"Sponsored recommendations": I pay for Spotify Premium, and yet somehow I'm still the product?
I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a "sponsored recommendation".
Why am I seeing ads if I'm already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
In the immortal words of James Stephanie Sterling "corporations don't just want some money. They want all of the money"
Because why make money off you one way, when they can make money off you two ways?
It seems you can turn it off by touching "what's this?" or "learn more" the next time you see one of these.
Really shitty that they don't even put this as a setting though.
You are always the product when you do not own physical or digital non-DRMed copies of your media.
If you can't reliably and repeatedly play your music in the middle of nowhere 50 miles away from any internet signal, you are the product. Download MP3s and take your music back.
And people on the lemmy.world instance wonder why we fight for the right to talk about piracy.
They treat your subscription as a promise of continued business. You're literally funding them trying to continue monetizing you and dominating your attention.
Fuck Spotify, fuck Netflix, fuck all of them.
VPN + Stremio
The lesson is that corporations will take, take, take no matter what. They will never honor any kind of social contract, and will always abuse anyone and everyone for profit to the maximum extent they are able.
So stop letting them take advantage of you.
And if they make a mistake, "my bad". You make a mistake and it's $100 in fees.
And push for legislation that doesn't allow em to do this in the first place.
Cause it doesn't make it right, but on some level it's hard to blame them for pushing the limits, if there's no resistance or repercussion. That's how we ended up in this mess.
Tech moves fast. Government moves slow. Most of these issues boil down to legislative failures.
I go hard when it comes to this. Firefox + uBlock Origin, use open source alternatives, don't communicate outside of Signal, 2FA on everything, you name it. And it's exhausting at times, not gonna lie. But my effort reinforces my sentiment that it shouldn't fall to the consumer to put in all this effort just to have some a basic, healthy blend of convenience, privacy, and security.
Might I add, I hate the way every user-facing UI has devolved into the Youtube Shorts / TikTok "doomscrolling" swipe-UI now. There seems to be absolutely not a single braincell left in UI development to even consider the actual use case of the interface.
It's all just:
That is literally what non-Open Source/capitalism is like:
Man you're absolutely correct. But I've yet to find a simplified music streaming solution that functions as seamlessly across a wide range of devices as Spotify connect does.
I want an alternative... I also don't want to manage a library as extensive as a streaming service's offerings myself. I need convenience.
I have a pretty sizeable local collection, and it can be a pain to manage sometimes. Tagging can become a real pain as well. A real splinter on the scrot.
I recently found Spotube. It uses the Spotify search API then plays the audio from youtube. Basically spotify premium for free.
Haven't actually used it yet though.
After trying to find an app with something even close to Spotify Connect I gave up and switched to Apple Music and replaced my speakers with newer Denon that have Apple streaming support.
It was the choice between letting Spotify fuck me over again and again and spending a few hundred dollars on new speakers. Annoying but fuck Spotify and their relentless upsells, ads, podcasts, books, etc
(I feel pretty strongly about that because I used it daily since they released their beta version close to two decades ago).
Enshittification in action.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it's everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they're locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.
This is because capitalism requires infinite growth.... which is literally fucking impossible so everything either grows infinitely or dies..... or option three: gets so fucking big it abuses governance to prevent itself from dying while murdering it's competition.
I hope they die but I doubt it.
Why do you hope they die? It's not the next one in lune is going to be any better.
I wish there was a way to permanently store this article into people's brains.
Well, not really. But you know what I mean.
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
What I really love about commercials is that if I click on them and order a life time subscription of whatever product they're selling, I'm still gonna get the same commercials.
Or even worse you'll get more. It applies to everything too. I got a vacuum a while ago and Amazon keeps recommending more. Who tf is out there buying multiple vacuums? Why does Amazon think that someone who spent $50 on a shop vac is now in the market for a $700 Dyson? For stealing so much of our data they sure are shit at advertising... Which is supposed to be the whole excuse for collecting data in the first place lmao
Why does Amazon think that someone who spent $50 on a shop vac is now in the market for a $700 Dyson?
Because their "algorithms" suck. Their "ML/AI" recommendation engine garbage sucks ass. I have no idea why publications or companies think this is in any way a better form of advertising than just...recommending things related to what you're watching / reading / listening to...but hey...I guess it at least allows them to spy on everything you ever do anywhere on the Internet and then try to join that up to what you do in real life through phone data, so the ends justify the means I guess.
EDIT: In addition to it sucking, it's largely irrelevant and likely prevents some sales from occurring. If I'm listening to a lot of a certain rock band...I'd likely want to know if they're touring and may be unaware of that fact...but nah, gotta push people to buy another vacuum or whatever instead.
Some people do use the strategy of buying a cheap product if you aren't sure you need a higher end one and then getting the better one if you don't like the cheap one. So people who buy a cheap x might actually be more likely to buy an expensive x than people who haven't recently bought a cheap x. Especially if they know that cheap x they sold you sucks.
People defend intrusive advertising by appealing to some sort of social contract (ie you suffer through these things in order to get Spotify or whatever for free) but it's not a social contract if the platform holds all the cards
Are we getting Spotify for free, if we're buying premium?
The problem is you can't "buy" products any more. Companies see that as interest, and then start to throw additional advertising to see how much they can get away with. Fuck that shit.
They've also run almost any way to do it outside of their ecosystems. If I want to listen to happy hardcore music, I have to hope spotify has it, but it's rare to find that on most playlists, I'd have to go spend thousands of dollars for the same experience that Spotify offers, and that's to own every track I'm even curious about.
Spotify is garbage. You pay them to basically pirate unlimited music (they pay table scraps). They have no values or integrity, but they do have a greedy business model.
I buy albums off bandcamp instead. Or from the artist's site directly.
Bandcamp is DRM-free, so whatever you buy there, you truly own it. Unlike on most other platforms.
DRM-protected music stores went extinct over a decade ago, following Steve Jobs' open letter to the music industry on the topic. By 2009, iTunes music was completely DRM-free and alternative stores had to follow suit to remain competitive.
It's personally a catch 22 for me.
I listen to an absolutely absurd amounts of different artists. A large portion of them simply don't have albums available for purchase and if they did... I would actually go broke buying all the stuff I listen to.
Every single day I type in a Combo of 2 random letters and numbers into spotify and listen to the first artist I don't recognize.
It really sucks that Spotify doesn't pay the artists anything reasonable but I haven't found an alternative that allows me to consume as much different music as I currently do.
This isn't even including the podcasts and audio books into the equation.
Greedy business model seems slightly unfair tbh. Spotify struggles to remain profitable and they’ve only raised their prices by like $1 in a decade
Maybe they shouldn't've thrown so much money into the pivot to podcasts, then thrown a bunch of money at that meathead idiot.
Just because they're incompetent doesn't mean they're not greedy.
Also, executives can still be cleaning up even as the company struggles to profit.
yeah, it's not spotify's fault that splitting $10/month between all the music you listen to doesn't pay the artists very much.
Haven't ads always been recommendations in some roundabout way? Regular ads are technically just a company recommending their own product/service to you (whether you need it or not).
I mean, real life recommendations are more often than not that too. I mean, ones you get asking friends.
I would bet that on Spotify most people discover music by listening to personalized generated playlists and not by waiting for ads to guide them. Have you ever used Spotify?
He fell for the classic blunder
I stopped using Spotify after I noticed that a song's share URL contains unique tracking elements. Then they started trying to lock down the podcast market, which reaffirms that leaving was the right choice.
Yeah they have been playing fast and loose with their 'premium' plan for a while. I cancelled and switched when they started serving ads to podcasts (not the baked-in ones from the podcast - dynamic ads inserted by Spotify).
It's insulting that they would pull this crap and embarrassing that we all put up with it.
You paid yes but... what if MORE money?
But think of the poor billionaires!
I hear you, tell me more!
Yeah, I dropped Spotify when they started plastering my home screen with ads for podcasts that I didn't want to listen to. If there had even just been a way to hide them after the fact, but no. I guess they really needed to justify the deal with Joe Rogan.
About a year ago I switched from Spotify to a local library with the Symfonium music player on my phone and Rhythmbox on the PC. I have not once looked back.
Plus, you get the satisfaction of growing a collection that can last forever.
I highly recommend it !
may I recommend Strawberry on desktop? It's really nice to use with large collections! https://i.imgur.com/ViOJK6B.png
Why does my Strawberry look like it's from 1999 :/
I've tried it, not my cup of tea. Rhythmbox conforms to my GTK4 theme a lot better, and the layout is so much more suited for me.
I feel that Strawberry's layout is ugly as sin, but hey, everyone seems to think Rhythmbox is ugly so maybe that's just me.
I admire any active music library management app tho. Seems like there aren't that many people with local music libraries anymore, so we don't get many new apps like Strawberry or Rhythmbox where MTP transfers, tag editing, lyrics, etc are big focuses. So cheers to the devs of Strawberry and thanks for the recommendation!
My dream is for Rhythmbox to be ported to libadwaita, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. All the latest GTK4 music players are extremely simple, with no library management features whatsoever. Think Amberol, GNOME Music, and G4Music. I wish I had learned some C when I was young and had the time so I could just port it myself.
Any reason to switch to this from winamp?
Yes!
I just cancelled Spotify and switched to Tidal a few months ago exactly because of shenanigans like this. I was getting popups to look at recommended eBooks that I had to buy.
That was it for me and I cancelled immediately. Between the ads and the countless bugs and issues I had while using their app, glad I made the change. Been a premium member with Spotify for almost 10 years.
I did the same, but it was because my card expired and instead of updating the details and having my premium plan continue as usual, they slyly took the opportunity and upgraded me to the duo plan which cost a few quid extra without my consent.
Since I never asked for this and because cards expire all the time, I decided not to take this punishment/con and decided to take my money elsewhere. Tidal has been great outside of voice assistant compatibility
To Spotify's credit, when I cancelled, I forgot and did it 2 days after it renewed and asked customer service for a refund. They did it no questions asked
Made that switch two years ago, still absolutely love Tidal. Wish it had a WearOS app but I'll take hot with the higher quality sound and no-bullshit app
In a similar boat but switched to Apple Music. I tried Tidal for a couple of months but it seemed like they are more interested in promoting Beyoncé and other friends of the owner than to help me discover music I love.
"What are you gonna do? NOT use us? lmao owned." - Spotify
Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal waving furiously Pick me! Pick me!
I haven't tried all of those, but I like Deezer. It plays music and it's much less pushy about podcasts or other crap that Spotify always clutters your start page with. The queue interface is also simpler to use. The only downside I see is that search is noticeably slower than Spotify on desktop.
Just buying the mp3s and having them forever.
Yeah it's odd for it to act cocky when it's actually one of the few modern service products that has plenty of competition that people are willing to use.
Get 'vanced lmao
Android auto, doesn't have an app
I just use InnerTune on Android.
Spotify pissed me off with some billing or API thing (don't even remember the details) back in 2012, so I cancelled and never looked back. From what I'm reading now and then things is just getting worse and worse - and I have no clue why people (especially paying ones) are sticking with it.
My whole family uses it, and it’s fine (the paid plan). People just want to hate on Spotify in this thread. More power to them, but it’s nowhere near as horrible as they describe. I get all my music and podcasts from there.
I canceled after the first time they did this with the "Drake takeover" in 2018. Their customer support claimed it wasn't advertisement, lmao.
Haha I also complained about that on their support forum. They claimed it was a recommendation.
Coincidentally this is the reason I quit Tidal after just a couple of months: they would push commercial hip-hop artists everywhere even though I am not into that.
xManager if you're on Android.
I've been to their website and GitHub and I still don't understand what the app does. Could you give a quick eli5?
It's funny because the radio industry used to have this pay-to-play model. It began to be called "payola" and triggered a huge controversy including congressional investigations and an FCC crackdown. Yet here we are, with the same shit happening again in digital format. This is honestly worse than payola since radio was free and this is not. I don't like paying to be advertised to. Considering leaving Spotify; there seem to be more and more shenanigans like this popping up, AND their subscription price just increased!
I work in the radio industry (digital side) and have to sign a payola contract every year.
The Wikipedia article says "payola" is an illegal practice and that text links to "commercial bribery" - so are they starting to get bribed into doing stuff like this too even though it's a paid service? That "they want all the money" statement must go deeper than I thought.
Once in a while here, for the rest no ads in the slightest here in the Netherlands, it’s all Gucci.
delete Spotify. it's toxic
I haven't had any issues with Spotify. I've discovered a bunch of new artists since joining a couolr years ago. I even remember the very first. I had no idea who Token was. Now I'm a fan. What's wrong with this kind of thing? I'll admit it's not as good as old fashioned radio used to be but it's still great, and being ad-free when paid is pretty amazing.
Nothing wrong with discovery, though masquerading an ad as an algorithm recommendation is super shady.
That said, Spotify has a track record of treating artists horribly. It also has atrocious sound quality compared to every other service out there.
I'm using Tidal. Has one of the highest artist pay out rates, and top notch quality.
You happen to know of a nontoxic alternative that doesn't involve torrenting?
Modded Spotify Premium w/ gold theme by RockMods, download from Mobilism. Works really well, been using it for months. Checks out with all the antivirus scanners I use, and most stuff on Mobilism is safe (there's exceptions of course, but I'm sure you know how to be safe if you mention torrenting). Create a separate spotify account for it just in case it gets "fixed" though. Seems well supported by updates. Much better to the alternative - torrent client for downloading 'Linux ISOs'...
Apple music
I like Apple Music. It's awesome even on Android, which is what I use.
If you don't own the music/games/movies you pay for, you are always the product.
I think with Spotify the artists are the product.
You NEVER own the music/games/movies you pay for. Even when you have a physical copy.
You have a license, not ownership. You're always the product.
I don't own the copyright, but I can use it offline with any software I want on any device whenever I want. I can lend the physical disk to a friend and if I don't like it or get bored with it, I can sell it. That's what you can do with music CDs and you used to be able to do with PC games before they contained Steam's DRM.
You have a license, not ownership.
This is nothing but bullshit copyright cartel propaganda. Quit spreading it.
I pay for Amazon Prime music premium or some shit, and about a month ago they started putting an ad up literally every time I log in telling me to subscribe to super-duper premium or whatever the fuck they call it. Seriously guys? How about no?
GenX here. Spotify came long after my youth. It came during my regression into second childhood.
TLDR: You don't need a spotify/tidal/whatever, a personally curated collection of music is awesome and not being able to instantly play anything is not a death sentence. It can make things more fun by introducing things like anticipation.
I was once a music-obsessed child whose only access to most music was the random chance of hearing it on the radio. There were a few magical tunes that I wasn't sure what album they were from or even who it was that would sometimes come in from the universe and give me a lift.
Then my mom got me a Woolco stereo for a birthday, 6th or 7th I think, and I now had the incredible ability to buy a 45 for a small amount of money - my allowance covered at least one, I remember, with money leftover for a large stash of candy to last out the week - and be able to hear any (one) song I wanted, anytime (that I was near my stereo). At used record stores I could get whole albums.
At some point I discovered that some record stores (I'm talking mall record stores in Saskatoon here, not hipster record shops on the lower east side) had a sort of 45 backlog, a section of older hit records you could still order, with a book you could look through for titles. Back then, it was understood that sometimes one hit tune was all an act was ever gonna have, and there was not a need to shove 9 remixes down your throat as an excuse to pump you for the price of an LP.
When you bought an LP, you got this 12" square of cover with it, big enough for detailed photos of the band, or lyrics, sometimes you'd even get a gatefold sleeve (so four broadsides instead of just two in full color, occasionally they would do this even without a second LP being included). Sometimes even high concept stuff, like Styx's "Kilroy Was Here" in the mid-80s, a concept album which featured still shots and narrative segments of a 20-minute movie the band had shot of the Science Fiction storyline, which was a response to the various shenanigans of the political establishment of the time. These included the Satanic Panic, which has been thoroughly explored in podcasts in recent years, along with Tipper Gore's P.M.R.C., which started with she heard Prince do Darling Nikki and by the end had elevated Frank Zappa, Dee Snider and John Denver as an unlikely triumvirate of free expression champions who spoke eloquently and with no uncertainty as to their message against this nascent fascism, and which I believe was the real reason Al Gore lost his election.
Anyone who loves music or freedom remembered.
Anyways I remember on many boring car rides where all I got was, you know, Aerosmith for the billionth time, that I wished there was a kind of car radio that you could just tune in by artist name and song and it would just play anything. As I saw it, we had telephones that I could talk to our relatives in other places with, why couldn't I just tell the radio station what song to play electronically as well?
And about forty years later, we did indeed have that. More or less. All we had to do was murder the idea of music as art that is worth paying the artists for. We can quibble over rates and such, say this streamer only shaves the skin down to a few quivering nerve endings whereas Spotify skins the artist alive, but we all know that flogging the artist until they have no skin left is not the way to produce great art.
So I got off. I've started to collect up my old physical collections as flac files, which my phone has plenty of room for. I make playlists like I used to make mix tapes to entertain myself on my drives.
Now in my case I can point to having spent about $20 in 90s-00s money on most of the albums I've amassed so I just put it together how i could. I bought LPs, I bought cassettes, I bought CDs and I even bought some itunes downloads, and in many cases I did it twice for the same record over the years. In other cases I never bought the record, sure. Some of those allowance weeks I bought blank tapes instead of 45s OR LPs.
But basically, pick the artists you actually like who are working and signaling that they need help, and make a point of sending them some money. Buy a shirt, buy a physical media, LPs are still a lot of fun but pretty pricey. But just, take your music into your hands and your hard drive. Don't stream anything. Carry it with you. Figure out how much space you've got on your phone, or get an SD card for it. Phone doesn't have an SD card? You picked a bad company to buy from I guess, cause now you've started to play the game of triaging.
In the 80s, if I was going out of town for the weekend to camp or whatever, I had to decide how much collection to carry with me. Do I just bring a few mixtapes? Do I bring a box of tapes to cover every musical necessity? Do (gasp) just listen to the radio? It was a whole part of your packing, deciding what music to have at the ready and what to not be able to play if you don't think of it now. It was a game you played with yourself. Later on it was burnt CDs, then CDs full of MP3s when the stereos got smart enough. But same game, until Spotify "solved the problem" by just making everything available everywhere, at a price you won't believe (because someone's been skinned to get that price, and it wasn't the scumbags at the head office, I assure you).
Get off the streaming. Take your music into your hands. Build a collection of your favorite music and cherish it. Support artists directly. Stop pretending that paying for a streaming service is doing anything but murdering music as art and making you lazy in the soul.
Unrelated service, but I use Walmart for their grocery delivery, which I pay for and I have a Walmart+ subscription. In the "my items" section, the section specifically for things I have already purchased before, they recently added sponsored items.
Yes, it's clearly marked but for fucks sake Walmart I'm trying to just get more of stuff I've bought before. You have pages and pages of sponsored stuff elsewhere, leave my items alone!
The crazy thing about paying for Spotify Premium is that their podcasts still run ads! disgusting.
What sort of ads are you getting? I have premium and podcasts do not have ads aside from the sponsors from within the podcast itself (like how YouTubers do sponsored segments).
Same. I've seen multiple people say this here and I've yet to experience it. Makes me wonder if the particular podcasters they're listening to have opted in to some sort of ad revenue thing from Spotify.
Unpopular opinion - in Spotify (and Spotify ONLY) I actually like that it does this. I like discovering new music and Spotify seems to have really good recommendations sometimes. Sure they collect a lot of listening data - but how else could they give good recommendations if they don't know what you like?
I agree with you, but you may be missing the point - this recommendation is sponsored, so likely it wouldn't have been recommended unless the artist paid.
It seems relatively harmless as long as they don't overdo it though. The only incentive for someone to pay for this is that that you might like their music and will listen to it more in the future, which would be a win for you as well.
Maybe it also allows smaller artists to gain momentum without only depending on the magic recommendation algorithm.
Without this feature, I wouldn't have known that Yeah Yeah Yeahs and PJ Harvey released new albums. So I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm happy artists I already love can still reach me; on the other hand, I hate that smaller artists I don't know about yet still have to pay to play
It's the least offensive type of advertising I see day to day. I couldn't care less how my listening data is shared, and I don't understand the zero tolerance some people have for adverts - it's not all bad.
If they ramp up the adverts, people will vote with their feet.
Since they believe that they are the landlord and you are a tenant using their product so ... !
I recently tried a new feature they added that would add recommended stuff into my already made playlists. I didn't like it and turned it off in the settings, but it still persists in basically advertising music that is completely unrelated to what I have. Like I shouldn't be hearing fucking TikTok by Kesha in my 90's grunge mix. It's all the more infuriating that it continues to act as if it is on when I turned it the fuck off.
For being so sophisticated, it's incredible how dumb the Spotify algorithm is.
For me somehow it decided Pink Moon by Nick Drake was my favourite song. At first it just threw it in the mix randomly when albums finished playing and it went on to play suggestions, but after a few times of me not skipping it it went ballistic. Now every time an album finishes it goes straight to Pink Moon. No matter what Spotify radio I try playing it will be Pink Moon. I keep skipping it and it keeps coming back. I don't have a problem with Nick Drake I just can't stand that song any longer. I never once played that song intentionally.
In the end I just cancelled my subscription.
It feels like they did it on purpose, because the main reason I actually pay for Spotify is because it generally is actually pretty good at recommending songs based on other songs I've checked the like box on, and I was able to find new music that didn't completely suck balls.
This shuffle feature doesn't seem to use the same algorithm. It just shuffles in artists that are currently popular and may have paid for the bump.
I absolutely loathe this new shuffle feature. I want to listen to my playlists not be spoon-fed advertising garbage. I remember one year Spotify had this thing where it was injecting popular x-mas songs into your playlist in the free version. What's worse was you couldn't skip the songs. I went back to using old MP3s for the rest of the month.
The whole notion of "If you're not the product, then you're the product" died a while ago.
Now, you're paying for the product, and you continue to be the product.
Paying for the product = monthly/yearly subscription You're the product = unique identifiers, data mining/harvesting, tracked across the web, etc. Perhaps even training some AI models in the background, too.
Now, you’re paying for the product, and you continue to be the product.
So this is what "neofeudalism" boils down to?
That's more "the oligarchs own and run everything and you must work for their benefit or you die"
Yup
Install ViMusic on Android and all your problems are gone. https://f-droid.org/packages/it.vfsfitvnm.vimusic/
InnerTune is also nice, UI is closer to YouTube Music.
There are about a million YT Music clients on F-Droid
That one is actually better, thanks
Buy CDs from the artists you like, and then rip them to .flac using Exact Audio Copy! 😁
I use Bandcamp and usually will wait for the days they give artists 100% of the revenue and buy everything I've been waiting on. You get a flac download so you can secure your purchase in case the site shuts down later, but you also have access to streaming.
Bandcamp is great too! I've downloaded everything I've bought from there, but one artist deleted their page and now I can't download what I purchased anymore. That's the only negative I can think about.
Plus, Bandcamp will also recommend new music and related artists. The recommended artists at the bottom of a band/artists's page are listed by the artist themselves, so you can pursue music that inspired the music you like.
I don't use Spotify anymore. But I also don't listen to "tons of different music". I have about 200 albums on Bandcamp and I pick up something new every couple weeks. I'm paying money, sometimes as much as a subscription, but I get to keep the music. It supports the artists. Sometimes they even send you a personal message.
Bandcamp got bought by epic and that sucks, but they're still the best music service I know.
Bandcamp hasn't changed at all since the Epic acquisition. Yet, at least. This is from an artist's perspective, too, as I use Bandcamp as essentially my website and main place to push people to if they want to purchase my music rather than stream.
Yeah I was real nervous when it first happened, but nothing has gone sour yet. I have held off some purchases until Bandcamp Friday though as a result.
That's good to hear. I was pretty concerned.
And Spotify didn't advertise at paying users for almost a decade until, well, today.
Not that I'm a fan of the ridiculous "I tOlD yOu sO" posturing in this thread, given that it's been almost a decade of initially groundbreaking and later reasonably high quality service.
One thing those commenters are right about though is: these companies will pursue profit to the bitter end and ads are a virtual inevitability for any major media platform.
I listened to 9,852 different tracks in 2022 from 3,247 different artists across 6,720 different albums.
It's just not feasible for me to buy them all.
Convenience and family plan is the only reason I have it. I've also got a local DNS server with ads blocked, so that helps. Otherwise I'd be pirating again. Have over 80k songs from back in the day, just need the newer stuff.
I cancelled my subscription. They're upping the price for the listening even though they've been steadily cutting the payouts to independent artists for years. Support small artists instead.
Never understood why anyone would want to rent their music in the first place. As good as the service may be when you sign up for it, you know it will eventually turn to shit as they're trying to monetize every last cent out of it, and then your only choices are to endure the shit or to quit the service and be left with nothing.
Convenience, pure and simple.
I used to maintain a gigantic Google Play Music library and used that to listen to music. I also had a hard copy locally and used Winamp.
Then Google killed GPM and there was no real good alternative at the time so I picked up Spotify and got easily hooked on the ability to listen to anything I wanted at any time. No ripping, no uploading, no buying, no hassle, no nothing. I've discovered so much music through the recommendation engine. Some are bigger bands I just hadn't listened to, some are obscure.
But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.
But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.
Yeah but my point is, you pay but you don't actually get those albums. So if after some years Spotify turns to shit you don't have anything to show for when you cancel the service, and even though you have paid the equivalent of dozens of albums your music collection is gone.
Also, I don't buy anyting near an album per month, so even on that level it doesn't make sense to me. I do have a large collection, but I'm not really digging much current music anymore so if I buy two albums per year, it's a lot.
Never understand why anyone would want to buy their music in the first place. I got tired of music really quickly, so buying would be waste of money for me, since, after some time, I won't be listening to music I bought. For me, renting music is better than buying. And sometimes I would just like to find some new music, since I'm tired of listening to the same old s*it. Just give me something random, something new, I newer heard before. But that's just me, and I believe this is not for anyone.
I also pay for Premium and get these ads. I always think it's funny because it's never anything I'd ever actually want to listen to
Honestly a music platform is one of the only places I would actually welcome targeted ads. Where it can analyze my taste and suggest new music accordingly. But instead they just promote the highest bidder which is always lame pop music.
You can disable it pretty easily in the settings. I wish more apps let you opt out of ads so easily.
Could not find it on android, do i need to use the webapp?
Maybe it's on notifications menu, but there are some many things in there and nothing related to ads
Try clicking the “what’s this?” I think it explained it when I did it. All I know is I got it once like a year ago and immediately disabled. Still stupid that they do this for paying customers but it wasn’t that hard to opt out.
I stopped using Spotify when I paid for premium a few years ago And they kept interrupting me to remind me that I was listening ad-free lol
I get the recommendations sometimes (they seem to come in batches, like I'll get a bunch over a few weeks and then won't see any for months), but I've never gotten this.
That’s an odd take. You are conflating completely different things. It costs close to nothing for artists to get their music on Spotify ($25 a year for several releases if I remember correctly).
There is no promise from Spotify that they will guarantee discoverability. Tens of millions of releases are uploaded to Spotify annually, how do you surface that to users?
Paying for promotions is ads. Artists (or their labels) are fully responsible for buying ads. They are advertisers. They spend money because they want to become more popular.
Users, on the other hand, buy a paid product. When they become the product it’s not by choice and it’s not because that improves user’s experience.
I couldn't deal with Spotify constantly pushing its industry plant artists and those paying to get into my recommendations. Fuck this company for not giving a shit about your actual tastes
Apple Music pays musicians, Qobuz pays the best and costs the most
They both sound really good. If you have the money and are willing to compromise on a few things than Qobuz is the nice one
There's also Tidal. Which pays well but is a buggy mess
Apple also rolled out a really good seaparate app specifically for browsing and listening to classical music.
Classical music doesn't organize easily into "bands/albums" the way most works from the last 80 years do. Most music players tend to fall apart when you try to organize a library of classical music in any coherent manner. So they solved this problem by desiging a completely separate UI for it.
I've actually had zero issues with tidal since I switched a couple of months ago, it pays artists better and I think it has more artists on it. I don't use the mobile app much though if that's what's buggy, I mainly use the desktop app (on Linux) and occasionally the Plex integration to listen from my tv
I've been on Tidal for over a year with barely any bugs. Highly recommend!
..I'm still the product?
Yes. You always will be with any corporate streaming service.
Navidrome may help
I dropped Spotify and starting using iBroadcast and haven't looked back. Glad to cut another subscription.
I wasn't aware of that service. - Thanks, good tip!
Soon it will be pay for Spotify on the same tier but also hear ad's.
How to introduce ads to the current premium tier without having everyone complain and leave
Step 1 - Introduce a new paid tier that's cheaper, has all the premium features, but still has ads
Step 2 - wait a few months
Step 3 - increase all prices so that new "cheaper" tier is the same price as the current premium tier
This sounds like the Netflix model.
Maybe then they will turn a profit
Or pay artists for once lol
I'd love to leave streaming services and roll my own server, but I rely on things like the Release Radar and song radios for discovery and just haven't been able to find a self-hosted solution for that.
I don't want to have to plan out the music I'm going to listen to, I just want to dive in.
I use the Spotify data via Every Noise at Once (https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=name&name=) to gather band suggestions, but it is an annoying amount of work compared to having a script that sees all of my music and makes a playlist of 20+ songs using that data for me. Have not found a solution for that.
I complained about this to their support one time
They gave me a month free lol
No small artist makes a profit with Spotify tho, it might help with publicity but the majority of the money lands in Spotifies pockets!
I'm sure this comes as no surprise, but they need to fix their algorithm. Don't advertise me Morgan Wallen when I've been listening to speed and thrash metal for the past six months and the last country song I listened to was Hank III over a year ago.
Honestly I think it's like Facebook, the advertiser can pick and choose what demographics see it- and some of them don't care, and just hit "select all". Waste of their money and annoys people who have no interest in the artist/genre being advertised because it should be targeted.
They control the algorithm. If it gives you good recommendations, it is because they want to lure users in. Then they will slowly start pushing only whatever makes them the most money like other platforms do.
You are also the product coz they keep raping your data and selling it to advertisers on other platforms.
Use blackhole or newpipe
Tidal is a good alternative. Will have to go elsewhere for podcasts, though.
I haven't subscribed to Spotify for quite some time, have they added proper 2FA feature (not for artists)? I think it's been "under consideration" for a long time
Me listening to Joe Rogan in my car:
“This episode is brought to you by Athletic …”
“Aaaargh! I pay Spotify! They gave you eight and eight figure contract! Why the fuck are there ads??”
There's an easy way to fix that. Stop listening to Joe Rogan.
The little I've seen of Joe seems like this:
Some rich guy you've never heard of: "So, umm, yeah, I've been trying this new form of yoga."
Joe: hits blunt and drinks something harmful "Oh yeah?"
Guy 1: burp "Yeah, and it's really opened my eyes and shit, y'know?"
Joe: "Oh really?"
(This but for who knows how long).
I don’t think I will. His show is incredibly entertaining.
".. listening to Joe Rogan..."
Thanks for telling.us you're stupid.
Not to be confused with Tim Janus, world championship burping title holder. I believe he also holds record for longest recorded burp at 18sec.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=gU3jBonhsrQ&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Shit like this is why monopolies and oliglopolies don't work. I hope people complain AND jump ship in big enough droves for this to change. Self-hosting and the old fashioned "buy your own music permanently" option are good too.
I don't use streaming services, I just buy MP3's (or AAC's on iTunes or whatever they're using nowadays, it's been a while) and keep them locally and on the cloud. Never liked most Streaming Services' recommendations anyway.
Mp3s are fortunately in a really good place with them being DRM free. Was why when Google Music shut down I was still able to download my music purchases and keep them for myself. It's one of more widespread consumer friendly digital options out there compared to all the DRM and account based digital options that exist for other products.
Meh, for not very much a month I can pay for premium Spotify and rip 320 mp3s to my hearts content, for anything that is more obscure or just not released on Spotify I buy through bandcamp. I used to buy a lot more but being much poorer now I'm going to take advantage of saving so much money and still being able to have files that I can hold on to and use how I like.
Juat rip thr files, Spotify pockets most of the money so if it's about supporting artists it's a bad solution anyway!
The biggest bullshit...
Spotify Exclusive Podcasts also contain sound ads here in germany. For me it was a reason to unsubscribe as i don't listen anymore to so much new music and have a own catalog of music from past.
I have around 5000 songs in a playlist. Anyone got an idea of how to migrate them to just local .mp3 files or something?
Any sailor worth his salt needs spend a few seasons earning his sea legs before he can begin to call to claim any understanding of the sea.
AKA, There is no easy way. It will lots of time and manual labor to find all the individual files in your Playlist.
Have you looked at spotify-downloader? it uses YouTube, so ymmv for quality, but it could be a good first step.
If you have a shit ton of time and don't care about mediocre to bad quality for the size, you could do the straightforward 80s way, play and record on "tape" (which can be digital files nowadays).
If you have any way of exporting to a list, then you might have some luck with some console wizardry and yt-dlp. Essentially "search" each title on youtube and auto-download the audio from the first result and try to fill in the track and artist fields automatically.
the synonymes entry in the english language for "ads" is expanding everyday
Arr.
There still is ni better way to listen to music than downloading it and playing it locally or via private local network.
Plexamp!
I never understand this. Is someone paying for spotify to push their music on people?
Is this like the new mlm scheme where artists have to pay spotify first so the algorithm prioritizes their songs so they can earn that same money back?
The screenshot literally says "sponsored recommendation". Not sure how much more clear it can be that somebody paid money for that.
I ment to say I don't get why anyone would pay for that.
Artist are trying to get paid for people listening on Spotify, not the other way around.
I guess It's like advertising your product on amazon so people buy from you not others, but somehow it feels stupid when you think about it in the context of a music streaming service.
This is exactly why I see Spotify as nothing more than a green garbage bin. I'm going back to my vinyl records.
I still pay for premium because it allows me to intercept their high quality 320kbps ogg streams.
Interesting 🤔 "intercept" as in to rip them?
And suppose a friend asked me how you do that. What should I tell them?
Look up soggfy or zotify. Can't link them here for obvious reasons.
You can use them without premium but the quality of saved files will be lower.
Why should they not make more money out of you? You already sold yourself when you signed up.
And they up the prices and you just better shut up about it. Talkin bout you fucking YouTube...
Wow, I'm not gonna move to another subscription music app. If I see this, I'm back to mp3s and maybe something selfhosted.
Because the dollars must flow
Dude right though!! Those are the worst!! And they only seem to pop up when I'm tossing a playlist on right as I start driving, worst fkn thing!!
Just been downloading all songs off Spotify to have them locally and find another way of expanding my library forwards, I've had enough of Spotify.
Music ads are nonsense
I cancelled my sub after I kept getting bombarded by some Michelle Obama podcast/book thing. Popped up so many times over the course of a week that I just yolo'd out and went with Youtube Premium (which gives Youtube Music as part of the deal).
Pirate all the things. No love for any corporation.
So if Spotify pays artists so poorly (I'm not claiming they don't), then why do those artists stay on the platform? I have no qualms about using my paid Spotify account. I don't really care how much they pay artists as long as they are paying artists.
Critical mass. They remove their songs from Spotify and the likelyhood of people changing platforms to keep listening to them is next to zero.
In a past thread on this topic, I've seen a few indie artists say that they benefit because Spotify amplifies their audience. They make crap on the streams, but a larger audience base is worth the trade-off since they'll be able to sell more concert tickets and merchandise.
Spotify has definitely helped me to discover new artists, but then I mostly listen to that artist on Spotify (Mostly because I'm not in their country.)
Honestly spotify should really let small artists make their pages more interesting.
One of my arguments is that inde artists and creators are as responsible for the enshitification of the internet as companies like google and Facebook are. They both are invested in making the internet into some global bazaar instead of a library.
No streaming platforms pay well. Are you saying that artists should pull out of all streaming services? How would new artists get their music to a general audience?
Tbh the times that these come up it's usually music that is right in my wheelhouse. I've found lots of new music through the recommendations of Spotify.
They specify and free music, and fail to mention ads in podcasts
Podcadsts.
Use vanced Spotify and don't pay them at all. I don't use it cause I prefer to have my flac files stored locally and discovering new songs is stupid on Spotify (mostly mainstream bullshit) but for someone used to using Spotify it's a good choice.
You can definitely discover music outside of mainstream bullshit on Spotify, that's a terrible take. Storing FLAC is your prerogative I suppose, I get it. I won't say Spotify doesn't have its issues though.
I was using it for almost a year. Still it gave me bullshit I didn't like.. Completely useless app for me.
That's probably because you're not using Spotify. I've been using Spotify using the family subscription of a friend of mine, and the recommendations are pretty good. Still not as good as they were on Apple Music, but hey, it's free for me.
I use Google Play Music and it's been pretty good. Haven't noticed any shenanigans, no ads or anything of the sort.
Boy do I actually miss that service. It just worked. And then they killed it.
Is it not YouTube music now?
I used that service but they jacked the price up so I quit and got Spotify
I understand some people against this, but it's the same as Netflix recommending a show or your cinema showing you other rmpvies to watch. Yeah it could be seen as an ad but it can help you find new content or enjoy other stuff we are not talking about an ad about something completely unrelated like a new toothpaste ...
Except this is a sponsored recommendation. In other words they don't show it to you because it matches your taste, they show it to you because someone paid for it to be shown to you. In my experience none of these sponsored recommendations have been something I'd remotely listen to, usually they're just random big mainstream artists.
Two things. First, the user didn't ask for the suggestion (it popped up). Second, the contents of the suggestion are "sponsored" (paid for by an advertiser and not necessarily related to the user's interest). User-friendly suggestions should be gathered in a single space that the user chooses to interact with (like a suggestions page) and contain only relevant information (uninfluenced by paid-for sponsorships).
Ah, I see the distinction now. True. There is already a suggestion feature in the "liked songs" playlist where you can have Spotify give your a suggested song every third song. So the pop-up is just a nuisance. I see now.
That's annoying. But I think there's a misconception of "if you pay for something it must be ad free." There's goals to get to X revenue. It's totally reasonable to have that way to get to X to be a blend of subscription fees and some forms of promotional content. Also, I am curious if the record labels have any agreements in place that require Spotify to do occasional promotions to both premium and non premium users in order for the service to have access to their music. I'd be curious to see what the "why am I seeing this?" link says.
Agree, extravagant bonuses need to be paid to all those executives, shareholders, investors, and music producers so that they can continue pushing their pet artist everywhere, and can continue employing the engineering teams that will keep quiet and keep pumping out that sweet sweet code.
We need those people to control everything we hold valuable, otherwise everything would be chaos! Therefore they are supposed to milk us on all of our online actions, our personal devices, etc. We owe them so much!
/s
A once a month pop up for a new album release is milking you? I don't see this as any different than the inserts from CDs and Vinyl that listed other items available to purchase. You just take them out and throw them away.
Imagine not wanting to be recommended things you'd like lol
But this is a sponsored recommendation. It's an ad. Will I really like it or do they just want money?
Losers born every minute. Lol
If you're not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
Basically every computer hardware manufacturer is collecting telemetry and sending it home. If you’re using MacOS or Windows, your OS is doing it aswell
Or Android, or iOS, or a Chromebook, or whatever other OS you're using next year, if it isn't some sort of Linux/UNIX system... and even some of those might not be great, but at least you can find out.
You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
But you're paying for the GOOD recommendations now, not the free bad ones... /s
That's not how big tech works, it's how DRM works. It is possible to sell music/games/movies in an ethical way, without DRM.