9 ms·
Goodbye, Slopify
- joshdavham 2y agoAre there any good AI-generated songs out there that are actually good to the point that you'd add it to one of your playlists?
- bobsmooth 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5JlXCo3Rb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5JlXCo3Rb4 This one is also really good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hX8iQvs2mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hX8iQvs2mw
- joshdavham 2y agoThanks haha! I sent these to my mom and she thought these were hilarious
- dlcarrier 2y agoI thought the headline was mocking Shopify, not Spotify. It shows how little creativity we have in tech company naming. I wonder which suffix is more popular, -ify, -ly, or -r.
- sangnoir 2y agoThese days, it's -ai. All those SomethingAI names won't age well, and will be dated sooner than the proprietors think
- PullJosh 2y agoI feel like -r is an old school internet thing. I wonder if anybody has data for trends over time.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoFeels like late 2000s to very early 2010s. And note that it was never -er, the -r was invariably preceded by a consonant. Thankfully, subsequent naming schemes stopped disemvoweling words.
- Tronno 2y agoNot quite "never": e.g. Napster
- dmix 2y agoI think they mean -r as in Tumblr
- vintagedave 2y agoInnocent times. I miss this period of the internet.
- red-iron-pine 2y agogrindr, vultr, gettr, et al
- notatoad 2y agoi know it as a "web 2.0 thing", but i guess that counts as old-school internet now. that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.
- anal_reactor 2y agoUS and USSR
- poink 2y agoNames are hard. I'd say it says more about how little creativity we have in tech company business models
- muppetman 2y agoThe most hilarious startups are all called "get(name)" I guess the hope is they won't end up in the toilet and they might, in the future, be able to buy a domain not prefixed by "get"
- Philpax 2y agoMy personal favourite is PostHog, which sounds like something one might say on Grindr.
- jsheard 2y agoIt doesn't just sound like that, it was used to mean exactly what you think well before PostHog was founded. I'm still not sure if that was an accident or the founders were in on the joke.
- vintagedave 2y agoI am obviously incredibly ignorant (not that I’d normally think so — but here I have no idea!) but I can’t think of what this means. Would you mind explaining please?
- Philpax 2y agoHog is slang for human male genitalia. Given that, the company's name is an imperative command to share photos of such.
- post-it 2y agoGrindr is a hookup app for gay men. "Hog" is slang for penis, so one might ask someone to "post hog" if they would like him to send a picture of his penis.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoIt worked for thefacebook.com.
- nichochar 2y agoReasoning: .com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance. As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).
- dmix 2y agoIt's mostly about domain names, real words are all gone long ago so people self-funding the early days chose the real words with modifiers.
- tmendez 2y agoMy next startup will be called Rifyly
- schappim 2y agoTotally! I thought this would be from an app developer lamenting Shopify’s transition from REST to GraphQL…
- arwhatever 2y ago-alate, -ster, etc. :-)
- zombiwoof 2y agoAI generated music should be against the terms and what we decided to pay for.
- dmix 2y agoSpotify can't tell the difference. You're not going to be forced to upload an Ableton project and video of you recording the instruments. AI music usually is heavily processed and arranged by a human anyway, it's not yet like pushing a button (if you want to get listens). At most it's the 'artists' self-admission of copyright via stuff like Distrokid + some automated analysis for sample royalties. So likewise AI at most will just be a checkbox they'll choose to ignore during that process just like people who repost other artists music.
- abrookewood 2y agoI think you are missing the point. The criticism is that Spotify are actually using third parties to create AI generated music in order to pay lower royalties. There was an article in the last month or so on HN that explained the process.
- crtasm 2y agoThere were recent articles about musicians being employed to churn out tracks, are you thinking of that? https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin... ctrl+f "summer afternoon in Brooklyn"
- abrookewood 2y agoYes, that's it - thanks.
- ljlolel 2y agoHangout.fm has no AI slop, all human
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoThis is an area where Apple can choose to Be Different and not allow their platform to melt into a puddle of slop. I hope they have what it takes.
- zerreh50 2y agoApple deletes your entire library if you don't subscribe for a few months. To me that is worse than anything Spotify has ever done wrong
- swyx 2y ago[flagged]
- LeoPanthera 2y agoHow is that relevant?
- ssalka 2y agoI stopped paying for Spotify years ago and instead make playlists on there that I can feed into any of the various websites that will rip mp3s for you. Yes they are 128kbps, but for casual listening, it's fine. Some tools will try to match against YouTube and download audio from there, since apparently in some cases YouTube will have higher audio quality. Unfortunately the free version of the Spotify iOS app is absolute unusable garbage.
- cobertos 2y agoWhere do you get the highest quality audio if you want to put in some work? I'd like to jump ship back to a personal library but don't know how I'm gonna extract these 2000 songs I only have 1/4 of locally
- clippyplz 2y agoSoulseek is great for this kind of thing.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoThere's a name I haven't heard in a long time...
- stevenAthompson 2y agoGet Qobuz. You can pay per track/album to actually own the music as lossless flac files or sign up for their streaming service that uses the same lossless format, but doesn't let you save them. I do a bit of both and load the flac files onto my fancy DAP for real listening.
- grogenaut 2y agobuy the cd and rip it? buy it from amazon music and download it (somewhat annoying now)? does apple still sell music for download?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- presentation 2y agoThought it was going to be about Shopify.
- Boogie_Man 2y agoI stoped using Spotify when they committed the unforgivable UI sin of "loading a page and then moving elements on that page when web calls complete" that resulted in me clicking on something other than what I had intended to because it changed with my thumb a nanometer from the screen. It was a good 20% of the time and it made me insane.
- drpossum 2y agoI guarantee that was some A/B testing and moving elements around drove what was technically engagement by 0.03% more. The best kind of engagement.
- anal_reactor 2y agoI think this explains why apps shuffle the UI around every now and then. I build muscle memory to access particular functionality fast, then update comes, I click the wrong thing, and that technically speaking is measured as more engagement.
- kibibu 2y agoThis is the scourge of the modern internet. Even Google does it.
- swyx 2y agowithout any hate to the well intentioned engineers working on the thing, spotify has just exceedingly poor product taste in any number of dimensions - the godawful ai dj they tried to force on pple - buying gimlet media and running it into the toilet. some of the world's best and favorite podcasts, gone because some swedish billionaire decided to throw all his money into foie grasing a perfectly fine niche media company. - buying anchor and going absolutely nowhere with it. it was never good so whatever. nice try i guess. - locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting (to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive) - they habitually screw over musicians https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin... - reggie watts: https://www.instagram.com/p/DEhAr7lx7CI/?igsh=bXBpZ25kczMyZ3d0 https://www.instagram.com/p/DEhAr7lx7CI/?igsh=bXBpZ25kczMyZ3... - bjork: https://variety.com/2025/music/news/bjork-spotify-streaming-worst-thing-for-musicians-1236285477/ https://variety.com/2025/music/news/bjork-spotify-streaming-... - they faked spotify wrapped numbers https://x.com/hello__caitlin/status/1864367028758565216?s=46 https://x.com/hello__caitlin/status/1864367028758565216?s=46 - this is petty but they are a big step back from winamp and that is just slop https://x.com/riomadeit/status/1878556039676666024 https://x.com/riomadeit/status/1878556039676666024 i will say ONE nice thing. Gustav Soderstrom himself does make a pretty damn good podcast about spotify https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-11/introducing-the-new-miniseries-spotify-a-product-story/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-11/introducing-the-new-... . its a real shame his product is mostly riding the highs of early good decisions.
- jsheard 2y ago> locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting Not to mention blowing >$250M of their subscription revenue to lock down one podcaster when most of their subscribers joined for not podcasts. That money could have gone towards paying music artists better rates like Apple Music and Tidal do.
- miunau 2y agoSpending that money was part of their strategy to go for a "bundled" rate for royalties, which 99% (their number) of the US customer base now does. In a nutshell, they can downrate the royalties for music as long as they bundle other things with it- that's why there's books on there now as well. UMG is now fighting it [0] but all the indies are basically fucked as there's no global leverage. The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now. [0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/26/universal-music-group-spotify-bundling-agreement/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/26/universal-music-...
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoSpotify is terrible but mostly because the interface is bad. It has so many frustrating changes that no one asked for that have accumulated over time and little annoyances / bugs that’ll never be fixed. I feel like basic things such as managing playlists or navigating my library are harder than they need to be. They deserve to lose. I’m curious about some of the newer services such as Qobuz or Deezer or Tidal. Are they any better?
- robbyt 2y agoUnfortunately many of thr same poor UI decisions are baked into Backstage, so soon you’ll have a similar experience deploying code onto your companies development platform.
- uhoh-itsmaciek 2y agoI'm also planning to leave. It's offensive that they decided to do podcasts and audiobooks and not allow you to turn that off in the UI. I want an app to listen to music! But someone there apparently thinks they can engage me more if they throw in a bunch of other irrelevant functionality. Ugh.
- glouwbug 2y agoWhat's most offensive is having to pay for audiobooks on top a monthly subscription
- bangaladore 2y agoI've been using Tidal for 2-3 years now. Happy with it. I'd recommend it without a question. I'd say that they, however, are very similar to Spotify from a UI/UX perspective as that seems what the consumer base wants. Unsure if the specific issues you have with Spotify also exist though.
- miunau 2y agoI switched to Tidal about 8 years ago after discovering how bad the Spotify encoding was. With some songs the high end is just complete garbage that physically makes my ears hurt, for example Enigma's Cross Of Changes. The encoding on that is so bad on Spotify, or at least used to be. What a waste of money, effort and computing resources. Of course, the best way is to buy either digital or physical releases, which I do for the ones that stick with me.
- Barrin92 2y agoWe're actually entering the timeline where you have to migrate to some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque (digital) monastery where people cultivate knowledge. He really was onto this trend, in the newer Dodge books as well. Maybe this is one of the few pro-social use cases for crypto, some sort of alternative net where people are verifiably real and content is authentic. I genuinely cannot understand how platforms are not taking more aggressive measures against this stuff.
- eloisius 2y agoIt just so happens that OpenAI’s sama is founder of World(coin), which in exchange for your biometric data can authenticate you online as a biological human.
- moltar 2y agoDoes anyone have any good tools for migrating off of spotify? And where to go? I’d like Apple but their apps are horrendous and they completely bastardized the classic Music app pre streaming.
- swyx 2y ago- https://github.com/jam3scampbell/music https://github.com/jam3scampbell/music - youtube music
- Minor49er 2y agoSoulseek is the best option out there. Bandcamp is also good
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agompeg layer 3
- zigglezaggle 2y agoI have been very happy with Deezer https://www.deezer.com https://www.deezer.com
- wswope 2y agoBeets (for library management) + Navidrome (for serving) is a great combo if you want to go self-hosted. Options for acquiring media: - Buy vinyl/CDs - Ripping from streaming services (Deezer was well-known for that a few years ago) - yt-dlp for niche picks you can’t find in better quality elsewhere - Rip CDs from local library - Bandcamp, Soundcloud - Various what.cd successors, if that’s your thing
- bobajeff 2y agoYou can use exportify to get playlists and likes off of there. After that maybe make a script to search for entries on whatever service you're using.
- davepeck 2y ago“Their apps are horrendous.” I’ll give a counterpoint: with a subscription, Apple Music for iPad is quite literally the best personal music exploration/listening app on the market. A quiet room and good pair of headphones is all the rest you need.
- andrewfromx 2y agoBut the future is obvious right? If an AI citizen pays taxes, contributes to society, and has the same rights as humans, why would their creative expression be considered less "real" than a human's? They would be a legitimate member of society expressing themselves through music, just like any other citizen.
- andrewfromx 2y agoit's the same bias this grandfather has: https://youtu.be/KiPQdVC5RHU https://youtu.be/KiPQdVC5RHU
- vlan0 2y ago>They would be a legitimate member of society. Damn, you went from pinocchio to real boy is 2 seconds. Your anthropomorphic assumptions will lead to the classification within various species. If you are gonna pay an AI for it's output, but not bees....you may want to re-evaluate your premise.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoWoke up today not knowing people even thought AI could be citizens. Wish I could go back to that time
- lern_too_spel 2y agoJohnny 5 became a citizen in 1988. You're at least 35 years behind the times. In real life, Saudi Arabia granted a robot citizenship in 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20171110114747/https://cic.org.sa/2017/10/saudi-arabia-is-first-country-in-the-world-to-grant-a-robot-citizenship/ https://web.archive.org/web/20171110114747/https://cic.org.s...
- aprilthird2021 2y agoI mean, that is not anywhere near what we are talking about. It's like those towns that make a dog the mayor to get in the news
- scotty79 2y agoIs there an app for AI music exclusively?
- WorkerBee28474 2y agohttps://suno.com/ https://suno.com/ then click 'Library'
- btown 2y agoIf you want good AI generated music that captures the best of human creativity, just go to your terminal and type `cat /dev/null`.
- jagged-chisel 2y agoYou’re going to need to pipe that into your audio device to hear it. I don’t have an opinion on the best headphones for this.
- carlos-menezes 2y agoUdio, probably.
- portaouflop 2y agoSpotify was shit exploitative grift even without AI — if AI manages to kill it for good that’s just one more argument for it imo
- chrsw 2y agoI wonder if an AI recommender system can recognize AI music
- vunderba 2y agoBen Jordan (from the band The Flashbulb) has a great video about using AI to detect AI music. It's worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo
- samplatt 2y agoHappy to find Ben Jordan's video here. He's done a few videos about just how bad Spotify (and others) are, and they're all very refreshing data-driven reviews of the industry, free from as much bullshit and bias as is possible.
- themichaellai 2y agoIs the belief that these tracks are being generated and placed by Spotify themselves, or is it possible that third parties are uploading generated music? Are other streaming services liable to encounter the same issue?
- mulitet4 2y agoI would wager it would be some third party since Spotify themself would not participate on their own platform (especially with ai slop)
- spuz 2y agoSpotify have been shown to deliberately promote songs which they call Perfect Fit Content that cost them less in terms of royalties. This includes AI generated songs and you can find the same song under 50 different names according to this article: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify...
- crtasm 2y agoWas there some proof that PFC includes AI generated content? While it seems most likely true I'd like to see e.g. a quote from someone involved.
- Dig1t 2y agoI have several songs that I actually like which are AI songs.. maybe they just need to label them explicitly as AI? Or maybe they need a way to filter it out. There are some honestly funny and interesting AI generated songs out there.
- pjs_ 2y agoRecommend getting an MP3 player. Just feels good man. 500GB of music, no ads, no network, no subscription, no distractions.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoPublic Service Announcement: there’s a healthy marketplace of refurbished and upgraded iPods from the 2004 era on eBay, the Classic 5.5 comes highly recommended with solid DAC from the factory but iPods mini with upgraded DAC, fresh battery, and large flash memory swaps for the old spinning disks are readily available. I subscribe to Qobuz and buy a lot of lossless DRM free music and can recommend them as well, tho there was recently a big swath of the available music dropped due to licensing issues (hence the utility of downloading DRM free music). I also price shop against the digital albums and often a CD on eBay will be cheaper, I don’t mind missing out on the “24bit 192khz hifi” to save a few bucks.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoBut an iPod from the 2004 era is both hard to use and very heavy. You can get a tiny flash-based modern mp3 player for $30-$40, which is below the apparent price of a 2004 iPod on eBay.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoMmm agree to disagree, iPod classic is not a heavyweight device and the UX is what we had when I was a kid so easy AND nostalgic, but agreed the little sandisk clips solve the problem just as well. Edit: I can't imagine swapping HDD for flash saves more than a few grams, can it?
- thaumasiotes 2y agoI had an iPod in 2004. I gave it away because it was too heavy to carry around. I ultimately replaced it with a Zen Stone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen#ZEN_Stone/Stone_Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen#ZEN_Stone/Stone_P...
- magnetowasright 2y agoI don't use spotify (primarily buy CDs and use ipod classics, also records because I am a cliche) and this made me think of the articles about the guy who was one of the most listened artists on spotify (piano for study/concentration type stuff iirc?) and he got punished or something because he was publishing under several names? I couldn't quite find that or what actually happened, but I did stumble upon this Wikipedia page about controversy over fake artists on spotify[0] that suggests some of those are commissioned by spotify. The only feature of spotify that I've ever been interested in was discovering new and new to me music. I'm not interested in AI slop though, and I can't imagine a lot of people would be (maybe the background noise use case don't mind so much which is fair, I suppose). Is this going to get to a tipping point with spotify for it to go under (or lose a LOAD of value), or is it going to be like 'smart' TVs where non-'smart' TVs essentially don't exist because almost all manufacturers have realised they can make more money from forcing ads and spyware? I see that it's been a problem for nigh on a decade according to that Wikipedia page but with the floodgates for AI feel a lot more open than they used to. Kinda related, does anybody use soundcloud any more? Just interesting that it seemed hugely popular and was then derided (terms like 'soundcloud rapper') and I haven't heard about it in a while. I suppose netflix still exists despite derision for their awful originals, killing the good originals, and having little content (especially internationally!). Spotify will be fine, especially with how little they pay artists, but it's probably a shame for a lot of users. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_on_Spotify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...
- r3trohack3r 2y agoI built this to satisfy the new music itch: https://audile.blankenship.io/ https://audile.blankenship.io/ Every time you load the page it recommends a random album from Deezer’s catalog. The algorithm is pretty silly: loop Math.random() * MAX_ID until you find an album id that actually exists and return it. The goal was to recreate that feeling you’d get going down to someone’s basement and thumbing through an old record collection. Also 1001 Albums to Listen To Before You Die is a pretty decent collection of canonical albums from the record industry that’ll keep you busy for quite a while.
- vFunct 2y agoAre these made by Spotify themselves so they don’t have to pay artists?
- geysersam 2y agoProbably not. Easier for them to let someone else do the dirty work.
- davesmylie 2y agoPretty much - either they pay gig musicians an hourly wage to record "human" slop that spotify has the rights to and can stream effectively for free, or just out right ai generated slop https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/ https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin... https://www.fastcompany.com/91170296/spotify-ai-music https://www.fastcompany.com/91170296/spotify-ai-music
- 4d4m 2y agoThis is why I offer free mp3s on my site :)
- muppetman 2y agoI can't understand how people use Spotify. It was great ~10 years ago? It's terrible these days. Pushing Podcasts at you (no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs), terrible music, the UI getting harder and less intuitive to use. It's a shame all good things have to slowly tend towards sucking, instead of getting better. Bitwarden, one of my beloved apps, has done the same with a god-awful UI redesign. Youtube music is just as bad with pushing unwanted content. I can't believe the answer after 10 years of this is to go back to doing it myself, downloading MP3s and using something (currently Jellyfin) to curate them. At least Youtube music lets me upload my own music to it, so that's the main reason I'm still mostly using it. PS: Please don't reply and tell me I just haven't found the right podcast. The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago> no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs When you inject personal opinions like this which are obviously at odds with millions of other people, it's difficult to take the rest of the comment seriously.
- muppetman 2y agoFair point.
- lern_too_spel 2y agoIt's at odds with millions of people but also in agreement with millions of others. I also don't listen to podcasts for the same reason. Spotify shouldn't push something that so many people detest without letting them opt out.
- robertlagrant 2y agoI don't think there's evidence for this. While listening to podcasts is evidence of liking them, not listening to podcasts isn't evidence for detesting them.
- idontwantthis 2y agoWhen does this actually happen? I can imagine it on their background music playlists (and wouldn’t really mind it) but I’ve never encountered it on any playlist at least as far as I’m aware. Is it only electronic music or will they AI you an entire 5 piece rock band?
- Philpax 2y agoOf all the problems that I have with Spotify - its frequently changing selection of music, its hostility to power users, its shuffle algorithm, its artist hostile rates, its frequently changing-for-the-worse interface - I can't really say that AI music is one of them. If I come across some and enjoy it, great! I'm not going to let that impact my enjoyment of music as a whole.
- tombert 2y agoI have put on "I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again" on YouTube Music, unironically, several times. I don't actually hate AI music.
- ku1ik 2y agoThank you for that. You made my day :)
- coder543 2y ago100% agree. I still listen to this one from time to time: https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/mit-license-text-becomes-viral-sad-girl-piano-ballad-generated-by-ai/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/mit-l... It's just so good, IMHO.
- msephton 2y agoSo bad it flips the bit and becomes so good.
- antigeox 2y agoMy Spotify experience was poisoned as soon as I signed up some 8 years ago to try it; I realized there was no way to remove the popular but garbage music from the dashboard. It was essentially advertising space for slop. So I cancelled my subscription within 1-2 days. I instead ended up going with Youtube Music which doesn't try to push propaganda on me and instead either shows me what I have in my library already that I have saved and/or uploaded myself, and music that they think I'd enjoy based off of my library. Prior to this like many other people I was a hardcore Grooveshark fan/user. There were other services, but their names escape me at the moment. I was looking for a replacement and platforms kept coming and going, but Youtube Music (for all of Google's faults) seem to have stayed all this time. I'm still using it, it's still not pushing slop on me. I'm happy. As an aside, accepting that I'm in the minority here speaking on behalf of them, I am not someone who would write a blog post announcing that I'm leaving some shitty platform. I'll just cancel my sub and move on. I don't need nor want to grandstand regardless of AI or just people's shit taste.
- numbsafari 2y agoMy wife continues to mourn the loss of Grooveshark and brings it up at least once a year. It was pretty amazing.
- photon_collider 2y agoAh, I remember Grooveshark. I discovered so much good music there.
- grapesodaaaaa 2y agoGrooveshark was so amazing
- grapesodaaaaa 2y agoalso on that note. I found so much new music on Turntable.fm That’s personally the site that I really mourn.
- pmarreck 2y agoJust learned that the CEO died of mysterious causes. My jam was Audiogalaxy. One thing that has always pissed me off is the heavy-handed way the Big 3 labels have dealt with this.
- doright 2y agoYou could use the Spotify API to autogenerate your own playlists and upload them to your library, bypassing Spotify's own recommendations. There are a couple of services out there that connect to Spotify this way. Usually I start with such a playlist then branch out into the album containing a song if I like what I hear. I also have a personal list of hundreds of albums I want to hear. If I don't feel like anything in specific I pick one at random since Spotify usually has it. Having such a list, I don't see the appeal in listening to Spotify's curated playlists.
- ramblin_prose 2y agoThis sounds interesting, would you please consider elaborating so I could give it a go?
- doright 2y agoIf you pay for RateYourMusic premium then you can use a service they offer called Sonemic. It gives you customized recommendations based on the ratings in your RYM account. You connect your Spotify account to link their track/album data to your Spotify library and then it gives you several playlists of hundreds of songs. Afterwards you can deauthorize the connection and keep your playlists. Only downside is you have to spend a bit of time adding all your ratings but you get both "recommends" and "out of comfort zone” lists. I've found some excellent picks I wouldn't have heard of otherwise from this service. Plus RYM alone is good for manually browsing user-generated lists. Also their genre categorisation is community-driven and by far the most detailed I've come across. Unfortunately their API is not open yet but they're making headway into officially releasing it this year. Hopefully by then I'll be able to auto-add all my curated to-listen albums.
- mastazi 2y agoEven before the rise of AI music, they started "customizing" playlists based on the algorithm, so that you see different songs compared to someone else who subscribes to the same playlist. This was one of the reasons why I left Spotify. There are hundreds of posts about this issue on the Spotify community site, e.g. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Option-to-disable-Made-for-you-feature/m-p/5433790 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Option-to... https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Spotify-Playlist-has-different-songs-to-a-friends/td-p/5489545 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Spotify-P... https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/I-Sent-a-Playlist-To-My-Friend-and-it-Has-Different-Songs/td-p/5323106 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/I-Sent-a-Playl...
- FrequentLurker 2y agoSo that is why I have been unable to discover new songs on spotify like before. Guess I will move over to yt music.
- red-iron-pine 2y agonah YT music is cappy too. just crappy in a different way.
- b1n 2y agoCory Doctrow goes into the reasons behind the rise of playlists and the control it gives the platform over their users/artists. Worth a read. https://craphound.com/category/internetcon/ https://craphound.com/category/internetcon/
- macNchz 2y agoI really don’t like this feature—I enjoyed their genre/mood oriented running playlists explicitly as a way to listen to stuff well outside of my usual listening while out on runs, but since they made them “made for you” they’re strictly worse. Relentless algorithmic sameness is everywhere and I’m sick of it. Spotify is also funny for maintaining the existence of their feature suggestion community boards while just utterly stonewalling for years while thousands of paying users beg for stuff like…being able to hide a section of the home screen, or not have long-standing playlists magically change.
- nine_k 2y agoI don't care too much if music is played by a living virtuoso live, created in a DAW with a ton of synths, samples, and sequencers, or completely synthesized by an AI model. What I care about is that music be good not plagiarized. If Spotify offered AI-generated tracks of stunning beauty and sterling production quality, I might even consider subscribing to it. But apparently the "slop" which the post refers to is far from this heavenly ideal. So I stay with YouTube premium and keep buying music on Bandcamp from the authors.
- wenbin 2y agosoon, you’ll see a lot of ai-generated fake podcasts in podcast player apps. Here’s a list of such fake podcasts (several thousands, many are in Apple Podcasts) : https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fake-podcasts-spams https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
- ripped_britches 2y agoI feel like there should definitely be some good parts about AI music. Probably a lot of slop today, but I’m open to AI entertainment possibly surpassing human entertainment in some cases. Or hybrid.
- pryelluw 2y agoI cancelled Spotify last year when that started happening. YouTube playlists are my thing now. Not as good but can get around this crap and it’s free
- nialv7 2y agoFor people moving off Spotify, have a look at https://listenbrainz.org https://listenbrainz.org. You can sync your listens to there and it will give you weekly recommendations. From my experience so far they are decent. Note they don't host songs themselves, but will auto-search youtube/bandcamp/etc. and play the closest match. So YMMV.
- phil917 2y agoI can't even properly put into words my hatred for AI generated "music"
- dejawu 2y agoIt's astonishing just how awful Spotify's software is. Everything it does, it does poorly, even down to things like playback and playlists that were figured out by other media players decades ago. Just this week, it started randomly playing music on its own when I open it. The fact that this thread has over a hundred comments within an hour speaks to just how despised it is. Spotify truly isn't a software company the same way your health insurance company has a web portal but isn't a software company either.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoI quit Spotify in the mid 2010s solely because the software was so bad, which robbed me of the satisfaction I might get today from quitting due to its even worse offenses.
- wwweston 2y agoYears ago, I saw a sign at a junkyard mechanic's shopyard: "We screw the other guy and pass the savings on to you." I laughed, as one does. A little dark humor goes a surprisingly long way, though the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial as you realize that maybe the laugh is meant to take the sting out of the truth that you may never know if you're the other guy or not. This is what Spotify was from the beginning. It was always going to be exploitative, it was always going to turn to the dark side and embrace the every form of enshittification possible because it was born that way. It was born out of sleight of hand between broadcast and retail. It was born out of papering over the economics of piracy with a thin veener of false legitimacy, where the word decimated doesn't begin to cover what actually happened to artist payouts because it's off by more than an order of magnitude. The shameless scale of it would make Walmart blush. It was born out of collecting consumers with convenience and a dash of zeitgeist. It was born screwing the people who create the work the platform depends on and passing the savings on to you. Screwing with you was inevitable, it was just put off until later.
- vintagedave 2y ago> you may never know if you're the other guy or not The older I’ve got, the more I think on kindness. With kindness, there is no ‘other guy’. Sure, this was funny. It is funny. It really is! But it’s _not that funny_. And I feel I couldn’t have said it wasn’t that funny until I’d seen enough (got old enough?) to understand. Like you I think I’ve thought about being the other guy or not. As for Spotify — I don’t subscribe. I don’t want to be part of it. > the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial I edited to add: what extraordinary wording.
- wwweston 2y ago> I edited to add: what extraordinary wording. Thanks for the kind words!
- jcstk 2y agoI'm reading these comments and I'm thinking "are we using the same Spotify?" I don't see any AI music, I don't get Podcasts pushed on me, the UI is fine, playlists are fine and I get new music I like suggested to me often.
- smackeyacky 2y ago"I'm not seeing a problem so how is there a problem" is not the right critique in an era where the selection algorithm is so personalised. Spotify is awful for me, I concur with the original article. YouTube Music is heading slowly the same way. At this rate I'll have to cast around for another phone that can take an SD card again. The service I really miss is eMusic, they had little in the way of well known music so leaned into small label music and it was wonderful.
- grugagag 2y agoGet a standalone music player and you will have full control (but you also may have some upfront work to do your music downloading and create your playlists but worth it imo). I got a Miyoo Mini game emulator for my kid and ended up getting one for myself, all for ~$50. Being offline (by choice, the device does have wifi) and being able fully customize the thing, backup the SD it's really great. It's such a whiff of fresh air to be honest, you get no popups, no attention misdirects, everything is there waiting for you and no corp messes up you.
- 9283409232 2y agoA lot of the get an iPod comments ignore music discovery. I like new music and think new music is good and would like to discover new music. Having to buy all the music I want to try would be to expensive.
- nunez 2y agoCollege and community radio are infinitely better for new music discovery. KEXP and KTRU here in Houston have expanded my horizons significantly. Bandcamp as well.
- cdme 2y agoThey also commission half-baked slop from session musicians for a fixed rate and then feed it into playlists to reduce the payouts due to artists. Between churning licenses, AI and session slop, it’s not a usable platform nor one worth supporting. It didn’t even start as a music platform — it was advertising first and music was determined to be an affordable draw.
- turbojet1321 2y agoI recently ditched Spotify for Qobuz. Spotify has always been a bit of a letdown, even though I've been using it since Rdio went bust (so ~10yrs). The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the amount of shit content they push at my kids. I want to me able to give my 10yo an app on their phone to listen to music, and not have to check to see if they're actually watching videos, or listening to (possibly wildly inappropriate) podcasts - or worst of both worlds - watching video podcasts. Qobuz isn't perfect in terms of UI, but they seem to care about, and only care about, music. I trialed Amazon Music, but it (unsurprisingly) is an ad platform, too. Apple Music was a contender - the only reason I didn't end up with it is because (also unsurprisingly) it doesn't integrate well with network streamers. Qobuz is a bit more expensive, but so far it has been worth it.
- beart 2y agoI just mentioned in another comment that I canceled my family subscription because of that video podcast nonsense with my own kids. I've not heard of Qobuz before, thanks for the recommendation.
- cdme 2y agoHost your own music on Jellyfin or Plex + Plexamp.
- slothtrop 2y agoNavidrome also
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoThis is totally an “ackchyually” comment, but the last time I checked, Spotify wasn’t an Electron app. It’s a Chromium Embedded Framework app, and they publish nightlies of CEF. Maybe they’ve moved over, but I doubt it.
- ge96 2y agoWhat's people's opinion on VS Code that's Electron based edit: personally if I just use my playlist spotify is fine for me, except the 4GB ram issue on 64bit but that's rare/may be old news now
- indigodaddy 2y agoI dig my YT music quite a bit. Love the plethora of mixes they give me with various smatterings of artists I listen to that go together nicely, plus some new artists in the same vein layered in.. And their holy grail My Supermix rarely misses for me.. Haven't noticed anything AI-created yet. That would really suck if it did happen..
- johnfn 2y agoThis article doesn't really gratify my intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- eduction 2y agoI don’t get it. If you want to avoid algorithmic garbage maybe don’t subscribe to a playlist made by an algorithm. There are tons and tons of human curated playlists on Spotify. There are also hundreds of radio stations across the US streaming online for free. People have these ultra narrow niche picky preferences and then ragequit when they don’t get their way. “I want a machine learning customized playlist but it should have perfect intuition about what is made by humans and what is not and if you can’t make that I’ll call you ‘garbage.’” We can’t even sort email properly with algos and we’ve been trying for over 30 years. We can’t block phishing. If you hate Spotify so much go back to your cd collection or try pirating mp3s again. That service is a miracle — dozens and dozens of startups burned hundreds of millions trying to build something like that years before - and all people can do is whine. “Mehhh, it’s electron, waaaaa”. Ok go make your own service in c++ or whatever and then get all the major labels on board and then make it popular and then make it profitable. I’ll wait. Or actually I won’t I think I’ll go listen to Money for Nothing on Spotify on any of five or six operating systems. Tech is wasted on people like this. Show some appreciation for the miracles around us. Spotify is one of them.
- skybrian 2y agoI don't see why Spotify's suggestions are all that important. I use it when I want full control over what I'm going to listen to. I search for artists and songs I learned about somewhere else and make my own playlists.
- protocolture 2y agoAI music is fine take it or leave it. The killer app of Spotify has been expanding my horizons past the 30 tracks on my MP3 player. But that seems to have stalled. I do like being notified when bands I like release new music. I am hopeless at keeping up with music so thats useful.
- gs17 2y ago> I do like being notified when bands I like release new music. One of my main complaints with Spotify is how lousy it is with that for me. Release Radar is usually a pile of songs almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what I listen to. Bands it knows I follow since it makes playlists for them will have new tracks never show up unless I go to their page or it comes up randomly. I have no idea what the "follow" feature does because it doesn't notify me for new music from followed artists, and "What's New" doesn't include new releases from all of them. But it has given me four notifications that Journey is coming to Nashville in case I didn't get it the first time.
- HypnoticOcelot 2y agoMy personal solution is to use ReleaseFeed(https://releasefeed.elomatreb.eu/ https://releasefeed.elomatreb.eu/) to get RSS updates for artists I want to listen to, which is great if you already use RSS.
- protocolture 2y agoI get targeted ads via the spotify app (and email sometimes) for Beast in Black, The Sword and Hammerfall. I dont really have the wide musical taste to comment in broad strokes but I havent missed an album for these so I am rather content. Release radar does seem useless.
- darepublic 2y agoyoutube with ublock on is the ultimate music website
- DroidPort 2y agoAre they greyed out because you blocked them? I'm confused? I'm 99% my discover weekly hasn't had one yet... and I have a full archive of all my discover weekly's from the last 4 years... Can anybody show me a simple way to check for AI Gnerated content in this list?
- pipeline_peak 2y agoYou can’t avoid something you can’t notice ;)
- TheAtomic 2y agoTidal
- tonymet 2y agowe need generalized transparency & control for AI content. a standard for metadata annotations, watermarking & UI indicators to inform consumers of AI content and allow them to screen it out. The problem with the AI content is that it cheapens real content . I'm not talking about the money, i mean the intrinsic and emotional value experienced when connecting with the content. AI pictures make you feel less engaged when you see a real picture from a friend.
- romanhn 2y agoI really don't understand the product decisions at Spotify. Some really basic functionality is missing like shuffling across all tracks in my library or treating Liked Songs as a playlist but not really (can't share with others). I keep using it for its discovery features, but even that is so much worse than ten years ago. Back then I would easily keep half of Discover Weekly. These days I'm happy if I find one or two songs I like. They feel like a company on auto-pilot.
- beart 2y agoYeah.. what the hell do they actually work on all day? I have a very long list of features in my head, that seem incredibly obvious and simple to implement. Some of these features were present in other music library applications ~25 years ago (Winamp et al.). For example, "following" an artist doesn't actually seem to do anything useful as far as I can tell. I've followed a million artists, but I often find out they released new albums and I had no idea. Even something as simple as a notification badge as I scroll through my followed artist list would do wonders for discovery. And when I consider that the features they do have in their applications don't work all that well to begin with... One egregious example is saving music for offline listening on my phone. I can't tell you how many times I've boarded an airplane to find out the app just decided to purge it all. Another super fun issue I ran into that actually cost Spotify money since I canceled my family subscription - There are no parental controls or any other method for blocking podcasts. And the podcasts now include videos! So I go through all the trouble of locking down youtube, etc on every device in my house and suddenly find my kid watching Logan Paul videos on Spotify! They just feel like a company that has the velocity of a snail.
- 827a 2y agoThere's been so many small changes over the years that have decimated the experience further and further for me. Most recently, the "Podcasts" Library tab has now been renamed "Podcasts and Courses". The competing KPIs that must have been at play to make "Audiobooks" a separate, third tab, but bundle "Courses" into "Podcasts" could surely be written about. Certainly with merit: That horizontal scroll area now has so many tabs that putting "Audiobooks" in 3rd place basically puts it over the fold at most screen sizes, and "Courses" in 4th place would be as invisible as a Google search result on the second page. Woe befalls the Audiobooks team, who lost that war. Sad for them. Sorry, throughout that diatribe I forgot to even mention what Courses were, or why anyone would want them. That could only be because, I have no idea. Seeing it written in my Library tab, "Podcasts and Courses" is like hearing the echo of a feature that doesn't exist. Where do I find these courses? What do I search for? Are they included in my plan? There's none on my home page... wait, I just realized how little I care. I think, or rather hope, we're entering an era of tech business where money gets more expensive, thus sensibility must return, you can't just be focused on growth you need to make money, keep customers happy, and not worry less about the next hundred million customers. I'm seeing it in some products. Not in Spotify, to be clear. Here's the sensible thing Spotify could do: Create a $22/mo plan, hi-fi audio, a big "Super Premium" badge around your avatar, custom app color themes, customize your home page and sidebars, this literally writes itself, people would buy it. Would it make enough money to justify the investment? Hey Dan: Did building Podcasts and Audiobooks? Yeah that's what I thought.
- jppope 2y agodunno about the AI generated, but their discover weekly algorithm definitely changed a couple of months ago. I went from getting a nice mix of post-2012 music, new, fresh, to a ton of songs I listened to in when I was first getting into music. Very frustrating
- throwaway2037 2y agoI want to focus on non-AI complaints for my question. Each time Spotify comes up on HN, the sentiment is dominated by nitpicking negative comments. To be clear, I am a musical normie that looks forward to daily Spotify to listen to popular music. I also don't mind the phone app, web app, and even Linux desktop app (what a blessing). My question to the haters: If Spotify is so bad, as you claim, why haven't we seen a flurry of competitors emerge? My guess: Licensing a large enough set of music to make a compelling alternative is the primary moat. Last point: While I believe people and their stories about AI gen'd slop appearing in their playlists, I have not experienced the same. Are my musical tastes so bland that they just don't bother? (No trolling to others on that one... Just poking a bit of fun at myself.)
- 1oooqooq 2y agooutright monopoly. i think it decided around 2008ish. pandora and all the others lost deals with labels, labels bougth into spotify, and apple promoted them left and rigth so its a dopoly. its not a space i follow so i have all the details wrong.
- woah 2y agoI'm so confused by these complaints. I use Spotify every day, and just type in the music I want to listen to. You click on a song and it plays. How are people getting all wrapped up in whether some podcast shows up on some screen, or whether there's AI generated music on there, or if the Electron app is properly optimized?
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agoIt is unfortunate that the term "slop" is being adopted for this. Make a new word! Slop has so many meanings already. /half-s
- discardedrefuse 2y agoTLDR; Bandcamp + Beets + Navidrome + Symfonium Long time paid Spotify user. Soon to be ex-paid user. This resonates with me. For a while now, I have been pretty unhappy with the way I consume music. Yes, because Spotify has become shit. The UI is hostile. Their business practices makes me feel bad for using it. And everything else already mentioned in other comments. But there's something else. My spotify Liked has about 2400 songs. And I can't name most of them. If you played one for me, chances are I wouldn't even know the artist. It all feels so... disposable. How did I get here? I hit like a few times on Discover Weekly, each week. And now...I have this mess! Spotify recommends me songs that sound exactly like other songs...that I can't remember the name of. I can't go back to check. Weeks later I hear it! Or is this the new one that sounds like the old one? I don't know. It's all so surreal and so different than the before times. In my yutes would buy albums and absolutely devour them whole. Every track. I would listen to just that album for days or weeks. I couldn't afford to buy all the music, so I squeezed every drop of enjoyment I could out the music I had. I think I enjoyed the music much more, back when I had much less. So, with that nostalgic feeling in mind. I'm starting a new system of music consumption. I'm going back to the old ways! Instead of paying Spotify $12/mo to shovel all the shit in my face, I'm going to spend $12/mo on Bandcamp (or equivalent) to buy an album and pour over it for the whole month, until I buy the next album. I don't know if this will work. I don't know how I'm going to handle discovery. But I have to do something; And this is something. A few weeks ago I bought some music. Threw it into a Beets.io library. Setup a Navidrome server inside my vpn. I listen with Symfonium on my phone (good offline features there). Now I'm trying to really listen to the music again; not just mindlessly consume it like disposable content. It feels like this muscle has completely atrophied. Lyrics don't stick like they used to. I don't instantly remember the track order. Listening to an entire album takes some effort. Maybe though, that's the way it should be.
- jacobjjacob 2y agoI just quit Spotify because they kicked my family off the family plan without hardly any warning. Apple Music has a family plan and they don’t require that you live at the same address Never looking back!
- JavaZero 2y ago[flagged]
- JavaZero 2y ago[flagged]
- conception 2y agoIf you’re looking for Classical - Idagio is amazing.
- richardfulop 2y agoif you guys into discovering electronic music I highly recommend cosine.club (created by hurfyd)
- sandos 2y agoTheir "disover weekly" has never been great for me. But their DJ is perfect.. its what I listen to 99% of the time tbh. No AI slop as far as I can tell :)
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y agowhat do you guys use if not spotify? especially if one is interested in discovering new music then radio.garden is hard to beat.
- gdilla 2y agoListen to real djs on YouTube and SoundCloud. Always better than Spotify - long sets all blended by, gasp, a human.
- andonumb 2y agoKudos to all the people who shared their opinions and mentioned many alternative services and tools. When I wrote the original post, I didn't know it would end up on HN and spark a discussion here, which means the topic is relevant. It's not just about the slop music itself, but the way Spotify is evolving (or devolving). I enjoyed the Weekly Discovery and Made For You playlists for years and its suggestion mechanisms were just what I needed. I could tolerate the terrible UI and other minor flaws of the app as long as the excitement of discovering new music continued. I also didn't like the special promotions, podcast recommendations, and other novelties, but the real value was there and it kept me paying for the service. The changes started around 2020, when the playlists started to contain fewer songs and artists that I could call discoveries. I found myself in what could be called a music bubble, and it didn't feel like it was growing much. Also, when I first started using Spotify, I spent a lot of time in the app and was more involved in the listening process. Now I was mostly just hitting the button, minimizing the window, and listening to music in the background. It became less interesting. I'd come back to the app occasionally to skip (or block) a track I didn't like. And then came the AI-generated tracks, which was the last straw for me. Not that I hate Spotify, it's just sad to see it go the way of enshitification. It probably still meets the needs of millions of other users, but I'm no longer one of them. In fact, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be more conscious about my hobby again. I still have my mp3 library that I've been building since the late 1990s, and I still buy and donate to artists from time to time, so I just have to relearn how to do the things that AI algorithms have tried (and failed) to do for me.
- willlma 2y agoSince people are reminiscing on the loss of their favorite music services from the past, I'd like to add We Are Hunted [1] to the list. > proprietary search technology which continuously scanned the Internet to identify the hottest new music in the world. For a short period is was the best way to discover new unknown music. It was bought by Twitter, folded into Twitter music (even though they never created a comparable feature) and killed along with it. If anyone knows anything like this that exists today, please let me know. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted
- apricot13 2y agoI have a slight y different issue on Spotify and YouTube music. during the day I listen to lo-fi and at night sometimes as background music. this has lead to my entire suggestion list being 4 hour long tracks and nothing related to my actual music I like! I guess most of that lo-fi stuff is now AI generated as well.