.
I've started collecting CDs and building my own Jellyfin library so I don't depend on streaming services.
On Qobuz here. I just buy vinyl then rip it directly from Qobuz generally.
not as far as I know!
Well my decision to cancel Spotify last month is already paying off.
anything to sustain the hateful joe roegan podcasts on the platform.
It's cheaper if you have 5 friends and take the family plan. I'm paying ~€2 a month for the last couple of years.
of course there are ways round it, but that's not my point. Getting expensive
Getting expensive would be the wrong wording. The price of subscription is simply following inflation. Otherwise as long as the price stays the same while people get raises, you could say it's getting cheaper.
But it could becoming increasingly not worth it. Depends how much % of your pay is spent on the subscription long term, as both of them go up. If the % is growing, then it's bad, if it's mostly the same or going down, thats good.
Meanwhile the new Seagate 26tb HDD is going for $270
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/seagate-expansion-26tb-external-usb-3-0-desktop-hard-drive-with-rescue-data-recovery-services-black/6614708.p?skuId=6614708&ref=198&affgroup=%22Content%22%2C%22May+Contract+Change%22%2C%22Partners+to+Keep%22%2C%22Roku+AO+-+ROP%22%2C%22Temp+0%25%22
I've been downloading my media for over 10 years now and I only have like 2 1/2 Terabytes filled, a 26tb drive could hold most people's lifetime media collections.
Owning your own storage and files is the only way to ensure you keep access to the media you want.
I'm paying £20/m for a lossless family plan from Deezer... That's how they get you 😭. Now I'd have to apologize to my family members if I took away their subscription. Used to be around £17 when I started a few years back.
I do not recommend getting a family plan.
Ditched Spotify and bought myself a galleon and a tricorner hat instead. Haven't looked back.
Lidarr + Navidrome + Feishin + Metube
Mullvad for acquiring, TailScale and Symfonium for listening while away from home
This sounds like a lot of setup but probably took a few hours in total to set up the various docker images and get them working together.
I spend my saved money on vinyls, official merch, and SoundCloud or BandCamp purchases for my local library.
A few hours, when you know what you're doing. A few month when you have to figure it out, and maybe even then, it won't work, or you'll have lost a lot of money trying.
This should be a lot easier to do, than it is
Fair, I should clarify: the few hours is for the music parts only. The homelab set up could easily stretch to months ... And I'd still recommend doing it to most, it's great fun setting it up!
Good Lord, others like you do exist!
This might be the actual first time I've seen someone just call out the bullshit for some of these people running janky services who don't have a family they need to support.
Out of curiosity, what is your experience/usage like with this? Spotify is very easy to justify if you heavily use some of their features because there's not a way (that I know of) to replicate them. For example:
From my usage, sacrificing a majority of those is a non-starter because my Spotify usage has become more than mp3 hosting and organization.
I scrobble with Last.FM for music discovery.
I don't really use social features and not sure if they're popular in homelab land. Some people I know share a Plex server.
I'm not a purist about these things tbh, I have an Xbox live subscription, among others, to use social features for pretty much the same reason you're using Spotify. I might have stuck with them if I was using them more.
Yarrr! hello there fellow matey! 🏴☠️ Sounds good but, do you also set this up individually on your wife's and kids phones and devices and keep them updated?
I mostly don't! The kids are too young, the wife has Home Assistant, Symfonium and has web shortcuts for the arrs. Haven't had any complaints since I got 2FA and external domain mapped for Hass.
My friend has had good results with jellyseerr with his wife and kids though haven't got to the point of needing it myself.
What pisses me off is that I can't have a family plaln associated with my main Google Workspace account. Because it's a Workspace account. So if I want to have a family plan for YouTube Music I need to have it associated with a gmail account not my workspace account. That's such bullshit, if you ask me!
They have prices? People are paying? 🤔🏴☠️🦜
Bandcamp is not banned in the UK yet. But i think the government has strong intelligence that they are a terrorist organisation.
Well, it's owned by friggin' Epic, now... so they're not that far off with their Intel.They sold it to Songtradr in 2023, there were "layoffs", a lot of the employees involved with unionisation while Epic controlled the company were fired (in the wiki page toward the end of the history section).
Wow, that trade went by very quietly. Glad they're out from Epic at least i guess... scummy as hell behavior from Songtradr...
Yeah, was like just over a year later, they still are the independent & small label place imo, I don't have faith that'll last forever unfortunately. They still are my go to place for discovery and exploration, bandcamp daily still has some interesting finds, I just make sure I download my purchases.
I will cancel it
Military defence is expensive
And yet, despite the subscription price or its raise, Spotify still insists on forcing promoted content on your homepage.
gotta give even more money to joe fuckhead - bet absolutely none of this will improve artist payouts..
I've had a grudge against Spotify waaaayyyy back when it first launched as an app on the computer.
For some reason, the Spotify app on my Mac wasted a ton of resources and battery. And it made me so mad I've never used them since.
Then years later they made dumbass Joe Rogan the face of the company so fuck all that.
Two things come to mind, spotify was always a browser based app on mac/linux/windows, I think that was way more inefficient in the early days of doing apps that way. The other thing is that spotify originally used its users' computers as cache to serve other users, that might've caused some additional load.
I switched to Tidal when I realised their stream quality was, at the minimum, double Spotify, and cheaper. Then all the controversial shit about Spotty came out and I was just shaking my head disapprovingly from Tidal's porch
Hell yeah tidal friend. Same here. The only annoying thing is its memory for where I was in a song/playlist. Seems like I can click away and it forgets where I was. That’s the one thing Spotify has over tidal
I use Bandcamp when I want to buy and YouTube with ad blocker for streaming.
Music costs??
I can't even imagine paying for it to begin with.
I bought one of those $5 for the entire year accounts off some shady website.
It lasted for 5 years.
No biggie. I never had subscriptions. I always thought it was a waste of money.
Will they be raising their rates in India? Because that's where Spotify thinks I live now.
I got a subscription two months ago because I had an event where it was simply easier to just use Spotify. I'm going back to plexamp I guess.
Is there any music on spotify that isn't also on youtube? Youtube has practically everything, it has always seemed to me. I've never been tempted by spotify.
The 128 bitrate on YouTube is quite the drag IMO except for like carmusic maybe.
This and the fact that Youtube are just as much robbing gits... like I have said, I don't want to sound mean but generally I'd like the artists to get paid for their work somehow. Now how to do that is the hard bit
AFAIK to get money in artists' pockets it's best to buy merch and buy tickets to shows.
Is there any reasonable option that I can use on a Garmin watch standalone? I like to run without my phone and listen to a podcast and Spotify has been my go to.
Can your watch play mp3s? Most podcasts are available for download that way too.
I'm pretty sure it can, but I don't actually know what subscription services or how it works to get podcasts downloaded. Spotify has been pretty easy. I guess it's time to look into this stuff. I have been doing this stuff legit for a while, but I guess I could get back on the high seas too if I have to. I just wanted to make sure the people making content were getting paid, but I think Spotify is bad for that too. So tired of good services getting slowly worse.
fuck Spotify, I only listen to downloaded flac and mp3 music and YouTube
Well I am happy to have cancelled this shit a few months ago
ive been using apple music for years, mainly like how for edm it tends to have highquality recorded live sets for all djs, and they are seperated instead of being one long continuous track, like youll get
I cancelled it when they started to crack down on family plans with separate households. It just wasn't worth the money to me anymore. I wonder how much more price hikes the remaining customers are going to tolerate. At some point it becomes cheaper to just outright buy music..
Probably is cheaper for a lot of people who just listen to the same stuff week after week
People pay corporations for music? Morons.
What an awful website. You either sell your soul or you throw away your money. No thanks, I will stick to the post title.
And?
Cool I can't pay any less than the zero I currently am subscribed at to not use their service
If you're on Android you won't need a family plan, just get ReVanced and patch YT Music so it's ad-free and plays in the background.
Amazon’s Prime Music? Most people have prime anyway, I think that comes with the ad version. Less than Spotify to switch to add free.
If you still have access to any .edu email addresses, you can get student rates for Apple Music, and probably others.
No addons that I know of, but they do an annoying thing where they change which specific version/release/album of a song is available, so your playlists end up missing songs even though the song itself is still available and you have to correct the playlist.
I don’t see why people hate Spotify so much. I used to go out and pay £10 for an album decades ago, multiple times a month sometimes. Now I can basically listen to anything for the price of an album a month. Plus, you can play Spotify on just about any device, even all the open source solutions that Netflix blocked like 15 years ago. On top of that it’s Swedish rather than American.
When you bought an album you owned it for life. With spotify you are borrowing the music and if you stop paying you get nothing left
For most people, that's an acceptable trade, because they don't want to maintain a library. And with Spotify, you get access to a much larger library than you could ever possibly keep.
Lots of reasons.
They pay their artists an an absolute pittance with a model that vastly favours the big labels. New artists, those artists striving to establish themselves and/or independent artists are screwed over.
At the same time they pay hundreds of millions of dollars to pricks like Joe Rogan.
The 'fake artists' controversy where Spotify pay stock music production companies to produce pretty bland 'playlist' mood music, then created an internal team to seed these tracks on their uberhyped suggested playlists.
Getting caught heavily promoting AI Bands who have been trained on actual musicians work, without paying them for it, which in turn allows Spotify to pay out even less royalties to actual musicians.
Daniel Ek recently investing in 100m Euros into an AI weapons company, which has triggered an artist boycott.
You have zero ownership and zero access rights to the music you stream.
In short, if you care at all about music and the people who make it then streaming in general is not a good model for their future and Spotify is poison.
Yeah I have been top member for over a decade. It is convenient, there are some things pushing me away though.
The podcast push, autoplaying unremoveable videos on the homescreen.
The algorithym pushing US style hack shit like what loser group of comedians take on politics is despite I exclusively listening to Australian comic book movie news and British Ukrainian war coverage.
Worsening UI/UX, poor offline management
Shorts/Reels
Removing features, from the running tempo sensor to family mixes.
The offline features on Spotify are abysmal. Half my downloaded albums don't even work. It's the primary reason I'm looking for an alternative. How can an app with such a high market share be this shitty?
They do not want you offline.
I hate that it hangs loading for so lomg before admitting defeat and showing the offline listings.
Yes! It always does the loading spin animation for like 10 seconds before it shows me my downloaded album. And some albums just never work at all. I have to go online and then offline again just to make it work at all, which defeats the purpose of being offline in the first place.
I just started my free qobuz trial though, and canceled my Spotify account. I mentioned their CEO as the reason I canceled.
My frustration with Spotify is based not in price but that they're choosing to shaft indie artists and new young artists.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetization-eligibility/
The 0.5% of royalties that they redirect to those with more plays is often 100% of the royalties for the little guy being stolen from.
The artificial tracks they wanna combat? I imagine they will surf by pleasantly with 1000-3000 plays over the last 12 months with a wider variety of bot accounts listening to ensure they reach enough unique listeners.
While it is essentially nothing (in monetary value) they still rob the teenage punk band that sounds awful of their first royalty dollar.
There are probably many individual reasons people have for hating Spotify, but here are some of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pHbS6bgmqE
Also, from Ben Jordan: https://youtu.be/MXudOLStaXA
Spotify was an amazing service. I've used it for years but its getting worse. More and more things that are intrusive are being added, prices are going up. It just sucks i wish they would have just split it into different tiers so i dont have to pay for all this extra shit.
Inflation is also rising. I am not so sure Spotify raised its prices more than inflation.
They have
If I'm renting music, at least give me FLAC level quality.
No, 320 kbps won't do.
Swedish or american- they’re still exploiting artists. Capitalists gonna capitalist.
I don't hate it per se, but would rather it paid the artists better.... quite simple really
One of the main thing Spotify has going for it is indie artists, without a label. And so a large portion of my collection will not be on services like Tidal or Apple Music
Spotify is still a thing?! Who knew… so many better options out there… hoping they crumble between artists leaving and no one wanting to deal with the drama and prices… they are about to be the “new vine” of pitfall and demise! Bye bye bye! Let the company burn!!
What better options are there? I'm old so don't know
if you don't mind downloading the music then Nictoine+, it's a GUI for soulseek. essentially Napster/Limewire. Anything you can get on spotify you can pretty much get there.
Keep in mind, like Napster, it takes time to find things you want. If you have your own server or hell even a cloud server with unlimited bandwidth and a good chunk of space you can put your music on there that way you can just stream it to whatever device you use to listen to music. Essentially a media server.
I have Apple Music because I am a student so, I pay way less than most but it downloads all my songs and playlists and can use it without data. But I also have the iHeartradio app which has my fave radio station plus so many podcasts.
But there is Apple Music, Tidal, iHeartradio, Soundcloud, Amazon Music, SiriusFM, qobuz, there are many.
Awesome thanks
You can rip MP3 files by using a Youtube-to-MP3 converter.
Just stop using Spotify entirely.
https://github.com/justin025/onthespot
Way better. My personal library is reaching 375k songs.
And once you have them ripped (however you choose to do that), host them via a media server so you can access them from whatever device you like.