- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
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I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify’s weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!
They pay artists better and it’s been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn’t easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.
Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you’re into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn’t pay as much as direct support.
This reads as an ad but I’m genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.
As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.
Never had a compliant with Apple Music, has a decent Android client with Auto support too.
Yeah, I’m looking to switch from iPhone to Pixel soon, but I’ll be keeping my AM sub. Had it since the day it launched, and it’s been great.
Part of it too for me is that they’ve given me the student price for 6 years after I left school lmao
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.
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.
Qobuz is refreshingly good.
I just recently discovered a band on Soundcloud that has amazing tracks but they all have the familiar feeling of good songs being listened to decades ago, with the voice of the singers similar to that of famous singers of all genres. This is the band in question. [(https://soundcloud.com/flowerpunkhobo)]
I think it’s AI generated music from previous songs from the past.
Many of my friends use it. I’m old school and just keep a collection of mp3s on multiple devices for backup.
It’s all but impossible to purchase an mp3 anymore. Anywhere you can theoretically buy music does everything it can to lock you in to their ecosystem and prevent you from accessing your music outside of it.
Tidal
Yeah, going from “Google Play Music” to “YouTube Music” was such a downgrade. Shit like Bluetooth had more issues with YTM, and they completely eliminated the ability to purchase music. It sucks and there are still no good alternatives on Android :-(
I’ve bought a ton of music off bandcamp and qobuz. Definitely not mp3 tho, not when lossless versions are also available
I believe that Bandcamp is doing a pretty good job with it. But you can always sail the seas
I have no issue sailing the seas, if I can’t buy it an own it, then I don’t see the problem in downloading it.
My mother hates Spotify and just wants to own her music and listen to like the 100 or so songs she likes, but absolutely cannot figure out how to buy them. She’s not really technical and wouldn’t pirate if she were.
Your mother is absolutely right and this old school way is not so old school, it’s not mainstream but not really old school. But yeah piracy is a bit hard to accommodate, so in this way there are two options, teach her how to use it OR download her music.
If you support your favorite creators by going to their show or buying stuff I don’t see the ethical problem of piracy. I’ve more than 1600 songs from a dozens of groups and I just love it, got the best quality (at least 16 bit 48Khz), can listen to the songs offline on my PC or with my iem (best kind of earbuds in my opinion).
The only downside is the size of the files, I have about 25gigs in my library, my phone and my pc have enough storage but if I’d like I could reduce this to around 5-6gigs by using “normal mp3 audio”
What IEM setup do you use?
really little but it’s a good start in my opinion, maybe one day I’ll invest in some more quality stuff. Currently I use the DAC of my phone with a pair of Tangzu Wan’er S.G.
Do you use iem yourself? If yes, what’s your setup?
Oh yeah I do… depends on which ones I grab. High end (in perception not so much quality) I have a couple sets of Triple driver Westones. The MMCX connector version arey favorite of the Westones . My other pair came with a garbage “dental floss” cable and TT bax connectors, when I complained I was told the metal inside was contamination free or some bullshit. I did not bother pointing out listening to digital music and mp3s reduces the audio quality enough that none of their marketing bullshit is relevant.
On the other side, KZ have been my go to, because I’m much less upset if I mess up 40.00 IEMs vs 400.00 Westones. I have the AS12 which claim to have 6 drivers in each ear, could be and probably is BS but they sound amazing.
I’ve also got a bunch of Sennheiser and Shure in ears. Shure is basically like oldstyle Westones but stiffer with the Sennheisers being the smallest and having the smallest visual footprint.
I use the last two for TV broadcast and the Sennheisers are 100% the way to go visually.
Lastly I use a set of DCMEKA dual drivers with a FiiO Bluetooth adapter, they too out punch their price point.
Or I’m old and deaf.
I live in Europe. Had Spotify for about 5 years, stopped paying and using 6 months ago. I usually buy from Bandcamp, mostly non mainstream music, and download in FLAC and store it on my server. I can stream through the app on my phone when I’m out.
For the ones I can’t find on Bandcamp, or albums from major labels, I tend to find it on Qobuz in MP3. Pricing trends to be similar everywhere.
My pirating nowadays is mainly for old music or establish artists.Edit: autocorrect
I scan understand that you prefer to pay for your music, personally I prefer support artists in other ways than buying from platform.
I don’t put my music on my server simply because i prefer to have music directly on local, it’s not that heavy so I prefer having my music directly on hand. Even with the possibility of self hosting it.
The artists I like don’t come around where I live, so I can’t support through live music. I’ve done it in the past when I lived in a large city. In the end we’re all trying our best. And we all have our use cases, there’s no right way to listen to music.
Yeah you’re right and live music is my opinion always the best 😃
What software do you use for that? I think I really need something like this, I have too much stuff that will never be on Spotify, like local band bootleg shows and video game remixes.
Slskd - https://github.com/slskd/slskd/
It uses the soulseek network (an old favourite of mine) installed though docker accessible through a browser.
If you want a desktop app, I recommend Nicotine+ for Linux or visit https://www.slsknet.org/news/node/1 for Windows.
Used CDs (or local library). Ripping software. Super easy. Or just buy from Amazon and download your files to local.
People sell whole collections or discographies on ebay too, I’ve had good luck with that. CD, then rip them. I don’t give a flying fuck what law says if I own the media I’m going to rip it.
For music that I really like, for artists that I really appreciate, I do look for ways to support them, because buying used does not.
No idea why you would think it’s hard to buy MP3s. I’ve never had a problem buying any, just go to the big name FAANG companies’ music store webpages or Bandcamp for FLACs. No DRM on any that I bought.
It’s not hard to download a YouTube video as an mp3, so all you’ve gotta do is rip it from one of the many places it’s posted up.
Me too, it’s just so much better
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!
If you are using Paypal, log in to Paypal and go to Bills. Select Spotify and scroll down - there should be a link to cancel the subscription at the bottom.
This is a legit problem with many services now. And some companies are, right now, being sued for this dark pattern practice.
You can sign up with one click, but to cancel they make it impossible. Some companies literally will process an account cancellation only by registered letter. How messed up is that?
I don’t pay for Spotify, but if I do pay for music then I would choose Tidal
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.
I jumped ship over to Quboz for this reason. I’ve been really happy with it
Never heard of them. They seem interesting, will definitely taka a look. Thanks for the hint!
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.
They been around since 2007 though, so not my biggest concern right now
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.
Edit: Couldn’t find the exact article I had read before but this one seems well formatted. https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/12/tidal-bets-future-artists-djs/
It doesn’t help that their parent company makes so little from them compared to a series of crypto ventures, but what can really compare to that.
Boy, that’s a bummer. Thanks for the information, I’ve missed that.
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.
Maybe I’m thinking of a different distributed system, but there’s one out there that replicates it’s files to different hosts if one ever goes down. With torrents people need to actively keep it up and it could be just one machine that eventually turns off, or one machine that the FBI raid and take down.
Edit: and crypto was for the payments and tracking of ownership. If you want it to be that easy to pay as pinging an IP, it can’t be credit cards or other similar methods. There are barriers all over the place to sending and receiving with that and it’d be rampant with fraud.
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.
Don’t use Spotify for podcasts. They’re actively trying to kill off what we know as podcasting and trying to lock the media into their own service.
Instead, use any app that supports Podcasting 2.0.
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.
Thanks, giving this a try.
the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it’s a great watch if you understand german!
it’s called Dirty Little Secrets
EDIT: here’s episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call “ghost musicians”
For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.
What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
I’m just amazed they haven’t tried to use AI to write and record their shoddy muzak, cutting out the musician all together.
In some ways it seems worse that they make humans pump out this slop instead of a machine
That it all-around sucks? That I’ve been telling people this since it’s creation? That nobody fucking listens to me? Or that this preview picture looks like ET and Titanic had a mash-up. Or all of the above.
It’s all of the above, duh.
I agree with most of this, but how have you never come across Munch’s “The Scream” before? (Have to admit, I lol’d at your description of it tho)
Seriously. I’m not at all an art guy so I feel qualified to observe that The Scream is probably one of the top 5 (and definitely top 10) most well known paintings, somewhere shortly after Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”
Insulting your users, that always works out so well
I’m all aboard Spotify alternatives, but this post is an echo chamber of people that are far more likely to know “the difference”. We aren’t representative of Spotify’s customer base.
Most people listening to music probably wouldn’t be able tell the difference from cutting the quality down by double digit percentages. This is exemplified by the number of people using wireless headphones.
Spotify certainly could offer service on par with Tidal and similar, but being beholden to shareholders that only look at the bottom line and never the quality of the service, that executive might not be right, but they’re not exactly wrong.
Insulting the artists too. Just like when Daniel Ek said that the “content” on Spotify was “basically free” to make.
Have known this for years, just look at any sleep or ambient playlist
