Can’t even seek through songs.
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What a shame it would be if this drove more people into using those awful cracked versions of the Spotify apk that give you most of the premium features without a premium account. Truly the godless heathens over at xManager (https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager) must be rejoicing over this.
Who tf uses Spotify without a premium account?
I’d rather pirate that shit that use it for free (I like to hit next all the way).
IMHO Spotify is one of the few services that it is worth to pay.
I have the family premium plan and honestly love it. I haven’t downloaded an mp3 in years because Spotify is so convenient. As far as subscription services go, this one is top tier for me.
Now when we look at movie streaming… well that’s what the music streaming could have been like. What an absolute mess.
Now if only they’d pay the musicians worth a shit. Maybe they should strike next.
Full disclosure I am on Spotify family plan and I love it because
It would be nice if companies didn’t slash features and would offer music for free with features beyond that of broadcast radio.
It would be nice if we didn’t have the mechanisms demanding infinite growth from companies because sometimes that’s just not possible or even necessary.
Imagine if Spotify could just be like ok, yeah we’re good no need to make major changes, everyone is happy, life is good thanks. Versus: oh shit we need to boost the quarterly numbers who can we fuck over to get there? I know, customers and musicians both! Yay!
if only they’d pay the musicians worth a shit<
afaik that’s mainly the fault of the music labels, they charge quite good money, but they don’t give it to the artists: https://blog.groover.co/en/tips/loud-clear-spotify-2/
That article, while not necessarily wrong, is blatant propaganda and overlooks the most important issues until the final paragraph, and even then it only touches on it once.
As someone with expansive knowledge and experience in the indie music industry, with a lot of experience dealing with streaming services and Spotify in particular the biggest problem is not the % of value created paid out, it’s what the actual value is. They don’t touch anywhere on how much you get paid per play, how the value is created, how the money flows once it’s in Spotify’s hands, etc.
As said in the article, artists and indie labels/distributors have basically no ways to reach Spotify to negotiate a price, but Spotify itself paid literal millions to license a few major labels in the beginning. The ‘value’ of a play is extremely skewed, where you’d need upwards of 10.000 plays to equal a single play on a nightly radio show for a big broadcaster like the BBC or at a festival with 500 people. On top of that, if you work hard, network properly and prepare your release you can get quite good exposure through radio, dj and other live plays, whereas with Spotify you have to be lucky that they put your pitch towards the right ‘tastemakers’, they are actively working against user (influencer)-playlists, have piss poor customer service, blatantly favour major label tracks in their algorithms and don’t actual care about their listeners.
On top of that we’ve got the obvious subscription enshittification, classic outlandish manager/director salaries and bonuses, the need to have an ever-rising share price and more.
Thanks for the insights. No holy among the capitalist companies…
Yeah I work at a label we pay our artists about 30% of what we make off them, but that isn’t actually that bad considering the amount of overhead there is at a record label and the amount of services we provide for them. Just advertising alone makes up about 1/3 of a big label and we will spend more on advertising, distributing and actually allowing them to make music than we actually pay them, so in terms of end value it’s probably closer to 60 or 70%
In this case, it’s a good thing that Spotify is an European and not an US company. Less incentive for enshittification. At the same time, the main reason they fuck over musicians so much is not so much Spotify but because of record labels and ads themselves. The record labels are the ones with the financial power, holding the copyrights. It’s not that Spotify doesn’t pay labels, they do, then in turn the labels keep most of the money and fuck over the artists. At the same time, the record labels came last to the streaming game. Blinded on the madness that was the Napster and peak P2P era, a war they lost, they didn’t want to even sell digital copies. Many awards and labels didn’t considered digital sales, legitimate sales. An many rogue artists sold or gave their digital albums for free to protest this. So they were always behind the curve. When Apple forced the labels to sit at the table for iTunes, they had no bargain leverage and were forced to accept shit terms in exchange for the hope that streaming would stop piracy. As a result, the tech giants got to keep most of the revenue bag and that’s been the status quo ever since.
On the other hand, adverts don’t pay. We tend to forget this because the likes of Google and Facebook are so massive. But the only reason they make any money is because of how massive they’re. Adverts are a shit form of payment. Too expensive and no one wants to advertise with you, too cheap and you can’t cover even the platform maintenance, it’s a delicate balance. The result is you need millions of eyes to make any significant amount of money from an advert. There’s a reason cable and open air TV has devolved into 15 minutes of advertisement per every 20 minutes of entertainment.
Spotify pays a fraction of a cent for every play. It takes 150 plays of a song to make a dollar from advertisement, and most of that dollar is gonna stay with the record label. This is significantly worse for indie and small up and coming artists. They simply can’t make a living out of Spotify unless they are already big and have a massive following. This hurts the whole industry as it becomes harder and harder to nurture new talent.
The up side is that, although they are getting shafted by Spotify and the labels, a subscription play is worth more than a free play. Up to ten times more than a free user play. So your subscription does help pay artists more. The down side is that less than 25% of Spotify users pay for a subscription.
As someone who was once a small artist on Spotify, they do actually pay really well. Better than most places.
because Spotify is so convenient.
I used to think the same, but these days it seems like most songs from my favorites/liked list are no longer on Spotify, as I hear the same 10 or 20 songs over and over again when I have it on random play, and when I manually try to go through my list it’ll skip over songs and not let me select them.
I guess the competition with the other music delivery companies is coming down to certain companies have exclusives for certain songs and artists.
I’ve never paid for any streaming music plan and I love it. I never have to pay to listen to music because I already have MP3s of all the good music
To each their own. For me, I really like the Discover Weekly/Daily features to discover new music and I can’t see how I would ever “already have MP3s of all the good music” since that’s an ever changing set. Heck, I still have a ton of old mp3s I used to rip and/or download, but I haven’t listened to them in a while.
I would gladly pay for a similar AYCE movie subscription, but I refuse to sign up for a ton of different services and play the “which service is that movie on again?” game. Instead it’s a very different approach for me.
Yeah me and my SO have a Spotify duo account plan. It’s great. I could never use the free version even back in it’s heyday. I don’t know how people still use the free tier to be able to complain about these changes.
Looking forward to when you wake up and realize that you’re just emptily shilling for a company that would happily take your money while refusing features.
Deep.
Why would you talk about how great the features that you pay when we’re talking about how they’re slashing free features then? I’m sure you love paying the same price to rent your music, the same price as just buying it, but that’s not what the conversation is about.
The amount of different genres I listen to means that the cost of the subscription is nowhere near what I would have to pay if I had to buy it.
I’m sure you love paying the same price to rent your music, the same price as just buying it, but that’s not what the conversation is about
It’s also complete bollocks. Family plan is £3 a month, let’s say an album costs £10. So in a year I could listen to basically all music for £36, or buy 3.6 albums. Maybe if I live to be a billion then it’ll cost the same price to buy the music rather than renting it, but for us mortals the subscription service is the better deal. It’s fine to not like people shilling for a profit-seeking company, but don’t make up nonsense to try and prove it’s not a good deal.
The Spotify Family plan is increasing by two euros, to £16.99 ($20.52).
This is as of 2021, where are you getting that it’s £3 a month? That’s £203.88 a year.
Where are you buying your albums? How is it that they’re all new releases, are you not recognizing that most of your music is not a release? How often do you listen to a full, new album? You likely don’t listen to more than 20 new songs a month anyways, unless you’re discovering a new genre. However, again, that’s not what this post is about, it’s about lowering the quality of the free features.
A family plan is shared between 6 accounts, I pay 1/6 of the cost. I probably listen to hundreds of new songs every month.
Not sure how this is emptily shilling though. Am I paying for a service? Yes. Will I stop paying for a service if they start “refusing features?” Also yes.
Like I said in another comment, I was happy with Netflix back in the day, but now, nope. I have self hosted alternatives.
If a service is not worth it for me, I stop paying. Different people have that line at different levels, and for me, today’s Spotify Premium is worth it. In the future it may not be.
No need to be so hostile.
We are all here on Lemmy because we see the value in self hosting and free & open source software.
However even here, people have the need to antagonize each other and call each other corporate shills.
Maybe a peek behind the curtain of human nature.
call each other corporate shills.
Well, to be fair, sometimes the “people” here are corporate shills.
Are bots actually prevalent here? I love me some Lemmy, but boy are they scraping the bottom of the barrel by targeting us and not reddit.
Are bots actually prevalent here?
Well first off, a shill could be a person, and not a bot.
To your question, yeah, they’re here, they’re also on Reddit.
They go wherever the people are at, so they can train, inflate user population, and influence opinions.
It costs them almost nothing to be at multiple places, at the end of the day it’s all text to be parsed and people to manipulate.
Actually, usually when I see someone questioning if bots exist I think of that as an actual bot trying influence people away from thinking about bots, considering that bots are all over the place at this point, it’s weird to see someone deny/question that.
Well first off, a shill could be a person, and not a bot.
Ah, when you put quotation marks around “person” I’d assumed you implied they were bots.
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/Iam14andThisisDeep
See how they down vote you.
Let me try to give a voice to the people down voting.
I hope that in the future they make a separate subscription model for each of these services.
$2/month I get the pause feature.
$5/week I get to control my own volume.
$4/month I don’t have to loudly shout the brand name of the commercial to go back to my podcast.
This is how websites keep the lights on and you shouldn’t be so ungrateful. We all know the pursuit of infinite profits means all these companies will continue to find more ways to squeeze customers. So I’ll go down with this ship even though just 5 years ago it was crazy to see a 2 minute unskippable ad but now there’s 3 of them and you’re an asshole for wanting to remove that.
What would the internet look like if we got rid of how companies advertise to us.
In the future you should consider what you’re saying before speaking out against enshitificatin and encroachment of mass marketing into our lives. It feeds. It never stops feeding and I am meat.
Enshittification everywhere. Selfhosting forever
Generally I agree, but spotify has just recently started to reach the point of profitability. And with high interest rates and reduced venture capital, its now or never for them. I, as a paying customer, haven’t felt this enshittification. But if they make that turn, then I’ll quickly resort to self-hosting digital music purchases, Lidarr, and Plex.
Also as a service I think it’s much more polished and better working than its competitors, even if it is shiftier for free users.
This is just for the free tier. The subscription is still a fair price and good service right now. They haven’t fucked it up yet, tho I don’t care for all the audiobooks and podcasts. But, there’s definitely worse things they could be doing and be getting away with.
I’ve been using Spotify for almost 2-3 years. The only thing I can say is the app gets DEGRADED EVERY YEAR!!! They do their best to bring more and more bugs with each update. I’m done with Spotify shit, also they removed a lot of regional songs from my country. The only reason I pay for Spotify is because I can download/rip their music and store it on my Plex Server.
what do you use for downloading from Spotify
Deemix and Deezer is better. Spotify streams in low quality.
I would also like to know if you’re PMing him
Likewise… haven’t found a good way to do this yet.
Me too, everything I’ve seen just finds a copy and rips it from YouTube
pirates are the FIRST to complain over a product rhwy dont pay for lmao
Why do you think they aren’t paying for it?
So many services pushing price hikes, increasing ads, diminishing features and libraries. No wonder people are seeking other options.
Literally the opposite. Pirating takes time, effort, resources, and I lose access to “everything” - I only get what I take the time to download and store.
If a product I pay for provides a great service, I’ll keep using it. It’s worth the money for excellent user experience and convenience. It’s when they keep upping the price while reducing the features or content that bothers me, and that’s when I’d rather spend the time pirating than paying them for a worse product.
Use tools to curate a feed that auto downloads. Work smarter, not harder.
I do. Still need to configure those too. Don’t get me wrong it’s not that bad, but there was a world 5 or so years ago where the streaming platforms were just easier for the cost. Not anymore.
What tools? How would you automate and selfhost something similar to Spotify service?
Pick someone who doesn’t pay for a product to unleash your own corporate bootlicking whine on, because the person you actually replied to said:
I pay for Spotify
I switched from Spotify back to Bandcamp and Apple Music. Fuck Spotify.
I pay for a service. They jack the price. They remove features. They add restrictions. They punish paying users.
The result is that I stop all of the above and do what’s best for me. Fuck them. They did this to themselves.
Spotify in on itself is worth paying for BUT…
Their app for android sucks blue donkey balls and I’d happily pay more if I’d get to use a slightly less retarded cousin of this app.
The other but:
Spotify in on itself is not very bad right now and basically could and SHOULD continue as-is forever.
However, the economic system as it currently is requires it to continually come up with new crap that nobody needs nor wants (see also all Microsoft software that went from absolute shit thirty years ago to absolute slimey shit with lots of useless but pretty ding dong bells attached to it with a nice camera hidden inside to spy on the insides of your butthole) and it only a matter of time before…
Some exec gets hired there that promises to double their revenue, then implements some shit that will double their revenue once, gets this exec his bonus upon which he immediately quits to go to the next company to fuck over with a pineapple, leaving Spotify with a huge exodus of users, a dwindling service, and two years later it’s dead.
I’ve seen this cycle with too many large companies, and it’s the same story over and over. Be it Boeing, Disney, just about all large game companies, etc etc…
So they went to the same model Pandora used to use 15 years ago
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Putting all the best features behind a paywall, opening up ad space as well as sponsored song spots… Where have I seen this before?
Pandora, but at least they were honest about it.
When Sirius bought Pandora and started bleeding subscribers, that closed doors for Spotify. No way to increase revenues but by increasing ads.
Wait, how would Sirius/ Pandora bleeding subscribers be a bad thing for Spotify?
It’s not necessarily a bad thing short term, but traditional media is much less likely to acquire them so that door is closed.
Every tech company right now?
This is literally just commercial radio.
This is enshittification 101
Spotify is losing money, they gain nothing by having free users, if they convert some people to paying customers it’s worth it for them. You can’t expect to listen to music for free when license holders charge ridiculous fees.
Yet they can bring in the fear factor blockhead and other hot garbage for how many hundreds of millions of dollars?
… Except they gather your data and use it to try and make profit.
Say least radio required them to give genuine value to you. Radio had to give away shit and run contests to get caller info to figure out how many listeners they had, to get advertisers etc. It was a real business.
Spotify just buys the music catalogue and then forces you into their ecosystem.
Except it seems like you can still skip forward. That’s not something you can do with radio.
In addition, radio has those incredibly annoying station identification bullshit announcements like “You’re listening to JFRH, the cooooolest FM station in the greater Grumug metro area!”, often with annoying sound effects like lasers and so on. Even worse, they often interrupt the music to have an ad for the station, in which the station-ad claims that this is another hour of ad-free music.
It’s shitty, but it’s not as shitty as radio.
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The free version is completely useless on smartphone. I hope the limitations won’t come to the desktop version
It was already like this in Europe when I began to use Spotify in 2015. I do not hate it because the app’s free tier is already unusable to me due to the adverts.
Tech Bros, reinventing classic technology with a veneer of techno babble.
Nah, it’s better than radio because now they can track you and sell your data, including everything they get from your phone, to the highest bidder.
I don’t mind paying for music
When I was a kid, I would go buy a CD basically every paycheck/allowance, for probably around $15-$20 of '03 money. 12ish tracks. I would add basically about 30 tracks to my collection per month for $30-$40. And even though I owned those (as long as my little brother didn’t fuck up the disc), I could only access the handful that I could carry with me. If you told 15-17 year old me, that for $11 a month I could access basically any music I could think of instantly, anywhere, I would’ve been like “sure, and then we’ll listen in our flying cars, right?”
There are lots of things that absolutely suck about modern life and the enshittification presented here, but music fans have it pretty good.
I remember the early days when iPods were still a thing and you had to buy music on iTunes. I don’t miss that at all. Imagine the price of buying every individual song of your current Spotify playlist, you’re getting a steal in comparison now.
Precisely. Tbh I would be comfortable paying more but only if it went to artists. At some point there will come a time when I go back to the 7 seas for music (especially given hdd sizes and the ease of streaming from your own library) but I feel pretty far from that at the moment especially as it’s the free tiers mostly that have been getting enshittified. But I think that’s roughly the lessons of the 2010’s - free products on the internet are either a loss leader to get you subscribing, or they’re probably selling your data to everyone.
Even then, the free versions of Spotify/Pandora are miles ahead of radio when I was a kid. Pick one of three stations that caters entirely to mainstream normies and then have a third of your time spent listening to ads and shitty DJs.
Same but if you want to support the artist, streaming services aren’t the way to do it
Buy merch and stream is the best I can come up with that makes it easy for me to listen to the music I want and support the artist.
If they have it, direct support is the best way. Like Patreon for instance.
Ya merch is by far the best, if you buy it cash at a show then that’s cash right in hand for them
I pirate all my music digitally. Then if I like a release, I buy it on vinyl, or if too expensive/unavailable on vinyl, I buy a shirt.
Resonate is a good alternative streaming service for folks who don’t want to feel locked in (https://resonate.coop/) Not as clean as Spotify but pretty decent for something bootstrapped.
Me neither, but I do mind paying a subscription for a shitty service that does not let me actually own anything and changes the rules every year.
I have no clue what you’re talking about. I’ve had Spotify premium for 5-ish years and nothing has randomly changed. The UI changed a bit here and there but nothing you couldn’t ignore if you wanted to and that’s it. I get all the music on the planet and podcasts, it’s a good deal if you ask me
That’s why we pay for a good service instead. The subscription is a fraction of a cost you’d get from paying to “own” the media, and it’s not like you still can’t combine the two either. It’s not one or the other.
And this is why I buy vinyl.
How do you combine a subscription service with having ownership of the media? If you’re not happy with Spotify just got to iTunes or the likes and buy the individual songs. Or what am I missing here?
This is why I tried to buy all my albums through Bandcamp… but Bandcamp has a new owner that fired half the staff and I’m worried they’re gonna get enshittified.
…for a reasonable fee, without ads.
Spotify matches that description.
For now.
E: y’all downvoters think Spotify isn’t gonna enshittify? Good luck with that.
Just curious, how much would buying an album cost you, and how big is your actual music playlist? Then let me know if it’s not a reasonable fee.
A CD cost ~$16-19 depending on how new a release it was. $6-12 used. Obviously not all songs are gonna be desirable on each CD.
I can buy a new album now for $12-15 on iTunes.
I spend ~$13/mo for my Spotify. About half of that time is listening to music I have saved as favorites (IOW not new), the rest listening to new podcasts and looking for new music.
No ads.
So I am absolutely getting my money’s worth in a per-month cost of new music/podcast vs what buying 1 old release or used CD would have cost. I get way more music and entertainment than I would buying one or even 2 used CDs a month.
I wouldn’t have the physical space for the amount of CDs that I would need
Arrr, ye be jokin’, matey! Payin’ for tunes instead of sailin’ the seas?
I only sail the seas when the industry is forcing my hand to do so by refusing to provide either adequate service, adequate coverage or reasonable pricing.
I’ll have to dust off my tricorn soon if the industry keeps onto that trajectory.
We are not the same.
Spotify is garbage, last time I used it it was missing basic features like sleep timer, play count, song rating, and history. I buy my music and use poweramp instead.
Spotify has sleep timer and listen history. I don’t see the need for song rating and play count, that sounds like old UX to me. Doesn’t actually add functionality for me.
Love power amp… I’m on Spotify thou… so I don’t get to use it too much
I would love for power amp to be able to connect to the main online storage services thou… that’s where most of my music I own is nowadays
I’ve been a happy paying spotify user for well over a decade, I love listening to new music all the time. Also, for counts/history I just scrobble to last.fm
Oh yeah, I should check out my last.fm, I set up scrobbling forever ago and then just forgot about it.
I’ve been using pulsar for years now with all of my old music files. That, and Amazon music and Pandora. I love Pandora’s randomness tbh.
