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“Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians.”
Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection…
What’s the equivalent for the movie and TV streaming?
I was thinking about the Paramount Decrees and how the repelling lead to the creation of studio owned streaming servies which has exclusive acces to the studio’s library like Paramount+, Disney+, Discovery+, apple Tv+, Peacock etc.
I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.
Yeah. Didn’t work on Librewolf (only stock FF), the UI was slow, the recommendations (the reason I wanted to try) were pretty bad, the ads couldn’t be blocked properly and left a few seconds of silence in their place (the only site I encountered that behaved like this!), and logged me out repeatedly (sometimes mid-session), presumably due to me using a proxy.
Once something gets critical mass and becomes “default,” it doesn’t even matter, people just use it and take it.
An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre). How was that even possible?
LOL a couple obvious reasons are that Spotify listeners don’t get to vote for grammy awards - only a few thousand people do - and to be eligible for a grammy an album has to be released in the United States. The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality. Jimi Hendrix never won a grammy. Neither did Bob Marley or Diana Ross. There’s a lot already wrong with the grammys.
The fake musicians and possibly AI-generated songs are more interesting. If the music industry is trying to eliminate musicians it wouldn’t be to avoid paying them - they’ve already figured out lots of ways to do that - it would be to have complete control over the music.
And Lenin said, “the best way to undermine society is through its music” — Bob Duvall
It’s a fake quote from Lenin, but suitably apt.
Weird how we’re supposed to think something is true and wise if it’s attached to somebody famous.
“Bleach cures anything.” – William Shakespeare
I only listen to obscure Swedish jazz musician.
The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality.
Do you know who Jon Batiste is?
The album won on quality. The sales spiked after the win.
That’s a good counterexample. Do you know what “more heavily influenced” means? It means “not always universally every time, but more often”.
The only people who make money on Spotify is Spotify. Support artists directly if you want them to continue to create.
Is there a streaming model that better supports artists, has a large catalog of music, and is reasonably affordable?
Apple Music pays over double per stream to artists and is better quality audio than Spotify.
The best thing you can do for artists is pirate everything (cutting out Spotify etc), and purchase an album a month from a band/artist you actually want to support. Buy direct for the artist, or Bandcamp (especially on Bandcamp Fridays)
Also merch and concerts, if this fits you.
All of the above, ideally.
I’m pretty sure Tidal pays artists better than Spotify or Apple Music.
2 x 0 at least
From what I recall it’s better but not much better. They also shilled for their snake oil MQA format but thankfully they are moving away from that.
Everyone always gave me shit for sticking with Pandora. It can basically do all the shit that Spotify can these days albeit a little different. You can even make your own playlists and listen offline if you have premium. It has a more limited library but it’s barely noticeable except maybe once or twice a year I can’t find a song I wanna listen to. It’s simpler and cheaper than Spotify with most of the same features. My favorite part is that I can literally pick any song I want and it will just continue playing after it’s over with similar songs. I’ve discovered so much music I would have never tried if it hadn’t shown up. And so far it hasn’t been overrun by AI slop like Spotify. Sure they pay artists less compared to competitors but at least they aren’t just straight up trying to replace them.
I’m not saying Pandora is objectively better. I’m just saying Spotify is falling into the world of enshittification and there are many alternatives out there. You could even just buy music and support artists directly like we used to.
Problem is Pandora is US only. They stopped streaming to the rest of the world years ago.
Damn I didn’t even know. That’s pretty dumb on their part as they could have been a bigger competitor. I’m sure they made the decision before Spotify took off as hard as it did.
I still prefer Pandora, it’s great for music discovery and it pays artists more than Spotify. I also feel like its recommendations are better or maybe I’ve just had better luck with them.
I’ve Definitely found new artists and albums after listening on Pandora that I went off and purchased CDs or albums thanks to it.
Apple Music’s recommendations were fairly good as well, and they also pay more than Spotify, but not tons and I abhor how it integrates music I don’t own with my actual library.
I need to try Tidal, but I also just don’t get the “you’ll stream everything and own nothing” idea. I just like “radio” services for discovering new stuff.
Can anyone tell me how to cancel Spotify service? I went to their website, but it wouldn’t let me in without installing or logging into their app. And from their app I can’t find a way to cancel!
Devils advocate moment… If people keep listening (or sort of listening) and they are OK with music that seems to lack any soul, is it not just giving the audience what they want and deserve?
Devils concierge moment… What a bunch of shitbags.
An artificial effect is not the same as a natural cause.
Sure, but can you explain what you mean by that in this context?
Just because people consume music slop, does not mean that that is a natural demand (given the supply is explicitly artificial, so certainly there’s an economic incentive to generate demand), or something they deserve to consume or have to be given to consume (you shit every day; does not imply you want shit).
Yeah, I suppose, in a closed system that might he true.
But this isnt a closed system.
Bandcamp, for example is rife with wonderful small scale artists. There are local music scenes. There are loads of ways of choosing to stream music.
The thing is that people choose to listen to Spotify despite this. And that is a choice.
We have to be careful when talking about things when we start suggesting that people are not smart enough, or motivated enough to know what they want.
Demand is not generated here, but fulfilled. People just want background music. The properties of that music, and its artistic integrity, isnt a factor in that decision, so it is a demand based upon other properties… Brand recognition, user experience and ubiquity.
Again, I’m not defending this, and it isnt something that appeals to me, but it is easier to understand how these revelations will probably not make much of an impact of spotifys business model.
Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.
Tidal has decided to sunset it’s app, which means it’s basically on maintenance mode now. Somewhat off putting.
Its app on a specific platform? Or do you mean the entire service? Seems weird that they would sunset their only product.
They’ve been making deeeeeep cuts in order to make the company “more like a startup”, as per Jack Doresey’s comments.
Well that’s fucking dumb.
Did they? Couldn’t find an announcement on the fly.
They laid off 10% of their workforce last year, and like 20% of the remaining work force late this year with cuts to engineering expected. It is not in a healthy place, seemingly, and they cover a very small slither of the market.
Boy, that’s a bummer. Thanks for the information, I’ve missed that.
I jumped ship over to Quboz for this reason. I’ve been really happy with it
I’m concerned with switching to a small alternative which then becomes untenable or shutters within a year and then having to piss around again.
Never heard of them. They seem interesting, will definitely taka a look. Thanks for the hint!
I think it was revealed several times already in the past. Few examples out my hat:
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When it was revealed how little they pay artists
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When they tried to corner the podcast market
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When they gave Joe fucking Rogan two hundred and fifty fucking million dollars for an exclusive deal
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Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.
I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.
If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it
We can do this with crypto now.
Ideally you want to use a hardware wallet though so the payment money doesn’t have to sit in a hot wallet connected to the internet, but that means pressing a physical button to initiate the payment, but it could just sit beside the computer, and eventually be built into computers.
Alternatively, you could have a hot wallet and it’s all seamless, but you risk the loss of funds from a compromised browser.
It’d include a permanent record of your ownership of what you purchased as well as long as you keep that seed phrase around, so you could redownload it if you lost the files.
Edit: And if the system was built around something like IPFS then the files would always exist.
I’m not sure how IPFS is different from torrents. I don’t think it’s solvable with blockchain too.
It’s nice that someone’s made electronic distributed gold, but that doesn’t include a payment system.
EDIT: in any case, I’m aware of various systems covering small pieces of what I’ve described.
Really hated when they started adding auto play of another unrelated podcast when my current podcast ends, like I don’t want your shitty podcast selection Spotify. The enshitification of the web continues.
I deleted the app the day the day they implemented this. The podcast they started playing was a 30 minute podcast advertising mattress firm or sleep country.
not sure if this explains why their stocks are so extremely expensive. every time i look at it it’s worse.
I just use ViMusic or RiMusic or one of those types of forks. I believe it uses YouTube and other sources. It is ad-free and has the usual stuff you’d expect like suggestions, playlists, genres etc. Occasionally the source platform will make a change that breaks it, an update comes out fixes it.
That and there are still (probably ancient at this point) desktop clients that scrape your Pandora and download local copies of all the tracks. That’s another good way to never listen to ads.
https://spotube.krtirtho.dev/ is another alternative, but it uses the Spotify api (you can hook up your account) and backends it by playing music from yt.
After comparing the sound quality of Amazon, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal, the dynamic range of Tidal really stood out - even in lowest quality. At that time, I read that Tidal had the highest payout to the artists. I also like that the service is partially owned by several artists.
The recommendations and feeds are really top notch, just the right mix of stuff I know and like and nice surprises. The “Daily Discovery” often explores a certain genre or mood. There are so many cool bands I’ve found - also from genres I don’t usually listen to. I can wholeheartedly recommend the service.
Or Qobuz, which is like Tidal, but better and they never tried to sell users on made-up MQA hi-res.
Qobuz is refreshingly good.
I heard of Tidal a long time ago but their non-English support is simply missing. It doesn’t even show the original Japanese titles of many songs I listen to.
How about Qobuz?
Edit: Tested Qobuz and the Japanese support was quite bad too. I searched for a Japanese artist, their name showed up but only one song was there. Tried searching for the title of a song instead, no hit. I thought I was region blocked. Then tried romaji and finally more results, mixed in English and Japanese though. In Spotify I can search in Japanese, English, or romaji when I’m too lazy to switch input method. Also in Qobuz lots of Japanese artists’ profiles were incomplete.
There’s a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it’s Spotify, on top of your label
Yes and…
Lily Allen and Kate Nash are on OnlyFans and make more money there…
Yeah, but that’s probably partially due to their existing fame.
Well, yeah.
They make more money from OF than from Spotify… and they are not doing porn.
Have known this for years, just look at any sleep or ambient playlist
