7 ms·

Leaving Spotify for freer pastures

42 points by Le_Dook 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Markoff 4y ago
I'm positively surprised this is actually not another Why I'm leaving twitter virtue signalling post, since I can imagine people doing same with Spotify over some content they don't like, nice to see for change someone leaving some platform for actual rational reasons.
rcarr 4y ago
This is very similar to what the British comedian James Acaster does/did. He buys music off Bandcamp then puts it on his iPod. He documented it all in his second book Perfect Sound Whatever, it helped him get over a breakup and depression around 2016 if I remember right. He jokes in his book that he has an 'iPod guy' who hooks him up with the old iPods. His recommendations here: https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/ https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/
- Le_Dook 4y ago
  Wow! What a list! I'd love to see more people make lists like it. I'll have to give the book a check too, thanks for sharing!
  - patchorang 4y ago
    I do this as well, here's a couple: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0fG7yOWKeuU3qH3k60gEVY?si=9550aeb4a32d422e https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0fG7yOWKeuU3qH3k60gEVY?si=... https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3DdZ7Gmydk7iE3eyshdzRV?si=701f9ea6d7724c5e https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3DdZ7Gmydk7iE3eyshdzRV?si=...
  - lancesells 4y ago
    I try and make playlists for the year I've experienced on Apple Music: 2020: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2020/pl.u-RR8Z1FMmVNg https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2020/pl.u-RR... 2021: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2021/pl.u-vx8k6T3WRyB https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2021/pl.u-vx... This year I'm going to start writing out the songs.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  I'm not sure how to feel about the status quo of only a decade ago being the vogue thing to do now.
hxugufjfjf 4y ago
I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  There are export tools.
  - hxugufjfjf 4y ago
    But what would I do with it? Yes, the playlist itself is important, but arguably the content is what I pay for. Even if importing to another provider was possible, the alternatives seem to suck equally. Buying all that music and future music I want is simply not feasible from an economical perspective.
- mrkeen 4y ago
  Is it possible to export? Is it possible to make them export it for you - via a GDPR request?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - piva00 4y ago
    You can export both as GDPR requests on the Account -> Privacy pane of Spotify's settings or through the public APIs here: developer.spotify.net As I mentioned in a previous comment in this thread, I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs, we don't block you from extracting your data if you wish.
- wantlotsofcurry 4y ago
  I exported all my spotify data by going to Account > Privacy Settings on their website and requesting all the data that I could get. This included: -Playlists -Streaming history for the past year (you can request history for the lifetime of your account too) -A list of items saved in your library -Search queries -No. of followers, accounts you follow, and blocked accounts -Payment and subscription data -User data -Family Plan data -Inferences -Voice input -Podcast interactivity -Spotify for Artists data I used this data to buy the music I wanted to keep and make my own collection.
metadaemon 4y ago
I recently bought my wife a record player and some "HiFi" equipment for myself. Really amps up the listening experience for me.
ccakes 4y ago
For those going down this path, Funkwhale[1] provides a good user experience with ActivityPub support to join/build a community. [1] https://funkwhale.audio/ https://funkwhale.audio/
- rcarr 4y ago
  This library sharing part sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen
  - radlad 4y ago
    Like Plex?
mrkeen 4y ago
I held out for a really long time. Google Music used to sell music and be an online player at the same time, which was pretty good. Then they threw that away.
LesZedCB 4y ago
awesome to see somebody else fed up with it. i just did the same about 2-3 months ago and landed on bandcamp (and steam for video game ost's haha). sadly there's still a lot of fragmentation and i'm trying to find other good places to buy DRM free music. (looking for old BTBAM if anyone has an idea) i do have vinyl as well for some of my favorites. but digital is still my primary listening mode.
- Le_Dook 4y ago
  It's really quite a shame how few options there are for buying music, especially with apple music no longer allowing to buy stuff. I recently got into Japanese classic city pop, and was surprised to find that there were several japanese sites that sold digital, drm free music still.
macrolime 4y ago
I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify. In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio. I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one album. When I listened to a track I'd then lookup the album for the track, find the most similar albums and then play some random songs from those albums, but with some controls to make larger jumps possible. It was not using a vector database like FAISS so it was kinda slow and had other issues and with too much bitrot I'd need a complete rewrite to get it working again, but I found lots of new music with it. Maybe there's some services like that out there now that can hook up to streaming services like Spotify?
- Kiro 4y ago
  Everyone seems to hate YouTube recommendations but as someone who mostly use YouTube to listen to music their recommendations are amazing.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    +1 for this, threw a lot of awesome Australian stuff my way I would never have heard otherwise
  - sph 4y ago
    They used to be good, then Youtube has just stopped trying with me. It has shown me the same music recommendations for the past 2 years, and I'm not even joking. The only thing that's always new and recommended is the latest hiphop song that's popular right now (i.e. video posted 12 hours ago, 3M views), and it should know I don't listen to hip hop, at all.
- fzliu 4y ago
  Is your music recommendation system open source? Would be down to check it out and learn a thing or two from it. On the topic of vector search, I'm fairly certain that Spotify still uses Annoy (https://github.com/spotify/annoy https://github.com/spotify/annoy). Like Faiss, it's a great library but not quite a database, which would ideally have features like replication (https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md), caching, and access control, to name a few.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
There is no way in hell that I am giving up on having instant access to 99.9% of all music, but I will say that Apple Music is infuriating in many ways. The desktop application is widely known to be crap, and, to the point of the article, my biggest frustration with the phone app is that 3 out of 5 icons along the bottom are dedicated to discovery. I don't want Apple to help me find music (that they likely get kick backs to promote).
- pavlov 4y ago
  It is a sad, terrible irony that Apple whose resurgence began when they acquired the best desktop framework from NeXT and further developed it into a revolutionary mobile one, is now a company that’s famous for how bad their new desktop apps are (Music, new macOS Settings, everything made with Catalyst…)
  - adammarples 4y ago
    I dunno if you can really call Apple famous for how bad the very recently updated macos settings app is. They were pretty famous before that and I don't think it's quite eclipsed them yet but I could be wrong.
  - marcellus23 4y ago
    Music is not any worse than iTunes was. And the new Settings app being bad is not exactly consensus — IMO the redesign was much-needed and well executed.
    - nickthegreek 4y ago
      iTunes is a pretty low bar to beat! I would generalize that apple has never gotten music right except for the iPod with that sweeet jog dial.
      - marcellus23 4y ago
        > iTunes is a pretty low bar to beat! Fair enough, but beside the point — if Music is as good or better than iTunes was, it can hardly be an indictment of the quality of Apple's recent system software.
davedx 4y ago
I tried Tidal and couldn't tell enough of a difference in audio quality with lossless in the car (very capable sound system) or in headphones (beyer dynamics). It's just one of those things that people will convince themselves is worth it sometimes when most of the time it's not, really. Eventually there were enough things missing on Tidal that I gave up and cancelled the sub and went back to Spotify. Spotify does everything well enough for me that it's still the best streaming service. The fact they listened to Adele and changed the functionality of how album playback works has a good side too! For me what would be awesome would be if they paid artists more. But that's true of any and all platforms like this.
pelorat 4y ago
> I think a lot of people would probably look at my distaste of Spotify and recommend another, more suitable, streaming platform like Apple music or Pandora Just go to YTM? I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much). Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now. I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.
- civopsec 4y ago
  Hate that navigating Spotify feels like loading websites. And it has felt that way ever since they moved their app to whatever pseudo-webapp framework it is that they’re using.
- sph 4y ago
  Eh, I just left Youtube Music considering to go back to Spotify. Youtube Music has a terrible UI, lacks features, and feels like an afterthought to entice people to get Youtube Premium. Honestly, if you're paying for Youtube Premium, you might as well use YT Music, but it's all around worse than Spotify. I'm currently giving Deezer a try.
  - philote 4y ago
    I've thought about going from YTM to Spotify, but hard to justify since I have YT Premium. One annoying thing I noticed with YTM is if I "liked" a song or artist, Google would assume I wanted to see news about them in my Google News feed. I don't think there's even a way to disable that.
  - treebeard901 4y ago
    I've been trying Deezer for a week or so. Other than an app crash once, it has been a good experience so far. It's just a simple music streaming app with a good collection of music. Not tied to a Big Tech company and actually based in France.
civopsec 4y ago
Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient. I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land. Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember what I listened to this year.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
  Make sure to check out the Discover Weekly playlist.
  - civopsec 4y ago
    Used to be consistently useful. Now it’s mostly sameness and songs that I’ve heard before.
    - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
      Sometimes the algo does get in a rut. It's up to you to tell it you're interested in other music. I do this by listening to a playlist I haven't in a while.
- piva00 4y ago
  Have you tried using the "Enhance" feature on playlists or playing a radio from a playlist/album/artist/song? Genuinely curious to know your experiences with those as they usually provide me enough variance and new artists recommendations, somewhat based on the general mood the original seed. Sometimes it can pigeonhole me into sameness but then I just feed something else to it and go from there.
  - civopsec 4y ago
    Playing radio yes. Now it just seems to spit out the same dozen bands that I already listen to. Maybe I will try “enhance” more (will save me from manually creating so many playlists; the centerpiece of Spotify which also sucks to manage). Thanks.
pro_zac 4y ago
Tidal is a relevant half measure for those looking to leave Spotify for a more album centric service with better profit sharing for artists. I used the FreeYourMusic app to migrate playlists, favorited songs, and albums.
lawgimenez 4y ago
I still pay for Spotify premium cause I’m scared they would remove my username and replace it with a random gibberish string. My account is one of the first sign ups where you get to choose usernames. Bandcamp looks nice, I miss buying physical albums.
yrnameer 4y ago
I've been using Plex with a server for my music on it for a while. I'd like to eventually switch to subsonic. Music has always been very personal for me -- I still have some sub-1000 youtube view songs I found as a 12 year old. So I've always known Spotify wouldn't be an answer for me. There's definitely a lot of unique and sometimes Spotify-exclusive content on the platform. That being said.... nothing ever changes. Any cloud music platform has always been just another radio-- whether they brand themselves that way or not. For the year or so that I used spotify I did find some gems, but I would forget about them as quickly as I found them. I think of my media library as something I have to put work into to have it be meaningful. Organizing it, deciding what you keep and what you toss out, what to pay for what to skip, all make it more important to you and more memorable. Having a library in itself is also of course a useful UX thing to remind yourself what you like and continue to go back to it.
- disposition2 4y ago
  If you haven’t already tried it, I highly recommend PlexAmp. It’s helped me rediscover some of my own local music and find it to be a much better experience for listening to music via Plex.
disposition2 4y ago
I’ve used streaming services for almost a decade now and nothing has ever come close to Rdio. I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery. I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caused me to speak with my $ and stop using it…plus its music discovery is no better than YTM. I still use LastFM as my primary source for recommendations and it does okay. But I will never forget how wonderful Rdio was to use…it felt (atleast to me) like a service for people who loved music and discovering new music
- s3000 4y ago
  What's your opinion of https://digs.fm https://digs.fm ? It's built by a HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 Which features made rdio so good?
  - thepuppet33r 4y ago
    Maybe it's just nostalgia, but it had a way of having a broad collection while still allowing you to discover new acts. It just... worked, seamlessly, and it didn't have any of the flashiness of Spotify. I like Spotify, but RDIO will always have a special place in my heart.
  - disposition2 4y ago
    I’m basing this off of 7+ year old memories so please excuse errors / misinformation… - It had label support. For example, if you wanted to find all releases by Deutsche Grammophon, you could - It’s handling of classical music seemed much better than anything I can recall using - It’s recommendations seemed to be better…like they went above and beyond basic genre recommendations - For ‘radio stations’ you could dislike a song or artist and it only affected that station. So if you love Bowie but don’t want him on your funk station, you could dislike the artist but still have all the Bowie you wanted on other stations…same for songs - The social aspect seemed to bade recommendations on people who had similar taste as you…kind of like Dig that would mention but it was built in to the service Again, this is all based off of memory but I’m confident I discovered more artists and music on that single service vs the plethora of varied services I use today. As to Dig, I have tried it but it’s such a manual thing I haven’t kept up. I tend to listen to local jazz / classical radio nowadays for the majority of my time and periodically use various services for discovery. I’ll have to give it another go. Side note, similar to OP, I have found BandCamp (specifically their weekly show) to be also good for discovery.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
What's this insistence that you can't listen to full albums on Spotify? Just tap the first song in an album and make sure shuffle is off.
patchorang 4y ago
I had the same issue with Spotify prioritizing playlists over albums. My roommate and I built a Spotify "record player". We printed out album covers and glued them to plywood squares. There is a QR code with the spotify URI on the back. We have a Pi with a camera on the stand. When the album is in the stand we play the album from the beginning, using the Spotify API. If you take the album off the music stops. You can't pause or skip forward or back. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc (Sorry, youtube made it a short and I don't know how to make it a video.)
- arran-nz 4y ago
  This is really inventive, great execution. Do you have a write up or src hosted anywhere?
  - patchorang 4y ago
    https://github.com/rttomlinson/spotify-record-player https://github.com/rttomlinson/spotify-record-player
echohack5 4y ago
I'm definitely the odd one out here. I hate any streaming service because the value of my music is being able to listen to that music whenever I want...including 20 years from now. I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art. I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band. Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire. Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify: beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify One Last Kiss - Utada Hikaru -> Yes follow slowly - Nekomata Master -> Nope Masada Gestalt - Zen Albatross -> Nope Yin-Yang - Victor Wooten -> Yes Zipangu - Wednesday Kanpanera -> Surprisingly, yes Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate. That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term.
- kcartlidge 4y ago
  Ditto. If my income drops or streamers shut down I'll still have my music. Owning nothing can be liberating, but not if you're replacing it with decades of renting instead. Plus I've also got loads of stuff that isn't on Spotify, Apple, and the rest. And as for discovery, the free Spotify still gives me some of that (I also like a bit of Smooth Chill or similar running in the background on ye olde voice assistant speaker).
ei8ths 4y ago
I've always liked how spotify's mobile app and web/desktop app work together. I get on Spotify here and there (unpaid) to see if things have improved over the years, not much has changed... I used to do the ipod thing with winamp back in napster days, then i kept a personal library just of cds i've bought, then i tried the subsonic thing i really liked dsub app for android. It was great but i really dont want to do server stuff at home...metadata on discs and bringing it over to digital audio, its never perfect and bugs me to where i'll spend hours cleaning it up... I've been using Youtube music/Google music for many years, abandoned my digital files and i find a lot of my music on youtube and recommendations on YTM. I usually pick the bands im into and they have similar artists and drill down that way, im not a huge fan of auto discovery playlists. YTM are going to be raising their rates, i pay for family premium, $15 -> $22/mo in april for me. So now im looking at alternatives and trying to avoid running a server and/or managing files. I think YTM has more music because of the youtube side but the client side UI sucks.
rcarmo 4y ago
I’ve never felt much of an allure for music streaming services. They’re great for skimming, but pretty useless for anything non-mainstream, so I’ve been slowly amassing a ripped CD library for decades, and use Plex (and the pretty amazing PlexAmp) to get at it. My only gripe with Plex is that the only voice assistant that interacts with it is Alexa, and it requires me to have my Plex server shared over the Internet. On the other hand, that’s been handy a couple of times when I was out and about and wanted to stream a couple of songs (which it did as well as Spotify).
- xenospn 4y ago
  I’ve been using Apple Music for my very niche taste (scandinsvian black metal) and it works great.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    I tried it for a while but other than Siri integration I got nothing much out of it…

42 points by Le_Dook 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I'm positively surprised this is actually not another Why I'm leaving twitter virtue signalling post, since I can imagine people doing same with Spotify over some content they don't like, nice to see for change someone leaving some platform for actual rational reasons.

rcarr 4y ago

This is very similar to what the British comedian James Acaster does/did. He buys music off Bandcamp then puts it on his iPod. He documented it all in his second book Perfect Sound Whatever, it helped him get over a breakup and depression around 2016 if I remember right. He jokes in his book that he has an 'iPod guy' who hooks him up with the old iPods. His recommendations here: https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/ https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/

Le_Dook 4y ago
Wow! What a list! I'd love to see more people make lists like it. I'll have to give the book a check too, thanks for sharing!
- patchorang 4y ago
  I do this as well, here's a couple: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0fG7yOWKeuU3qH3k60gEVY?si=9550aeb4a32d422e https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0fG7yOWKeuU3qH3k60gEVY?si=... https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3DdZ7Gmydk7iE3eyshdzRV?si=701f9ea6d7724c5e https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3DdZ7Gmydk7iE3eyshdzRV?si=...
- lancesells 4y ago
  I try and make playlists for the year I've experienced on Apple Music: 2020: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2020/pl.u-RR8Z1FMmVNg https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2020/pl.u-RR... 2021: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2021/pl.u-vx8k6T3WRyB https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-year-is-2021/pl.u-vx... This year I'm going to start writing out the songs.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
I'm not sure how to feel about the status quo of only a decade ago being the vogue thing to do now.

hxugufjfjf 4y ago

I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.

jtbayly 4y ago
There are export tools.
- hxugufjfjf 4y ago
  But what would I do with it? Yes, the playlist itself is important, but arguably the content is what I pay for. Even if importing to another provider was possible, the alternatives seem to suck equally. Buying all that music and future music I want is simply not feasible from an economical perspective.
mrkeen 4y ago
Is it possible to export? Is it possible to make them export it for you - via a GDPR request?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- piva00 4y ago
  You can export both as GDPR requests on the Account -> Privacy pane of Spotify's settings or through the public APIs here: developer.spotify.net As I mentioned in a previous comment in this thread, I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs, we don't block you from extracting your data if you wish.
wantlotsofcurry 4y ago
I exported all my spotify data by going to Account > Privacy Settings on their website and requesting all the data that I could get. This included: -Playlists -Streaming history for the past year (you can request history for the lifetime of your account too) -A list of items saved in your library -Search queries -No. of followers, accounts you follow, and blocked accounts -Payment and subscription data -User data -Family Plan data -Inferences -Voice input -Podcast interactivity -Spotify for Artists data I used this data to buy the music I wanted to keep and make my own collection.

metadaemon 4y ago

I recently bought my wife a record player and some "HiFi" equipment for myself. Really amps up the listening experience for me.

ccakes 4y ago

For those going down this path, Funkwhale[1] provides a good user experience with ActivityPub support to join/build a community. [1] https://funkwhale.audio/ https://funkwhale.audio/

rcarr 4y ago
This library sharing part sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen
- radlad 4y ago
  Like Plex?

mrkeen 4y ago

I held out for a really long time. Google Music used to sell music and be an online player at the same time, which was pretty good. Then they threw that away.

LesZedCB 4y ago

awesome to see somebody else fed up with it. i just did the same about 2-3 months ago and landed on bandcamp (and steam for video game ost's haha). sadly there's still a lot of fragmentation and i'm trying to find other good places to buy DRM free music. (looking for old BTBAM if anyone has an idea) i do have vinyl as well for some of my favorites. but digital is still my primary listening mode.

Le_Dook 4y ago
It's really quite a shame how few options there are for buying music, especially with apple music no longer allowing to buy stuff. I recently got into Japanese classic city pop, and was surprised to find that there were several japanese sites that sold digital, drm free music still.

macrolime 4y ago

I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify. In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio. I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one album. When I listened to a track I'd then lookup the album for the track, find the most similar albums and then play some random songs from those albums, but with some controls to make larger jumps possible. It was not using a vector database like FAISS so it was kinda slow and had other issues and with too much bitrot I'd need a complete rewrite to get it working again, but I found lots of new music with it. Maybe there's some services like that out there now that can hook up to streaming services like Spotify?

Kiro 4y ago
Everyone seems to hate YouTube recommendations but as someone who mostly use YouTube to listen to music their recommendations are amazing.
- rcarr 4y ago
  +1 for this, threw a lot of awesome Australian stuff my way I would never have heard otherwise
- sph 4y ago
  They used to be good, then Youtube has just stopped trying with me. It has shown me the same music recommendations for the past 2 years, and I'm not even joking. The only thing that's always new and recommended is the latest hiphop song that's popular right now (i.e. video posted 12 hours ago, 3M views), and it should know I don't listen to hip hop, at all.
fzliu 4y ago
Is your music recommendation system open source? Would be down to check it out and learn a thing or two from it. On the topic of vector search, I'm fairly certain that Spotify still uses Annoy (https://github.com/spotify/annoy https://github.com/spotify/annoy). Like Faiss, it's a great library but not quite a database, which would ideally have features like replication (https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md), caching, and access control, to name a few.

wintermutestwin 4y ago

There is no way in hell that I am giving up on having instant access to 99.9% of all music, but I will say that Apple Music is infuriating in many ways. The desktop application is widely known to be crap, and, to the point of the article, my biggest frustration with the phone app is that 3 out of 5 icons along the bottom are dedicated to discovery. I don't want Apple to help me find music (that they likely get kick backs to promote).

pavlov 4y ago
It is a sad, terrible irony that Apple whose resurgence began when they acquired the best desktop framework from NeXT and further developed it into a revolutionary mobile one, is now a company that’s famous for how bad their new desktop apps are (Music, new macOS Settings, everything made with Catalyst…)
- adammarples 4y ago
  I dunno if you can really call Apple famous for how bad the very recently updated macos settings app is. They were pretty famous before that and I don't think it's quite eclipsed them yet but I could be wrong.
- marcellus23 4y ago
  Music is not any worse than iTunes was. And the new Settings app being bad is not exactly consensus — IMO the redesign was much-needed and well executed.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    iTunes is a pretty low bar to beat! I would generalize that apple has never gotten music right except for the iPod with that sweeet jog dial.
    - marcellus23 4y ago
      > iTunes is a pretty low bar to beat! Fair enough, but beside the point — if Music is as good or better than iTunes was, it can hardly be an indictment of the quality of Apple's recent system software.

davedx 4y ago

I tried Tidal and couldn't tell enough of a difference in audio quality with lossless in the car (very capable sound system) or in headphones (beyer dynamics). It's just one of those things that people will convince themselves is worth it sometimes when most of the time it's not, really. Eventually there were enough things missing on Tidal that I gave up and cancelled the sub and went back to Spotify. Spotify does everything well enough for me that it's still the best streaming service. The fact they listened to Adele and changed the functionality of how album playback works has a good side too! For me what would be awesome would be if they paid artists more. But that's true of any and all platforms like this.

pelorat 4y ago

> I think a lot of people would probably look at my distaste of Spotify and recommend another, more suitable, streaming platform like Apple music or Pandora Just go to YTM? I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much). Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now. I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.

civopsec 4y ago
Hate that navigating Spotify feels like loading websites. And it has felt that way ever since they moved their app to whatever pseudo-webapp framework it is that they’re using.
sph 4y ago
Eh, I just left Youtube Music considering to go back to Spotify. Youtube Music has a terrible UI, lacks features, and feels like an afterthought to entice people to get Youtube Premium. Honestly, if you're paying for Youtube Premium, you might as well use YT Music, but it's all around worse than Spotify. I'm currently giving Deezer a try.
- philote 4y ago
  I've thought about going from YTM to Spotify, but hard to justify since I have YT Premium. One annoying thing I noticed with YTM is if I "liked" a song or artist, Google would assume I wanted to see news about them in my Google News feed. I don't think there's even a way to disable that.
- treebeard901 4y ago
  I've been trying Deezer for a week or so. Other than an app crash once, it has been a good experience so far. It's just a simple music streaming app with a good collection of music. Not tied to a Big Tech company and actually based in France.

civopsec 4y ago

Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient. I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land. Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember what I listened to this year.

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Make sure to check out the Discover Weekly playlist.
- civopsec 4y ago
  Used to be consistently useful. Now it’s mostly sameness and songs that I’ve heard before.
  - ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
    Sometimes the algo does get in a rut. It's up to you to tell it you're interested in other music. I do this by listening to a playlist I haven't in a while.
piva00 4y ago
Have you tried using the "Enhance" feature on playlists or playing a radio from a playlist/album/artist/song? Genuinely curious to know your experiences with those as they usually provide me enough variance and new artists recommendations, somewhat based on the general mood the original seed. Sometimes it can pigeonhole me into sameness but then I just feed something else to it and go from there.
- civopsec 4y ago
  Playing radio yes. Now it just seems to spit out the same dozen bands that I already listen to. Maybe I will try “enhance” more (will save me from manually creating so many playlists; the centerpiece of Spotify which also sucks to manage). Thanks.

pro_zac 4y ago

Tidal is a relevant half measure for those looking to leave Spotify for a more album centric service with better profit sharing for artists. I used the FreeYourMusic app to migrate playlists, favorited songs, and albums.

lawgimenez 4y ago

I still pay for Spotify premium cause I’m scared they would remove my username and replace it with a random gibberish string. My account is one of the first sign ups where you get to choose usernames. Bandcamp looks nice, I miss buying physical albums.

yrnameer 4y ago

I've been using Plex with a server for my music on it for a while. I'd like to eventually switch to subsonic. Music has always been very personal for me -- I still have some sub-1000 youtube view songs I found as a 12 year old. So I've always known Spotify wouldn't be an answer for me. There's definitely a lot of unique and sometimes Spotify-exclusive content on the platform. That being said.... nothing ever changes. Any cloud music platform has always been just another radio-- whether they brand themselves that way or not. For the year or so that I used spotify I did find some gems, but I would forget about them as quickly as I found them. I think of my media library as something I have to put work into to have it be meaningful. Organizing it, deciding what you keep and what you toss out, what to pay for what to skip, all make it more important to you and more memorable. Having a library in itself is also of course a useful UX thing to remind yourself what you like and continue to go back to it.

disposition2 4y ago
If you haven’t already tried it, I highly recommend PlexAmp. It’s helped me rediscover some of my own local music and find it to be a much better experience for listening to music via Plex.

disposition2 4y ago

I’ve used streaming services for almost a decade now and nothing has ever come close to Rdio. I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery. I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caused me to speak with my $ and stop using it…plus its music discovery is no better than YTM. I still use LastFM as my primary source for recommendations and it does okay. But I will never forget how wonderful Rdio was to use…it felt (atleast to me) like a service for people who loved music and discovering new music

s3000 4y ago
What's your opinion of https://digs.fm https://digs.fm ? It's built by a HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 Which features made rdio so good?
- thepuppet33r 4y ago
  Maybe it's just nostalgia, but it had a way of having a broad collection while still allowing you to discover new acts. It just... worked, seamlessly, and it didn't have any of the flashiness of Spotify. I like Spotify, but RDIO will always have a special place in my heart.
- disposition2 4y ago
  I’m basing this off of 7+ year old memories so please excuse errors / misinformation… - It had label support. For example, if you wanted to find all releases by Deutsche Grammophon, you could - It’s handling of classical music seemed much better than anything I can recall using - It’s recommendations seemed to be better…like they went above and beyond basic genre recommendations - For ‘radio stations’ you could dislike a song or artist and it only affected that station. So if you love Bowie but don’t want him on your funk station, you could dislike the artist but still have all the Bowie you wanted on other stations…same for songs - The social aspect seemed to bade recommendations on people who had similar taste as you…kind of like Dig that would mention but it was built in to the service Again, this is all based off of memory but I’m confident I discovered more artists and music on that single service vs the plethora of varied services I use today. As to Dig, I have tried it but it’s such a manual thing I haven’t kept up. I tend to listen to local jazz / classical radio nowadays for the majority of my time and periodically use various services for discovery. I’ll have to give it another go. Side note, similar to OP, I have found BandCamp (specifically their weekly show) to be also good for discovery.

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago

What's this insistence that you can't listen to full albums on Spotify? Just tap the first song in an album and make sure shuffle is off.

patchorang 4y ago

I had the same issue with Spotify prioritizing playlists over albums. My roommate and I built a Spotify "record player". We printed out album covers and glued them to plywood squares. There is a QR code with the spotify URI on the back. We have a Pi with a camera on the stand. When the album is in the stand we play the album from the beginning, using the Spotify API. If you take the album off the music stops. You can't pause or skip forward or back. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc (Sorry, youtube made it a short and I don't know how to make it a video.)

arran-nz 4y ago
This is really inventive, great execution. Do you have a write up or src hosted anywhere?
- patchorang 4y ago
  https://github.com/rttomlinson/spotify-record-player https://github.com/rttomlinson/spotify-record-player

echohack5 4y ago

I'm definitely the odd one out here. I hate any streaming service because the value of my music is being able to listen to that music whenever I want...including 20 years from now. I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art. I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band. Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire. Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify: beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify One Last Kiss - Utada Hikaru -> Yes follow slowly - Nekomata Master -> Nope Masada Gestalt - Zen Albatross -> Nope Yin-Yang - Victor Wooten -> Yes Zipangu - Wednesday Kanpanera -> Surprisingly, yes Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate. That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term.

kcartlidge 4y ago
Ditto. If my income drops or streamers shut down I'll still have my music. Owning nothing can be liberating, but not if you're replacing it with decades of renting instead. Plus I've also got loads of stuff that isn't on Spotify, Apple, and the rest. And as for discovery, the free Spotify still gives me some of that (I also like a bit of Smooth Chill or similar running in the background on ye olde voice assistant speaker).

ei8ths 4y ago

I've always liked how spotify's mobile app and web/desktop app work together. I get on Spotify here and there (unpaid) to see if things have improved over the years, not much has changed... I used to do the ipod thing with winamp back in napster days, then i kept a personal library just of cds i've bought, then i tried the subsonic thing i really liked dsub app for android. It was great but i really dont want to do server stuff at home...metadata on discs and bringing it over to digital audio, its never perfect and bugs me to where i'll spend hours cleaning it up... I've been using Youtube music/Google music for many years, abandoned my digital files and i find a lot of my music on youtube and recommendations on YTM. I usually pick the bands im into and they have similar artists and drill down that way, im not a huge fan of auto discovery playlists. YTM are going to be raising their rates, i pay for family premium, $15 -> $22/mo in april for me. So now im looking at alternatives and trying to avoid running a server and/or managing files. I think YTM has more music because of the youtube side but the client side UI sucks.

rcarmo 4y ago

I’ve never felt much of an allure for music streaming services. They’re great for skimming, but pretty useless for anything non-mainstream, so I’ve been slowly amassing a ripped CD library for decades, and use Plex (and the pretty amazing PlexAmp) to get at it. My only gripe with Plex is that the only voice assistant that interacts with it is Alexa, and it requires me to have my Plex server shared over the Internet. On the other hand, that’s been handy a couple of times when I was out and about and wanted to stream a couple of songs (which it did as well as Spotify).

xenospn 4y ago
I’ve been using Apple Music for my very niche taste (scandinsvian black metal) and it works great.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  I tried it for a while but other than Siri integration I got nothing much out of it…