Can anyone tell me how to cancel Spotify service? I went to their website, but it wouldn’t let me in without installing or logging into their app. And from their app I can’t find a way to cancel!
Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.
I just use ViMusic or RiMusic or one of those types of forks. I believe it uses YouTube and other sources. It is ad-free and has the usual stuff you’d expect like suggestions, playlists, genres etc. Occasionally the source platform will make a change that breaks it, an update comes out fixes it.
That and there are still (probably ancient at this point) desktop clients that scrape your Pandora and download local copies of all the tracks. That’s another good way to never listen to ads.
https://spotube.krtirtho.dev/ is another alternative, but it uses the Spotify api (you can hook up your account) and backends it by playing music from yt.
Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.
I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.
Really hated when they started adding auto play of another unrelated podcast when my current podcast ends, like I don’t want your shitty podcast selection Spotify. The enshitification of the web continues.
the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it’s a great watch if you understand german!
it’s called Dirty Little Secrets
EDIT: here’s episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call “ghost musicians”
For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.
What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
That it all-around sucks? That I’ve been telling people this since it’s creation? That nobody fucking listens to me? Or that this preview picture looks like ET and Titanic had a mash-up. Or all of the above.
It’s all of the above, duh.
I agree with most of this, but how have you never come across Munch’s “The Scream” before? (Have to admit, I lol’d at your description of it tho)
Seriously. I’m not at all an art guy so I feel qualified to observe that The Scream is probably one of the top 5 (and definitely top 10) most well known paintings, somewhere shortly after Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
So happy I switched to Tidal long ago because the pathetic music stream quality it has. I made me had headaches , literally. For the ones who don’t know Best quality audio streaming are Tidal and Apple music . YouTube music is pure crap quality as Spotify.
Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations
So instead of the cents that artists get from streaming you propose they get nothing at all? You can buy from Bandcamp if the artists are on it and use ListenBrainz.
Didnt bandcamp get bought by some big company a little while ago? Sp bandcamp just doesent have the library yet. I do like it though in its current form (until it gets enshittified)
Exactly, they aren’t losing anything and there’s hope a better system will come along.
Agreed on Bandcamp though. The very few artists who use it get my money through there.
Can I import my history from Last? I’ve had my lfm account for like… almost 20 years, and I really don’t want to have to start off blank…
yes, you can connect them and you can import from last.fm. I was in the same situation as you, first I had both simultaneously running for some time, because I needed to get comfortable with the idea of removing last.fm. I also have data since 2008 so I felt a bit insecure ‘risking’ that. But after a while I concluded there was really no need for me to keep last.fm so I removed it. Haven’t had any regrets. ListenBrainz isn’t perfect but, despite it’s small development team, it’s sgnificantly improving every year.
https://listenbrainz.org/settings/music-services/details/ Here you can “Connect to your Last.FM account to import your entire listening history and automatically add your new scrobbles to ListenBrainz.”
I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.
Yeah. Didn’t work on Librewolf (only stock FF), the UI was slow, the recommendations (the reason I wanted to try) were pretty bad, the ads couldn’t be blocked properly and left a few seconds of silence in their place (the only site I encountered that behaved like this!), and logged me out repeatedly (sometimes mid-session), presumably due to me using a proxy.
“Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians.”
Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection…
not sure if this explains why their stocks are so extremely expensive. every time i look at it it’s worse.
Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I’d love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.
In my experience, the same fake albums show up on Deezer as Spotify. Frankly, I think the best way is Bandcamp. For for an album, download it forever. Stop paying to listen to the same music over and over and get DRM free tracks you can listen to your way while giving the money to the artists selling their albums directly.
Bandcamp the union busting company that laid off like 75% of its staff over 2023…?
I was recommended RiMusic from Lemmy, using the YouTube music selection.
It has a radio function but it makes wierd presumptions: say I radio off a synthwavey film soundtrack song, it’ll favor more show music that has little in common with the original selection. Maybe it’s just me.
Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
I couldn’t find any info on this. Do you have an article?
Not about the removal of said songs. But basically it’s a rapper known to use lot of controversial metaphors often using lot of etnic stereotypes in his lyrics about pretty much every communities including his own. Some anti antisemitic association compiled lyrics they took issue with on a video they published on twitter and it reached the prime minister. He then tweeted about starting an investigation on said rapper for terrorist and nazi apology in his texts. It went nowhere cause there is simply no such things in those lyrics but apparently deezer didn’t need a conviction to decide some songs had to go. If you want to search for more details rapper name is freeze corleone, be warned tho, he like to play with controversy so a lot of his lyrics contain conplotist bullshit and dictator/terrorist namedroping. But it’s never about their ideology that’s why talking about apology is stupid imo.
I’ve been using Deezer for almost a year now.
Things I like:
- Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
- Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.
Things I (we) don’t like:
- As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows (“hits” in other word).
- My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don’t have servers.
I find Flow fantastic for discovering new songs.
I have now used Deezer for a bit over half a year after Spotify.
The song selection is pretty equal. The playlists can even automatically be imported/exported with TuneMyMusic.
I think Deezer’s best feature is the song radio which finds songs of similar genre, and it really does find songs and artists I have favorited after hearing them. I always found that feature in Spotify to work pretty poorly.
However, if you don’t have an exact song in mind, finding music by theme is terrible in Deezer. There are few set categories, but the amount of user-created playlists is very small, compared to Spotify.
I’d recommend giving it a try, but I wouldn’t say its better or worse than Spotify. Just different.
I’ve been using Deezer since Tidal dropped Plex support. So far the library seems to be the same as Spotify, at least I wasn’t missing too many songs when transferring my Spotify playlists in.
I like the built-in song identifier and radio station support. The song quizes are a little gimmicky, but kinda fun. I probably haven’t used it enough for recommendations to get me down, but so far nothing crazy has popped up there.
I’m not sure if it’s just my phone, but every couple days when I first launch the app, I need to close and reopen it to get it to load, my desktop app constantly throws up a banner saying the app is offline, but it doesn’t actually effect functionality, so it’s just annoying more than anything.
I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify’s weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!
They pay artists better and it’s been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn’t easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.
Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you’re into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn’t pay as much as direct support.
This reads as an ad but I’m genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.
As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.
An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre). How was that even possible?
LOL a couple obvious reasons are that Spotify listeners don’t get to vote for grammy awards - only a few thousand people do - and to be eligible for a grammy an album has to be released in the United States. The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality. Jimi Hendrix never won a grammy. Neither did Bob Marley or Diana Ross. There’s a lot already wrong with the grammys.
The fake musicians and possibly AI-generated songs are more interesting. If the music industry is trying to eliminate musicians it wouldn’t be to avoid paying them - they’ve already figured out lots of ways to do that - it would be to have complete control over the music.
The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality.
Do you know who Jon Batiste is?
The album won on quality. The sales spiked after the win.
