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I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 an

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums. My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands. That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent. Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted. Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny.

rldjbpin 3y ago
i had different experiences with music, partly due to the time frame, but i share your perspective. however i don't think spotify helps with discovery for me any longer. it did play a major role until last couple years, even when my tastes changed drastically. now it is hard to find something new that is closer to what i like and is not pushed by the artists trying to promote their work. even using shuffle on a large playlist results in same set of tracks playing every day. i think these sorts of sentiments are shared by the others here. from price perspective, i actually started spending on music with spotify premium. i still feel that it is worth the money after entering into a much better economic condition.
lawgimenez 3y ago
I was born in 1986 and we have the same story but my road leads to punk and hardcore. Which I believe the records (CDs, cassettes) are very hard to find compared to metal. I listened to a lot of Dead Kennedys when I was young, so I really don't mind if the quality is lossless or shitty. I am just glad that I could listen to it on repeat.
bowsamic 3y ago
If you were basically born with Spotify, like many of us here (or at least, had it or something like it from a young-ish age), then unfortunately there's no way we will ever appreciate it. It's like someone from a century go saying how amazing it is that we all having flushing toilets in our houses and refrigerators. It's just life now, it's the new normal, not amazing.
- Innervisio 3y ago
  Although true in comparison, it is still relative. I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time. But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself. I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me. Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other. Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    How do you deal with availability overload? First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did not feel sufficiently "mine", like a handmade copy on physical media did, despite being just as unlicensed. Very often, the records I did buy were quite a disappointment at first, before they started growing on me, and some of what I consider the best today would have never made it past that threshold if they happened in the abundance of Spotify or the heyday of unbounded internet piracy. It's actually quite ironic: all my friends who indulged in Napster et al now have spotify accounts, whereas I have just stopped extending my repository of CD rips.
    - Innervisio 3y ago
      Very much similar! I started taping cassettes when i was like 8-10 years old. I erased some music from my mother’s cassette and she was furious hahah. What do you mean with availability overload? I would say i am an active listener, my mind is rather a bit creative and i would dare to say that 80-90% percent of the time, i know what to listen. Even if it means to discover something new. I used to like the Spotify recommendations but i disabled them since 2 years at they became like ads network “whoever pays more, gets more recommended”. I discover music now through personal recommendations, magazines (online), forums, references from artists i usually read about, or music produced by a producer i respect. How do you deal with? But for example, right now i just wanted to listen some salsa/merengue (you can begin to guess where i am from) i always liked and made my own playlist with own songs. Cheers!
BrandoElFollito 3y ago
When you were born I was a teenager in France recording music from the radio to a tape praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song. And that the song is not cut. Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it. Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy. This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discovery functionality is great though
- secondcoming 3y ago
  > praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song Hahaha, I did that in Ireland too. I'm pretty sure DJs deliberately talk over the song intros to make illegal recordings unviable.
- miroljub 3y ago
  Hey, back in the time I was recording ZX Spectrum games broadcasted once a week over one of the radio stations. Commodore 64 owners were jealous of us, since this couldn't work with C64 due to different tape recording system.
  - sys_64738 3y ago
    Maybe they were jealous but you still owned a Speccy!
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Lots of us remember taping the radio... I have old recordings where I pretended to be the DJ announcing the next song. Oh man was I bad!
- Aeolun 3y ago
  I remember using my 64mb MP3 player on repeat with 15 or so songs, but never really casette tapes.
- esafak 3y ago
  I turned into Shazam doing that; I could recognize any song I liked by the first note.
mgoetzke 3y ago
Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?
  - tuyiown 3y ago
    Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.
- jose_zap 3y ago
  Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)
- wasyl 3y ago
  It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse
  - xnorswap 3y ago
    It's impossible to listen to some albums because of song replacement. You can try to do so, but when you click play on some albums it replaces several tracks with their single versions. I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.
    - nmeagent 3y ago
      For me this is one of the most compelling reasons to own non-DRM'd physical media: its content is no longer subject to the whims of corporate bullshit after the point of sale. Replacing songs within albums with other versions is appalling.
Taurenking 3y ago
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devjab 3y ago
The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies. I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise. I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?
- piva00 3y ago
  > The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies. I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs. The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses. The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules. Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.
- lawgimenez 3y ago
inferiorhuman 3y ago
CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise. For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life. KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.
- vibrio 3y ago
  Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.
- disqard 3y ago
  Yes, KEXP is great! I regularly discover new artists there.
- ssl-3 3y ago
  CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had. They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular. In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS. Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).
da39a3ee 3y ago
In the UK my public library had CDs including metal and that was how I discovered music as a teenager.
- bpye 3y ago
  Various libraries in Metro Vancouver still have CDs, though they tend to be more popular artists.
vintermann 3y ago
> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...) But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.
- xnx 3y ago
  Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.
- janaagaard 3y ago
  > But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole. But doesn’t that even out? Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica. If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener. But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month. What am I missing here?
- troupo 3y ago
  That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone). However, I think it's a hard problem to solve. The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease. There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.
nicoco 3y ago
The fact that you can say "Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever" when they basically pay the musicians nothing is amazing to me. Have we come this far into individualism? "It's good for me, so it must be the best thing ever".
- pipes 3y ago
  But the post didn't say that. It just described the benefits of using it.
- criddell 3y ago
  Would you say that the Spotify era is a worse time to be a musician than the UMG / Sony / Warner era? I’m not a musician but it seems to me it’s always been difficult to make a living as an artist. I wonder if it’s easier to find an audience today than it was 50 years ago?
  - bookofjoe 3y ago
    >The creator economy can't rely on Patreon. https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rely-on-patreon https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rel...
  - xetplan 3y ago
    It is a joke now compared to what it was. There are entire parts of the music industry that no longer exists. There use to be working musicians in every city that were basically unknown outside the city. NYC or SF had their own entirely unique music scenes. There use to be entire bars that were goth bars or punk bars in even mid sized cities. Imagine opening a bar in 2024 that only caters to people who like punk music? It doesn't even make sense. Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media. To just compare the distribution channels misses the plot. Every city use to have a knock off free paper of the Village Voice that was mostly for promoting live music. Now even the Village Voice itself is basically dead. Anyone who thinks things are good now, simply can't comprehend what they missed out on. Music teaching is a good example I think. There use to be all kinds of professional music teachers. If you were a gigging local musician you had the other income stream of teaching. Youtube is great for a music teacher that happens to win the music teaching lottery at the expense of all other music teachers. Of course, if you ask the youtube lottery winner they will say things have never been better. Scale that process across everything to do with music and that is the reality compared to the old reality. You can't ask the gigging local musician who teaches on the side how things are because they are mostly doing something else now and don't count. It is like asking the lottery winners if it is worth it to play the lottery. Not surprisingly they all say yes, best thing ever.
kugla 3y ago
All of this is because of the technological change (MP3, internet speed) not because of the streaming service.
- deleted 3y ago
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- snet0 3y ago
  All of this is *possible* because of the technology. The existence of the technology doesn't mean the software exists, or that the software is any of good/useful/cheap.
globalise83 3y ago
What I love about Spotify and think shows that their engineering culture is really solid, is their progressive web app. I only use Ubuntu on my different computers, and my first task after a fresh install is to log into Spotify and save their web app on my machine. It just works: the icon appears in my favourites, the app renders really nicely in a native-like window, etc. It is by far the best progressive web app experience I have had. I totally forget that it's just a website with the browser UI switched off.
input_sh 3y ago
I'd also add that, in comparison to its competition, it's fairly "open" API-wise. TIDAL: no API. Soundcloud: API registration disabled. Apple Music: paywalled. Beatport: API registration disabled. Etc etc. That isn't to say you can get everything via the API (you can't get monthly listeners, only an abstraction of it on a 0-100 scale, or artist's pick you sometimes see on artist pages), but compared to whom they're matched against, kudos to them.
kreco 3y ago
> That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent. Interestingly, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ so you could actually do whatever you want and listen to your music the way you want. The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).
- jasode 3y ago
  >, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ Assuming you meant to write, "Spotify could have been as streaming service _and_ an MP3 shop" ... No, Spotify didn't have the leverage in negotiations with Big Record Labels to offer streaming plus DRM-free mp3 files for 0.5€. Apple is more powerful than Spotify and they eventually relented to Big Labels demands and added a more expensive tier of songs at $1.29 instead of all songs being just $0.99 pricing. Too generalize... to consider the realism of any hypothetical alternative business models for Spotify to have, you also have to consider whether the Big Labels would have even made those ideas possible when Spotify was negotiating the licenses.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI). It has never been easier to own an easily copiable and backup-able form of the music you want and use it with myriad ways to play it and listen to it. People just don’t want to pay a dollar or two for their favorite songs.
  - lowercased 3y ago
    Or... don't want to repay. I've followed some bands from vinyl to tapes to cds to now. I've bought some of the same songs 4, 5, 6 or more times. Listening for 'free' via streaming is good enough for most stuff any more, even if it means I'll lose access to some stuff. If I'm really desperate, maybe I'll look for a torrent, but I haven't done that in years.
Xeyz0r 3y ago
Spotify is a convenient and affordable way to listen to music, but it is not without its drawbacks.
k8svet 3y ago
They put the fucking unlike button 2 pixels away from the fucking play button. In the app and notification widget. It's irreversible, permanent, and immediately unsyncs the song. There's no development team I resent as much as Spotify. Takes minutes to load cached playlists. Often stumbles on multidevice playback. It's constantly refreshing and hiding content I was about to click on. If their recommendations weren't decent is happily yeet them. I guarantee their shit app loses them money.
nunez 3y ago
HMV; WOW what a throwback.
nunez 3y ago
> Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted. My question would have been "But how do artists get paid?" Which is still a murky answer today if you're not touring like crazy and going hard on ancillaries, like merch, ads, etc.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  Relatedly, the music industry has never really cared if/how artists got paid - all they care about is that the businessmen (and they have primarily been men, historically) get paid.
freetanga 3y ago
I understand you - I am a bit older and did similarly, buying cassettes in the 70s Yet, I miss the undivided attention of that first listening, listening to all tracks in sequence (picking the track sequence was an art in itself, creating an atmosphere across the album). Feeling the difference between Side A and B. Those 10$ felt like great return. Exchanging tapes with friends, recording mixtapes, listening sit downs. A lot of this is lost due to streaming in general. When you can get any song in history in a few clicks, it takes away part of the “mystical journey” of finding your new musical beat. More self reinforcing stuff, just like Social Networks. About Spotify, I agree with the OP. Interface gets worse, price goes up, podcast content is irrelevant for me (but drives price up). I find it grating since I already pay for the Apple bundle which includes Music (which is somehow even worse than Spotify). If Apple had a better interface I could ditch Spotify. Guess I must try Cider again.
- esafak 3y ago
  I trade songs with family on Spotify regularly. I suspect it is influencing our recommendations! You can also listen to music together using Jam, though I have not tried it: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-26/spotify-jam-personalized-collaborative-listening-session-free-premium-users/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-26/spotify-jam-personal...
throw0101b 3y ago
> The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums. > My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands. Before the general population figured out ripping, you could often return things if you did not like the music. I often went to HMV (333 Yonge, Toronto Canada), bought 6+ CDs, listen them for a week or two, and return the ones that I didn't like (keep 2-3). I would then repeat the process and buy a bunch more. They stopped this policy in (IIRC) the late-90s or early-00s, as people were just ripping CDs and returning everything they purchase the day before.
crtasm 3y ago
> 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. and it's $11 every month, forever.
- geraldhh 3y ago
  > except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. and was there but isn't anymore
  - iggldiggl 3y ago
    There's even a third category: Is there, but only in a defective, incomplete fashion. (For years now, a number of Bob Dylan's live albums have been missing the gapless between-tracks transitions online. It almost feels as if Columbia ripped its own CDs for uploading and accidentally configured the ripping software to drop the pre-gaps…)
- elijaht 3y ago
  If I bought an album a month for the rest of my life, I would have 600 albums. In the last MONTH I have listened to music from that many albums on Spotify. So the forever argument doesn't really pain me.
  - sweeter 3y ago
    not to mention that "forever" with online streaming services tends to mean, "until licenses change" or the company changes hands and they decide to invoke the clause in the ToS you agreed to that says that you dont own and aren't entitled to the thing you paid for. See recently, Crunchyroll Funimation acquisition. People had bought blu-ray copies at extra cost for a digital copy which was honored by CR and retracted after the merger where they promptly deleted the media that these people owned and paid full price for individually.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    If it works for you that's great. The comparison could be made that we can listen to music from [as many albums as we want] for $0 on Bandcamp, then buy the tracks we really like. There's things missing from both platforms, of course.
gdilla 3y ago
I can't stand spotify. I need indy artists, DJ mixes, flips and remixes, so Soundcloud is my go-to. Free tier is less annoying too, less ads.
- deleted 3y ago
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seanw444 3y ago
I love fast-paced, riff-focused metal. I didn't find out until I got Spotify that that genre was called thrash metal. I absolutely would not have found all the albums and artists I listen to daily without Spotify. It's one of the few proprietary apps I don't mind on my phone and PC.
falcolas 3y ago
I have a similar opinion, but with one big caveat (which means I'd be happy to drop Spotify in a heartbeat): I still have access to all those old albums I bought with my wages and allowance. I've digitized them, and they have migrated from computer to computer. And a large number of those albums/songs... aren't on Spotify. And all the songs I've 'discovered' on Spotify will also be gone some day, because they're not from mainstream artists. If I want to listen to them in another 10 years, I'll have to buy them.
- oe 3y ago
  I digitized the CDs I still had left a couple years ago. Over half of them were not on Spotify. And they weren’t even anything obscure, just electronica where licensing is often a bit complicated.
  - iggldiggl 3y ago
    > And they weren’t even anything obscure A noticeable number of Bob Dylan's live albums are all mutilated in online distribution (streaming and download, everything), because somebody somehow managed to drop the gapless between-tracks transitions. (Those missing bits exactly match the pre-gap on the corresponding CD releases, so it almost feels as Columbia just ripped its own CDs for uploading and somehow mismanaged the process).
stronglikedan 3y ago
Pandora is much better at discovery (Spotify is actually really terrible by comparison), and cheaper too. Unfortunately, they refuse to implement high quality streams for whatever reason, or I could finally ditch Spotify. As it is, I just use Pandora's free tier for discovery to help curate my Spotify playlists.
- mips_r4300i 3y ago
  It is drastically better than Spotify. I am surprised this isn't more well known. Maybe people just haven't tried Pandora recently. The most I can get from Spotify is about 40 songs in a custom Radio playlist that I can't refresh or update.
brabel 3y ago
We're from the same generation and I also loved heavy metal... I learned about new bands by buying magazines specializing in metal, renting videos from the big bands which usually would include opening acts with new bands (or even the famous guys or their fans on the video wearing other bands' t-shirts), from friends, by going to festivals (there were lots of them around if you were willing to travel around a bit, though I was in a highly populated area so that may not have been an option for you)... there was always more bands that I knew about than what I could possibly listen and buy albums... of course, today it's so much easier, but I feel like the problem today is actually the abundance of choice! You could just listen to the best couple of songs of each band, and still have more than enough music to enjoy. That seems to be what happens if you let Spotify or other services pick songs for you. You can still dig in if you really want, but I feel like most people won't do that... and you start having very high expectations from what a good song is as you only listen to effectively, the "greatest hits"!
j_crick 3y ago
> Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny Comparing a product to what it was like decades ago and declaring it good is not the same as discussing it on merit and as is.
Fnoord 3y ago
Back in the day before Spotify existed you could use different options. You could use Discogs to find similar music. Then you could use SoulSeek to find this music. Or simply join a metal channel/server on SoulSeek or IRC or DCPP and find other fans of similar music. But even before that you could also just look at a label catalog and travel to a vinyl or CD store (where you can listen before you buy...). Or you could use shortwave radio to catch a pirate station. Yes, this even worked for obscure genres like the one you mentioned. I have a broad taste of music and at times I've been into subgenres of the genre you mentioned. Have I discovered new music via Spotify? For sure. Did different methods exist before? Yup. Is the Spotify method high signal to noise? Nah, the previously mentioned methods also worked very well. And I have virtually and IRL met tons of people, including people within the core of music subgenres. Thanks to Discogs, DCPP, and SoulSeek. I do like one feature about Spotify showing shows near me (even though I have passed the age / time of my life where I went to artists as I have only time and money to do things like go to theatre with my kids). However that feature as well as buying merchandise also existed outside of Spotify long ago.
SergeAx 3y ago
So, your overall spending on music is down about 90% now. I wonder, who took the most of this loss: artists, record labels or music stores?
sweeter 3y ago
This isn't different than knowing Amazon uses child labor and works people to death and still using it anyways. Its not really a "sign of how far we've come" so much as it is, "this is convenient for me, I do not care about anything else"
EasyMark 3y ago
I'm a big metal and jazz fan. I don't use spotify (or haven't for a while) but on apple music I curate my own playlists and get most of what I would get from surfing the high seas and rearranging folders and albums in a fraction of the time. I know you can do the same on Spotify, so it's good enough for me.
playing_colours 3y ago
I was lucky to have a few friends sharing my passion for metal. Anyway there were quite a lot of magazines about metal music. They really helped me to discover new styles, bands, and releases. Oh how I enjoyed reading the reviews of the new albums back then! Some journalist were very talented in describing the music in tasty details and I was longing for the moment, when I buy and listen to the long awaited CD.
ungreased0675 3y ago
Oddly enough, I feel like streaming music service algorithms only reluctantly serve up new music. To me it feels like a constant reversion to the mean, not a portal to endless possibilities. It’s closer to listening to the radio than digging crates in a record store.
- Spivak 3y ago
  I absolutely can't relate. The monthly streams for the first 10 artists in my Discover Weekly this week are 45k, 90k, 89k, 30k, 121k, 931k, 231k, 25k, 7k, 14k. I would have zero chance to discover these bands in the wild. To be fair you have to push Spotify a little by listening to tiny bands before it starts recommending more of them because the "gravity" of popular music is too strong. Like what do you recommend to someone who listens to mega popular genre defying artists like Taylor Swift? She's so ungodly popular that they could be a diehard metal head and still listen to her. There's no signal. The set of music TSwift fans also listened to is all music.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
>> there were literally zero ways to discover new songs Older than you, and into hardcore, not metal, but there were definitely ways to discover new songs back then. First of all, I had friends that were into the same music, so when one of us got a new record, we all got a new record, I would borrow records from friends and if I liked it I would tape it, and friends made me tapes. Radio did play hardcore, only they were pretty limited in what they could play, since if a band had a name like "The Crucifucks" or something like that, they couldn't even say that name over the air, but they still had hardcore radio shows that came on in college towns around 2 AM in the morning, and people would tape them and they would get passed around. We would go to a different town and drive around at 2 in the morning and tape straight from the car radio to a boombox just to find new music. Next thing was compilation albums, so the labels would put out an extra cheap LP that was just a song or two from every band on the label, so for hardcore, Blasting Concept by SST, Rat Music for Rat People, American Youth Report, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, the Decline of Western Civilization, the Flipside comps, etc. Some of those you could even get at the mall. Wasn't played on MTV other than a couple songs that were humorous (TV Party, Institutionalized) but you could find a little bit on Night Flight. Then there were the zines, Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside, later maybe Forced Exposure. If they compared a band you liked to another band, you would try to check them out. And of course going to $5 all ages shows, if you went to see a band you liked, 3 or 4 other bands were playing too. So there were ways. I've never used Spotify but I know it is way easier now to find exactly what you want at the press of a button. But the search was part of the fun back then. The lack of technology did not stop us.

rldjbpin 3y ago

i had different experiences with music, partly due to the time frame, but i share your perspective. however i don't think spotify helps with discovery for me any longer. it did play a major role until last couple years, even when my tastes changed drastically. now it is hard to find something new that is closer to what i like and is not pushed by the artists trying to promote their work. even using shuffle on a large playlist results in same set of tracks playing every day. i think these sorts of sentiments are shared by the others here. from price perspective, i actually started spending on music with spotify premium. i still feel that it is worth the money after entering into a much better economic condition.

lawgimenez 3y ago

I was born in 1986 and we have the same story but my road leads to punk and hardcore. Which I believe the records (CDs, cassettes) are very hard to find compared to metal. I listened to a lot of Dead Kennedys when I was young, so I really don't mind if the quality is lossless or shitty. I am just glad that I could listen to it on repeat.

bowsamic 3y ago

If you were basically born with Spotify, like many of us here (or at least, had it or something like it from a young-ish age), then unfortunately there's no way we will ever appreciate it. It's like someone from a century go saying how amazing it is that we all having flushing toilets in our houses and refrigerators. It's just life now, it's the new normal, not amazing.

Innervisio 3y ago
Although true in comparison, it is still relative. I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time. But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself. I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me. Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other. Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.
- usrusr 3y ago
  How do you deal with availability overload? First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did not feel sufficiently "mine", like a handmade copy on physical media did, despite being just as unlicensed. Very often, the records I did buy were quite a disappointment at first, before they started growing on me, and some of what I consider the best today would have never made it past that threshold if they happened in the abundance of Spotify or the heyday of unbounded internet piracy. It's actually quite ironic: all my friends who indulged in Napster et al now have spotify accounts, whereas I have just stopped extending my repository of CD rips.
  - Innervisio 3y ago
    Very much similar! I started taping cassettes when i was like 8-10 years old. I erased some music from my mother’s cassette and she was furious hahah. What do you mean with availability overload? I would say i am an active listener, my mind is rather a bit creative and i would dare to say that 80-90% percent of the time, i know what to listen. Even if it means to discover something new. I used to like the Spotify recommendations but i disabled them since 2 years at they became like ads network “whoever pays more, gets more recommended”. I discover music now through personal recommendations, magazines (online), forums, references from artists i usually read about, or music produced by a producer i respect. How do you deal with? But for example, right now i just wanted to listen some salsa/merengue (you can begin to guess where i am from) i always liked and made my own playlist with own songs. Cheers!

BrandoElFollito 3y ago

When you were born I was a teenager in France recording music from the radio to a tape praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song. And that the song is not cut. Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it. Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy. This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discovery functionality is great though

secondcoming 3y ago
> praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song Hahaha, I did that in Ireland too. I'm pretty sure DJs deliberately talk over the song intros to make illegal recordings unviable.
miroljub 3y ago
Hey, back in the time I was recording ZX Spectrum games broadcasted once a week over one of the radio stations. Commodore 64 owners were jealous of us, since this couldn't work with C64 due to different tape recording system.
- sys_64738 3y ago
  Maybe they were jealous but you still owned a Speccy!
mlrtime 3y ago
Lots of us remember taping the radio... I have old recordings where I pretended to be the DJ announcing the next song. Oh man was I bad!
Aeolun 3y ago
I remember using my 64mb MP3 player on repeat with 15 or so songs, but never really casette tapes.
esafak 3y ago
I turned into Shazam doing that; I could recognize any song I liked by the first note.

mgoetzke 3y ago

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

lawgimenez 3y ago
I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?
- tuyiown 3y ago
  Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.
jose_zap 3y ago
Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)
wasyl 3y ago
It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse
- xnorswap 3y ago
  It's impossible to listen to some albums because of song replacement. You can try to do so, but when you click play on some albums it replaces several tracks with their single versions. I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.
  - nmeagent 3y ago
    For me this is one of the most compelling reasons to own non-DRM'd physical media: its content is no longer subject to the whims of corporate bullshit after the point of sale. Replacing songs within albums with other versions is appalling.

Taurenking 3y ago

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devjab 3y ago

The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies. I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise. I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?

piva00 3y ago
> The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies. I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs. The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses. The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules. Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.
lawgimenez 3y ago

inferiorhuman 3y ago

CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise. For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life. KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.

vibrio 3y ago
Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.
disqard 3y ago
Yes, KEXP is great! I regularly discover new artists there.
ssl-3 3y ago
CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had. They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular. In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS. Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).

da39a3ee 3y ago

In the UK my public library had CDs including metal and that was how I discovered music as a teenager.

bpye 3y ago
Various libraries in Metro Vancouver still have CDs, though they tend to be more popular artists.

vintermann 3y ago

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...) But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.

xnx 3y ago
Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.
janaagaard 3y ago
> But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole. But doesn’t that even out? Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica. If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener. But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month. What am I missing here?
troupo 3y ago
That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone). However, I think it's a hard problem to solve. The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease. There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.

nicoco 3y ago

The fact that you can say "Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever" when they basically pay the musicians nothing is amazing to me. Have we come this far into individualism? "It's good for me, so it must be the best thing ever".

pipes 3y ago
But the post didn't say that. It just described the benefits of using it.
criddell 3y ago
Would you say that the Spotify era is a worse time to be a musician than the UMG / Sony / Warner era? I’m not a musician but it seems to me it’s always been difficult to make a living as an artist. I wonder if it’s easier to find an audience today than it was 50 years ago?
- bookofjoe 3y ago
  >The creator economy can't rely on Patreon. https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rely-on-patreon https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rel...
- xetplan 3y ago
  It is a joke now compared to what it was. There are entire parts of the music industry that no longer exists. There use to be working musicians in every city that were basically unknown outside the city. NYC or SF had their own entirely unique music scenes. There use to be entire bars that were goth bars or punk bars in even mid sized cities. Imagine opening a bar in 2024 that only caters to people who like punk music? It doesn't even make sense. Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media. To just compare the distribution channels misses the plot. Every city use to have a knock off free paper of the Village Voice that was mostly for promoting live music. Now even the Village Voice itself is basically dead. Anyone who thinks things are good now, simply can't comprehend what they missed out on. Music teaching is a good example I think. There use to be all kinds of professional music teachers. If you were a gigging local musician you had the other income stream of teaching. Youtube is great for a music teacher that happens to win the music teaching lottery at the expense of all other music teachers. Of course, if you ask the youtube lottery winner they will say things have never been better. Scale that process across everything to do with music and that is the reality compared to the old reality. You can't ask the gigging local musician who teaches on the side how things are because they are mostly doing something else now and don't count. It is like asking the lottery winners if it is worth it to play the lottery. Not surprisingly they all say yes, best thing ever.

kugla 3y ago

All of this is because of the technological change (MP3, internet speed) not because of the streaming service.

deleted 3y ago
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snet0 3y ago
All of this is *possible* because of the technology. The existence of the technology doesn't mean the software exists, or that the software is any of good/useful/cheap.

globalise83 3y ago

What I love about Spotify and think shows that their engineering culture is really solid, is their progressive web app. I only use Ubuntu on my different computers, and my first task after a fresh install is to log into Spotify and save their web app on my machine. It just works: the icon appears in my favourites, the app renders really nicely in a native-like window, etc. It is by far the best progressive web app experience I have had. I totally forget that it's just a website with the browser UI switched off.

input_sh 3y ago

I'd also add that, in comparison to its competition, it's fairly "open" API-wise. TIDAL: no API. Soundcloud: API registration disabled. Apple Music: paywalled. Beatport: API registration disabled. Etc etc. That isn't to say you can get everything via the API (you can't get monthly listeners, only an abstraction of it on a 0-100 scale, or artist's pick you sometimes see on artist pages), but compared to whom they're matched against, kudos to them.

kreco 3y ago

> That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent. Interestingly, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ so you could actually do whatever you want and listen to your music the way you want. The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).

jasode 3y ago
>, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ Assuming you meant to write, "Spotify could have been as streaming service _and_ an MP3 shop" ... No, Spotify didn't have the leverage in negotiations with Big Record Labels to offer streaming plus DRM-free mp3 files for 0.5€. Apple is more powerful than Spotify and they eventually relented to Big Labels demands and added a more expensive tier of songs at $1.29 instead of all songs being just $0.99 pricing. Too generalize... to consider the realism of any hypothetical alternative business models for Spotify to have, you also have to consider whether the Big Labels would have even made those ideas possible when Spotify was negotiating the licenses.
lotsofpulp 3y ago
> The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI). It has never been easier to own an easily copiable and backup-able form of the music you want and use it with myriad ways to play it and listen to it. People just don’t want to pay a dollar or two for their favorite songs.
- lowercased 3y ago
  Or... don't want to repay. I've followed some bands from vinyl to tapes to cds to now. I've bought some of the same songs 4, 5, 6 or more times. Listening for 'free' via streaming is good enough for most stuff any more, even if it means I'll lose access to some stuff. If I'm really desperate, maybe I'll look for a torrent, but I haven't done that in years.

Xeyz0r 3y ago

Spotify is a convenient and affordable way to listen to music, but it is not without its drawbacks.

k8svet 3y ago

They put the fucking unlike button 2 pixels away from the fucking play button. In the app and notification widget. It's irreversible, permanent, and immediately unsyncs the song. There's no development team I resent as much as Spotify. Takes minutes to load cached playlists. Often stumbles on multidevice playback. It's constantly refreshing and hiding content I was about to click on. If their recommendations weren't decent is happily yeet them. I guarantee their shit app loses them money.

nunez 3y ago

HMV; WOW what a throwback.

nunez 3y ago

> Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted. My question would have been "But how do artists get paid?" Which is still a murky answer today if you're not touring like crazy and going hard on ancillaries, like merch, ads, etc.

phone8675309 3y ago
Relatedly, the music industry has never really cared if/how artists got paid - all they care about is that the businessmen (and they have primarily been men, historically) get paid.

freetanga 3y ago

I understand you - I am a bit older and did similarly, buying cassettes in the 70s Yet, I miss the undivided attention of that first listening, listening to all tracks in sequence (picking the track sequence was an art in itself, creating an atmosphere across the album). Feeling the difference between Side A and B. Those 10$ felt like great return. Exchanging tapes with friends, recording mixtapes, listening sit downs. A lot of this is lost due to streaming in general. When you can get any song in history in a few clicks, it takes away part of the “mystical journey” of finding your new musical beat. More self reinforcing stuff, just like Social Networks. About Spotify, I agree with the OP. Interface gets worse, price goes up, podcast content is irrelevant for me (but drives price up). I find it grating since I already pay for the Apple bundle which includes Music (which is somehow even worse than Spotify). If Apple had a better interface I could ditch Spotify. Guess I must try Cider again.

esafak 3y ago
I trade songs with family on Spotify regularly. I suspect it is influencing our recommendations! You can also listen to music together using Jam, though I have not tried it: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-26/spotify-jam-personalized-collaborative-listening-session-free-premium-users/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-26/spotify-jam-personal...

throw0101b 3y ago

> The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums. > My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands. Before the general population figured out ripping, you could often return things if you did not like the music. I often went to HMV (333 Yonge, Toronto Canada), bought 6+ CDs, listen them for a week or two, and return the ones that I didn't like (keep 2-3). I would then repeat the process and buy a bunch more. They stopped this policy in (IIRC) the late-90s or early-00s, as people were just ripping CDs and returning everything they purchase the day before.

crtasm 3y ago

> 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. and it's $11 every month, forever.

geraldhh 3y ago
> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there. and was there but isn't anymore
- iggldiggl 3y ago
  There's even a third category: Is there, but only in a defective, incomplete fashion. (For years now, a number of Bob Dylan's live albums have been missing the gapless between-tracks transitions online. It almost feels as if Columbia ripped its own CDs for uploading and accidentally configured the ripping software to drop the pre-gaps…)
elijaht 3y ago
If I bought an album a month for the rest of my life, I would have 600 albums. In the last MONTH I have listened to music from that many albums on Spotify. So the forever argument doesn't really pain me.
- sweeter 3y ago
  not to mention that "forever" with online streaming services tends to mean, "until licenses change" or the company changes hands and they decide to invoke the clause in the ToS you agreed to that says that you dont own and aren't entitled to the thing you paid for. See recently, Crunchyroll Funimation acquisition. People had bought blu-ray copies at extra cost for a digital copy which was honored by CR and retracted after the merger where they promptly deleted the media that these people owned and paid full price for individually.
- crtasm 3y ago
  If it works for you that's great. The comparison could be made that we can listen to music from [as many albums as we want] for $0 on Bandcamp, then buy the tracks we really like. There's things missing from both platforms, of course.

gdilla 3y ago

I can't stand spotify. I need indy artists, DJ mixes, flips and remixes, so Soundcloud is my go-to. Free tier is less annoying too, less ads.

deleted 3y ago
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seanw444 3y ago

I love fast-paced, riff-focused metal. I didn't find out until I got Spotify that that genre was called thrash metal. I absolutely would not have found all the albums and artists I listen to daily without Spotify. It's one of the few proprietary apps I don't mind on my phone and PC.

falcolas 3y ago

I have a similar opinion, but with one big caveat (which means I'd be happy to drop Spotify in a heartbeat): I still have access to all those old albums I bought with my wages and allowance. I've digitized them, and they have migrated from computer to computer. And a large number of those albums/songs... aren't on Spotify. And all the songs I've 'discovered' on Spotify will also be gone some day, because they're not from mainstream artists. If I want to listen to them in another 10 years, I'll have to buy them.

oe 3y ago
I digitized the CDs I still had left a couple years ago. Over half of them were not on Spotify. And they weren’t even anything obscure, just electronica where licensing is often a bit complicated.
- iggldiggl 3y ago
  > And they weren’t even anything obscure A noticeable number of Bob Dylan's live albums are all mutilated in online distribution (streaming and download, everything), because somebody somehow managed to drop the gapless between-tracks transitions. (Those missing bits exactly match the pre-gap on the corresponding CD releases, so it almost feels as Columbia just ripped its own CDs for uploading and somehow mismanaged the process).

stronglikedan 3y ago

Pandora is much better at discovery (Spotify is actually really terrible by comparison), and cheaper too. Unfortunately, they refuse to implement high quality streams for whatever reason, or I could finally ditch Spotify. As it is, I just use Pandora's free tier for discovery to help curate my Spotify playlists.

mips_r4300i 3y ago
It is drastically better than Spotify. I am surprised this isn't more well known. Maybe people just haven't tried Pandora recently. The most I can get from Spotify is about 40 songs in a custom Radio playlist that I can't refresh or update.

brabel 3y ago

We're from the same generation and I also loved heavy metal... I learned about new bands by buying magazines specializing in metal, renting videos from the big bands which usually would include opening acts with new bands (or even the famous guys or their fans on the video wearing other bands' t-shirts), from friends, by going to festivals (there were lots of them around if you were willing to travel around a bit, though I was in a highly populated area so that may not have been an option for you)... there was always more bands that I knew about than what I could possibly listen and buy albums... of course, today it's so much easier, but I feel like the problem today is actually the abundance of choice! You could just listen to the best couple of songs of each band, and still have more than enough music to enjoy. That seems to be what happens if you let Spotify or other services pick songs for you. You can still dig in if you really want, but I feel like most people won't do that... and you start having very high expectations from what a good song is as you only listen to effectively, the "greatest hits"!

j_crick 3y ago

> Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny Comparing a product to what it was like decades ago and declaring it good is not the same as discussing it on merit and as is.

Fnoord 3y ago

Back in the day before Spotify existed you could use different options. You could use Discogs to find similar music. Then you could use SoulSeek to find this music. Or simply join a metal channel/server on SoulSeek or IRC or DCPP and find other fans of similar music. But even before that you could also just look at a label catalog and travel to a vinyl or CD store (where you can listen before you buy...). Or you could use shortwave radio to catch a pirate station. Yes, this even worked for obscure genres like the one you mentioned. I have a broad taste of music and at times I've been into subgenres of the genre you mentioned. Have I discovered new music via Spotify? For sure. Did different methods exist before? Yup. Is the Spotify method high signal to noise? Nah, the previously mentioned methods also worked very well. And I have virtually and IRL met tons of people, including people within the core of music subgenres. Thanks to Discogs, DCPP, and SoulSeek. I do like one feature about Spotify showing shows near me (even though I have passed the age / time of my life where I went to artists as I have only time and money to do things like go to theatre with my kids). However that feature as well as buying merchandise also existed outside of Spotify long ago.

SergeAx 3y ago

So, your overall spending on music is down about 90% now. I wonder, who took the most of this loss: artists, record labels or music stores?

sweeter 3y ago

This isn't different than knowing Amazon uses child labor and works people to death and still using it anyways. Its not really a "sign of how far we've come" so much as it is, "this is convenient for me, I do not care about anything else"

EasyMark 3y ago

I'm a big metal and jazz fan. I don't use spotify (or haven't for a while) but on apple music I curate my own playlists and get most of what I would get from surfing the high seas and rearranging folders and albums in a fraction of the time. I know you can do the same on Spotify, so it's good enough for me.

playing_colours 3y ago

I was lucky to have a few friends sharing my passion for metal. Anyway there were quite a lot of magazines about metal music. They really helped me to discover new styles, bands, and releases. Oh how I enjoyed reading the reviews of the new albums back then! Some journalist were very talented in describing the music in tasty details and I was longing for the moment, when I buy and listen to the long awaited CD.

ungreased0675 3y ago

Oddly enough, I feel like streaming music service algorithms only reluctantly serve up new music. To me it feels like a constant reversion to the mean, not a portal to endless possibilities. It’s closer to listening to the radio than digging crates in a record store.

Spivak 3y ago
I absolutely can't relate. The monthly streams for the first 10 artists in my Discover Weekly this week are 45k, 90k, 89k, 30k, 121k, 931k, 231k, 25k, 7k, 14k. I would have zero chance to discover these bands in the wild. To be fair you have to push Spotify a little by listening to tiny bands before it starts recommending more of them because the "gravity" of popular music is too strong. Like what do you recommend to someone who listens to mega popular genre defying artists like Taylor Swift? She's so ungodly popular that they could be a diehard metal head and still listen to her. There's no signal. The set of music TSwift fans also listened to is all music.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

>> there were literally zero ways to discover new songs Older than you, and into hardcore, not metal, but there were definitely ways to discover new songs back then. First of all, I had friends that were into the same music, so when one of us got a new record, we all got a new record, I would borrow records from friends and if I liked it I would tape it, and friends made me tapes. Radio did play hardcore, only they were pretty limited in what they could play, since if a band had a name like "The Crucifucks" or something like that, they couldn't even say that name over the air, but they still had hardcore radio shows that came on in college towns around 2 AM in the morning, and people would tape them and they would get passed around. We would go to a different town and drive around at 2 in the morning and tape straight from the car radio to a boombox just to find new music. Next thing was compilation albums, so the labels would put out an extra cheap LP that was just a song or two from every band on the label, so for hardcore, Blasting Concept by SST, Rat Music for Rat People, American Youth Report, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, the Decline of Western Civilization, the Flipside comps, etc. Some of those you could even get at the mall. Wasn't played on MTV other than a couple songs that were humorous (TV Party, Institutionalized) but you could find a little bit on Night Flight. Then there were the zines, Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside, later maybe Forced Exposure. If they compared a band you liked to another band, you would try to check them out. And of course going to $5 all ages shows, if you went to see a band you liked, 3 or 4 other bands were playing too. So there were ways. I've never used Spotify but I know it is way easier now to find exactly what you want at the press of a button. But the search was part of the fun back then. The lack of technology did not stop us.