7 ms·

To be an old man, how did we get to the point where your music and the software you use to play the music cannot be independent things? I have a Spotify subscri

To be an old man, how did we get to the point where your music and the software you use to play the music cannot be independent things? I have a Spotify subscription - if I want to shuffle albums or not or use a different shuffling algorithm, that should be possible. If I want to use my own visualization with the song or a different EQ mix, I should be able to do that too. Spotify isn’t only the music service, they’re a player, recommendation engine, eq, and visualization. This really limits the abilities of other software to compete in those spaces. Is there an bare bones service that just provides you with the stream that can be fed to your own tools?

Scarblac 5y ago
On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Anyway, presumably you can still copy the album to a playlist and shuffle that.
- logical_proof 5y ago
  That happened the moment that they recorded it and sold it you to listen to at your convenience. To think that an artist should have the ability to tell me how to enjoy their art is just ludicrous. There is nothing wrong with an artist saying that the best way to listen is x, y, or z. But, to tell me I have to listen in their order strikes me as invasive.
  - melenaboija 5y ago
    Maybe it is a discrepancy on who thinks that owns what. Artists own their creations and maybe have the right of not wanting to call it their album if it is not shon as they want. On the other side I guess they could just choose another platform and I am pretty sure that Spotify did because they think it is better for their business, whatever that means.
    - sp332 5y ago
      Artists have certain rights, like copyright. But they do not literally own their creations if they have sold them. See "first sale doctrine" for example.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - otterley 5y ago
        The “first sale” doctrine applies to physical copies of copyrighted works, not to licensed digital streams. You don’t get a physical medium with a streaming service, nor do you get a “copy” in the legal sense.
- CyanBird 5y ago
  > On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? They do have control, they can merge all the tracks into a single long file and sell it like that, but this is not what is happening here, she decided to murk with how the consumers choose to engage with the artwork
- PeterisP 5y ago
  > when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Since forever? When did artists have rights to control how their work is presented? There are restrictions on making derivative works (but that goes beyond simply presenting the work in a different way), and there are explicit permissions to present works in ways where artists are likely to disagree - e.g. parody and satire; and at least in USA the courts have repeatedly rejected the notion of "moral rights" i.e. being able to restrict the context the work is used if the economic rights have been properly licensed. The composer does not have the right to restrict me from playing their song on an out-of-tune instrument while trying to fart in unison; the poet does not have the right to restrict me from reading their poem with a horrible pronunciation and with commentary that completely misses their point; the painter does not have the right to restrict me from using their masterpiece as a literal doormat for wiping dirty boots. Copyright grants them exclusive rights on making copies and a few other things, but not control about how these copies of their work should be presented or used.
  - eddieroger 5y ago
    I’m glad I’m not the only person who thought this. Do we think Da Vinci intended the Mona Lisa be presented in a museum, behind glass and a rope? If I were to commission and buy art and hang it in my bathroom, the artist can voice their preference for me not to, but at that point it isn’t their call. Albums can be played arbitrarily, it’s just a lot easier to do that digitally than changing out vinyl.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - notimetorelax 5y ago
      It’s funny you bring up Da Vinci, he notoriously did not finish his works and perfected his paintings all his life not giving them back to the client.
    - ibejoeb 5y ago
      It depends on what you consider the unit of work. Sometimes a song is a unit, but often it's the album. Shuffling an album for this type of work is more similar to reading chapters of a novel out of order.
- caslon 5y ago
  When RCA released the first commercial record player in the 1930s.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Literally millenia ago.
  - delecti 5y ago
    I mean, millennia ago, music was only live, and the musician could stop if they so chose.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      And they couldn't stop anyone from reproducing it however they wanted after hearing it or seeing it written down? Their work (ie. the song) could be presented however anyone felt like it.
      - delecti 5y ago
        I think there's a meaningful difference in a "reproduction" that's a perfect digital copy of the artist's performance, and just playing the same song yourself.
- laumars 5y ago
  Since CD players included a shuffle button. Before that, since it was possible to record songs from the radio into a blank cassette. And before that, since DJs included a second turntable to allow them to structure a set their way (Jimmy Saville pioneered this. Such a shame he turned out to be a monster).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Yeah I don't get this. Once the work is released it's out the artist's hands. The artist has no control. This is how it has always been and how it should always be.
  - Pulcinella 5y ago
    This is literally not true and is ahistorical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#Visual_Artists_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#Visual_Artists_Ri...
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      First of all, the law is only as good as its enforcement. Without enforcement the law effectively does nto exist. Second, that link says nothing about audience consumption, it only preserves the provenance and integrity of the work. As mentioned elsewhere copyright covers the rest but both of these constructs are mental and somewhat illusory. More importantly your audience has to subscribe to them to follow them. Third, at first glance that appears to only cover the USA. I am advocating for a rejection of these principles.
- seized 5y ago
  Why does one artist, who a majority of people may not like or listen to, get to dictate how everyone listens to all music on a service?
  - jafo 5y ago
    Because we tolerate it. It doesn't seem so long ago we didn't have much of an ability to pick what music we listened to. This will seem alien to younger HNers, but it is true. You listened to what was played. Sure, there were records and 8 tracks et al, but portability was limited. Not being able to choose what we listened, when you listened to it, or how you listened to it to peaked with disco - the backlash hit simply because you could not escape it...it was EVERYWHERE....radio, tv, movies, commercials...it died of overexposure. Then for a hot minute - about 35ish years - we had complete freedom to choose how and what we listen to. Starting at about 1980 with the Sony Walkman + cassette, you could organize music to be portable the way you wanted, at a price of time and effort. This price dropped to almost nothing by the mid 2010s with mp3s and mp3 players. Complete musical freedom! The problem? Even "almost nothing" wasn't good enough, we demanded it to be "nothing". So here come the streaming services to rescue us from the burden of work required to maintain our freedom....
tata71 5y ago
spotify-cli et al
wintermutestwin 5y ago
So much this! I pay for an Apple Music sub, but I should be able to choose from a wide array of player apps (or roll my own!).
- marcellus23 5y ago
  You literally can, the API exists and plenty of third party players also exist.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    It's telling that the person who wrote that top level comment has clearly never actually tried to find a 3rd party player. Like how people will clamor for a theoretical feature, then you take the time to implement it, check your analytics, and find absolutely no one is using it.
    - wintermutestwin 5y ago
      Wow! I had no idea. In my defense, app discovery seems broken to me as I don't know a trustworthy source. I certainly can't trust app store reviews and info.
      - effingwewt 5y ago
        Too true, app store search is nothing but ads and spam. I can't fault you at all for not being able to find something reputable. Another instance of walled gardens failing to provide what people actually want, as opposed to what companies think we want.
        wintermutestwin 5y ago
        If you are gonna build a walled garden, it becomes your responsibility to curate it well.
        BoorishBears 5y ago
vasco 5y ago
I think you can do this with Audius but I'm still a Spotify subscriber too.
bondarchuk 5y ago
>I have a Spotify subscription That's how.
iamdbtoo 5y ago
With the Spotify API and librespot, you can make a player using almost anything these days.
- bengale 5y ago
  Apple have MusicKit too.
the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
You can still shuffle on the album. It’s just not on the main album play button any longer.
res0nat0r 5y ago
Shuffle is enabled and working for me on her latest album.
Syzygies 5y ago
I have a Tidal https://tidal.com/ https://tidal.com/ subscription; there are $10 and $20 monthly levels. They support third-party tools, though perhaps not roll-our-own. I prefer Tidal to any other service because I can select albums and play them on demand. My wall of CDs sits idle. I admire Adele for this. I once sat next to a friend of Steve Jobs on a flight; he asked for a drawing of the circuit I was using with my iPod, to bring to Steve. I asked if Jobs wanted his legacy to be "the man who destroyed the album". He was a bit offended and didn't grasp my point. I should have sat next to Adele!
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Or he disagreed that Jobs destroyed the album. I am having a tough time connecting the dots myself. I can search Apple Music right now, and see plenty of albums. Not that it affects me, I have never once in my life listened to a whole album, nor do I plan to. I would never even know the lyrics to a song if it were not for the internet making it easy to look them up.
gentleman11 5y ago
Streaming massively commoditized media, and concentrates power in a few companies. I wouldn’t want to be a musician these days. I hate what game subscription services are going to do to indie games in the future
jacquesm 5y ago
> Is there an bare bones service that just provides you with the stream that can be fed to your own tools? Google drive + winamp ...
jraph 5y ago
> Is there an bare bones service that just provides you with the stream that can be fed to your own tools? Actually Clementine was (is still?) able to play songs from Spotify premium (through the deprecated libspotify). There's an open source Spotify client library that might enable this too [1]. You could use youtube-dl or one of its forks, or Invidious, to download from YouTube and play the result with whatever music player you feel like using. [1] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

Scarblac 5y ago

On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Anyway, presumably you can still copy the album to a playlist and shuffle that.

logical_proof 5y ago
That happened the moment that they recorded it and sold it you to listen to at your convenience. To think that an artist should have the ability to tell me how to enjoy their art is just ludicrous. There is nothing wrong with an artist saying that the best way to listen is x, y, or z. But, to tell me I have to listen in their order strikes me as invasive.
- melenaboija 5y ago
  Maybe it is a discrepancy on who thinks that owns what. Artists own their creations and maybe have the right of not wanting to call it their album if it is not shon as they want. On the other side I guess they could just choose another platform and I am pretty sure that Spotify did because they think it is better for their business, whatever that means.
  - sp332 5y ago
    Artists have certain rights, like copyright. But they do not literally own their creations if they have sold them. See "first sale doctrine" for example.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - otterley 5y ago
      The “first sale” doctrine applies to physical copies of copyrighted works, not to licensed digital streams. You don’t get a physical medium with a streaming service, nor do you get a “copy” in the legal sense.
CyanBird 5y ago
> On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? They do have control, they can merge all the tracks into a single long file and sell it like that, but this is not what is happening here, she decided to murk with how the consumers choose to engage with the artwork
PeterisP 5y ago
> when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Since forever? When did artists have rights to control how their work is presented? There are restrictions on making derivative works (but that goes beyond simply presenting the work in a different way), and there are explicit permissions to present works in ways where artists are likely to disagree - e.g. parody and satire; and at least in USA the courts have repeatedly rejected the notion of "moral rights" i.e. being able to restrict the context the work is used if the economic rights have been properly licensed. The composer does not have the right to restrict me from playing their song on an out-of-tune instrument while trying to fart in unison; the poet does not have the right to restrict me from reading their poem with a horrible pronunciation and with commentary that completely misses their point; the painter does not have the right to restrict me from using their masterpiece as a literal doormat for wiping dirty boots. Copyright grants them exclusive rights on making copies and a few other things, but not control about how these copies of their work should be presented or used.
- eddieroger 5y ago
  I’m glad I’m not the only person who thought this. Do we think Da Vinci intended the Mona Lisa be presented in a museum, behind glass and a rope? If I were to commission and buy art and hang it in my bathroom, the artist can voice their preference for me not to, but at that point it isn’t their call. Albums can be played arbitrarily, it’s just a lot easier to do that digitally than changing out vinyl.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - notimetorelax 5y ago
    It’s funny you bring up Da Vinci, he notoriously did not finish his works and perfected his paintings all his life not giving them back to the client.
  - ibejoeb 5y ago
    It depends on what you consider the unit of work. Sometimes a song is a unit, but often it's the album. Shuffling an album for this type of work is more similar to reading chapters of a novel out of order.
caslon 5y ago
When RCA released the first commercial record player in the 1930s.
whimsicalism 5y ago
> On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented? Literally millenia ago.
- delecti 5y ago
  I mean, millennia ago, music was only live, and the musician could stop if they so chose.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    And they couldn't stop anyone from reproducing it however they wanted after hearing it or seeing it written down? Their work (ie. the song) could be presented however anyone felt like it.
    - delecti 5y ago
      I think there's a meaningful difference in a "reproduction" that's a perfect digital copy of the artist's performance, and just playing the same song yourself.
laumars 5y ago
Since CD players included a shuffle button. Before that, since it was possible to record songs from the radio into a blank cassette. And before that, since DJs included a second turntable to allow them to structure a set their way (Jimmy Saville pioneered this. Such a shame he turned out to be a monster).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tomc1985 5y ago
Yeah I don't get this. Once the work is released it's out the artist's hands. The artist has no control. This is how it has always been and how it should always be.
- Pulcinella 5y ago
  This is literally not true and is ahistorical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#Visual_Artists_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights#Visual_Artists_Ri...
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    First of all, the law is only as good as its enforcement. Without enforcement the law effectively does nto exist. Second, that link says nothing about audience consumption, it only preserves the provenance and integrity of the work. As mentioned elsewhere copyright covers the rest but both of these constructs are mental and somewhat illusory. More importantly your audience has to subscribe to them to follow them. Third, at first glance that appears to only cover the USA. I am advocating for a rejection of these principles.
seized 5y ago
Why does one artist, who a majority of people may not like or listen to, get to dictate how everyone listens to all music on a service?
- jafo 5y ago
  Because we tolerate it. It doesn't seem so long ago we didn't have much of an ability to pick what music we listened to. This will seem alien to younger HNers, but it is true. You listened to what was played. Sure, there were records and 8 tracks et al, but portability was limited. Not being able to choose what we listened, when you listened to it, or how you listened to it to peaked with disco - the backlash hit simply because you could not escape it...it was EVERYWHERE....radio, tv, movies, commercials...it died of overexposure. Then for a hot minute - about 35ish years - we had complete freedom to choose how and what we listen to. Starting at about 1980 with the Sony Walkman + cassette, you could organize music to be portable the way you wanted, at a price of time and effort. This price dropped to almost nothing by the mid 2010s with mp3s and mp3 players. Complete musical freedom! The problem? Even "almost nothing" wasn't good enough, we demanded it to be "nothing". So here come the streaming services to rescue us from the burden of work required to maintain our freedom....

tata71 5y ago

spotify-cli et al

wintermutestwin 5y ago

So much this! I pay for an Apple Music sub, but I should be able to choose from a wide array of player apps (or roll my own!).

marcellus23 5y ago
You literally can, the API exists and plenty of third party players also exist.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  It's telling that the person who wrote that top level comment has clearly never actually tried to find a 3rd party player. Like how people will clamor for a theoretical feature, then you take the time to implement it, check your analytics, and find absolutely no one is using it.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    Wow! I had no idea. In my defense, app discovery seems broken to me as I don't know a trustworthy source. I certainly can't trust app store reviews and info.
    - effingwewt 5y ago
      Too true, app store search is nothing but ads and spam. I can't fault you at all for not being able to find something reputable. Another instance of walled gardens failing to provide what people actually want, as opposed to what companies think we want.
      - wintermutestwin 5y ago
        If you are gonna build a walled garden, it becomes your responsibility to curate it well.
      - BoorishBears 5y ago

vasco 5y ago

I think you can do this with Audius but I'm still a Spotify subscriber too.

bondarchuk 5y ago

>I have a Spotify subscription That's how.

iamdbtoo 5y ago

With the Spotify API and librespot, you can make a player using almost anything these days.

bengale 5y ago
Apple have MusicKit too.

the_mitsuhiko 5y ago

You can still shuffle on the album. It’s just not on the main album play button any longer.

res0nat0r 5y ago

Shuffle is enabled and working for me on her latest album.

Syzygies 5y ago

I have a Tidal https://tidal.com/ https://tidal.com/ subscription; there are $10 and $20 monthly levels. They support third-party tools, though perhaps not roll-our-own. I prefer Tidal to any other service because I can select albums and play them on demand. My wall of CDs sits idle. I admire Adele for this. I once sat next to a friend of Steve Jobs on a flight; he asked for a drawing of the circuit I was using with my iPod, to bring to Steve. I asked if Jobs wanted his legacy to be "the man who destroyed the album". He was a bit offended and didn't grasp my point. I should have sat next to Adele!

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Or he disagreed that Jobs destroyed the album. I am having a tough time connecting the dots myself. I can search Apple Music right now, and see plenty of albums. Not that it affects me, I have never once in my life listened to a whole album, nor do I plan to. I would never even know the lyrics to a song if it were not for the internet making it easy to look them up.

gentleman11 5y ago

Streaming massively commoditized media, and concentrates power in a few companies. I wouldn’t want to be a musician these days. I hate what game subscription services are going to do to indie games in the future

jacquesm 5y ago

> Is there an bare bones service that just provides you with the stream that can be fed to your own tools? Google drive + winamp ...

jraph 5y ago

> Is there an bare bones service that just provides you with the stream that can be fed to your own tools? Actually Clementine was (is still?) able to play songs from Spotify premium (through the deprecated libspotify). There's an open source Spotify client library that might enable this too [1]. You could use youtube-dl or one of its forks, or Invidious, to download from YouTube and play the result with whatever music player you feel like using. [1] https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot