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Reasons to Abandon Spotify That Have Nothing to Do with Joe Rogan

• edmcnulty101 5y ago
  With torrent sites existing, the real value of music recordings is zero dollars. Another way to look at Spotify is actually trying to recover some of this money for artists.
  • thenthenthen 5y ago
    I never liked Spotify, most music I listen to is not available there, you have to login/make an account of someone wants to share a song with you (pfff) and ofcourse the total bs about 'paying artist' while pirating music themselves[0]. This is just a company interested in making a profit [1]. Nothing more nothing less [0] https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-threatened-researchers-who-revealed-pirate-history-171006/ https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-threatened-researchers-who-... [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxxkn/musicians-are-dragging-spotifys-ceo-for-funding-a-military-ai-company https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxxkn/musicians-are-draggin...
    • leephillips 5y ago
      What music do you listen to that’s not on Spotify?
    • edmcnulty101 5y ago
      From what I was reading Daniel Ek made tons of money before Spotify. I heard that Spotify doesn't make a profit.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  > Spotify, like Facebook and Amazon, has the advantage of being odiously indispensable. No matter how much people grow to hate the service, they cannot envision life without it. Are you kidding me? If you don’t like something about Spotify, switch to Amazon or Apple music, Pandora, Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, or a dozen others. This seems like “As much as I dislike Bing, I cannot envision life without it!”
  • ss108 5y ago
    Pandora is in no way a replacement for Spotify. With Tidal or Amazon, can I just import my Spotify library in? How do I know they have all my music? Search engines are not the right analogy here.
    • 12ian34 5y ago
      I know your questions were rhetoric but on importing Spotify to Tidal, I've recently tried it and it was not as smooth as I hoped so gave up for the time being. Tidal recommend a 3rd party. I went to their website, selected Spotify -> Tidal, then read something about it only transferring 500 songs for free. You need to PAY for a SUBSCRIPTION to do this one off job and it isn't cheap ... so I quit the process before signing in with auth0. I scoured GitHub for good Spotify to Tidal python libraries and couldn't get any to work. I then thought I'd just make my own since I have the nice JSON export of my Spotify data, but then then couldn't find details on an official public Tidal API so totally gave up and now my free trial has run out. Tidal have lost a customer and I'm stuck with Spotify when what I really want is for bandcamp to have a better app, more geared to long music listening sessions, with playlists.
      • ss108 5y ago
        Thanks. My questions weren't purely rhetorical. I do want to actually know the feasibility of ditching Spotify, and this comment may save me some time in terms of figuring out how to export to Tidal if I want to.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • commoner 5y ago
      > Pandora is in no way a replacement for Spotify. Pandora now offers on-demand streaming as a subscription service (Pandora Premium), just like Spotify. This has been available since 2017, after Pandora acquired the assets of Rdio.[1] Pandora's music discovery features are best-in-class, but its maximum audio quality is lower than that of other services (192kbps vs. Spotify's 320kbps).[2] Pandora also pays artists less per stream than Spotify and most other services do,[3] probably because Pandora has a huge proportion of free users. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2017-03-13-pandora-premium-music-streaming-hands-on.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-03-13-pandora-premium-music-st... [2] https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-do-i-need-for-pandora-and-spotify https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-much-speed-d... [3] https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-royalties-breakdown/ https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-roya...
• zirobi 5y ago
  > I love that people are looking for alternatives to Spotify and I don’t know how to explain to them that it has never been ethical or sustainable to expect to have unfettered access to the entire history of recorded music for $10/month. — Ross Grady, missing the point. This has nothing to do with Spotify and everything to do with the market for streaming services. It takes an unbelievable amount of money to operate a service like Spotify and consumers have not yet demonstrating a willingness to pay more than $10-15/mo for pretty much any mainstream digital subscription. That leaves a very small amount for artists. Which is wrong. But what are you going to do? Either customers pay more, which they won't. Or artists leave Spotify for platforms that pay them more in hope the increased cut compensates for significantly lower volume, which is unlikely. Or someone finds a way to run a global streaming service at such a reduced cost that some savings can be passed onto the artists, which would've happened already if possible.
  • CPLX 5y ago
    > That leaves a very small amount for artists. Which is wrong. But what are you going to do? I mean, you could start by taking a glance at the billions of dollars amassed but Spotify’s owners as a starting point.
    • zirobi 5y ago
      Completely agree, but they're playing a game with artists which is something like "How little can we pay them and still have enough material for the average consumer to pay $10-15/mo to believe they have all the music in the world?" and they're not going to start paying artists more of their own volition. So what action does that leave?
    • newsbinator 5y ago
      Unpopular opinion: I get a lot more value from the output of Spotify's owners than I get from billions of musicians. I only listen to hundreds of musicians and Spotify gives me those hundreds for $15/mo. Those hundreds change by 10% ~ 30% every month into other hundreds. I don't feel any ethical need to compensate musicians I don't listen to. And the ones I do listen to I don't feel strongly enough attached to to pay more than $15/mo for recurring access. There are perhaps 10 whose permanent media I would buy and replay, if they left Spotify.
• srean 5y ago
  What's wrong with carrying your own music on your own storage device ? With appropriate backups of course and they neednt be mutually exclusive. The article does bring up this point of view towards the end. I dislike the possibility, however remote, of being cut off from my music at the whim of a service provider or the government. I come from India, the current government is ever so trigger happy about cutting off the internet and/or web sites because someone said something that did not show them in the best of lights.
  • edmcnulty101 5y ago
    That's exactly what I did before Spotify. Just torrented the artist and put it in my own device.
• floatboth 5y ago
  Spotify was not available in my country for ages and it insists on using DRM on the web so I never signed up. YouTube Music is great – no DRM, one subscription for music and getting rid of YouTube ads (while supporting your favorite video creators far better than ads do).
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    Except not everything on my YouTube playlists is listenable on Music since it doesn't recognize that it's a track and grays them out. Other than that and some other minor gripes (no way to have videos take up the whole window, just small part of it or Fullscreen) it's a nice service.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Maybe I am too old fashioned, buying music direct from musicians, after concert gigs, and making my own play lists. No need to abandon something I never bothered with in first place.
  • coldtea 5y ago
    >Maybe I am too old fashioned, buying music direct from musicians, after concert gigs, and making my own play lists. Wow! I'd like to see your collection of wax cylinders!
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      Buying tapes, or nowadays CDs has very little to do with wax cylinders.
      • Guessnotgauss 5y ago
        Im with you dude. Music has a distinct meaning to me. I like to engage in the story, not consume passively.
• say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
  I abandoned The New Yorker a while ago. The entire magazine is one big woke circle jerk. These are people who get high off of smelling their own farts. The bias is everywhere in the magazine. Their long-form investigative work hasn't produced something interesting in some time. They must have lost their talented writers and editors in a woke war. So, I don't really care what someone from the New Yorker has to say about Joe Rogan, as they join the cancel crusade. If anything, I may sign up for Spotify for standing up against cancel culture, and I won't be subscribing to the New Yorker at time soon.
  • jayspell 5y ago
    I signed up for Spotify specifically to support Rogan.
  • jker 5y ago
    I’m not sure I can agree with you about the New Yorker’s “wokeness” and bias. But I will say that the magazine’s humor pieces and cartoons have changed completely over the past ten years. They used to be genuinely funny, sometimes hilarious, and appealed to a broader wit and humanity. Now they’re miserably self-referential. I doubt they’re even funny to the tiny in-group of wealthy anxious Manhattanites for whom they’re written.
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  The idea that it's "too much" to expect all of the music for $10 is strange because there are legal ways to do that right now. I can just go on YouTube, turn an ad blocker on, and there we go. It's not curated, there's no playlist, there's no buffering on my phone when I go underground, the general experience is worse, etc. But that's literally free. Without the ad blocker, it's ad supported, okay, so it's like default spotify without paying. But it's there and it has been for like, ten years now. In fact I find that YT has loads of stuff that's not on Spotify at all. If you're disappointed that it turns out that most people ended up not paying for music once they had the choice, fine. But like, the idea that it's somehow unsustainable is obviously wrong, and calling it unethical is pretty opinionated (how is it unethical for me to click on a Beatles video when they're all either dead or fantastically wealthy?) I've been considering cancelling Spotify for ages, I've been on and off. The only thing that keeps me using the platform is that it's more convenient - it's like buying a coffee at the motorway services instead of making one from a bag of coffee, a cafetiere, and a kettle in my car. I can do it, I just don't want to sometimes.
  • leephillips 5y ago
    I was skeptical, so I just searched for some rather obscure stuff on YT, and wow—they had it all. But how’s the audio quality? Is it as good as Spotify?
    • Tenoke 5y ago
      Quite a lot of stuff is uploaded with lower quality on YouTube, often on purpose (e.g. popular techno channels like HATE are allowed to upload a lot of tracks but it's still a type of promo so it's at a Lower bitrate) compared to the lossless option on Spotify. I'd wager most wouldnt notice the difference though.
      • leephillips 5y ago
        “Quite a lot of stuff is uploaded with lower quality on YouTube.” Yeah, I suspected that. That’s enough reason for me to stick with Spotify.
• rocketChair 5y ago
  Love Spotify myself. They've done what none of the competitors have managed in my opinion. Good free-tier, amazing premium service and price, an unbelievably large collection of artists and music, strong privacy protection without the need to provide credit card details (for free tier) or mobile phone numbers, in a super-polished and easy to use package, without all the terrible data-collection. They really have become the kings of music streaming.
  • throwjs51009 5y ago
    // without all the terrible data collection // That's not true. Check this out: https://nitter.net/steipete/status/1025024813889478656 https://nitter.net/steipete/status/1025024813889478656
  • devilbunny 5y ago
    You don't have to provide details, ever. I have Spotify Premium. I go to a retailer and use cash to buy a card good for a year's subscription for $100. Then I enter the card into my account. The email address is @mailinator.com in case I ever need to check something, but otherwise they have no clue who I am. When it expires, if I haven't been paying attention, I live with free-tier for a day or two until I can go buy another card.
• throwjs51009 5y ago
  Spotify alternatives: Tidal https://tidal.com/ https://tidal.com/ Deezer https://www.deezer.com/ https://www.deezer.com/ Bandcamp https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/ Jango https://www.jango.com/ https://www.jango.com/ Radio Paradise https://radioparadise.com/ https://radioparadise.com/ Qobuz https://www.qobuz.com/ https://www.qobuz.com/ Pandora https://www.pandora.com/ https://www.pandora.com/
  • MisterSandman 5y ago
    What a weird list, why would you exclude it's biggest competitors? Amazon Music, Apple Music, YouTube Music?
    • theandrewbailey 5y ago
      Can you buy and own music from those services?
      • MisterSandman 5y ago
        ? what does that have to do with anything? Spotify doesn't let you do that either, and OP mentioned "Spotify alternatives", not "Spotify Alternatives that aren't really alternatives because you buy the music instead of streaming which is a completely different service that has existed since iTunes"
    • throwjs51009 5y ago
      Because everyone already knows about them.
• jeegsy 5y ago
  Nothing to do with Rogan but then goes on to discuss Rogan quite a bit with a generous helping of other Artists who have protested Rogan. The hubris on this person. He actually believes that he can talk people out of Spotify!
• secretsatan 5y ago
  I've never signed up to a music streaming service, I distrust them immensely, I don't like the idea of algos picking my music, especially not, if you like that, then you'll like this, I think it's recipe for making everything sound the same I also don't like the amount they payout to artists. I'm no saint, I used to be on napster and limewire, but now having a decent paying job, I buy albums again from services like Bleep. As I like a lot of indie stuff, I think it's important they get a decent cut because I don't think many of them are selling in the millions. I still don't feel much guilt pirating the odd movie, especially as it's no longer possible to sign up for a single provider, I now have to sign up for multiple services. And twenty bucks is too damn much for a single VOD But the media I use most, mostly video games and music, I really don't mind paying.
  • KptMarchewa 5y ago
    You don't like how much they pay artists so you decided to pay nothing. Great logic.
    • secretsatan 5y ago
      Read
• j7ake 5y ago
  Maybe the solution is to use streaming as a discovery service but still encourage people to buy albums directly from the musician. The musician can add value to the albums by making it a beautiful package with lots of extra details and behind the scenes of the music. For example: a box set https://us-store.deutschegrammophon.com/products/hilary-hahn-paris-lp-boxset https://us-store.deutschegrammophon.com/products/hilary-hahn...