Spotify is a background noise generator. With hard work it can be used to listen more attentively by searching for specific albums by specific artists, although the amount you’re contributing to those artists is ambiguous.
I can't stand Spotify's redesign anymore. Looking for an improved Winamp-like app with very simple interface and playlists. What should I try?
Apple Music is a joke as well. I can't even play some of my custom audio files (they're not music, custom sounds) because Apple thinks they are not allowed to play in my country. I can't play my own audio files because of some buggy software Apple doesn't care about maintaining anymore.
I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp. Everyone says they hate the interface but apart from the suggestions or the front page (which I don't use), what are the problems exactly? I have playlists with songs that I can double click to play. What more is there to it?
Default library view has a search box at the top and three main panes. Two on top, one on bottom. Top left is a list of all the artists in your library. Top right is a list of all the albums. Bottom is a list of all tracks that match the existing filters. Click on an artist, and it filters the albums and tracks, Click on an album, and it filters the tracks. Very information dense, extremely fast search, very responsive UI.
Compared to Spotify, where when I open it it defaults to a list of six playlists, a bunch of big fat tiles of podcasts I've never once listened to, a "Made for vel0city" horizontal scroll of auto-playlists, on and on. Extremely low density view, which is fine for a mobile device prioritizing touch but I'd like a denser view for desktop usage.
Winamp is a lightweight program that runs on your personal computer, loading files or folders of mp3s and other audio files that you own/control. The UI is pleasant, stable, customizable, responsive. Nothing will trigger the user's attention, no recommendations, UI changes or updates. No attempt to sell or monetize anything. No surveillance or tracking.
It's not perfect (adding and syncing music from Bandcamp could be smoother; it requires their Doppler Sync app to sync over Wi-Fi/AirDrop instead of syncing via cloud storage, which would be my preference).
But the UX is decent, it supports playlists, and it just works offline. If you can see your music you can play it which — oddly — has not been my experience with apps for streaming services that are supposed to let you download playlists for use offline.
I'm working on a new cross platform desktop music app with a clean modern interface. It should be ready for beta testing soon. Message me if you're interested in trying it.
If you're interested in owning your own music and hosting it yourself, you could spin up a Plex server and use Plexamp. Plexamp is probably the best music experience I've come across in the last 20 years. I just buy music from Bandcamp, HD Tracks, and Amazon when those don't have what I'm after.
Indeed. I've felt alienated since they launched the Electron redesign. The old client was both gorgeous and intuitive, as well as easy on system resources.
When I used Spotify I tried to hold onto the old client for as long as possible, going as far as locking down the Spotify update directory in %APPDATA% to null the autoupdater...
Spotify is one of the prime apps for "mass consumption", should be given the UI, UX and other aspects are geared towards your average nerf herders - not the tech savvy, independent-thinking-valuing crowd.
I’ve felt similarly for many years, but remain trapped using Spotify due to a lack of decent alternatives. Tried Tidal, but it wasn’t really any better. Would love to hear what leavers migrate to.
I do find Tidal to be a little better. I migrated due to comments on here and found it to not be the "no bullshit" experience that I hoped for, but it is a bit less obnoxious at least.
I switched to https://qobuz.com, mainly for the high audio quality (it goes up to 192kHz 24bit, which is worth it for me as I have the necessary equipment to make use of this), but it also supports "Spotify quality" i.e. mp3 quality/320 kbps, but I stayed for the experience.
It does not really have an algorithm, there is one playlist "My weekly Q", which updates each week with songs that you could like.
The only other algorithmic thing they have are song/artist radios like Spotify has, which also work relatively good.
Their front page features handpicked songs from people at Qobuz and songs that are trending on qobuz (these won't look at all like Spotify charts most of the time, as the audience is different). But you can customize the front page by filtering the genres you want to see.
But as mentioned I stayed for the experience, and this includes for some (by far not all) albums you can download the whole PDF of the CD inlet or see a description/history/backstory about an Album provided to you by Qobuz, also the choices that Qobuz handpicks are very often excellent picks which I immediately add to my favorites. And as these picks are not some algorithm that decides this, I don't end up in a rabbit hole of recommendations like on Spotify, but more often discover really new things that I would've never through Spotify. They also have their own magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine.
You can also buy songs, and they will be yours to keep forever, as you can get the songs directly as FLAC, WAV, ... without DRM and whatnot.
There is also an unofficial qobuz downloader, which is against their ToS, but works.
Though I still have not stopped using Spotify, as I'm in a family plan and don't pay anything for it, and sometimes Qobuz does not have some songs.
FWIW I also use https://last.fm for recommendations, and Qobuz can automatically scrobble to it.
All in all Qobuz has more of the "sitting in a Living Room and listening to vinyls/CDs vibe" rather than the TikTok/Instagram vibe that Spotify gives to me.
Otherwise, I found Deezer to be quite a good alternative to Spotify.
Sadly they all seem to be in a race to the bottom.
I switched to YouTube Music when Spotify made it clear they were going to spend a lot of money on podcasts, which makes it even more annoying that it looks like You Tube is planning on doing the same.
I end up missing Pandora (not available in most countries).
Deezer is really great, not enough people talk about it. It has a simple and great homepage, you can upload your own MP3s, playlists are still mostly human curated, it has a shazam-like feature built in, the playlist management is the best, and the recommendations are second only to perhaps Spotify.
I'm also not a fan of the direction Spotify is going, but if I want to keep listening to music, I don't see a way around it - and I don't think other music services are materially different. I support the artists I care about most by going to their concerts and/or buying merch. I use services like last.fm for better discovery. Spotify doesn't have to be the only way you interact with music.
The author doesn't say how they're going to keep listening to songs. Are they going to start buying/torrenting all their music? Are they going to switch to a different service, and does that service address any of the listed issues? Or are they simply giving up on listening to music (in the quantities/variety available through a catalogue like Spotify's)?
I have Tidal HiFi-Plus (19.99 Euro/month [up to 24-bit, 192 kHz]), but i can't really say that i would recommend it.
There is also HiFi (10.99/month [up to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz]).
My biggest problems with Tidal (except for the price) are:
- Music suddenly becomes unavailable (greyed out), only to be become available under the same name later again (but you need to manually re-add it to playlists).
- Sometimes it just stops the playback and if i resume it always jumps to one specific song.
I cannot say anything about the mobile player, as i only use it on PC.
Alternativly: Just buy the music you like as FLAC.
Thanks. I tried Tidal for a while. The experience was pretty good and audio quality too. Not quite worth the price for me though. Will try Apple Music since I have that with Apple One.
I find Apple Music materially different on some of these. The UX of the music app for Mac sucks, but I use other software to interact with it (Raycast) so rarely touch the app itself – you can't do that with Spotify with anywhere near the same success. The Music app for iOS is really nice in my experience. The Podcast experience is entirely separate, and based mostly on open standards (although Apple have an opt-in additional proprietary layer). And Apple pay ~2x what Spotify do for streams. Lastly, it syncs my music that isn't on Apple Music, which Spotify cannot do, so I can still buy music elsewhere (like Bandcamp) and have it all in the same library.
It's not perfect, I'd still prefer streaming money to be distributed in a better way, and the apps could be better, but for me it's noticeably better on many fronts. I've also heard good things about Tidal in a few different ways – they pay even more for streams and have higher bitrate streaming I think. Both are good ways of pushing back against Spotify's control of the industry.
I got pissed off by their product, so I just stopped paying them. Now I just hear ads every 10-20 minutes, which pisses me off even more. Now I really don’t wanna pay for Spotify anymore.
…it’s probably not the best business relationship, but hey, I didn’t start it.
If only it were the ads... I accidentally let my subscription lapse and the experience was so bad that it convinced me not to renew and leave the service altogether.
I mean yes, you get ads, but also your playlists get added random songs (which are pretty bad for my music), they play in shuffle only, and you can only skip a small number of songs per hour, turning the service into a radio you can sometimes fast-forward. I also had to reinstall the app because downgrading to free got it stuck - it wouldn't let me play my offline songs but it also wouldn't show me anything else. And for well over a year the only way to pay with a gift card on Android was exploiting a mild privilege escalation bug.
I imagine that there's someone at Spotify whose job is to identify how annoying your product can be before the number of lost ad plays surpasses the income from paid users, and I imagine their free tier is as close to that as possible. But that's a risky play considering they are not the only game in town.
Spotify are pioneers in brazenly enshittifying free tiers to bully users into paying for Premium.
I remember them pausing ads when they detected I turned the computer volume down or muted it, and resumed the ad when I turned it back up. This was in 2015 or so.
Playing them can also be expensive. A record player diamond tip can usually last 1000 hours, and they cost about as much as you are willing to pay, from a few € to idiotic amounts.
Are you talking about vinyl records? I don't think this technology from the last century has any benefit to digital recordings and apart from nostalgia or doing an archival it has no reason to be used still.
> It is markedly more expensive than Spotify, though.
A big reason I switched away from Spotify to buying DRM free albums is actually because I realized it's significantly cheaper to do the latter. I plan on listening to music for the rest of my life. I'm in my mid 20s.
Let's say I live for another 60 years. At current Spotify prices, that is nearly $8000. Obviously the cost of premium won't be $11 for the next 60 years though, so that $8000 is an extremely optimistic minimum.
While the cost of albums generally increases with inflation also, the cost of albums I already purchased never increases. For the rest of my life, an album I purchased for $10 will always be an album I purchased for $10. Even if that seems absurdly cheap in the future due to inflation.
Once you build up an initial library, it's very easy to spend less per month buying albums vs Spotify Premium. Over the last year, I would estimate my monthly average spending on music is around $2-3.
I have a very large library. My monthly spending (over the last two years) on Bandcamp is 20€, and I don't even spend that much there compared to others. I do spend a lot of time listening to music
And the fact is that you don't even need to listen to that many music. When I had Spotify, I only have an handful of playlists (managing albums sucked), that I listened to every day. Same with Apple Music, I only added the albums I already have in the library. I have like 500+ albums and when I want to add something, I spend time listening on Youtube (could go back to free spotify) if it's worth the effort to get them in my curated local library.
I use bandcamp, which is vastly materially different from spotify (at least for now) in both its value proposition to me and its commitment to fairly compensate artists. It offers phone apps on which I can trivially stream any music I've bought there as well as lots of music I haven't (though artists can also opt out of allowing this).
I can also purchase the music, which the artist gets a fairly significant cut of, and which the apps start yelling at you to do if you're repeatedly listening to the same albums. Doing this also lets me download it, either to local storage on one of the proprietary phone OSes so I can play it when I don't have signal, or as actual files I can put on my computer, which I personally then use to also stream it to myself on any linux device using freely available tools (mpd and shoutcast, often through an ssh tunnel)
I get that the last part of my use case allegedly requires me to be "technical" (IE set up a config file and use a command-line application or two), but the baseline use case of bandcamp provides streamable music without that, and it's not like it's some obscure thing no one's heard of either. What are you talking about?
> I don't think other music services are materially different.
I'm afraid you thought incorrectly, the following is true for basically every other service available:
* Better quality sound
* Payout to content creators is higher
* Cheaper
The nail in the coffin for me (as a consumer) was Ek's €100m A.I. arms tech investment.
The nail in the coffin for me as a content creator is likely going to be the new 1000 streams per song before getting ANY royalties; will have to see how it plays out, but I'm not having my music on that shitty platform if they're going to profit from it without recompense.
My Spotify has only one row of podcast recommendations (in the All tab). The rest are my type of music or the last album I was listening to. Am I missing something here?
> It keeps pushing playlists that feel generic, bland, more based on demographics than my years of consistent listening history.
I don't really agree with this point. The personal playlists (both Discover Weekly and the Daily Mix ones) are very close to what I usually listen to and have made me discover dozens of artists I didn't know before. Maybe they work better for some than for others, but they don't feel like being based just on demographics at all to me.
I don’t agree with the author too. My Release Radar is totally on point with my type of genre, it has been this way. I’m curious if author has a generic taste in music?
I feel like both of you are correct. It feels to me that Spotify's recommendations easily gets stuck in a 'local maxima' where it just keeps recommending the same music over again with little variation. I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated. Music just ends up feeling a lot more bland with Spotify, in my experience.
I don't even know what the Discover Weekly playlist is supposed to be. It frequently puts in not-new songs from not-new artists Spotify know I've been listening to.
I've had the same exact experience. I had to stop relying on Spotify-generated playlists because they just kept giving me the same familiar songs over and over again.
The "local maxima" thing is interesting, because while with Spotify it is noticeable sometimes, it was a lot worse of a problem with Google Play Music which I previously used. By the time they shut that down, I almost felt trapped into listening to nothing but Tycho.
> I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated.
Like which ones? I tried Tidal and music discovery sucks just as badly there too. I'm really craving a music discovery experience that brings back the humanity. Even when an algorithm suggests a good song, it still feels hollow and divorced from any cultural context.
I think Apple Music's playlists and algorithmic recommendations are much better and have more variation. Unfortuantely, Apple Music is terrible at playing music. OP can rightfully complain all they want about homepage customisation, but Apple Music, even on iOS, will just regularly refuse to play music files. Even worse with their embarrasing web or Windows clients.
My main complaint with Spotify's recommendations algorithm is that you cannot provide any clear negative feedback to it anymore.
I played a single Christmas album from an artist that my mom wanted to hear over the holidays, but I don't like that artist or style of music otherwise.
Now, every time they release a new song it comes up in my release radar, and random similar things pollute my discover weekly.
There's no way to say "never recommend this to me" or to remove past listens from my history. I'm just forever doomed, apparently, to get jumpscared with Christian contemporary music anytime I try to play these playlists.
Yeah fair enough, I have had the occasional few months where it goes a little haywire (too skewed to a genre / style I was just curiously listening to, rather than wanting more of).
It does seem to fix itself - although a negative feedback mechanism would be nice!
Not sure if it's a different team building the feature or maybe it is because they are more constrained by the actual choices of the existing playlist, but the recommendations I get underneath a playlist that I am creating are MUCH better than the generic playlists for the same genre that get promoted on the homepage / search results.
Yeah I find these recommendations (which I think are the same ones that play after an album or whatever has finished) to be really good on the whole. There are some songs it keeps suggesting and after a while it can get a bit “stuck” on the same artists, but I’ve discovered so much good music through them. The main For You playlists aren’t much good for me. I thought it might be down to the stronger signal of “this is specifically what I want to listen to”
I feel the same way about Spotify. It reminds me of Netflix in that it's hard for me to find interesting content to consume. I wish there was a way to become a power user, enabling me to better organize my audio library and delve deeper into their extensive collection to uncover new, intriguing music.
Moreover, the fact that artists seem to be paid so little makes me increasingly inclined to consider leaving their service for something else, like Tidal, or simply using YouTube Music.
By the way, if anyone is working on a Spotify killer, feel free to reach out. It would be fun to help out.
> I feel the same way about Spotify. It reminds me of Netflix in that it's hard for me to find interesting content to consume. I wish there was a way to become a power user, enabling me to better organize my audio library and delve deeper into their extensive collection to uncover new, intriguing music.
I have the exact opposite experience on Spotify, I canceled my Netflix subscription because I got tired of being stuck scrolling trying to find something to watch.
On Spotify I have my playlists, including an "Inbox" playlist for sorting later when I find interesting new music. On playlists it used to be able to start a "radio" for recommendations based on the playlist's content, that has moved to the "Enhance" feature which will interleave some tracks on an existing playlist, I can add the tracks I like to the playlist and ignore the ones I didn't like, then refresh the "Enhance" feature to get new recommendations.
When I'm listening to some weird ass music that I want to discover more artists/tracks on a similar genre I will start a track or album radio, when I stumble upon a track that I like I will add to a matching playlist or simply put into my "Inbox" one to sort later.
I've done that for the past 10+ years and have discovered many, many artists and songs this way, even completely new genres that I liked.
I dread the interface of Spotify. What do they employ massive numbers of UX people for? Nothing regarding Spotify's interface is any better than 2012. Cards, auto-play TikTok'ified video bullshit, weird navigation of menus and playlists, hidden core functionalities, lack of customization, funneling of user flows into garbage marketing content...
It's like they are sitting in a lab and professionally try to find out how to annoy people and make their lives harder.
In the end, I understand that they need to bullshit their way out of shareholder expectations but it's sad to see the enshitification of Spotify over the years. Let's see how long it takes them to nuke account sharing like Netflix and now Disney.
UX people just do what they think is right and follow trends. They don't do real research like how it was done in the 80's and 90's. And there's also dark patterns...
From what I've heard the Spotify UI is made by multiple teams. Each team makes their own section and other teams don't need to (nor can they) interfere.
The post notes that Spotify pays $0.003-$0.005 per stream, and compares that to the average exec making $200k/year.
If Spotify diverted all that exec money to artists, I wonder whether the $0.003-$0.005 figure would change, or if that would be too only amount to <$0.0005 difference.
It might be fair to criticize Spotify's deal with rights holders of music, but the above line of critique doesn't hold so strong to me.
As it happens, $200k/year for an exec seems low?
Disclaimer: I don't use Spotify and instead manage my own collection.
Spotify doesn't pay the artists directly. Apple Music doesn't pay the artists directly. Youtube Musice doesn't.... You get my gist.
All those pay to the rights holders. Why does no one ever question the rights holders: EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group why the artists are paid pennies?
I don't use Spotify anymore for random listening either. I use it only for very specific cases where I search for one particular song (and that's usually because I'm looking at a score at the moment and want to listen to it too, i.e. a very specific use case).
For everything else I only see a mess, basically what the author described. Bluntly speaking, it's become useless. Now I actually put on a CD at home when I want to listen to something.
However, I do listen to a particular podcast, on podcasters.spotify.com (10-minute Japanese listening practice), and at least there aren't any ads there.
I feel the same like, I cannot get away from some songs even when I dislike them.
I got some AirPods and have a few Apple Music subscription I’ll try instead.
I’ve also just started listening to some good radio stations like FBI in Sydney Australia. Best way to find new music in my opinion. I add what I like on Spotify and it spices it up a bit.
I had never heard of FBI radio but it's right up my alley, and I've actually lived in Sydney for many years. So cheers for the inadvertent recommendation there
Spotify did a good job until lately. Apple is quite unusable for me, since they can't distinguish between me and my partner - whoever starts something on a HomePod, it's done with my account. We tried to reset Siri often, but gave up on it.
Another downside is the ~4000 Songs shared Spotify Playlist with some friends&co-workers which is not available on Apple Music, and sadly they make it (IMHO) ridiculous hard to import Playlists from other Platforms.
People may not know what Echo-Nest is. Since I once worked quite
deeply with it, here's my thought on how Spotify might be dislodged.
Echo Nest is a set of music analysis routines that provide high level
information about songs, like tempo, time signature, key, chordal
modes, and other features best thought of as
compositional/musical. Beneath it is a deep stack of low level signal
processing parts, libaubio for example, for onset detection, spectral
flux, timbre analysis, pitch estimation. These build into
intermediates like chord analysis, rhythm classifiers and
whatnot. Above that you can build "genre" and "mood" then cluster into
a similarity space because there's few enough parameters.
It seems to me, more as a "mathematical intuition" at this stage, that
advances in NN for generative work could be targeted at blind
classification, bypassing the whole expensive parametric layers and do
machine listening on the raw audio.
Are there any recommendation and music search systems that work this
way. I expect the training prospect is terrifying, but whoever works it
out first will have an alternative and possibly better route into
music recommendation.
If Echo Nest were as important as you say, then that's bad news, because Glenn MacDonalds, the Echo Nest chief engineer, was one of those who were fired in the recent downsizing.
I'm not so sure they deserve all credit for Spotify's discovery features - those where at their best right after Sander Dieleman and Aäron van den Oord were interns there, and both those guys were snapped up by Deepmind and have a ridiculously good publication history by now.
But that Spotify is going to get a ton worse without MacDonald, is pretty certain.
Not sure what Spotify does, but I gets worse in all kind of different aspects. I don't take a look at the start page anymore, just noise.
I hear quite diverse Music genre, so it was quite nice that Spotify has Mix-Tapes so I could randomly pick one or the other. Release-Radar was a cool mix of new stuff. But lately it feels like they are pushing only on genre.
> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. While the indie artist I have been obsessed with gets literally nothing because they don’t meet a certain arbitrary threshold.
Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. If I upload my music to a platform that pays me 100% of the royalties, I will get to keep the most of 0 dollars, because nobody will be there to listen to it.
I would argue that the issue is mainly relevant for indies who are past the "much-needed exposure" phase, starting to blow up, and now don't get a good (fair) share of it. That would be a great moment to go off platform, and take the audience with them, but many can't (won't) do that, because it may mean less exposure. So, after all, Spotify seems to bring something of their own to the table (a pool of listeners) that they want to be paid for. To get more exposure, they need bigger artists, to get those, they need money and crooked deals to convince the big labels to license it. So, while unfair at first glance, comparing a Taylor Swift deal to what I'm getting off of Spotify perhaps (I'm only guessing), I am happy to accept the deal for the random exposure I am now enjoying because of it.
I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from).
I mean they are revenue-share deals. So each label will get paid a % of Spotify's total revenue according to the number of listens they have and how well they negotiated the deal.
So labels like UMG are going to get a better deal than some indie artist who just has to sign up normally. How much the UMG artists end up getting paid is up to UMG.
The problem is really that 90% of people listen to a few big artists that are owned by these mega-labels. And that distorts the entire economy of the sector.
It's not always people. Spotify has a spam problem. With the distribution key Spotify uses (correctly, if not precisely, described in the article), you don't even need stolen account credentials. You can just sign up a thousand accounts, and listen to your own fake artists, and actually get paid more than you spent on those accounts. All you need to do is play a lot more songs than the average listener. Make your spam songs short (slightly more than 1 minute seems to be enough to defeat Spotify's anti-spam algorithms, judging by the spam I find), and you can rack up a ton of plays.
And if you do that, you should even have room to put in a few plays of the big pop stars. So that you have someone protesting if your spam accounts get closed by spotify and their plays wiped.
> Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically.
I'm confused by your argument here. If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no? Let's say there are 1 billion music listeners worldwide (I pulled this number out of my ass). 90% of these want to listen to pop music and will subscribe to a platform that has the major pop artists. It then follows that these pop artists will naturally get 90% of listeners on the platform too, no? The only difference is the marginal 10% who want to primarily listen to indies.
In other words, a "fair" revenue distribution model would still direct most of the money to a handful of popstars, but now it wouldn't be so extremely skewed. Instead of 99%, they'd only get 90% - which should IMO be more than enough and crucially at least it's fair.
As it stands, indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists who don't need subsidizing anymore. It's completely the wrong way around.
I agree with all you say, but I probably didn't fully get the point you were trying to make with this:
> indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists
I am not sure how my $8 of Spotify money subsidized Taylor Swift and/or how that is a problem? I would have $0 otherwise, not $10. Spotify enabled me to get to the $8. Fair is a hard word when the distribution power of Spotify is not accounted for, I'd argue. Again, I know nothing, it's just one perspective I often find myself in, and it feels weird (being someone who benefits from Spotify, i.e. the $8 instead of $0).
> If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no?
Ah, but what if those big stars have the negotiating leverage to get paid more per play ?
If the platform has a fixed-size pie and can afford to pay $0.005 per play, but Joe Rogan and Taylor Swift will walk away unless they get $0.01 per play, should small artists' slice of the pie be reduced to $0.002 per play?
That's entirely possible, I wasn't delving into the "why". For what it's worth, I agree with you that the big stars have a much more concentrated negotiating power. Unless the small artists unionize, they'll simply have very little leverage.
> basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists
I don’t think this is right. I don’t know much about revenue distribution, but I think you’re conflating listeners and money. The ratio between the two is not constant. And I think this was the GP’s point — the percentage of money a top artist gets is more than an indie musician gets. Why? Because they have a better contract with Spotify (and Apple, etc). (And that’s okay)
So, let’s say the pop stars get 90% of the listeners. And they then get 85% of the possible revenue from those listeners. For the indie groups, they only get 50% of the revenue for their listeners (and yes, I know these numbers are wrong, but they are illustrative).
Pop stars = 0.9 * 0.85 = 76.5% of subscription fees to the artist. (+ 13.5% to Spotify)
Indie = 0.1 * 0.5 = 5% of subscription fees to the artists (plus 5% to Spotify)
In this case — yes. The popular groups will take home a much larger piece of the total revenue. Smaller groups have 10% of the listeners, but only 5% of the total revenue (and ~6% of the total “artist” revenue (5/(76.5+5)).
But if pop stars bring in more listeners, the absolute revenue for the Spotify (et al) is higher, which is all they care about. In the above scenario, Spotify would get ~73% of their revenue from the top artists. (13.5 / (13.5+5)). Which makes the difference in contracts worth it from Spotify’s point of view.
But the smaller groups still get more (relatively and absolutely) than they did in the age of physical media. And they have a much larger pool of listeners that can be exposed to their music.
You can be mad that smaller artists don’t have the same deal as Taylor Swift, et al. But that doesn’t mean that they should. That’s what I took from the GP post. You shouldn’t look at what is “fair” because (a) that’s not how the market works and (b) there are many ways to define “fair”. If those artists bring more listeners, then it makes sense from Spotify’s POV to cut a better deal with those artists.
Instead, I’d focus on how much absolute revenue artists get. Is it more or less when compared with pre-Spotify/streaming. And can you make a living doing it?
From the listener point of view - your $X/mo (£,€,etc) still goes to whomever you listen to. If you don’t listen to <insert famous artist here>, then they don’t get a fraction of your monthly fee. Does your favorite Indie band get a smaller slice of $X? Sure. But that’s still >0.
I agree with your analysis, I just wanted to point out that this is effectively a regressive taxation. In this instance, Spotify is the state and from it's perspective, it makes sense to tax the pop stars less (as a %-age of income) than some tiny alt-nu-grunge-garage-under-over-in-out rock-jazz-house band. That's what maximizes Spotify's tax revenue. But it's still a regressive tax. The richer you are (in the Spotify ecosystem) the less of your earnings you have to give up. Whether this is fair or unfair is debatable - I suppose in a pure market economy, whatever the market agrees on is fair. But there's a massive disparity in negotiating power, which means that the small artists are naturally disadvantaged. Big popstars have a huge concentrated negotiating power. Small artists do not. It is thus less likely that they'll be able to negotiate a "fair" revenue model, whatever that might mean.
Again, fairness is debatable. As a society, we decided that regressive taxation is unfair, because rich people can proportionally bear much higher taxes than poor people without impacting their lifestyle. I'm not going to go into the realities of rich people ending up paying a much lower effective tax rate due to being able to afford to optimize their taxes.
Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically.
That's because a small number of streaming services monopolized the market. In the old days, the mid-sized city I live in used to have like 15 mainstream music stores and 3 that carried mostly indie music and they were well-visited.
Streaming could be fair if they cut up the royalties by subscribes:
The average indie wouldn't even make it to these indie record stores though. They only have so much space and so much ability to carry slow moving inventory.
I think you've over-complicated this, or at least missed the point by quite a lot. The question is extremely simple: Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? I don't care how much money top performers want. If I am going to spend money on music, it should go to artists that I actually listen to. And it does, because I buy music on CD and via Bandcamp and other websites, instead of streaming it.
And that's kind of the thing. If I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator. It's Literally only music that works this way, to my knowledge.
There's plenty of problems with music licensing, and to me this is just another one of them.
> Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to?
Well, you could simply bypass Spotify and just buy the music directly from the artist, no (which you indicate you do)? So Spotify isn't necessary for this, I'd guess?
Spotify isn't a payment app for artists (again, I feel super weird defending them, I am not a fan myself!), it's a distribution channel.
That's exactly what I wanted to say further up but you summarized it way better in less words. I still think Spotify is great to discover music, but yes, there needs to be direct monetization outside of it!
I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there. You could give a more charitable interpretation by just treating Spotify as a music discovery service, that's not really what Spotify is marketed or intended for. Spotify is meant to be the ultimate end-game of online music streaming: it is meant to flat-out replace your giant MP3 library. And that's exactly how many people use Spotify. Not just Spotify, but also Apple Music, Pandora, etc.
If it was a music discovery service, it would be reasonable for artists to accept lower payouts and whatever other garbage because it's just an additional revenue source anyway. However, streaming music is not just an additional revenue source. Streaming music is becoming the primary way that people consume music all of the time. It is a $25 billion/year industry.
Artists and fans alike can't control the way that the larger market moves, but the way that the larger market moves will for sure have major impact on the entire industry and that impact will trickle all the way down. There is no reason to think that we can't or shouldn't try to discourage and flat-out regulate unfair practices. It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes.
I don't really understand the point of defending what Spotify does, Spotify fights tooth and nail to try not to pay more royalties. When they were small they argued they had no choice but to pay low rates because otherwise they could never survive, and of course they never went back and changed their mind on that, because what incentive do they have?
So yeah. My opinion? Spotify sucks, the article was spot on.
> I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there.
So people here are complaining about how Spotify does not pay the people who create music enough.
And there exists a zero friction option to pay the people who create music.
But people don’t want to use the zero friction option to pay the people who create music because it would cost $1 or $2 per song.
So yeah. My opinion? People are just really cheap, and what they want is to spend as little as possible on music, but at the same time feel good about it by blaming someone else for not paying the music creators more.
You want the people who create your music to be paid more? Go to their website, and buy it. Life does not get much easier.
Sure I buy music, but that's really beside the point and not at all to do with the problem that is being raised. We (at least me and whoever wrote this article) are in fact choosing to not use streaming services. But even if people are "really cheap" there's no particular reason their money should be split across artists they don't listen to, and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply must work this way, if it doesn't have to work this way for any other industry, it doesn't have to work this way for music. If we have to fix it with regulation, painfully, over a long period of time, then fine. I don't like that, but that's what happens when industries fail to self-regulate meaningfully.
> But even if people are "really cheap" there's no particular reason their money should be split across artists they don't listen to,
Listeners opted into buying a product sold by a business that does that. And the music creator also opted into it. That is where the market cleared. And people had and have the option to simply pay for the music directly, but they don’t want to.
>and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply must work this way,
Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).
>if it doesn't have to work this way for any other industry, it doesn't have to work this way for music.
Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.
The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money. So that’s how little people are willing to play (presumably because piracy is an easy alternative).
Edit to reply to below comment since I hit posting limit:
>Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries?
The biggest one is probably the ease of pirating music.
>And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested
The recent run up is still far from SP500 performance, which is basically break even. Since IPO, SP500 return is 11%+, and Spotify is 8%, which is basically a 3% per year loss.
Spotify’s biggest customers are the 3 big record labels (Warner/Universal/Sony) and exists as a negotiating tool against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.
Anyway, to conclude, I would blame the broad populace for not wanting to pay more for music. Surely, lots of them knew how to, and then decided they would pirate it, until a sufficiently cheap monthly legal streaming option came along.
> Yes, there is. They opted into buying a product sold by a business that does that. And the music creator also opted into it. That is where the market cleared. And people had and have the option to simply pay for the music directly, but they don’t want to.
Most people don't and will never have a deep understanding of what they're spending their money on. They are paying money to be able to stream music, and that's as far as 99% of the consumer base has thought things through. It's, unfortunately, always going to be the job of far fewer people to try to get some oversight into bad practices, because the market won't just magically do that on its own. To many people, it comes as a surprise that it's fully possible for them to listen to an artist all the time and yet have the vast majority of their subscription payment go to an entirely different artist they don't even listen to. Legitimately, people are surprised to learn this. It's not intuitive at all.
(P.S.: The fact that something is the way it is today is not in and of itself a "reason", that's just tautological.)
> Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).
Maybe 20 years ago, but this is pretty crazy to say today. We're going a bit in circles though. I already kind of went in this direction:
> It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes.
Barely anyone is actually capable of competing with Spotify in any meaningful way. Apple is one of the richest and most resourceful companies in the world and they already had a massive userbase of people purchasing music and it wasn't even that easy of a fight for them to get in the door with streaming. Spotify is still the global leader by a long shot.
> Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.
Unless you demonstrate some kind of reason why music would specifically have to work differently, I don't think it makes sense to simply take it at face value that it does. Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries? I think the answer is more cynical and less satisfying, which is to say, it was and is an industry that's easy to abuse, not unlike many other industries that have also suffered from pretty ridiculously unfair labor and payment practices, like anime, game development, or the VFX industry.
> The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money.
And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested in it. They know as well as anyone does that competing with Spotify and the other handful of big players is basically impossible if you're not either extremely wealthy or already one of them, so there's probably little reason to fret over it. Even amidst their huge layoffs at the end of the year last year, I would place my bets on them continuing to lose money and keep investing.
> if I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator.
In your examples, money goes to right holders, not necessarily content creators.
That was true in CD-age and is true on Youtube.
A big distinction to make I think
Sure, there has always been a bit of an issue with the money making it to the actual intended recipients with music. For some reason it feels like it's more egregious and weird with music than most other things.
True, but for the most part, the rights holders will be the labels representing the artists, and they'll have some kind of deal in play, so if you squint the artist still gets paid.
Sure, many label-artist deals are bad. But that's a different issue, and putting Spotify into the mix doesn't change the situation. Spotify is still paying the rights holders.
The only artists who aren't getting paid at all are the aging ones who sold all their rights to some conglomerates (Bob Dylan etc). They got paid via a normal record deal in the past, then they got some rights back after the old deals expired, then they sold their rights again for a lump sum and no promise of a return of the rights. Today, these artists get paid by their retirement portfolios not their music rights.
> I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from).
Because we want a level playing field that leads to innovation.
Just like we used to not tolerate monopolies in other areas of our lives. Or price fixing.
If you let the top few entities work together to extract most of the value for themselves and keep everyone else out, getting through will be nearly impossible for anyone else and you'll create a system where everyone listens to just a few artists.
It's well past time that anti-monopoly and anti-price-fixing laws get applied to situations like this. And to the disaster that is Ticketmaster.
thank you for the post. The recommendation engine becoming generic and main page of pushed content were also the reason I moved away from Spotify Family to Apple Music family - added I was keen to see apple 3D sound which is not that great today. Pushing the age limit, even Apple Music seems uninteresting and I keep listening to the same music over and over.
The UX of Apple Music is also terrible:
- awkward Music interface that you keep mixing library and cloud versions, and my kids still don't get it.
- Testing my intelligence and memory on each menu item to find where my Pink Floyd album I keep playing is.
- I don't care about any albums they push on the main page and no way to tell them Beyonce or Rap is not for me AFAIK. Why don't they offer simliar artists I can explore than generic categories?
- no way to remotely access my kids play options when they fall sleep (got Spotify for this feature)
- With the above items, low return value per Euro I invest, listening on the same albums over and over.
Can very well relate to being annoyed with Spotify being an all-encompassing audio platform. I guess there is a market to that. YouTube Music is also bringing podcasts to their app.
But for someone who actually consumed a lot of audio content, that’s a terrible idea. If they had separate apps for these and showed hints to get you to download others, it’d feel way more organised.
I’ve completely moved to Apple Music for my music needs. The search is horrible and the suggestions are okay at best. But the UX and the audio quality is amazing.
I’ve also adapted to searching and listening to Albums instead of searching for one track and letting the platform decide what I listen to for the rest of the day.
Completely unrelated. But what Apple Music does with popular Album Arts is also incredible. I don’t have a problem with existing still image album arts. But there’s a real chance that animated album arts are the future
Yep. I'm a very happy Overcast user, so I will never use Spotify to play podcasts. The podcast panel in Spotify UI makes that part of the screen useless for me. It bothers me about the same as an ad banner would.
Furthermore I'm annoyed at them calling whatever they are doing 'podcasts'. To me, a podcast means an open RSS feed. Even Apple, the king of walled gardens respects this.
I don't think an all-encompassing audio platform is a bad business idea. After all audio is not a big market as it is. But it should be possible to turn features on and off. I have zero interests in podcasts and audiobooks either - I have no patience for that stuff.
But it's important to note that at least with (paid) Spotify you can simply use a different client which doesn't offer any suggestion. This is what I do.
Outside of music the one thing I would want in audio isn't there though :( It would be erotic ASMR-style content. But as usual big companies stay away from anything under the belt.
Oh and I would love nature audio also but I don't think they offer this either (and it's pretty repetitive so usually a short clip on repeat works fine).
I dunno why people seem to have these weird relationships with commercial companies where they get disillusioned, feeling betrayed even, and then have to go through what essentially is a break up with these tax entities. Is there a term for this psychological phenomena?
I've seen slides from marketing agencies where they're called Brand Fanatics. Apparently if customers are emotionally invested in a company, they pay 3x more or something like that.
I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed. Only if I scroll really further than I've ever scrolled before could I find it.
Spotify shows me:
"Made for xnorswap: ": 5 "daily mixes" which have always been a bit rubbish because they're not really mixes, they seem to pick a song I like then they're that song's radio. The "Discover Weekly" mix is decent, the daily ones are not.
"Jump back in:" Continue listening to various playlists or albums.
"Recently Played": Similar, but for things I finished the first time.
"Your Shows": Podcasts I've actually subscribed to.
"More like bdrmm": Picks an artist I've recently listened to and suggests similar.
Only then we finally get to suggestions for things I haven't actually engaged with:
"Audiobooks for you": recommended audiobooks.
"Editor's Picks:" Suggested playlists
"Episodes for you": Episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed.
"New Episodes": More episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed.
"Shows you might like": Finally the recommended podcasts, about 5 pages down, and similar to podcasts I've listened to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan.
"Popular with listeners of Battleground": More recommended podcasts, again similar to a podcast I do listen to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan.
"Popular with listeners of Oh God What Now": More recommendations based on a podcast I rarely listen to.
"popular with listeners of TRiP": More similar podcasts.
"Popular with listeners of Scott Hanselmann": ditto.
"Spotify Original Podcasts": Finally, deep below anywhere I've scrolled outside of an exercise to look for it, I finally get linked to the Joe Rogan podcast, under a section where they link a bunch of Spotify podcasts.
Is Spotify UK totally different? Or has spotify put me in a "Likes music" category that has all the music recommendations above all the podcast recommendations?
Because I didn't even know Spotify Original Podcasts were a category until I scrolled 10 pages down to look for it.
>I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed.
That you have followed or listened to a podcast in Spotify is what makes you different here.
I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify, despite being a user since the invite-only days, yet the UI recommends podcasts at the same frequency as you've described.
I imagine many of the other people here do not want podcasts to appear anywhere in the Spotify UI.
Never listened to a podcast on Spotify and on my Home screen i have to scroll quite a lot (its like 10 row, pretty much in the middle of Home screen in my case) to see one row "Episodes for You" and one row of "Shows to try". Don't see how it is "pushing podcasts".
I've never listened to a podcast and have zero podcast related content on both mobile and desktop. There is one audiobook recommendation section, the 9th section down.
Maybe it's you indeed. Spotify shows me Podcasts I should listen to supposedly based on the ones I currently listen to, but... I don't listen to Podcasts, and I don't subscribe to any. I listened to two episodes two years ago on vacation with my girlfriend in the car, and didn't even finish them, and now I need to listen to all this great stuff!
In addition to that:
"Jump back in" and "recently listened" are basically the same list of albums. I have tried to understand the logic behind them, but it makes no sense to me, and could very well be just one section.
I listen two some very much non mainstream media. I do have two or three sections of "please listen to random German Rap, or maybe Taylor Swift, everyone likes that". If they base everything on data, they really should know that this won't make me listen to what they propose, so why do they do that?
> I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed. Only if I scroll really further than I've ever scrolled before could I find it.
I accidentally listened to a podcast in Spotify once. That podcast has been on my homepage ever since. There is no way for me to get rid of it.
I prefer multiple times to buy an album each month, and make the conscious decision of what I am going to listen instead of relying in algorithms. There's time for random playlist based in genre. But really, in this case, less is more.
Long article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in.
For me I navigate my music via My Liked songs + my own playlists for particular moods. If I open the app and press play it defaults to where I left off.
The fact there is a home page which shows options similar to what I like is fine, sometimes useful. Yes I’d prefer to customise it. Yes the recommendations aren’t perfect. Not a reason to quit, I love Spotify and haven’t found a better alternative.
The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal.
> The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal.
But you can, if you have the audio files you can use them as local files [1] in your Spotify library.
Local files in Spotify is extremely iffy. It has forgot them many times for me.
The worst is on iOS where you have to be on the same wifi and wait randomly. And sometimes without warning the files just go away. This is unacceptable. People need to play music for dance, yoga, exercise classes for their job. You can't just randomly throw away the files to have them discover this when the class starts.
I wonder if it would be possible to setup a folder on a remote server, and use that as the directory for local files. Wonder if Spotify would play nice with that.
Uploading music seems to work fine for Apple Music. It’s been a while since I’ve done it, but all the songs I’ve uploaded in the past are still available on all my devices.
I quit Spotify for the exact same reason, but I did not blog about it. I tried to host my own alternative, but I realized that it's hard to get the songs nowadays since everything is streamed. So, I switched to Deezer. It's nice that they have some support for local files for songs I already bought elsewhere and that are not on the platform.
However, there is something annoying on the Spotify homepage that drove me away...
Criticism is welcome, wrapping it in LimeWire nostalgia and extra 20 paragraphs of fluff to make it long enough for a blog post is makes it harder to find.
> Long article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in.
The "podcast pushing" is an underrated reason to quit; It's why I did. I decided it was effectively a safety issue.
I subscribed to Spotify Premium when I bought a car and installed an Android Auto head unit, telling myself "this will basically be my radio and I can control it from the head unit without messing with my phone"
The breaking point for me was when I had to scroll past 3-4 rows of podcast suggestions (onto an entire other screen) to find any music on my homepage. At that point, I decided it was unsafe, and began the long, arduous path of going back to 2008 and buying all my music piecemeal to host on PlexAmp. I'm quite happy with the results now, though.
I think people get frustrated when services change to try and acquire more revenue, which explains podcasts being shoved down your throat.
In regards to Spotify allowing uploading of your own songs, I remember I think they did have that at the beginning. I remember there used to be an option to import your iTunes library on Windows. I uploaded a small collection of MP3's and it worked okay, but was somewhat cumbersome compared to say Foobar or MusicBee.
I never use spotify's suggestions at all. I don't even see them in my client (spotify-qt). I don't want "discovery". I just want to listen to the stuff I already know I want.
Which is one thing I really like about Spotify, if you have a subscription you are free to use whatever client you wish <3
It also seemes to have avoided enshittifying itself, moving from free with ads to paid with ads like many TV streaming services have done. They still get a thumbs up for me.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadApple Music is a joke as well. I can't even play some of my custom audio files (they're not music, custom sounds) because Apple thinks they are not allowed to play in my country. I can't play my own audio files because of some buggy software Apple doesn't care about maintaining anymore.
Say what? Have you ever used Winamp?
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/RZcn2kEEAjWWV2jXYuJNUc.png
Compared to Spotify, where when I open it it defaults to a list of six playlists, a bunch of big fat tiles of podcasts I've never once listened to, a "Made for vel0city" horizontal scroll of auto-playlists, on and on. Extremely low density view, which is fine for a mobile device prioritizing touch but I'd like a denser view for desktop usage.
https://brushedtype.co/doppler/
It's not perfect (adding and syncing music from Bandcamp could be smoother; it requires their Doppler Sync app to sync over Wi-Fi/AirDrop instead of syncing via cloud storage, which would be my preference).
But the UX is decent, it supports playlists, and it just works offline. If you can see your music you can play it which — oddly — has not been my experience with apps for streaming services that are supposed to let you download playlists for use offline.
See for yourself: https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1634601462645882880
When I used Spotify I tried to hold onto the old client for as long as possible, going as far as locking down the Spotify update directory in %APPDATA% to null the autoupdater...
Very happy I switched. The new windows app is well built, too
It does not really have an algorithm, there is one playlist "My weekly Q", which updates each week with songs that you could like.
The only other algorithmic thing they have are song/artist radios like Spotify has, which also work relatively good.
Their front page features handpicked songs from people at Qobuz and songs that are trending on qobuz (these won't look at all like Spotify charts most of the time, as the audience is different). But you can customize the front page by filtering the genres you want to see.
But as mentioned I stayed for the experience, and this includes for some (by far not all) albums you can download the whole PDF of the CD inlet or see a description/history/backstory about an Album provided to you by Qobuz, also the choices that Qobuz handpicks are very often excellent picks which I immediately add to my favorites. And as these picks are not some algorithm that decides this, I don't end up in a rabbit hole of recommendations like on Spotify, but more often discover really new things that I would've never through Spotify. They also have their own magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine.
You can also buy songs, and they will be yours to keep forever, as you can get the songs directly as FLAC, WAV, ... without DRM and whatnot.
There is also an unofficial qobuz downloader, which is against their ToS, but works.
Though I still have not stopped using Spotify, as I'm in a family plan and don't pay anything for it, and sometimes Qobuz does not have some songs.
FWIW I also use https://last.fm for recommendations, and Qobuz can automatically scrobble to it.
All in all Qobuz has more of the "sitting in a Living Room and listening to vinyls/CDs vibe" rather than the TikTok/Instagram vibe that Spotify gives to me.
Otherwise, I found Deezer to be quite a good alternative to Spotify.
I switched to YouTube Music when Spotify made it clear they were going to spend a lot of money on podcasts, which makes it even more annoying that it looks like You Tube is planning on doing the same.
I end up missing Pandora (not available in most countries).
The author doesn't say how they're going to keep listening to songs. Are they going to start buying/torrenting all their music? Are they going to switch to a different service, and does that service address any of the listed issues? Or are they simply giving up on listening to music (in the quantities/variety available through a catalogue like Spotify's)?
They very much do if you care about audio quality.
Spotify still doesn't support high-res audio e.g. CD quality and above.
My biggest problems with Tidal (except for the price) are: - Music suddenly becomes unavailable (greyed out), only to be become available under the same name later again (but you need to manually re-add it to playlists). - Sometimes it just stops the playback and if i resume it always jumps to one specific song.
I cannot say anything about the mobile player, as i only use it on PC.
Alternativly: Just buy the music you like as FLAC.
It's not perfect, I'd still prefer streaming money to be distributed in a better way, and the apps could be better, but for me it's noticeably better on many fronts. I've also heard good things about Tidal in a few different ways – they pay even more for streams and have higher bitrate streaming I think. Both are good ways of pushing back against Spotify's control of the industry.
Just that alone is enough for me to support them rather than Spotify.
Along with the fact that Apple's discovery and new music playlists have gotten a lot better than Spotify's in just a few years.
…it’s probably not the best business relationship, but hey, I didn’t start it.
I mean yes, you get ads, but also your playlists get added random songs (which are pretty bad for my music), they play in shuffle only, and you can only skip a small number of songs per hour, turning the service into a radio you can sometimes fast-forward. I also had to reinstall the app because downgrading to free got it stuck - it wouldn't let me play my offline songs but it also wouldn't show me anything else. And for well over a year the only way to pay with a gift card on Android was exploiting a mild privilege escalation bug.
I imagine that there's someone at Spotify whose job is to identify how annoying your product can be before the number of lost ad plays surpasses the income from paid users, and I imagine their free tier is as close to that as possible. But that's a risky play considering they are not the only game in town.
I remember them pausing ads when they detected I turned the computer volume down or muted it, and resumed the ad when I turned it back up. This was in 2015 or so.
Buying albums works. It’s what I do. It is markedly more expensive than Spotify, though.
A big reason I switched away from Spotify to buying DRM free albums is actually because I realized it's significantly cheaper to do the latter. I plan on listening to music for the rest of my life. I'm in my mid 20s.
Let's say I live for another 60 years. At current Spotify prices, that is nearly $8000. Obviously the cost of premium won't be $11 for the next 60 years though, so that $8000 is an extremely optimistic minimum.
While the cost of albums generally increases with inflation also, the cost of albums I already purchased never increases. For the rest of my life, an album I purchased for $10 will always be an album I purchased for $10. Even if that seems absurdly cheap in the future due to inflation.
Once you build up an initial library, it's very easy to spend less per month buying albums vs Spotify Premium. Over the last year, I would estimate my monthly average spending on music is around $2-3.
I can also purchase the music, which the artist gets a fairly significant cut of, and which the apps start yelling at you to do if you're repeatedly listening to the same albums. Doing this also lets me download it, either to local storage on one of the proprietary phone OSes so I can play it when I don't have signal, or as actual files I can put on my computer, which I personally then use to also stream it to myself on any linux device using freely available tools (mpd and shoutcast, often through an ssh tunnel)
I get that the last part of my use case allegedly requires me to be "technical" (IE set up a config file and use a command-line application or two), but the baseline use case of bandcamp provides streamable music without that, and it's not like it's some obscure thing no one's heard of either. What are you talking about?
I'm afraid you thought incorrectly, the following is true for basically every other service available:
* Better quality sound
* Payout to content creators is higher
* Cheaper
The nail in the coffin for me (as a consumer) was Ek's €100m A.I. arms tech investment.
The nail in the coffin for me as a content creator is likely going to be the new 1000 streams per song before getting ANY royalties; will have to see how it plays out, but I'm not having my music on that shitty platform if they're going to profit from it without recompense.
I don't really agree with this point. The personal playlists (both Discover Weekly and the Daily Mix ones) are very close to what I usually listen to and have made me discover dozens of artists I didn't know before. Maybe they work better for some than for others, but they don't feel like being based just on demographics at all to me.
I don't even know what the Discover Weekly playlist is supposed to be. It frequently puts in not-new songs from not-new artists Spotify know I've been listening to.
I think the parent might be a new user. It was good for me for a few years but now it’s just stale as shit.
I've been using Spotify since 2015.
Like which ones? I tried Tidal and music discovery sucks just as badly there too. I'm really craving a music discovery experience that brings back the humanity. Even when an algorithm suggests a good song, it still feels hollow and divorced from any cultural context.
I think Spotify's problem may stem from their quest from incresingly precise taxonomy for music https://pudding.cool/2023/10/genre/
I played a single Christmas album from an artist that my mom wanted to hear over the holidays, but I don't like that artist or style of music otherwise.
Now, every time they release a new song it comes up in my release radar, and random similar things pollute my discover weekly.
There's no way to say "never recommend this to me" or to remove past listens from my history. I'm just forever doomed, apparently, to get jumpscared with Christian contemporary music anytime I try to play these playlists.
It does seem to fix itself - although a negative feedback mechanism would be nice!
Moreover, the fact that artists seem to be paid so little makes me increasingly inclined to consider leaving their service for something else, like Tidal, or simply using YouTube Music.
By the way, if anyone is working on a Spotify killer, feel free to reach out. It would be fun to help out.
I have the exact opposite experience on Spotify, I canceled my Netflix subscription because I got tired of being stuck scrolling trying to find something to watch.
On Spotify I have my playlists, including an "Inbox" playlist for sorting later when I find interesting new music. On playlists it used to be able to start a "radio" for recommendations based on the playlist's content, that has moved to the "Enhance" feature which will interleave some tracks on an existing playlist, I can add the tracks I like to the playlist and ignore the ones I didn't like, then refresh the "Enhance" feature to get new recommendations.
When I'm listening to some weird ass music that I want to discover more artists/tracks on a similar genre I will start a track or album radio, when I stumble upon a track that I like I will add to a matching playlist or simply put into my "Inbox" one to sort later.
I've done that for the past 10+ years and have discovered many, many artists and songs this way, even completely new genres that I liked.
It's like they are sitting in a lab and professionally try to find out how to annoy people and make their lives harder.
In the end, I understand that they need to bullshit their way out of shareholder expectations but it's sad to see the enshitification of Spotify over the years. Let's see how long it takes them to nuke account sharing like Netflix and now Disney.
If Spotify diverted all that exec money to artists, I wonder whether the $0.003-$0.005 figure would change, or if that would be too only amount to <$0.0005 difference.
It might be fair to criticize Spotify's deal with rights holders of music, but the above line of critique doesn't hold so strong to me.
As it happens, $200k/year for an exec seems low?
Disclaimer: I don't use Spotify and instead manage my own collection.
In 17% layoff, the numbers was around 1500 employees fired. It means there are around 7300 employees left. So that includes some execs.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/04/tech/spotify-layoffs-thir...
All those pay to the rights holders. Why does no one ever question the rights holders: EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group why the artists are paid pennies?
https://artists.apple.com/partners
CDBaby is popular where 91% of revenue from Apple, Spotify etc goes to the artist.
So then it seems that the price per stream does make a difference.
For everything else I only see a mess, basically what the author described. Bluntly speaking, it's become useless. Now I actually put on a CD at home when I want to listen to something.
However, I do listen to a particular podcast, on podcasters.spotify.com (10-minute Japanese listening practice), and at least there aren't any ads there.
I keep getting Black Sabbath's Paranoid, the song, in various "deep cuts" and "new music" themed lists and suggestions. It's from 1969.
Apple's lists and suggestions may actually have new music.
I got some AirPods and have a few Apple Music subscription I’ll try instead.
I’ve also just started listening to some good radio stations like FBI in Sydney Australia. Best way to find new music in my opinion. I add what I like on Spotify and it spices it up a bit.
Going the artist link, it doesn't even list all the albums.
YouTube Music on the other hand has everything and more.
Another downside is the ~4000 Songs shared Spotify Playlist with some friends&co-workers which is not available on Apple Music, and sadly they make it (IMHO) ridiculous hard to import Playlists from other Platforms.
I tend to think whatever good bits we see (Discovery being good) is sitting on the shoulders of that base work.
Yet, the product values of Spotify do not align with these people or musicians anymore.
Echo Nest is a set of music analysis routines that provide high level information about songs, like tempo, time signature, key, chordal modes, and other features best thought of as compositional/musical. Beneath it is a deep stack of low level signal processing parts, libaubio for example, for onset detection, spectral flux, timbre analysis, pitch estimation. These build into intermediates like chord analysis, rhythm classifiers and whatnot. Above that you can build "genre" and "mood" then cluster into a similarity space because there's few enough parameters.
It seems to me, more as a "mathematical intuition" at this stage, that advances in NN for generative work could be targeted at blind classification, bypassing the whole expensive parametric layers and do machine listening on the raw audio.
Are there any recommendation and music search systems that work this way. I expect the training prospect is terrifying, but whoever works it out first will have an alternative and possibly better route into music recommendation.
I'm not so sure they deserve all credit for Spotify's discovery features - those where at their best right after Sander Dieleman and Aäron van den Oord were interns there, and both those guys were snapped up by Deepmind and have a ridiculously good publication history by now.
But that Spotify is going to get a ton worse without MacDonald, is pretty certain.
Verschlimmbessern at its best.
Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. If I upload my music to a platform that pays me 100% of the royalties, I will get to keep the most of 0 dollars, because nobody will be there to listen to it.
I would argue that the issue is mainly relevant for indies who are past the "much-needed exposure" phase, starting to blow up, and now don't get a good (fair) share of it. That would be a great moment to go off platform, and take the audience with them, but many can't (won't) do that, because it may mean less exposure. So, after all, Spotify seems to bring something of their own to the table (a pool of listeners) that they want to be paid for. To get more exposure, they need bigger artists, to get those, they need money and crooked deals to convince the big labels to license it. So, while unfair at first glance, comparing a Taylor Swift deal to what I'm getting off of Spotify perhaps (I'm only guessing), I am happy to accept the deal for the random exposure I am now enjoying because of it.
I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from).
So labels like UMG are going to get a better deal than some indie artist who just has to sign up normally. How much the UMG artists end up getting paid is up to UMG.
The problem is really that 90% of people listen to a few big artists that are owned by these mega-labels. And that distorts the entire economy of the sector.
And if you do that, you should even have room to put in a few plays of the big pop stars. So that you have someone protesting if your spam accounts get closed by spotify and their plays wiped.
I'm confused by your argument here. If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no? Let's say there are 1 billion music listeners worldwide (I pulled this number out of my ass). 90% of these want to listen to pop music and will subscribe to a platform that has the major pop artists. It then follows that these pop artists will naturally get 90% of listeners on the platform too, no? The only difference is the marginal 10% who want to primarily listen to indies.
In other words, a "fair" revenue distribution model would still direct most of the money to a handful of popstars, but now it wouldn't be so extremely skewed. Instead of 99%, they'd only get 90% - which should IMO be more than enough and crucially at least it's fair.
As it stands, indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists who don't need subsidizing anymore. It's completely the wrong way around.
I am not sure how my $8 of Spotify money subsidized Taylor Swift and/or how that is a problem? I would have $0 otherwise, not $10. Spotify enabled me to get to the $8. Fair is a hard word when the distribution power of Spotify is not accounted for, I'd argue. Again, I know nothing, it's just one perspective I often find myself in, and it feels weird (being someone who benefits from Spotify, i.e. the $8 instead of $0).
Ah, but what if those big stars have the negotiating leverage to get paid more per play ?
If the platform has a fixed-size pie and can afford to pay $0.005 per play, but Joe Rogan and Taylor Swift will walk away unless they get $0.01 per play, should small artists' slice of the pie be reduced to $0.002 per play?
I don’t think this is right. I don’t know much about revenue distribution, but I think you’re conflating listeners and money. The ratio between the two is not constant. And I think this was the GP’s point — the percentage of money a top artist gets is more than an indie musician gets. Why? Because they have a better contract with Spotify (and Apple, etc). (And that’s okay)
So, let’s say the pop stars get 90% of the listeners. And they then get 85% of the possible revenue from those listeners. For the indie groups, they only get 50% of the revenue for their listeners (and yes, I know these numbers are wrong, but they are illustrative).
Pop stars = 0.9 * 0.85 = 76.5% of subscription fees to the artist. (+ 13.5% to Spotify)
Indie = 0.1 * 0.5 = 5% of subscription fees to the artists (plus 5% to Spotify)
In this case — yes. The popular groups will take home a much larger piece of the total revenue. Smaller groups have 10% of the listeners, but only 5% of the total revenue (and ~6% of the total “artist” revenue (5/(76.5+5)).
But if pop stars bring in more listeners, the absolute revenue for the Spotify (et al) is higher, which is all they care about. In the above scenario, Spotify would get ~73% of their revenue from the top artists. (13.5 / (13.5+5)). Which makes the difference in contracts worth it from Spotify’s point of view.
But the smaller groups still get more (relatively and absolutely) than they did in the age of physical media. And they have a much larger pool of listeners that can be exposed to their music.
You can be mad that smaller artists don’t have the same deal as Taylor Swift, et al. But that doesn’t mean that they should. That’s what I took from the GP post. You shouldn’t look at what is “fair” because (a) that’s not how the market works and (b) there are many ways to define “fair”. If those artists bring more listeners, then it makes sense from Spotify’s POV to cut a better deal with those artists.
Instead, I’d focus on how much absolute revenue artists get. Is it more or less when compared with pre-Spotify/streaming. And can you make a living doing it?
From the listener point of view - your $X/mo (£,€,etc) still goes to whomever you listen to. If you don’t listen to <insert famous artist here>, then they don’t get a fraction of your monthly fee. Does your favorite Indie band get a smaller slice of $X? Sure. But that’s still >0.
Again, fairness is debatable. As a society, we decided that regressive taxation is unfair, because rich people can proportionally bear much higher taxes than poor people without impacting their lifestyle. I'm not going to go into the realities of rich people ending up paying a much lower effective tax rate due to being able to afford to optimize their taxes.
That's because a small number of streaming services monopolized the market. In the old days, the mid-sized city I live in used to have like 15 mainstream music stores and 3 that carried mostly indie music and they were well-visited.
Streaming could be fair if they cut up the royalties by subscribes:
https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-o...
But the labels with major pop acts simply will not let that happen, because it'll drastically lower their revenue.
And that's kind of the thing. If I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator. It's Literally only music that works this way, to my knowledge.
There's plenty of problems with music licensing, and to me this is just another one of them.
Well, you could simply bypass Spotify and just buy the music directly from the artist, no (which you indicate you do)? So Spotify isn't necessary for this, I'd guess?
Spotify isn't a payment app for artists (again, I feel super weird defending them, I am not a fan myself!), it's a distribution channel.
If it was a music discovery service, it would be reasonable for artists to accept lower payouts and whatever other garbage because it's just an additional revenue source anyway. However, streaming music is not just an additional revenue source. Streaming music is becoming the primary way that people consume music all of the time. It is a $25 billion/year industry.
Artists and fans alike can't control the way that the larger market moves, but the way that the larger market moves will for sure have major impact on the entire industry and that impact will trickle all the way down. There is no reason to think that we can't or shouldn't try to discourage and flat-out regulate unfair practices. It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes.
I don't really understand the point of defending what Spotify does, Spotify fights tooth and nail to try not to pay more royalties. When they were small they argued they had no choice but to pay low rates because otherwise they could never survive, and of course they never went back and changed their mind on that, because what incentive do they have?
So yeah. My opinion? Spotify sucks, the article was spot on.
So people here are complaining about how Spotify does not pay the people who create music enough.
And there exists a zero friction option to pay the people who create music.
But people don’t want to use the zero friction option to pay the people who create music because it would cost $1 or $2 per song.
So yeah. My opinion? People are just really cheap, and what they want is to spend as little as possible on music, but at the same time feel good about it by blaming someone else for not paying the music creators more.
You want the people who create your music to be paid more? Go to their website, and buy it. Life does not get much easier.
Listeners opted into buying a product sold by a business that does that. And the music creator also opted into it. That is where the market cleared. And people had and have the option to simply pay for the music directly, but they don’t want to.
>and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply must work this way,
Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).
>if it doesn't have to work this way for any other industry, it doesn't have to work this way for music.
Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.
The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money. So that’s how little people are willing to play (presumably because piracy is an easy alternative).
Edit to reply to below comment since I hit posting limit:
>Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries?
The biggest one is probably the ease of pirating music.
>And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested
The recent run up is still far from SP500 performance, which is basically break even. Since IPO, SP500 return is 11%+, and Spotify is 8%, which is basically a 3% per year loss.
Spotify’s biggest customers are the 3 big record labels (Warner/Universal/Sony) and exists as a negotiating tool against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.
Anyway, to conclude, I would blame the broad populace for not wanting to pay more for music. Surely, lots of them knew how to, and then decided they would pirate it, until a sufficiently cheap monthly legal streaming option came along.
Most people don't and will never have a deep understanding of what they're spending their money on. They are paying money to be able to stream music, and that's as far as 99% of the consumer base has thought things through. It's, unfortunately, always going to be the job of far fewer people to try to get some oversight into bad practices, because the market won't just magically do that on its own. To many people, it comes as a surprise that it's fully possible for them to listen to an artist all the time and yet have the vast majority of their subscription payment go to an entirely different artist they don't even listen to. Legitimately, people are surprised to learn this. It's not intuitive at all.
(P.S.: The fact that something is the way it is today is not in and of itself a "reason", that's just tautological.)
> Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).
Maybe 20 years ago, but this is pretty crazy to say today. We're going a bit in circles though. I already kind of went in this direction:
> It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes.
Barely anyone is actually capable of competing with Spotify in any meaningful way. Apple is one of the richest and most resourceful companies in the world and they already had a massive userbase of people purchasing music and it wasn't even that easy of a fight for them to get in the door with streaming. Spotify is still the global leader by a long shot.
> Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.
Unless you demonstrate some kind of reason why music would specifically have to work differently, I don't think it makes sense to simply take it at face value that it does. Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries? I think the answer is more cynical and less satisfying, which is to say, it was and is an industry that's easy to abuse, not unlike many other industries that have also suffered from pretty ridiculously unfair labor and payment practices, like anime, game development, or the VFX industry.
> The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money.
And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested in it. They know as well as anyone does that competing with Spotify and the other handful of big players is basically impossible if you're not either extremely wealthy or already one of them, so there's probably little reason to fret over it. Even amidst their huge layoffs at the end of the year last year, I would place my bets on them continuing to lose money and keep investing.
The internet largely sucks because of ads and tracking. But it's cheaper for users than paying directly, so it's what we are stuck with.
In your examples, money goes to right holders, not necessarily content creators. That was true in CD-age and is true on Youtube. A big distinction to make I think
Sure, many label-artist deals are bad. But that's a different issue, and putting Spotify into the mix doesn't change the situation. Spotify is still paying the rights holders.
The only artists who aren't getting paid at all are the aging ones who sold all their rights to some conglomerates (Bob Dylan etc). They got paid via a normal record deal in the past, then they got some rights back after the old deals expired, then they sold their rights again for a lump sum and no promise of a return of the rights. Today, these artists get paid by their retirement portfolios not their music rights.
Because we want a level playing field that leads to innovation.
Just like we used to not tolerate monopolies in other areas of our lives. Or price fixing.
If you let the top few entities work together to extract most of the value for themselves and keep everyone else out, getting through will be nearly impossible for anyone else and you'll create a system where everyone listens to just a few artists.
It's well past time that anti-monopoly and anti-price-fixing laws get applied to situations like this. And to the disaster that is Ticketmaster.
The UX of Apple Music is also terrible: - awkward Music interface that you keep mixing library and cloud versions, and my kids still don't get it. - Testing my intelligence and memory on each menu item to find where my Pink Floyd album I keep playing is. - I don't care about any albums they push on the main page and no way to tell them Beyonce or Rap is not for me AFAIK. Why don't they offer simliar artists I can explore than generic categories? - no way to remotely access my kids play options when they fall sleep (got Spotify for this feature) - With the above items, low return value per Euro I invest, listening on the same albums over and over.
Curious if there is a better way...
But for someone who actually consumed a lot of audio content, that’s a terrible idea. If they had separate apps for these and showed hints to get you to download others, it’d feel way more organised.
I’ve completely moved to Apple Music for my music needs. The search is horrible and the suggestions are okay at best. But the UX and the audio quality is amazing.
I’ve also adapted to searching and listening to Albums instead of searching for one track and letting the platform decide what I listen to for the rest of the day.
Completely unrelated. But what Apple Music does with popular Album Arts is also incredible. I don’t have a problem with existing still image album arts. But there’s a real chance that animated album arts are the future
Furthermore I'm annoyed at them calling whatever they are doing 'podcasts'. To me, a podcast means an open RSS feed. Even Apple, the king of walled gardens respects this.
But it's important to note that at least with (paid) Spotify you can simply use a different client which doesn't offer any suggestion. This is what I do.
Outside of music the one thing I would want in audio isn't there though :( It would be erotic ASMR-style content. But as usual big companies stay away from anything under the belt.
Oh and I would love nature audio also but I don't think they offer this either (and it's pretty repetitive so usually a short clip on repeat works fine).
I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed. Only if I scroll really further than I've ever scrolled before could I find it.
Spotify shows me:
"Made for xnorswap: ": 5 "daily mixes" which have always been a bit rubbish because they're not really mixes, they seem to pick a song I like then they're that song's radio. The "Discover Weekly" mix is decent, the daily ones are not.
"Jump back in:" Continue listening to various playlists or albums.
"Recently Played": Similar, but for things I finished the first time.
"Your Shows": Podcasts I've actually subscribed to.
"More like bdrmm": Picks an artist I've recently listened to and suggests similar.
Only then we finally get to suggestions for things I haven't actually engaged with:
"Audiobooks for you": recommended audiobooks.
"Editor's Picks:" Suggested playlists
"Episodes for you": Episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed.
"New Episodes": More episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed.
"Shows you might like": Finally the recommended podcasts, about 5 pages down, and similar to podcasts I've listened to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan.
"Popular with listeners of Battleground": More recommended podcasts, again similar to a podcast I do listen to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan.
"Popular with listeners of Oh God What Now": More recommendations based on a podcast I rarely listen to.
"popular with listeners of TRiP": More similar podcasts.
"Popular with listeners of Scott Hanselmann": ditto.
"Spotify Original Podcasts": Finally, deep below anywhere I've scrolled outside of an exercise to look for it, I finally get linked to the Joe Rogan podcast, under a section where they link a bunch of Spotify podcasts.
Is Spotify UK totally different? Or has spotify put me in a "Likes music" category that has all the music recommendations above all the podcast recommendations?
Because I didn't even know Spotify Original Podcasts were a category until I scrolled 10 pages down to look for it.
>I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed.
That you have followed or listened to a podcast in Spotify is what makes you different here.
I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify, despite being a user since the invite-only days, yet the UI recommends podcasts at the same frequency as you've described.
I imagine many of the other people here do not want podcasts to appear anywhere in the Spotify UI.
In addition to that:
"Jump back in" and "recently listened" are basically the same list of albums. I have tried to understand the logic behind them, but it makes no sense to me, and could very well be just one section.
I listen two some very much non mainstream media. I do have two or three sections of "please listen to random German Rap, or maybe Taylor Swift, everyone likes that". If they base everything on data, they really should know that this won't make me listen to what they propose, so why do they do that?
I accidentally listened to a podcast in Spotify once. That podcast has been on my homepage ever since. There is no way for me to get rid of it.
> should've been yours too
Different people like different things. That's okay.
For me I navigate my music via My Liked songs + my own playlists for particular moods. If I open the app and press play it defaults to where I left off.
The fact there is a home page which shows options similar to what I like is fine, sometimes useful. Yes I’d prefer to customise it. Yes the recommendations aren’t perfect. Not a reason to quit, I love Spotify and haven’t found a better alternative.
The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal.
But you can, if you have the audio files you can use them as local files [1] in your Spotify library.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/
The worst is on iOS where you have to be on the same wifi and wait randomly. And sometimes without warning the files just go away. This is unacceptable. People need to play music for dance, yoga, exercise classes for their job. You can't just randomly throw away the files to have them discover this when the class starts.
However, there is something annoying on the Spotify homepage that drove me away...
What is with the growing trend on HN of just being overly negative about posts that are shared here?
The "podcast pushing" is an underrated reason to quit; It's why I did. I decided it was effectively a safety issue.
I subscribed to Spotify Premium when I bought a car and installed an Android Auto head unit, telling myself "this will basically be my radio and I can control it from the head unit without messing with my phone"
The breaking point for me was when I had to scroll past 3-4 rows of podcast suggestions (onto an entire other screen) to find any music on my homepage. At that point, I decided it was unsafe, and began the long, arduous path of going back to 2008 and buying all my music piecemeal to host on PlexAmp. I'm quite happy with the results now, though.
You can do this on Apple Music. Upload from one device, and it's available to stream on any of your devices. For me it's the main reason I use Apple over Spotify. https://support.apple.com/guide/music/import-items-already-o...
In regards to Spotify allowing uploading of your own songs, I remember I think they did have that at the beginning. I remember there used to be an option to import your iTunes library on Windows. I uploaded a small collection of MP3's and it worked okay, but was somewhat cumbersome compared to say Foobar or MusicBee.
Which is one thing I really like about Spotify, if you have a subscription you are free to use whatever client you wish <3
It also seemes to have avoided enshittifying itself, moving from free with ads to paid with ads like many TV streaming services have done. They still get a thumbs up for me.