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what‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or
by endofreach 9mo ago
what‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs & managing their own library.
m a y b e some devs would. but those thinking about it, wouldn‘t be stopped like that. i am thinking about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time & motivation to crawl down yet another rabbit hole of diy.
- whywhywhywhy 9mo ago>what‘s in it for spotify? Their relationship with the labels
- snowmobile 9mo agoMany people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for subscription services.
- ulrashida 9mo agoExactly this. Increasing prices with worsening service and feature bloat combined with questionable ethics made it an easy decision to cancel.
- parpfish 9mo agoThis is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit. Spotify will never be able to pay out enough if people don’t think this music is worth paying for. They want access to every new album but refuse to pay how much a single new CD would have cost back in the day
- writebetterc 9mo ago> This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit. The pie that Spotify divides up among the artists is a global one. It's not like you listen to one artist, so they get your 10 bucks every month. You're paying Taylor Swift, even though you never listen to her.
- parpfish 9mo agoTheir prorata payment scheme isn’t inherently good or bad. If I listen to obscure indie band all month, some of my money will go to Taylor swift. But all those swifties are also paying obscure indie band.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoit's not bad by itself, but I argue the opaque structure of it is horrendous. Especially in financial matters, you should be able to estimate how much money you get if you put X effort in and get Y metrics. But even getting a proper Y isn't straightforward, let alone Z payout.
- pluralmonad 9mo agoAside from all the middle men nibbling at artist take, its also a symptom of trading on fundamentally un-scarce resources. A better business model is selling access to the scarce things like the artist themselves. Trying to maintain stranglehold on a particular order of zeros and ones is always going to be tough.
- parpfish 9mo agoThat’s part of the reason that artists have made a bigger push toward selling merch as a means of making a living. But that feels so arbitrary and unsustainable to me. Why should I buy a tshirt from somebody because I like their music? Fashion design is its own unrelated art form.
- doesnt_know 9mo agoEvery entertainment market is saturated. Even if every creative endeavour stopped now, there would still be more freely available content to last more then any individual human life span. Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something and goes out of their way to consume a specific niche, there isn’t much reason to pay much, or anything for entertainment.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something to be fair, that's a billion dollar business of an audience. Bandcamp is still a thing because people like that exist. So I wouldn't readily dismiss that. But yes. We're in an age where people treat TV shows as "second screen entertainment", the silver screen is dying out, and where Spotify is flooding its library with white noise and AI slop. And people at best shrug. There's never been less respect for the arts, and it reflects in wider consumer patterns. Any future artists will need to appeal to a shrinkingly few fanbase of those who care about quality.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoSpotify is a model where the artist suffers, the company itself works on a slim margin, and the record labels gets the lion's share. It's pretty much the worst case scenario business. The issue even goes back to the days of CD's. The artist still wouldn't get that much back compared to the label publishing the disc. even in 2000 is was still more profitable to buy a tshirt than a CD from the artist. I'm not very well versed in this area, but clearly something needs to change. Being able to independently published helps, but Spotify's model does indeed make it harder to sell your own albums despite it being easier than ever to distribute it without a middleman.
- imtringued 9mo agoIf you get a Spotify subscription to support small artists, you'll be in for a rude awakening once you realize how Spotify allocates your funds. Hint: Your subscription pays for the listening habits of free users. Who do those free users listen to? The reason why Spotify is a raw deal for the artists you listen to is the same reason why it is possible to bot listens of your AI generated songs and get out more money than was paid for by the bot's subscription. The entire Spotify business model is very peculiar in how stupid and wasteful it is and who the beneficiaries are. What you should do instead is give yourself a fixed music budget, export your stream counts and subscribe to their patreons in proportion to how much you listened to them.
- kilroy123 9mo agoI know people who recently canceled, but I think it has more to do with them raising the price.
- snowmobile 9mo agoYeah I'm not saying my friends who cancelled are going to torrent music like it's the 2000's, but when so much music is freely available on the web, why pay? For me it was mainly that the app kept getting worse though.
- ezst 9mo agoI will never START paying for Spotify. I like my music and so I like to know my music, I have no problem curating my collection, chasing rare works for artists I really like. I enjoy the process, I enjoy the result, I enjoy that I own it. I really don't see why I would rather spend hundreds a year for the privilege of owning nothing at all in the end, while being prescribed what I shall listen to, when and where.
- lukan 9mo agoMy old mp3 collection is too big for my mobile phone and I did not set up a private streaming solution yet. So out of convenience, I also used spotify. Stream anywhere anything is nice. And I did enjoy finding new artists through the algorithm there .. but I do made up my mind about letting go of the concenience and owning all my music again. It is a big effort, though and I don't enjoy it so much like you.
- ezst 9mo agoI encourage you to have a look at subsonic-compatible servers (navidrome, airsonic & forks), that's a good compromise IMO/E when you've got to pick what music you want to carry with you.
- brailsafe 9mo agoSeems like a reasonable hobby, people love doing this, but idk that not doing something you already wouldn't be inclined to do carries much weight. Almost like how people who haven't moved out of their hometown cite all sorts of reasons or apparent faults of the place they haven't moved to, like it's too expensive; it's too rainy; it's too busy; it's not sunny enough; but really, they weren't in the business of leaving anyway, because they're comfortable or don't know how to make friends, or they stubbornly try to love a place they actually hate, or they have family there and a support structure, or they have no ambition, or they actually just like the place. Either way, the moving goalposts and random critiques don't matter, it's not the hypothetical destination's burden to court someone who won't make that leap anyway, but there may be a select few fence sitters who are just waiting for a push. I don't think Spotify's main objective is to persuade hobbyist music collectors to stop, but rather it's to persuade people who want to access music anywhere to pay for the service, which may or may not be someone forced to ditch their vinyl collection or Zune. Voting with your wallet only matters if the service you actually might pay for or are paying for stops being a compelling product.
- sdoering 9mo agoIF I were still a Spotify user - this would be the nail in the coffin. Not that the founder wouldn't give me enough reason. But they lost me due to other reasons. I am still paying for streaming, though. Still. Not sure if it is really worth it - and once I have my local mp3 collection available for myself - not sure, if I need a paid streaming service. I am getting too old and I return more and more to the songs I grew up with. And to be honest - if I would be missing anything, I could easily yt-dlp it, store it on my server and have it available ti myself via self hosted streaming. I am loosing more and more interest in streaming. For video and music.
- cdrnsf 9mo agoI run a Navidrome server I stream my own music from. I tag everything with Mp3tag and have a shell script to organize and upload the tagged files. Not all of the music I listen to regularly is on Spotify and their treatment of artists is abominable.
- CryptoBanker 9mo agoPerhaps worried about downloads being used for training music models
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo agoCan’t have competitors when they inevitably move in that direction themselves.
- rjh29 9mo agoI'm old enough to have an mp3 collection, so I haven't needed spotify. They don't have 20% of the tracks in my playlist and their integration of local audio has been steadily eroded to be almost unusable now (i.e. it's completely separate, doesn't show up in regular search, playlists etc.). They also push audiobooks and sponsored results in my face even on the Premium subscription, and their UI sucks. If you already have a collection and are reasonably content in what you listen to, topping it up with a few albums a year is not that hard. Or just use youtube music!
- asveikau 9mo agoEven if you have an mp3 collection, the streaming apps are good for discovery, recommendations, and generating playlists. There are probably good local solutions for the last one especially, but a convenient UI that's already on all your devices helps.
- rjh29 9mo agoAbsolutely - although the free plan (or free trial) of Spotify/YouTube are good enough for that. Spotify is certainly convenient especially being multi-device, but after a few months you've probably exhausted its recommendations.
- hostyle 9mo ago> Even if you have an mp3 collection, the streaming apps are good for discovery, recommendations ... No they are not. Hi there. We noticed you have been listening to Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Deftones. Why not have a listen of this Robbie Williams song too ... blasts out some pop song at extra high volume.
- asveikau 9mo agoI haven't had this experience at all.
- themafia 9mo agoCozy secondary relationships with music labels. Payola goes one way and industry demands go the other. Since "owners" take such a big chunk (50%) of paid royalties for streaming there is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers. Controlling the number of "spins" an song or album of theirs gets is still a huge concern of the labels.
- troupo 9mo ago> here is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers. Spotify has exactly zero music "directly by artists and performers". Even indie artists have to go through distributors and labels. Because without "owners" that own 60-80% of all world music, and that Spotify pays 70% of revenue to there would be no Spotify (or any music streaming service).
- crtasm 9mo agoYou don't need to hand over any ownership or % of earnings if you self-publish and pay a distributor to put your album on the streaming platforms.
- themafia 9mo ago> Even indie artists have to go through distributors and labels. Is it impossible for an artist to own their own label? > or any music streaming service That doesn't seem to follow from any part of your argument.
- have_faith 9mo agoI cancelled my Spotify the other day in favour of listening to my own archive. I’m admittedly an outlier though.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jrflowers 9mo agoI put Rockbox on a non-techie friend’s new mp3 player just the other day. Some folks absolutely went back to buying/pirating music after the whole Spotify playing ads for ICE thing. It’s apparently fun curating a collection like in the olden days, and sites like fmhy have gotten pretty popular recently.
- Retr0id 9mo agoI think the main use-case for the metadata-enriched 300TB archive is training AI models like suno. Anyone torrenting music for personal consumption had higher quality sources available already.
- johnnyanmac 9mo agoNVidia seems to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677628 Their response to litigation? > NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models. It's barely veiled these days how little they care for art.
- crazygringo 9mo ago> what‘s in it for spotify? Honestly, Spotify itself probably couldn't care less, for the obvious reasons you say. But the music labels sure do. Their contracts with Spotify surely require it to implement appropriate DRM, stop all attempted piracy, etc. If Spotify wants to be on good negotiating terms with labels, they have absolutely no choice but to take as much legal action as possible.
- queenkjuul 9mo agoLol i say it to my friends all the time, "if music were as easy to pirate as 20 years ago I'd already be back" Credit where it's due, Spotify made it a lot harder to find pirated music in good quality
- direwolf20 9mo agoAren't there illegal tools for downloading music from Spotify?
- troupo 9mo agoYou have to first find spotify in the court docs: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.655608/gov.uscourts.nysd.655608.19.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.65... ATLANTIC RECORDING CORPORATION; ATLANTIC MUSIC GROUP LLC; BAD BOY RECORDS LLC; ELEKTRA ENTERTAINMENT LLC; ELEKTRA ENTERTAINMENT GROUP INC.; FUELED BY RAMEN LLC; WARNER MUSIC INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LIMITED; WARNER RECORDS INC.; WARNER RECORDS LLC; SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT; ARISTA MUSIC; ARISTA RECORDS, LLC; ZOMBA RECORDING LLC; UMG RECORDINGS, INC.; CAPITOL RECORDS, LLC; and SPOTIFY USA INC., Plaintiffs, ANd then you could read the decision https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.655608/gov.uscourts.nysd.655608.11.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.65...: Factual Background - III The Record Company Plaintiffs’ business model relies in significant part on the licensing of their catalogs of sound recordings to legitimate streaming services like Spotify. IMO Spotify couldn't care less. The actual owners of music care.
- protocolture 9mo agoSpotify cancelled my subscription. I started off with a Spotify partner subscription with my wife, which grandfathered into some other thing, like a family subscription, and then whatever I had got cancelled. Meanwhile I found a new local radio station has started playing 60% of what I like, some new (to me) joint venture thats a web first marketing company and they bought a bunch of radio stations to add local radio advertising to their list of services. Between spotify with ads, radio with ads, I am listening to radio, while planning out how to most easily go back to just having my favourites on my phone or maybe even an mp3 player.
- s1artibartfast 9mo agoI would go back in an instant. I think a lot of people would if it is convenient. Furthermore, all someone has to do is make a Spotify clone to interact with the archive and you have consumed their entire business. Even if you didnt want a DIY solution, I bet you would accept a free clone, along with every other customer
- endofreach 9mo agoi dont think its much harder. but we got used to a different convenience standard regarding the consumption (of our music/library).
- integralid 9mo ago> i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs I'd love to self host my music, but curating my collection is a lot of work. I made several attempts, but looking for music I like was too much work for me. If getting "illegal" music becomes easier I'll definitely eventually do this.