8 ms·
Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music aga
by olivierestsage 9mo ago
Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music again. It's really fun to build a collection knowing you're supporting the artists, download FLAC files, organize your little "collection" page ... Feels like a renaissance in my relationship with music, the most fun I've had since what.cd. Anyway, love this stance they're taking.
- vjerancrnjak 9mo agoI miss what.cd, bandcamp almost a replacement
- 2bewithu 9mo ago[dead]
- devilcius 9mo agoThere's is a quite solid alternative to what.cd: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
- MarcelOlsz 9mo agoThere's also Orpheus.network which is fantastic, gazelle based as well.
- felixg3 9mo agoIs it easy to get in as a former what cd power user rank? I found my old rippy stickers from what.cd and missed that community so much. Ptp is great and alive though.
- SirMaster 9mo agoJust take the interview on IRC, the questions are a piece of cake for anyone even a little familiar with audio formats and torrent trackers.
- Semaphor 9mo agoI miss Oink’s pink palace, what.cd was only almost a replacement
- alexjplant 9mo agoBandcamp continues to be the best place to organically discover new artists. If I'm ever bored I go to their front page and browse by genre. It feels like the digital version of Sam Goody or whichever 90s record store had the headphone kiosks where you could listen to songs before buying the record. Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
- miki123211 9mo agoThis is not Spotify, it's Spotify fraudsters. It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
- pixl97 9mo ago>It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it, and then your bank is like "oh, sorry man, we can't do anything about that, guess they have your card forever now" FTFY.
- alexjplant 9mo agoSpotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. They also routinely allow bedroom EDM and trap producers to associate their releases with older artists just because they have the same name. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to respond to these egregious cases of misclassification. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down. Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so. And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
- WD-42 9mo agoI’ve been doing the same over the last few months. The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt. Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
- te_chris 9mo agoYes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise… Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
- WD-42 9mo agoI did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.
- conartist6 9mo ago:'D
- eterm 9mo agoI can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now. Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him. It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
- nluken 9mo agoOh! I know this one! You're thinking of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage's LPs from 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74'
- 9mo ago
- conartist6 9mo agoNow that's a sales pitch! You have my interest.
- distances 9mo agoI've been reading about Spotify pushing generated music but haven't seen that myself so I'm interested to know in what context it happens. Is it certain music styles? Spotify's own playlists? That smart shuffle feature? I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
- beberlei 9mo agoI believe if you go down the rabbit hole of "mood playlists" and spotify created playlists, then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for and that could probably include AI generated music. If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
- troupo 9mo ago> then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for I love this conspiracy theory. Which track doesn't Spotify pay royalties for? Considering that it licenses 100% of its music from external distributors.
- butlike 9mo agoIt's not really a conspiracy theory. YouTube users can use royalty-free music, it stands to reason Spotify would have the same (potentially internally) to decrease costs. "Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.
- fortran77 9mo agoI only go to massage parlors that display their ASCAP or BMI license in the window. I wouldn't be happy getting an ending if some musician is being ripped off.
- autoexec 9mo agoI'm not saying they are doing it now, but what's stopping them from generating their own tracks? What's to stop them from creating some bullshit company to generate AI slop and then licensing music from themselves at fractions of what they'd pay a real artist just to keep up the illusion so that real artists don't leave their platform? If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.
- eleventen 9mo agoSame for me! Switched to Bandcamp + Navidrome and have decided that one of my goals for the year is to find at least 2 albums per month I want to buy. I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album. [1] https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync [2] https://github.com/subdavis/bandcamp-sync-flask https://github.com/subdavis/bandcamp-sync-flask
- nemomarx 9mo agoWhat's the navidrome pitch?
- ezst 9mo agoYou stream the music you own, it uses the subsonic protocol/API, and so is compatible with countless clients, letting your enjoy your lossless music on fancy hardware at home or cached on your mobile device when on the go.
- indrora 9mo agoBetter Plex than plex for music built by people who know what they're doing that uses a common API among different servers and clients, including ones that glue to Sonos, etc.
- sph 9mo agoself-hosted winamp, using an open protocol, so you can use whatever client if you don't like its web application.
- indrora 9mo agooh my god thank you for showing me that I had been using a combination of aria2 and a link scraper plugin for years to download bulk out of bandcamp because of how fast their API will time out.
- eloisius 9mo agoThis is great. If you packaged it as a docker-compose YAML and maybe added a periodic task to poll automatically id drop it into Container Station in my NAS today.
- Ritewut 9mo agoSame. I buy music from Bandcamp and Qobuz. I don't stream it though instead opting to sync my massive music collection through Syncthing
- marknutter 9mo agoIf you came across a song and fell in love with it, only to find out later that it was generated by ai, would you stop loving the song?
- JohnFen 9mo agoYes, I certainly would. I might even start hating the song, if that discovery left me feeling tricked.
- marknutter 9mo agoThat is such a bizarre opinion to have. Do you not enjoy art because it gives you joy?
- JohnFen 9mo agoOf course I do. But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another. It's not about pretty sounds (or pictures, or whatever the medium is). If that communication isn't there, then the art has no real value to me regardless of how pretty it is. If I think I'm talking with a person and it turns out that I'm talking with a machine, I've been duped and will likely be angry about it. Another way to think about it is that when it comes to art, "the ends justify the means" doesn't really work because the whole point is more the means than the ends.
- hexage1814 9mo ago>But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another Maybe if a person generated 50,000 songs, not even listening to them, you could have a point. Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing. And that interpretation is often different from what the author originally had in mind. Hell, most people don't know the author of most movies, TV shows, and the like they watched. In other words, to me, it's more about what people take from that thing, as opposed to "Oh, what that sentient being was trying to communicate?" And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from. Also: the very dataset where that thing was trained wasn't trained on an alien dataset, with an alien culture and the like, all originating from poems written by real people, movies by real people, etc., etc. The model learned from human culture; therefore, whatever it produces is a reflection of that culture, which people could and most likely will relate to, and, hell, they are already doing that. But even taking the argument at face value, "Oh, human creation," someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics, curating the data, and the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
- butlike 9mo agoAbsolutely! Bandcamp has really been phenomenal these past few years for me as well
- pkulak 9mo agoI switched to Bandcamp a while back because I was sick of Spotify playing the same 100 songs forever. It feels like they have about 2 songs for every artist that they will actually play in any generated playlist.
- TyrunDemeg101 9mo agoI just wanted to say, thanks for saying this. I actually have been writing music and using Distrokid to publish to the normal streaming services (Spotify/Apple Music) and your comment actually pushed me to sign up for and put music on Bandcamp. In case you'd like to take a look, shameless self promotion: https://aaronholbrook.bandcamp.com/music https://aaronholbrook.bandcamp.com/music I have to go through my back catalog, and add all my music, but I appreciate your perspective and for wanting to support artists!
- TyrunDemeg101 9mo agoReplying to myself for anyone that sees this... but I just have to say - within a day of posting, someone purchased my entire discography! I'm so blown away! So validating to know someone enjoyed my work enough to buy it. Thank you to everyone who's taken a listen, and thank you to the person that bought it! <3
- jazzyjackson 9mo agoBest part of owning music is importing them to an old version of iTunes and sync'ing to your iPod. I am vindicated in my choice to use an ipod with an aux jack every time Android Auto can't decide whether to connect over USB or bluetooth and just doesn't play audio until I restart the phone and the car...
- jaredcwhite 9mo agoI took have gone back to using an old Mac laptop lying around, running iTunes, and syncing music to my old iPod Classic. I was surprised that ALAC was supported even way back when, so I can listen to high-res lossless audio!
- tayo42 9mo agoWhat do you search for or listen to that gives you ai generated music?
- anentropic 9mo agoAmen!
- john-tells-all 9mo agoSame. I like the idea of my money going to the artists. And, you can "buy the catalog", give an artist $150 or so to get ALL their music. I have a couple composers who I adore so that was a no-brainer. If I was going to pay them for most of their work anyway, why not give them the money now?
- neonmagenta 9mo agoWhen I used to play, Bandcamp was always the most band/creator-friendly platform
- paul7986 9mo agoGreat to see this! The flood of AI Music will bring music royalties down to zero which Im all for if it kills AI music(spammers and silly prompt engineer songwriters trying to make a buck go away)! AI trying to mimic humanity all ways needs to die! Who does AI benefit besides those at the very top? *Note i am hobbyist songwriter (melody and lyrics) since a teen (few decades ago)and use Suno. It makes my songs sound just like everyone elses cookie cutter crap... it has no soul to it.. just the feel of tech billionaires getting filthy rich off destroying society/humanity!
- 4k93n2 9mo agomy favourite part of having my own local library again is turning on shuffle and having it actually shuffle
- campfireman 9mo agoI experienced a similar renaissance! Now using Nextcloud and Subsonic to stream music to my phone etc. Wrote a little article on my blog: https://blog.ture.dev/posts/goodbye-spotify-and-yt-music/ https://blog.ture.dev/posts/goodbye-spotify-and-yt-music/
- iamacyborg 9mo agoFor those who miss Spotify connect capabilities and apps, I've been using Roon (self-hosted, but susbcription required) for my music library for a couple years now and it is absolutely excellent. You get full access to stream your own library and the ability to integrate into Tidal and/or Qobuz for any music you want to hear but don't own a copy of. It's really very good.
- SethMurphy 9mo agoIt took one obvious, obnoxious, and well infiltrated new music AI slop in the my recommended new music feed to finally turn me completely sour on Spotify. I was a prelaunch US user who had brand loyalty built in from the start. I even met Daniel Ek during the big early hype. Its gone. It has been the listen of last resort for awhile, and I used it for discovery of new releases. It's dead to me now
- interludead 9mo agoThere's something genuinely satisfying about owning the music again instead of just passively streaming whatever an algorithm decides to surface
- tmtvl 9mo agoAs someone who's always bought music rather than getting a subscription, welcome to the club! Do make sure to back everything up, though, I remember when Google Play Music was shut down and I needed to download everything (fortunately it was announced well beforehand so there was no need to rush). 7digital is also pretty good, I've bought a bunch of Saxon and Rainbow albums on there. As awesome as Bandcamp is, many bigger artists don't have a presence there (although King Diamond's entire discography is on there, that's cool).
- insane_dreamer 9mo agoI switched to buying CDs and vinyl again a couple of years ago, and bought some second-hand hifi equipment. I still have a family AppleMusic subscription mostly because my kids use it a lot especially in the car, but I want to go back to owning creative works and compensating artists instead of renting.