Spyke

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me_irl

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me_irl

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The best ones already have no ads, and they do it for free. They run off donations only. You just need to find a way to get invited into them.

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Reddit has never turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but filed to go public anyway

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The people still choose reddit/Facebook/google. I don't know we're supposed to change that without actually removing people's freedom of choice.

In my opinion/experience, it's for a few reasons. People are marketed these centralized platforms, typically they're very/fairly simple to use, and those platforms already have an established userbase. Combined with the other factors, the userbase will keep growing, which also incentivizes Even more users to adopt the platform.

For most people, there's no incentive to use some small random forum. And these small random forums aren't typically run for profit, meaning people aren't paying for ads for their niche forum or hobby website because it's just a hobby, not a business run for profit. Whereas people will see countless ads for Instagram or TikTok. Typically, people who don't block ads, and use these sorts of media didn't care enough to bother looking for alternative platforms, they couldn't even be bothered to set up an adblocker.

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Pirate archivist group scrapes Spotify's 300TB library, posts free torrents for downloading 86,000,000 tracks — investigation underway as music and metadata hit torrent sites

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I have not been able to replicate the amazing experience I had with Audiogalaxy or Soulseek. [...] My taste in music is extremely eclectic but since I've been limited to Spotify, I am rarely discovering weird music anymore. Fuck corporations.

Soulseek is still alive

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Apple Music isn't the best streaming music service — it's just the least annoying

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I don't think his post is meant to be hostile. It's not pointless, but it would add more of a discussion to elaborate on the topic.

On the topic of choosing to own (download (without DRM)) your music, one of the benefits is that it allows you to have all your music available in whichever music player (app/program/streaming service) you like. You can access the music while offline, without being required to pay some subscription fee. If downloading, it's generally also very easy to switch between different players if you so desire to in the future. You can control the metadata (swap album art, edit track info, etc.) You can sometimes even use owned media in tandem with streaming services to put all your media in one place within a streaming service's app/program. Usually, doing this requires less purchases/downloads to get all your media in one place, but still requires a sub.

On the topic of using Apple Music as a player.. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but you needed to use iTunes (on a PC!) to import local MP3 files to Apple Music, which, iTunes, love it or hate it, requires you to not only own a PC, but it has its limitations such as FLAC files being unsupported... That being said, Apple Music does provide a great convenience for many people and it's often cheaper than legally purchasing all of your songs. You can even add your downloaded songs from a PC (but not locally from an android device for some reason??)

I prefer to own my music. For anyone who likes the idea but doesn't know where to start, I can give some recommendations for convenience.

For music acquisition, use a legal website like Bandcamp to purchase your music, most of the money goes to Artists, compared to some other platforms. Alternatively you could pirate.. (illegal! I don't care if you pirate, but I'm not gonna write a tutorial.)

If you want to sync owned/downloaded files, use: SyncThing - free software that lets you automatically mirror file directories between your devices, syncing your libraries with no fees required. Available on Android/Win/Linux/Mac

For players, I recommend:

Android:

PowerAmp - trial & one time purchase, has theming support, massive customization options

Oto Music - lite version or one time purchase, supports downloading & embedding lyrics

PC:

MusicBee - free, has theming support, allows loading network files (local or remote)

Plenty of players available for different functional needs and/or aesthetics, but these are what I currently use.