The last and only truth I needed to know about Spotify was it’s 250 million dollar deal with Joe Rogan, who is antivax incel cancer, and that was it for me. No need to learn or know any more about them.
Normies love some Rogan he shills Russian propaganda to them!
Just like Fuckface 45 is the normal man’s idea of a rich man, Rogan is the normal man’s idea of a smart man.
And wrong on both accounts.
not sure if this explains why their stocks are so extremely expensive. every time i look at it it’s worse.
I mean they paid Joe Rogan $100 million dollars so they have already wrecked their reputation.
Yeah, I switched to deezer then, haven’t had any trouble with it.
Ngl, I canceled them and haven’t gone back since. Don’t really miss it much, I try to use the same cost as my subscription to buy music every month on CD when I can.
I just want to remind people that you may still have a used CD store in your city, also 2nd hand stores for CDs. They tend to be quite cheap these days.
I have recently discovered Qobuz (French company). You can purchase digital music. They aren’t cheap, but they have selection and hi-res music (sometimes 24 bit).
But good on you for the CDs, too!
I heard they pay artists a lot more. Need to double check.
Try bandcamp too. Almost all goes to the artist and you get FLACs.
I’ve used them plenty but…
They recently got acquired by a turd company and if I remember correctly, already issued a round of layoffs.
Don’t recall the details. Check.
I cancelled it the second I found out how easy it was to get it for free.
I still buy FLAC releases individually from artists I like, I just use Shittify for discovery. Fuck 'em.
Spotify was my penultimate subscription. Still have to bring my AWS Lightsail instances back in house. :(
Yeah, enshitification indeed. Was quite happy 4 years ago. Worth $10/mo. to get what I want and some new stuff occasionally thrown in. Suggested music tracked my tastes, easy UI, all that.
Then they upped it $1. Fine. Then I started getting all sort of bullshit when my playlist ran out. “Fuck was that?!”
Now that I cancelled the paid version, the ads are killing me. Look, I’m a GenXer, accustomed to ads for free TV and radio. I’m fine with that revenue model. But fuck me, just like modern radio, the ads became so thick as to be distracting. And of course I can’t use it in the deep woods where my internet is sketchy.
I download all my playlists. FOSS I can use to upload and play that on my phone? Guess I’m back to pirating.
But I am grateful for independent journalism, which is now my main hope for the future.
Well guess who’s in control of eyeballs on those journalists?
Social media companies, who have clear incentives to deprioritize such content and have repeatedly shown they do.
Let’s reclaim music from the technocrats. They have not proven themselves worthy of our trust.
While I agree with the article, I have issue with this line. These are not technocrats, they are “leaders” willing to make companies and their products objectively worse in the name of short term profits. These aren’t ‘technical experts put in charge,’ they are greedy, spineless pigs.
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”
After comparing the sound quality of Amazon, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal, the dynamic range of Tidal really stood out - even in lowest quality. At that time, I read that Tidal had the highest payout to the artists. I also like that the service is partially owned by several artists.
The recommendations and feeds are really top notch, just the right mix of stuff I know and like and nice surprises. The “Daily Discovery” often explores a certain genre or mood. There are so many cool bands I’ve found - also from genres I don’t usually listen to. I can wholeheartedly recommend the service.
Or Qobuz, which is like Tidal, but better and they never tried to sell users on made-up MQA hi-res.
I heard of Tidal a long time ago but their non-English support is simply missing. It doesn’t even show the original Japanese titles of many songs I listen to.
How about Qobuz?
Edit: Tested Qobuz and the Japanese support was quite bad too. I searched for a Japanese artist, their name showed up but only one song was there. Tried searching for the title of a song instead, no hit. I thought I was region blocked. Then tried romaji and finally more results, mixed in English and Japanese though. In Spotify I can search in Japanese, English, or romaji when I’m too lazy to switch input method. Also in Qobuz lots of Japanese artists’ profiles were incomplete.
Qobuz is refreshingly good.
I didn’t know this, but it makes sense. One of my biggest complaints about streaming (Pandora is guilty of this, too) is that anyone with a copy of Ableton and a mediocre talent can crank out tracks barely modifying the base toolset. I tend to listen to a lot of variants of electronic music. 95% of the music is absolute crap. 4.5% is tolerable. And 0.5% might end up in my playlist. Less tan 1:100/songs. I have no doubt that “band” or artist names were made up to crank something out, abandoned, and started up under a different name to churn out more boring samesies hoping for a few plays in one of those “made for you” playlists.
So the service doing this for themselves and enabling it for profit isn’t surprising.
This ratio has been true of music forever. We have always depended on filters to get to the good stuff. Used to be access to recording studios (hence labels fucking everyone), then DJ’s setting taste (had its own problems). Pick a period of time there’s always a group or economic filter separating wheat from the chaff (not perfectly but generally successfully?) which makes it hard for independent/lesser knows to break through.
Now everyone can record and publish easily, so it’s about finding shortcuts or tricks to game the system and get ahead. Or, as always, just get lucky 🤷♂️
One of my biggest complaints about streaming (Pandora is guilty of this, too) is that anyone with a copy of Ableton and a mediocre talent can crank out tracks barely modifying the base toolset.
People being able to do art isn’t a bad thing, and I’m glad streaming has made publishing so much more accessible.
Art… look, I get the premise of what you’re saying, but just because art is mediocre or just bad doesn’t free it of criticism because “art.” It can be shitty art and be called exactly that. It’s not sacred.
Yeah sure, it’s actually good to think critically about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s existence is a negative, which is how your comment comes off - dismissive.
In the same way the world would be a slightly worse place without the joys of b-movies like The Room or Suburban Sasquatch or Plan 9 FOS, or without outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston etc…
I don’t need to listen to badly made music any more than I need to be exposed to budget hotel room art on the walls of the Louvre. You wanna watch B movies? Great! But nobody’s inserting 30 C and D films between your current netflix series.
“badly made music” is a subjective idea.
“Inserting 30 C and D films” implies forcing someone, you are never forced, Spotify is not a goddamn radio station, you can just click on the track or album or artists you want.
Same thing with Netflix, you can click the search bar and type in your film or show of choice, you can even stop using Netflix altogether instead of just consooming like a slop vacuum.
Maybe touch non-algorithmically selected non-personalized grass too.
🎶 but look I made you some conteeeeeent daddy made you your favorite open wiiiide 🎶
Everyone always gave me shit for sticking with Pandora. It can basically do all the shit that Spotify can these days albeit a little different. You can even make your own playlists and listen offline if you have premium. It has a more limited library but it’s barely noticeable except maybe once or twice a year I can’t find a song I wanna listen to. It’s simpler and cheaper than Spotify with most of the same features. My favorite part is that I can literally pick any song I want and it will just continue playing after it’s over with similar songs. I’ve discovered so much music I would have never tried if it hadn’t shown up. And so far it hasn’t been overrun by AI slop like Spotify. Sure they pay artists less compared to competitors but at least they aren’t just straight up trying to replace them.
I’m not saying Pandora is objectively better. I’m just saying Spotify is falling into the world of enshittification and there are many alternatives out there. You could even just buy music and support artists directly like we used to.
Problem is Pandora is US only. They stopped streaming to the rest of the world years ago.
Damn I didn’t even know. That’s pretty dumb on their part as they could have been a bigger competitor. I’m sure they made the decision before Spotify took off as hard as it did.
I still prefer Pandora, it’s great for music discovery and it pays artists more than Spotify. I also feel like its recommendations are better or maybe I’ve just had better luck with them.
I’ve Definitely found new artists and albums after listening on Pandora that I went off and purchased CDs or albums thanks to it.
Apple Music’s recommendations were fairly good as well, and they also pay more than Spotify, but not tons and I abhor how it integrates music I don’t own with my actual library.
I need to try Tidal, but I also just don’t get the “you’ll stream everything and own nothing” idea. I just like “radio” services for discovering new stuff.
I don’t think this is earth shattering news. These companies identify when the audience is barely paying attention (to content and ads) and spits out the cheap stuff. I watch fly fishing and fly tying videos on YouTube and often fall asleep with it on. Then I wake up to the third hour of a professional bass fishing tournament. It happens a lot
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.
I’m just amazed they haven’t tried to use AI to write and record their shoddy muzak, cutting out the musician all together.
In some ways it seems worse that they make humans pump out this slop instead of a machine
Never had a compliant with Apple Music, has a decent Android client
Yeah, I’m looking to switch from iPhone to Pixel soon, but I’ll be keeping my AM sub. Had it since the day it launched, and it’s been great.
I understand that it’s a different model that will not work for everyone. But check out Bandcamp’s payout model. Find new music via internet radio/MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that)/yt and buy it via the model that is straightforward and at least seems to put the most money in artists’ pockets
Bandcamp also has a “discover” feature where you can set which genres you are interested in. I did find some interesting albums this way too
I’m a bandcamp user and buy stuff regularly there, only because they are the lesser of all evils… but what is their current status? I thought they went bankrupt and owned by tencent?
Are they still fighting the good fight? Or heading toward enshittification?
I imagine they will inevitably enshittify since the buyout but they seem to be good still for now.
The nice thing is I get to download the files so I’m not fucked when it happens.
They are still doing the Bandcamp Fridays where everything you pay goes to the artist, so that’s nice.
Bandcamp was owned by Epic Games, not Tencent for a short while, and now owned by Songtradr which does not have anything to do with tencent.
At least, this is what i found.
MusicBrains (I don’t remember RN the name of music exploration based on that
When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”
Insulting your users, that always works out so well
Insulting the artists too. Just like when Daniel Ek said that the “content” on Spotify was “basically free” to make.
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.
