This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I think it was revealed several times already in the past. Few examples out my hat:
When it was revealed how little they pay artists
When they tried to corner the podcast market
When they gave Joe fucking Rogan two hundred and fifty fucking million dollars for an exclusive deal
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.
Many of my friends use it. I'm old school and just keep a collection of mp3s on multiple devices for backup.
It's all but impossible to purchase an mp3 anymore. Anywhere you can theoretically buy music does everything it can to lock you in to their ecosystem and prevent you from accessing your music outside of it.
I believe that Bandcamp is doing a pretty good job with it. But you can always sail the seas
I have no issue sailing the seas, if I can't buy it an own it, then I don't see the problem in downloading it.
My mother hates Spotify and just wants to own her music and listen to like the 100 or so songs she likes, but absolutely cannot figure out how to buy them. She's not really technical and wouldn't pirate if she were.
Your mother is absolutely right and this old school way is not so old school, it's not mainstream but not really old school. But yeah piracy is a bit hard to accommodate, so in this way there are two options, teach her how to use it OR download her music.
If you support your favorite creators by going to their show or buying stuff I don't see the ethical problem of piracy. I've more than 1600 songs from a dozens of groups and I just love it, got the best quality (at least 16 bit 48Khz), can listen to the songs offline on my PC or with my iem (best kind of earbuds in my opinion).
The only downside is the size of the files, I have about 25gigs in my library, my phone and my pc have enough storage but if I'd like I could reduce this to around 5-6gigs by using "normal mp3 audio"
I live in Europe. Had Spotify for about 5 years, stopped paying and using 6 months ago.
I usually buy from Bandcamp, mostly non mainstream music, and download in FLAC and store it on my server. I can stream through the app on my phone when I'm out.
For the ones I can't find on Bandcamp, or albums from major labels, I tend to find it on Qobuz in MP3. Pricing trends to be similar everywhere.
My pirating nowadays is mainly for old music or establish artists.
Edit: autocorrect
No idea why you would think it's hard to buy MP3s. I've never had a problem buying any, just go to the big name FAANG companies' music store webpages or Bandcamp for FLACs. No DRM on any that I bought.
Used CDs (or local library). Ripping software. Super easy. Or just buy from Amazon and download your files to local.
People sell whole collections or discographies on ebay too, I've had good luck with that. CD, then rip them. I don't give a flying fuck what law says if I own the media I'm going to rip it.
For music that I really like, for artists that I really appreciate, I do look for ways to support them, because buying used does not.
Yeah, going from "Google Play Music" to "YouTube Music" was such a downgrade. Shit like Bluetooth had more issues with YTM, and they completely eliminated the ability to purchase music. It sucks and there are still no good alternatives on Android :-(
I've bought a ton of music off bandcamp and qobuz. Definitely not mp3 tho, not when lossless versions are also available
It's not hard to download a YouTube video as an mp3, so all you've gotta do is rip it from one of the many places it's posted up.
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
Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.
Tidal has decided to sunset it's app, which means it's basically on maintenance mode now. Somewhat off putting.
Did they? Couldn't find an announcement on the fly.
They laid off 10% of their workforce last year, and like 20% of the remaining work force late this year with cuts to engineering expected. It is not in a healthy place, seemingly, and they cover a very small slither of the market.
Edit: Couldn't find the exact article I had read before but this one seems well formatted. https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/12/tidal-bets-future-artists-djs/
It doesn't help that their parent company makes so little from them compared to a series of crypto ventures, but what can really compare to that.
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.
If you don't like it you don't have to listen to it. Every time some algorithm playlist churns out another spoonful of slop you don't actually have to open wide.
You could just look up the artists you like and what other people like that's like those artists, or look at collabs they've done or who remixes them or been remixed or covered by them and who they've been in bands with and what genre they tag to see who else is in that (micro)genre/niche.
I've never actually listened to someone else's playlists, not man-made nor generated, only my own, and I regularly listen to extremely niche folks with 1k-40k Monthly Listeners all of whom are completely legitimate artists with unique great music, many of them electronic actually.
The truth is that 99% of people like copy-paste slop and that's why they click on the slop and gravitate towards algos or charts for top ten artists.
And a global market for music with a low entry barrier means that it's easier than ever to get started artistically expressing yourself for fun and for yourself, just as it should be, but still hard to be actually heard if you want to take it commercial, even if it's fairer system than the gatekeeping of labels.
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.
Edit: nice massive edit you did.
And is this argument that “if i don’t like it I don’t have to listen to it”? The WHOLE POINT of Spotify is to listen to it and be exposed to music, and my position was that it’s littered with crap. You’re basically telling me that if I don’t like billboards along the roadside I shouldn’t bother having a car? Lol, whatever man. Shitty art is still shitty art. Not everything belongs in a gallery.
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.
One of the best thing to do is to pirate almost all of your music and then reward the creators by going to their shows, buying them shirts or even CDs (you can also rip physical copy if piracy is not a thing)
Or buy off Bandcamp on Friday's. But also support local and developmental acts
Ideally just send them money, most of the are set up for donations.
Tshirts and CDs create waste unless you actually end up using them
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.
The chart showing how much money the CEO has made off selling the stock.. wouldn't he run out of shares? It appears executives have sold over a billion dollars in 2024.
Makes you wonder if they heard these investigations were ongoing and figured they'd sell shares before lawsuits came and any potential dips in the company worth.
If so.. insider trading charges would be nice
CEOs are often compensated with stock, AFAIK.
Insider trading is almost a joke now, and about to become way more of one under the next few years of the SEC.
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!
I don't pay for Spotify, but if I do pay for music then I would choose Tidal
