I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers…
I’m going to need a free (ads ok) option that I can try a little bit before I switch the whole family plan over. I tried downloading tidal and another one a little while back, and they didn’t last for long. One I couldn’t test without a subscription. I don’t remember the problem with another. I’m strictly in the convenience camp with this one folks. I just want to press play, I don’t have time to think about music otherwise.
Amazon’s Prime Music? Most people have prime anyway, I think that comes with the ad version. Less than Spotify to switch to add free.
If you still have access to any .edu email addresses, you can get student rates for Apple Music, and probably others.
Ugh, yeah I haven’t considered that. We do have prime, but we’re really close to getting rid of it. We don’t watch Prime Video because it feels ridiculous to navigate and everything seems like an addon they want you to pay more for. I’d assume music is similar.
If you’re on Android you won’t need a family plan, just get ReVanced and patch YT Music so it’s ad-free and plays in the background.
I don’t see why people hate Spotify so much. I used to go out and pay £10 for an album decades ago, multiple times a month sometimes. Now I can basically listen to anything for the price of an album a month. Plus, you can play Spotify on just about any device, even all the open source solutions that Netflix blocked like 15 years ago. On top of that it’s Swedish rather than American.
I don’t hate it per se, but would rather it paid the artists better… quite simple really
If I’m renting music, at least give me FLAC level quality.
No, 320 kbps won’t do.
Lots of reasons.
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They pay their artists an an absolute pittance with a model that vastly favours the big labels. New artists, those artists striving to establish themselves and/or independent artists are screwed over.
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At the same time they pay hundreds of millions of dollars to pricks like Joe Rogan.
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The ‘fake artists’ controversy where Spotify pay stock music production companies to produce pretty bland ‘playlist’ mood music, then created an internal team to seed these tracks on their uberhyped suggested playlists.
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Getting caught heavily promoting AI Bands who have been trained on actual musicians work, without paying them for it, which in turn allows Spotify to pay out even less royalties to actual musicians.
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Daniel Ek recently investing in 100m Euros into an AI weapons company, which has triggered an artist boycott.
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You have zero ownership and zero access rights to the music you stream.
In short, if you care at all about music and the people who make it then streaming in general is not a good model for their future and Spotify is poison.
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My frustration with Spotify is based not in price but that they’re choosing to shaft indie artists and new young artists.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetization-eligibility/
The 0.5% of royalties that they redirect to those with more plays is often 100% of the royalties for the little guy being stolen from.
The artificial tracks they wanna combat? I imagine they will surf by pleasantly with 1000-3000 plays over the last 12 months with a wider variety of bot accounts listening to ensure they reach enough unique listeners.While it is essentially nothing (in monetary value) they still rob the teenage punk band that sounds awful of their first royalty dollar.
Swedish or american- they’re still exploiting artists. Capitalists gonna capitalist.
Yeah I have been top member for over a decade. It is convenient, there are some things pushing me away though.
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The podcast push, autoplaying unremoveable videos on the homescreen.
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The algorithym pushing US style hack shit like what loser group of comedians take on politics is despite I exclusively listening to Australian comic book movie news and British Ukrainian war coverage.
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Worsening UI/UX, poor offline management
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Shorts/Reels
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Removing features, from the running tempo sensor to family mixes.
The offline features on Spotify are abysmal. Half my downloaded albums don’t even work. It’s the primary reason I’m looking for an alternative. How can an app with such a high market share be this shitty?
They do not want you offline.
I hate that it hangs loading for so lomg before admitting defeat and showing the offline listings.
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Spotify was an amazing service. I’ve used it for years but its getting worse. More and more things that are intrusive are being added, prices are going up. It just sucks i wish they would have just split it into different tiers so i dont have to pay for all this extra shit.
Inflation is also rising. I am not so sure Spotify raised its prices more than inflation.
There are probably many individual reasons people have for hating Spotify, but here are some of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pHbS6bgmqE
Also, from Ben Jordan: https://youtu.be/MXudOLStaXA
When you bought an album you owned it for life. With spotify you are borrowing the music and if you stop paying you get nothing left
For most people, that’s an acceptable trade, because they don’t want to maintain a library. And with Spotify, you get access to a much larger library than you could ever possibly keep.
Still no lossless?
not as far as I know!
Dropped it for Tidal years ago, never looked back.
I’ve started collecting CDs and building my own Jellyfin library so I don’t depend on streaming services.
On Qobuz here. I just buy vinyl then rip it directly from Qobuz generally.
Is there any music on spotify that isn’t also on youtube? Youtube has practically everything, it has always seemed to me. I’ve never been tempted by spotify.
The 128 bitrate on YouTube is quite the drag IMO except for like carmusic maybe.
This and the fact that Youtube are just as much robbing gits… like I have said, I don’t want to sound mean but generally I’d like the artists to get paid for their work somehow. Now how to do that is the hard bit
AFAIK to get money in artists’ pockets it’s best to buy merch and buy tickets to shows.
Man, music is one of those things where file sizes, quality and performance all conspire to make both offline media and self-hosting so viable. I never understood Spotify’s role.
I mean, you can like physical media and understand why Netflix was more convenient than digging through enormous TV DVD boxsets. But who the hell didn’t have a MP3 dump of hudreds of CDs by the time Spotify started being a thing?
I obviously do understand why people use Spotify.
But you are correct; my phone has 128GB internal storage, my hard drive music collection is smaller than that. There has been solutions for syncing (a curated list of) music to mobile devices for a long time. There are many - and frankly much better - ways to discover new music outside of Spotify. There are some really cool music only internet radio stations out there.
And I’m not even talking about self-hosting, which simply cannot be recommended to everyone.People defending Spotify always come back to convenience, and always dismiss the disdvantages of generated playlists, and downplay the suckness of AI content. And never acknowledge that alternatives exist, right down to NOT using a music streaming service.
You could just be young. By the time I was old enough to start pirating Spotify had already existed for years and it’s just significantly easier than getting into a tracker. My wife has yearly playlists she’s been making since she was a teen and doesn’t want to loose those.
“Youngins” dont understand that when Spotify came on the scene people had already stopped playing music on CDs and MP3s largely. It was when the ipod and iphones already existed and people were getting ripped off by apple for $1.29 per song that they wanted to listen to.
I vividly remember at the time trying to tell people to try Spotify instead of paying for literally every song they wanted to listen to, and people were skeeved by it because it sounded too good to be true
God this made me remember my parents getting me an iPod touch and a 50$ gift card. I listened to an owl city album for days on repeat lmao.
A big part of it that finally made me pay for spotify is it helping me to find new music. Its not perfect, but when the app actually works correctly it will queue up music similar to the song or playlist you searched and it can help you find new bands or other songs by the artists you like. When i was just listening to my downloaded music I’d get stuck in a rut of the same few albums or artists.
Like a million songs come out every week. Can’t keep up when it’s mostly digital now, no cd to get. But you can rip Spotify!
I was like 9 when Spotify was incorporated
Dummy
Your parents failed you by not having an MP3 dump of hundreds of CDs to give to you.
I actually know plenty who still hold onto them…
That is fascinating to me as well:
Movies > Big filesizes > many public trackers and seeders Music > smaller and easier to store/play > less public trackers, only slsk is really viable Books > even smaller > there are some websites like anna and a lot of small ones But then: Sheet music > even smaller files > almost impossible to pirate
It is fascinating to me that there isnt one clear spectum along filesize.
I guess it has to do with the target audience and demand.
There are a lot of reasons for this but mostly because music streaming has been so popular that it wiped out the market for music. Its also a huge pain in the ass to sort and organize music when nobody follows a standard when they rip music so it makes automating things a lot harder as well.
I have several thousand songs I’ve downloaded over the last 25 years but even with modern tools like MusicBrainz Picard or Lidarr, there’s no good way to organize your collection. You wind up with a bunch of singles or oddball songs from a compilation album, from a sampler, or you download an album and half of the songs come from the US version while the other half is from a UK version of the album and the uploader forgot to include a bonus track that comes on that version. Its just a huge mess that you dont see with movies and TV because apart from things like a “Director’s Cut” or “Extended Version,” you know what you’re getting when you download them.
Additionally, playback isnt easy either. Are you going to manually transfer hundreds of files to your phone? Stream from your home media server to your phone and use a bunch of bandwidth? You’re getting tired of 30% of your songs so are you going to go through your collection one by one and erase them?
There’s a huge convenience factor for services like Spotify. With movies and TV the convenience factor definitely favors the self-hosted side of things.
Re: Transferring, I bought a 1TB sd-card for my phone and use Syncthing to transfer music from desktop to phone.
Nowadays people say it’s advanced shit for powerusers, but just a decade ago this was the way for everybody: download shit to your computer, sync some of it to mobile devices, listen on the go. Everybody did it, OSs had dedicated software that got activated as soon as you plugged the device in etc.
I hate the “convenience factor” or “non-technical user” arguments.
I’ll weigh in since I started hosting my own subsonic server.
I dropped lidar because, like you said, its full album based and doesn’t play well with partial collections. I dont want to collect music albums, I want to listen to music. I’ve not found a good solution for it yet, but I don’t even think I even need it. Once I get music, I tag the files with a desktop app which uses musicbrains for data and then drop the files on a SMB share. Navidrome picks them up and makes them available for streaming in 2 seconds.
Bandwidth is free and file storage space is cheap. Any convenience I gained from spotify is lost when music gets removed from it. Most recently it was king gizzard who removed half their library from spotify and I actually purchased some of their albums from bandcamp before. I own the mp3s already, but used spotify for convenience. Now I host them myself. Now I’m in control.
Obviously though, I’m the odd man out. Not everyone will be able to do this. But if I can, I will. And since I can, I do.
Since I already had a jellyfish server for TV/Films, I’ve been testing it for music recently. And the Finamp app is pretty great. I can create playlists and download them for offline listening.
That’s definitely a nice feature for sure but getting Jellyfin to even recognize the album/songs means they all need to be properly labeled and filed correctly and that some database somewhere needs to have that album’s metadata available which can be real hit or miss. SoulSeek seems to be decent for labeling and allows you to choose who you’re downloading from but its still a clunky mess at the end of the day.
I’m all for self hosting as much as possible but for me personally its just much more convenient to use a streaming service for music, and these days I find myself listening to podcasts the most which aren’t going to be available on the high seas (nor would I bother if they were because I’m not going to listen to them again).
I wouldn’t have subbed to Spotify on my own. I’m inherited into my wife’s family plan. For me the biggest benefit is just discovering new music. I used to have a big MP3 library, but after a couple computer upgrades, they’ve kind of disappeared over the years. Having Spotify there has been really convenient for just listening toto old stuff I’ve lost as well. This said, if my FiL cancels, I probably wouldn’t sub for myself anyway.
It’s easy, consistent, and they put new music in front of you. That’s all most people want.
Self hosting is a pain. It’s work. Nobody wants to fuck with servers while their kids are yelling cause music is down with the rest of entertainment.
Yea it is a bit of a pain, but also I haven’t found a reliable setup like rrsuite for music.
Ideally it should allow for noticing a song on Spotify and transfer direct to the server
There are ways you can use a Spotify account registered in another country and you basically pay about £2 a month. I’m mainly into 80s and 90s music and used Spotify to discover music, and once I come across a song I like I add the album name to a list (i.e. note it down) and find the CD from a second hand shop or failing which obtain the FLAC files some other way. This way I now have an offline library that has most of the songs that I love. Spotify will be there as long as I can just pay £2-ish but the moment they try the age verification or raise prices, its bye-bye for them.
I ripped CDs to FLAC, put them on a Plex server, and use Plexamp on my computer and phone. Now I’ve got my own personal streaming service.
Not everyone will do that though… plenty of people I know have zero idea about that kind of stuff
Unfortunately true. It’s the uninformed (and who don’t care enough to get informed) that allow the violation of rights and privacy continue.
I have a 50TB library of movies and TV, Plex, the *arrs, a dedicated server, and even I dont bother with music because its a huge pain in the ass to deal with. I have a bunch of songs from before music streaming was popular and a few I’ve gotten from SoulSeek since then, but that’s about it. Ripping CDs, labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure is just too much work especially when you get into thousands and thousands of songs. There are software solutions to this but they don’t work very well because music is much harder to deal with when you can have 50 versions of the same song floating around out there.
Somewhere out there is a person with a single folder named “music”, with zero sub folders, containing thousands upon thousands of tracks with names like “1.mp3” and “1 (1).mp3” and they’re totally okay with it.
Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
IMO it makes more sense to rip and download music than movies. Music is small files that you listen to dozens or hundreds of times, whereas movies are large files that you might only watch once or twice.
labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure
You need to do the same thing for movies and TV shows though.
Lidarr will do this for you, mostly automated.
To rip CDs, I use abcde (“a better CD encoder”) on Linux. It automatically tags the tracks based on CDDB or Musicbrainz data.
There’s probably a basic app that’ll move it to the right directory structure, but I find Lidarr pretty easy to use. I copy the album across to my server, then in Lidarr I add the relevant album then click the button to manually import it, and point it to the right folder. Lidarr will automatically sort it into the right directory structure. I have it configured to use the structure that Plex wants - folders per artist, then folders per album inside those.
That’s assuming it has data on Musicbrainz. For MP3/FLAC files from albums that aren’t on Musicbrainz, it’s a bit trickier. I sometimes use kid3 (KDE audio tagger) as it can pull from other sources like Discogs and Amazon.
This is the way to go!
They age verify in the UK already…
For most people though they won’t be hacking things to use Spotify. I agree £2 a month is OK but for me the issue is they charge a fortune yet pay artists a pittanceTrue. For me it hasn’t come up so far, possibly because my account is registered in a different country. It’s going to be a bit inconvenient but probably time to give them the finger and look elsewhere.
Lazy doormat Spotify users: “Okay… but this is the LAST, LAST, LAST TIME FOR REAL. Do it again and there’ll be a hashtag and a series of Tiktok memes!”
I make that subscription cost back in 10 minutes of work.
Doormat Spotify users 🤣
“I’m SO good at making money that I don’t care when people cheat me out of it for no other reason than because they feel like it. This is something I am proud of.”
“I spend hours configuring services so I can have a second sandwich with lunch twice a month.” - Proud little nerd with poor cost benefits analysis.
I’m very happy to skip a fast food trip to not extend my day job for .000005% of my salary.
Ohhhh maybe I’ll save up for a bigger house now that I have opened up budget for that avacado toast!
You are so cool. I am very impressed.
You’re the one out here calling people names, take a moment and think about your comments and behavior. You can only be accountable for your own actions.
Maybe if you don’t want some random person shitting on your stupid comments, you shouldn’t be so derogatory about different use cases. Think about that and how you ended up here being lectured about being a dick on the Internet.
I made a general comment, and my opinion has not changed. You didn’t have to make it personally about you, but you decided to come defend your honor against a nonspecific shitpost. Just like MY opinion is mine, yours is YOURS, and you didn’t need to jump in here.
Heck, I specifically addressed my initial comment to “lazy, doormat Spotify users” and for some reason you decided I was talking about you.
Words have meaning, whatever gets you through the day 🤣. I know it’s hard being a nerd with nobody around.
I mean spotify is one of those things where it’s harder to move away and the cost benefit is harder to argue against. It’s not like the streaming bullshit that has happened where everything is fragmented and you’d need 200 substations to watch the movies you want.
The thing that sucks with Spotify is the money they gave fucking Joe Rogan
Look, I can’t expect your assessment of value proposition to align with mine - we are different people.
But if I were a paying Spotify customer, and they gave $250 million dollars to pay someone I think is actively damaging the world, and then started charging me MORE to pay for it, there is ABSOLUTELY no amount of cost benefit and convenience that would keep me there.
I will sit in a dark, silent room motivating on pure spite before I would accept such an indignity.
Like I said, fuck Joe Rogan, but every big Corp has been responsible for awful shit. At some point you have to live and you have to give in somewhere.
This is coming from someone that self hosts and even I can’t be bothered to self host every fucking random ass song in existence.
My value proposition is that my entire family doesn’t have to listen to ads and I don’t have to spend half my day tracking down songs.
Again, my larger point is that spotify for all its bullshit still isn’t streaming video levels of utter bullshit.
Well, you’re right. Everyone has to draw their own line. I’ll agree with you this is probably less egregious than some, and I personally do make make purchases I shouldn’t from institutions I shouldn’t to get by.
But I do every single one of those holding my nose and acknowledging I’m contributing to a problem.
Move those goal posts baby, anything to not look like a jackass online 🤣
I’m paying £20/m for a lossless family plan from Deezer… That’s how they get you 😭. Now I’d have to apologize to my family members if I took away their subscription. Used to be around £17 when I started a few years back.
I do not recommend getting a family plan.
Ditched Spotify and bought myself a galleon and a tricorner hat instead. Haven’t looked back.
Lidarr + Navidrome + Feishin + Metube
Mullvad for acquiring, TailScale and Symfonium for listening while away from home
This sounds like a lot of setup but probably took a few hours in total to set up the various docker images and get them working together.
I spend my saved money on vinyls, official merch, and SoundCloud or BandCamp purchases for my local library.
A few hours, when you know what you’re doing. A few month when you have to figure it out, and maybe even then, it won’t work, or you’ll have lost a lot of money trying.
This should be a lot easier to do, than it is
Good Lord, others like you do exist!
This might be the actual first time I’ve seen someone just call out the bullshit for some of these people running janky services who don’t have a family they need to support.
Fair, I should clarify: the few hours is for the music parts only. The homelab set up could easily stretch to months … And I’d still recommend doing it to most, it’s great fun setting it up!
Out of curiosity, what is your experience/usage like with this? Spotify is very easy to justify if you heavily use some of their features because there’s not a way (that I know of) to replicate them. For example:
- Shared playlists
- Universal links directly to songs
- Playback control from a second device
- Group listen/jam
- Zero overhead for search and discovery. From someone mentioning a band you can find, sample, and add to a playlist in 30s or less
- Public playlist discovery
- Easy crawling. Eg. browsing from Song -> Featured Artist -> Album -> Record label -> Related Artists etc…
From my usage, sacrificing a majority of those is a non-starter because my Spotify usage has become more than mp3 hosting and organization.
Yarrr! hello there fellow matey! 🏴☠️ Sounds good but, do you also set this up individually on your wife’s and kids phones and devices and keep them updated?
I mostly don’t! The kids are too young, the wife has Home Assistant, Symfonium and has web shortcuts for the arrs. Haven’t had any complaints since I got 2FA and external domain mapped for Hass.
My friend has had good results with jellyseerr with his wife and kids though haven’t got to the point of needing it myself.
fuck Spotify, I only listen to downloaded flac and mp3 music and YouTube
It’s cheaper if you have 5 friends and take the family plan. I’m paying ~€2 a month for the last couple of years.
of course there are ways round it, but that’s not my point. Getting expensive
Getting expensive would be the wrong wording. The price of subscription is simply following inflation. Otherwise as long as the price stays the same while people get raises, you could say it’s getting cheaper.
But it could becoming increasingly not worth it. Depends how much % of your pay is spent on the subscription long term, as both of them go up. If the % is growing, then it’s bad, if it’s mostly the same or going down, thats good.
gotta give even more money to joe fuckhead - bet absolutely none of this will improve artist payouts…
You guys are paying for Spotify?
Their strategy has been for years to make the phone app very constrained if you’re not paying, so to have any decent experience that was kinda required.
I don’t no. But as they keep removing features from the free account, and here in the UK you at least need an account now to play anything people do
Yes. Go back to your bubble now.
What bubble?
The bubble where Spotify isn’t a massively successful service and most aren’t paying for it or music in general.
Usename checks out
I bet you’re a habitual reddit user. Comment checks out.
I never said it wasn’t a successful service. I’m only genuinely surprised that so many people pay for what I personally consider marginal improvements. Also thanks for being the usual internet jerk ready to snap at any comment he doesn’t like: now I have an idea of who may pay for that subscription.
👌👍 I’m sure you were genuinely questioning who is paying for Spotify and not being a snarky sarcastic jackass 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 This shit is like watching Trump tards get upset when South Park takes calls out their shit.
Damn, you got me! Now I have to rethink my whole plan to undermine Spotify’s revenues one comment a time!
Get riled.
the modded app chad bubble
We have the duo plan, for me and my wife. Kids don’t need one yet.
Firefox & ublock and there are no publicities.
My 'ol android apk doesn’t work any more thoug… and can’t find a new one (Hint hint, blink blink)
I’ve been using a cracked yt music since the Spotify crackdown. I miss my playlists often :^(
must be hard paying 5 bucks for an exporter :^(
Same with pi-hole.
I guess some people are, as long as it’s a good balance of convenience and price. Ages ago, Napster, Kazaa and DC++ were considered more convenient than buying music. I guess torrents are used for that these days.
There’s a P2P app from the same era as KaZaA, originally released the same year (2001), that’s still in active use today: Soulseek. It’s a great way to find obscure music, some of which isn’t on streaming services and is extremely difficult to obtain otherwise.
Usenet is good for less popular stuff too. Torrents die once the last seed is gone, but some Usenet providers have over 10 years retention, and you always get full speeds over an encrypted connection with no uploading required.
Do I need an invite for usenet?
now I don’t want to be that person but I’d like to give artists some money somehow. Like I dislike AI as it rips people off - there is a (difficult) middle line to tread
The problem is there’s some 90s albums I can’t find anywhere - not on Discogs, not on eBay, not on Marketplace. The record labels are usually long gone. But they’re on Soulseek. I’m not sure what else to do to get them.
There’s also things like DJ sets/mixes that were never sold, only ever distributed online for free.
And that Judas priest CD in the cellar somewhere, sometimes you have paid the artist already so soulseek comes in handy.
Of course… I mean you don’t want them coming around your place to see you do you (Judas Priest that is)
Of course… not quite my point but yours is valid. I’d just like a more ethical alternative which I know is asking far too much in 2025
Bandcamp?
I work a desk job. I cant put pirated music on my work computer or ill get fired. Only real option is a pay service.
I don’t like to bring my personal stuff on my work computer, but I can use my phone for all that stuff instead. You could use a BT speaker to blast pirate metal in the office.
I thought about using my phone but I dont have unlimited data on my phone. I also dont have unlimited data at home so id run my phone and internet down faster. Phone is the real issue as its not much cell data at all per month.
An offline solution exists too, but then you would need to sync a few gigabytes of mp3 files on your phone. Not quite as convenient, but at least it wouldn’t use any mobile data. Actually, it’s still a whole lot nicer than dragging a CD player and a few discs with you. If you’re into retro, you totally can get CDs too…
Also Daniel Ek is investing in AI war company:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html
So glad he didn’t get his grubby hands on Arsenal FC in the end.
And Trump!
Meanwhile the new Seagate 26tb HDD is going for $270
I’ve been downloading my media for over 10 years now and I only have like 2 1/2 Terabytes filled, a 26tb drive could hold most people’s lifetime media collections.
Owning your own storage and files is the only way to ensure you keep access to the media you want.
