Feels like late 2000s to very early 2010s. And note that it was never -er, the -r was invariably preceded by a consonant. Thankfully, subsequent naming schemes stopped disemvoweling words.
i know it as a "web 2.0 thing", but i guess that counts as old-school internet now.
that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.
It doesn't just sound like that, it was used to mean exactly what you think well before PostHog was founded. I'm still not sure if that was an accident or the founders were in on the joke.
Grindr is a hookup app for gay men. "Hog" is slang for penis, so one might ask someone to "post hog" if they would like him to send a picture of his penis.
.com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance.
As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).
You're not going to be forced to upload an Ableton project and video of you recording the instruments. AI music usually is heavily processed and arranged by a human anyway, it's not yet like pushing a button (if you want to get listens).
At most it's the 'artists' self-admission of copyright via stuff like Distrokid + some automated analysis for sample royalties.
So likewise AI at most will just be a checkbox they'll choose to ignore during that process just like people who repost other artists music.
I think you are missing the point. The criticism is that Spotify are actually using third parties to create AI generated music in order to pay lower royalties. There was an article in the last month or so on HN that explained the process.
I stopped paying for Spotify years ago and instead make playlists on there that I can feed into any of the various websites that will rip mp3s for you. Yes they are 128kbps, but for casual listening, it's fine. Some tools will try to match against YouTube and download audio from there, since apparently in some cases YouTube will have higher audio quality.
Unfortunately the free version of the Spotify iOS app is absolute unusable garbage.
Where do you get the highest quality audio if you want to put in some work? I'd like to jump ship back to a personal library but don't know how I'm gonna extract these 2000 songs I only have 1/4 of locally
You can pay per track/album to actually own the music as lossless flac files or sign up for their streaming service that uses the same lossless format, but doesn't let you save them.
I do a bit of both and load the flac files onto my fancy DAP for real listening.
I stoped using Spotify when they committed the unforgivable UI sin of "loading a page and then moving elements on that page when web calls complete" that resulted in me clicking on something other than what I had intended to because it changed with my thumb a nanometer from the screen. It was a good 20% of the time and it made me insane.
I think this explains why apps shuffle the UI around every now and then. I build muscle memory to access particular functionality fast, then update comes, I click the wrong thing, and that technically speaking is measured as more engagement.
without any hate to the well intentioned engineers working on the thing, spotify has just exceedingly poor product taste in any number of dimensions
- the godawful ai dj they tried to force on pple
- buying gimlet media and running it into the toilet. some of the world's best and favorite podcasts, gone because some swedish billionaire decided to throw all his money into foie grasing a perfectly fine niche media company.
- buying anchor and going absolutely nowhere with it. it was never good so whatever. nice try i guess.
- locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting (to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive)
> locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting
Not to mention blowing >$250M of their subscription revenue to lock down one podcaster when most of their subscribers joined for not podcasts. That money could have gone towards paying music artists better rates like Apple Music and Tidal do.
Spending that money was part of their strategy to go for a "bundled" rate for royalties, which 99% (their number) of the US customer base now does. In a nutshell, they can downrate the royalties for music as long as they bundle other things with it- that's why there's books on there now as well. UMG is now fighting it [0] but all the indies are basically fucked as there's no global leverage.
The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now.
Spotify pays on a pro rata model. Something like 70% of their operating revenue is divided amongst license holders based on the number of plays. The only way the majority of artists make more money is if Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake and The Weeknd suddenly fall off the face of the earth and their record labels burst into flames.
All streaming platforms realistically pay out close to the federally-set royalty rate.
really which part? that ui where it switches songs if your finger grazes it even slightly? and starts over completely when you try to flip it back, forgetting where you were? the loud non audio adjusted ads?
Presumably they mean the part where it gives you easy access to a huge amount of music all in one place (unlimited and ad free, if you pay for a subscription). Most of the time I'm listening to music in the background so the UI isn't really much of an issue.
Not to mention axing third party API access instead of coming to a licensing agreement, forcing DJs, dance class teachers and others to jump ship to Tidal/Beatport/whatever at high cost, losing all their carefully curated playlists unless they go through the time consuming process of converting them.
They also deprecated their library (libspotify) which had previously been used to build alternative third-party clients and playback-capable integrations for paying Spotify users. They promised a replacement, but that never happened… the best we ever got was a set of watered down APIs that’s curiously missing what one would need to build a third party client.
They couldn’t allow for users to opt out of the constant A/B testing and user herding in the ever-changing official client by using a sane third-party client that just acts like a normal music player and obeys the user’s preferences. The ability to shove the music that’s most profitable and whatever other non-relevant audio content in users’ faces by mandating official client use is too valuable to give up.
Somehow even Apple is better on this front, with there being multiple alternative Apple Music clients out there that are build with official Apple SDKs and aren’t reverse engineered, which is crazy. They’ve out-Apple’d Apple.
> They also deprecated their library (libspotify) which had previously been used to build alternative third-party clients and playback-capable integrations for paying Spotify users. They promised a replacement, but that never happened…
> to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive
It seems like most podcasts do everything they can to make downloading an MP3 impossible. This isn't just a spotify problem. Just about every website for every podcast I've seen does the same thing.
That would explain why mine were definitely wrong too. Although I wouldn't attribute it to malice since it makes little sense to tell me I used their paid service much less than I thought, at least compared to the opposite.
Spotify is terrible but mostly because the interface is bad. It has so many frustrating changes that no one asked for that have accumulated over time and little annoyances / bugs that’ll never be fixed. I feel like basic things such as managing playlists or navigating my library are harder than they need to be. They deserve to lose.
I’m curious about some of the newer services such as Qobuz or Deezer or Tidal. Are they any better?
Unfortunately many of thr same poor UI decisions are baked into Backstage, so soon you’ll have a similar experience deploying code onto your companies development platform.
I'm also planning to leave. It's offensive that they decided to do podcasts and audiobooks and not allow you to turn that off in the UI. I want an app to listen to music! But someone there apparently thinks they can engage me more if they throw in a bunch of other irrelevant functionality. Ugh.
I've been using Tidal for 2-3 years now. Happy with it. I'd recommend it without a question.
I'd say that they, however, are very similar to Spotify from a UI/UX perspective as that seems what the consumer base wants. Unsure if the specific issues you have with Spotify also exist though.
I switched to Tidal about 8 years ago after discovering how bad the Spotify encoding was. With some songs the high end is just complete garbage that physically makes my ears hurt, for example Enigma's Cross Of Changes. The encoding on that is so bad on Spotify, or at least used to be. What a waste of money, effort and computing resources.
Of course, the best way is to buy either digital or physical releases, which I do for the ones that stick with me.
We're actually entering the timeline where you have to migrate to some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque (digital) monastery where people cultivate knowledge. He really was onto this trend, in the newer Dodge books as well.
Maybe this is one of the few pro-social use cases for crypto, some sort of alternative net where people are verifiably real and content is authentic. I genuinely cannot understand how platforms are not taking more aggressive measures against this stuff.
It just so happens that OpenAI’s sama is founder of World(coin), which in exchange for your biometric data can authenticate you online as a biological human.
I’ll give a counterpoint: with a subscription, Apple Music for iPad is quite literally the best personal music exploration/listening app on the market. A quiet room and good pair of headphones is all the rest you need.
But the future is obvious right? If an AI citizen pays taxes, contributes to society, and has the same rights as humans, why would their creative expression be considered less "real" than a human's? They would be a legitimate member of society expressing themselves through music, just like any other citizen.
Damn, you went from pinocchio to real boy is 2 seconds. Your anthropomorphic assumptions will lead to the classification within various species. If you are gonna pay an AI for it's output, but not bees....you may want to re-evaluate your premise.
Happy to find Ben Jordan's video here. He's done a few videos about just how bad Spotify (and others) are, and they're all very refreshing data-driven reviews of the industry, free from as much bullshit and bias as is possible.
Is the belief that these tracks are being generated and placed by Spotify themselves, or is it possible that third parties are uploading generated music? Are other streaming services liable to encounter the same issue?
Spotify have been shown to deliberately promote songs which they call Perfect Fit Content that cost them less in terms of royalties. This includes AI generated songs and you can find the same song under 50 different names according to this article: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify...
I have several songs that I actually like which are AI songs.. maybe they just need to label them explicitly as AI? Or maybe they need a way to filter it out.
There are some honestly funny and interesting AI generated songs out there.
Public Service Announcement: there’s a healthy marketplace of refurbished and upgraded iPods from the 2004 era on eBay, the Classic 5.5 comes highly recommended with solid DAC from the factory but iPods mini with upgraded DAC, fresh battery, and large flash memory swaps for the old spinning disks are readily available.
I subscribe to Qobuz and buy a lot of lossless DRM free music and can recommend them as well, tho there was recently a big swath of the available music dropped due to licensing issues (hence the utility of downloading DRM free music). I also price shop against the digital albums and often a CD on eBay will be cheaper, I don’t mind missing out on the “24bit 192khz hifi” to save a few bucks.
But an iPod from the 2004 era is both hard to use and very heavy. You can get a tiny flash-based modern mp3 player for $30-$40, which is below the apparent price of a 2004 iPod on eBay.
Mmm agree to disagree, iPod classic is not a heavyweight device and the UX is what we had when I was a kid so easy AND nostalgic, but agreed the little sandisk clips solve the problem just as well.
Edit: I can't imagine swapping HDD for flash saves more than a few grams, can it?
So what, you want to modify a good mp3 player to look more like a bad one?
With the classic iPod you've got a bad UI instead of a good UI and a large object instead of a small one. And while it will be lighter without the hard drive, it will still be a lot heavier than an mp3 player. It's pure downside on several different dimensions.
If you want to play your music on a device shaped like an iPod, it's even easier to use your existing phone.
Ipod classics have a spinning rust hdd. They are heavy. The 2004 4th gen 40 GB is 176 grams and is a bulky 110 cm3. That's quite a bit more than my pixel 5, which is 151 grams and just 81 cm3. In fact, could buy nearly any old phone and do better, immediately, and have a much nicer display and better bluetooth codecs and the ability to play lossless formats.
I've had about 4 San Disk clips now. mostly because I lose them or put them through the wash.
some of the older models were definitely better, but at 20-40 bucks each and no real dependencies on the rest of my personal computer ecosystem it's a fair trade.
it's only that Spotify and YT music are easy to use that I haven't bought a new one. with enshitifacation being a thing I might go back
Newer Sony Walkmans have lossless support and some can also act as a USB DAC. Unfortunately the UIs are still terrible (no search, only oversensitive alphabet scroll?), proprietary cables and the device slowly re-indexes every boot. Organizing music hasn't improved since 2000 with some albums being split into 10 artists if they have collaborations. Still, at least we don't have to use Sonic Stage any more, mine has a uSD slot, and mass storage largely works. It's a shame Zune went nowhere, the HD was a wonderful device.
I’ve been strongly considering refurbing the 6th gen iPod Classic I have in the garage. The disk died years ago, and I imagine it would need a battery by now.
Now I’m wondering if anybody sells a USB-C adapter to iPod dock connector.
One of these days the parts are going to end up at my doorstep. Boredom and a couple of beers away.
- Ability to sort by the albumartist tag (listen to heaps of compilations)
- Ability to export play log
- Functions like any other external storage device for transfer purposes
Anything out there? Last I checked (10 years ago) there was nothing that hit all these marks. I had a Sansa Clip with Rockbox and just dealt with the low storage capacity.
iPod video 5th gen w/ Rockbox custom firmware. Then do the bluetooth mod and you're in music heaven. Probably fairly easy to write a plugin for the functionality you mentioned.
Anything that takes SD cards should make storage a non-issue and make file transfer dead simple. Even microSD cards can hold over well over 5TB
Dedicated players are getting harder to find though. I had a Cowon mp3 player for a few years which was pretty nice. Maybe see if they've got something you like? http://www.cowonglobal.com
I just rotate music on a microSD for mobile. However, you can optionally self-host a music server and connect with a client on your device to stream. It's also possible to SSH from outside home network, if you really want to.
On a lark, I refunded up my phone with my mp3 library I keep on my laptop and I built up so many years ago. I enjoyed it just fine for the nostalgia but I still don't understand where I'm going to discover new music without services like Spotify. I used go to shows and see new artists that way, but with kids that's not as much a valid proposition as it once was.
Back when music blogs were exploding, it was a great way to discover new music. I'm not sure how many of those are still around, but hype machine has been out there for probably 20 years now and that was always a great way to just blow a few hours listening to all kinds of new stuff - https://hypem.com/latest/all
There's also local independent radio stations, many of which have streaming now.
I have an Android phone with a 500GB SD card and audio jack. I use an app called PowerAmp. Recently they introduced some optional subscription, but I ignored that, and so far my experience has been fantastic. I've been using that app as my audio player for years already.
I don't get it why people but Samsung S99 Pro Plus Maxi for €9999 when cheap phones for developing markets are objectively better, minus the camera, and cost like €300.
Ever since Google Play Music was killed off, I've been putting off setting up a home server and accessing my entire collection like that. There's some Android program that allows one to do that, forget the name of it though. Think it has "fish" in the name
I don't use spotify (primarily buy CDs and use ipod classics, also records because I am a cliche) and this made me think of the articles about the guy who was one of the most listened artists on spotify (piano for study/concentration type stuff iirc?) and he got punished or something because he was publishing under several names? I couldn't quite find that or what actually happened, but I did stumble upon this Wikipedia page about controversy over fake artists on spotify[0] that suggests some of those are commissioned by spotify.
The only feature of spotify that I've ever been interested in was discovering new and new to me music. I'm not interested in AI slop though, and I can't imagine a lot of people would be (maybe the background noise use case don't mind so much which is fair, I suppose). Is this going to get to a tipping point with spotify for it to go under (or lose a LOAD of value), or is it going to be like 'smart' TVs where non-'smart' TVs essentially don't exist because almost all manufacturers have realised they can make more money from forcing ads and spyware? I see that it's been a problem for nigh on a decade according to that Wikipedia page but with the floodgates for AI feel a lot more open than they used to.
Kinda related, does anybody use soundcloud any more? Just interesting that it seemed hugely popular and was then derided (terms like 'soundcloud rapper') and I haven't heard about it in a while.
I suppose netflix still exists despite derision for their awful originals, killing the good originals, and having little content (especially internationally!).
Spotify will be fine, especially with how little they pay artists, but it's probably a shame for a lot of users.
Every time you load the page it recommends a random album from Deezer’s catalog. The algorithm is pretty silly: loop Math.random() * MAX_ID until you find an album id that actually exists and return it.
The goal was to recreate that feeling you’d get going down to someone’s basement and thumbing through an old record collection.
Also 1001 Albums to Listen To Before You Die is a pretty decent collection of canonical albums from the record industry that’ll keep you busy for quite a while.
Part of that feeling involves piecing together that person's tastes and whether you can be bothered digging deeper into their collection.
A more accurate recreation of that feeling might be to pick a random user with a large collection (or maybe a couple of users that are mutual friends) and select from their owned albums? Discogs would potentially be a better fit but you'd be veering into serious collectors there rather than a random person's basement.
I think it's neat though, enjoyed refreshing and seeing loads of weird album art!
I love discogs. Also hate it because I spend too much money there! Serious collectors and random basement are both vibes I need in my music discovery life!
What I do is use RateYourMusic.com and find people who rate albums similar to the way I do. The site even lets you build music charts and filter albums by how highly they’re rated by the users you follow.
I use SoundCloud from time to time, my taste is really niche and it works great for that (but you need to find a relevant artist first).
I recently jumped off Qobuz exclusively because of their drunk recommendation algorithm, or lack thereof (it seems I'd often end up with whatever is on the front page). I wound up on Pandora: their whole value proposition was finding music you like, and music you might like. I haven't been on Spotify in a hot minute, so I can't make a comparison, but Pandora has been pretty good.
Pretty much - either they pay gig musicians an hourly wage to record "human" slop that spotify has the rights to and can stream effectively for free, or just out right ai generated slop
I can't understand how people use Spotify. It was great ~10 years ago? It's terrible these days. Pushing Podcasts at you (no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs), terrible music, the UI getting harder and less intuitive to use.
It's a shame all good things have to slowly tend towards sucking, instead of getting better. Bitwarden, one of my beloved apps, has done the same with a god-awful UI redesign.
Youtube music is just as bad with pushing unwanted content. I can't believe the answer after 10 years of this is to go back to doing it myself, downloading MP3s and using something (currently Jellyfin) to curate them.
At least Youtube music lets me upload my own music to it, so that's the main reason I'm still mostly using it.
PS: Please don't reply and tell me I just haven't found the right podcast. The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
> no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs
When you inject personal opinions like this which are obviously at odds with millions of other people, it's difficult to take the rest of the comment seriously.
It's at odds with millions of people but also in agreement with millions of others. I also don't listen to podcasts for the same reason. Spotify shouldn't push something that so many people detest without letting them opt out.
I don't think there's evidence for this. While listening to podcasts is evidence of liking them, not listening to podcasts isn't evidence for detesting them.
Spotify has over 640 million active users. Of those, 100 million are active podcast listeners, despite having an app they frequently use that lets them listen to podcasts. This suggests that many of Spotify's users hate podcasts as much as they hate the wacky morning DJs who say democracy's a joke.
I didn't say that all 540 million hate podcasts. I said that many do. It doesn't take a very large fraction of 540 million to get millions that hate podcasts.
It's not many out of 100 million. 4% would not be many out of the total. That's why I said: I thought you meant "a significant fraction of", not "at least a tiny fraction of".
You meant "at least a tiny fraction of". That's all. When you say "many", we should read "at least a tiny fraction of".
You refuse to believe that millions of people hate podcasts, to the point that you apparently need a survey with millions of people saying that as evidence. You live in a bubble of people who haven't told you they hate morning DJs and podcasts. If I instead told you that millions of people detest vlogs, would you also require hard evidence?
"I don't think there's evidence for this," in response to my statement that millions of people hate podcasts. You might forgive most readers for understanding that to mean that you don't think millions of people hate podcasts.
I responded to something you wrote. Maybe I didn't respond to what you meant to write, but the solution to that is for you to write what you meant.
I don't know if you think this opinion (expressed in this way) makes you seem insightful, but just so you know, it just makes you seem uninformed. It's like saying "Listen to music? No thanks, I don't want to listen to a guy in makeup screaming about satanism into a microphone". Like, yes, that type of music does exist, but it's uninformed to make the claim that that's all music is.
Weird take. I don’t know anyone who detests podcasts. They just don’t listen to them.
Having such strong feelings about something you can just ignore is unhealthy.
FWIW, I cancelled Spotify last year and their focus on podcasts was one of the reasons. But there are plenty of other services that cater to music lovers so I just increased my bandcamp spend and moved on with my life.
>no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs
I agree this format of podcast is terrible, but there are many podcasts that are more like one or a couple of people each giving a presentation and I enjoy them a lot.
Ukraine the Latest by The Telegraph and The History of Rome by Mike Duncan are ones I particularly enjoyed.
Hardcore History has not been as productive lately but the back catalogue is incredible. Makes a 6 hour drive feel like nothing at all. I know some people don't like Dan Carlin, but I really enjoy the long-form historical storytelling style.
I actually really like podcasts but never wanted my music app forcing theirs above links to actual music, or inserting extra ads into episodes that I could listen to from other sources. Their rollout of podcasts made me make a point to never, ever listen to a podcast on Spotify.
The Bitwarden API is well-documented. There is a popular alternate implementation of the server, and there are alternate client implementations like https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app.
> The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
Yeah same for me too. The only podcasts I can bear are monologues, when there's more than one people at least they're each talking to me not to each other. Things like Hardcore History, Anthropocene Reviewed, and most of 99% Invisible.
When does this actually happen? I can imagine it on their background music playlists (and wouldn’t really mind it) but I’ve never encountered it on any playlist at least as far as I’m aware. Is it only electronic music or will they AI you an entire 5 piece rock band?
Of all the problems that I have with Spotify - its frequently changing selection of music, its hostility to power users, its shuffle algorithm, its artist hostile rates, its frequently changing-for-the-worse interface - I can't really say that AI music is one of them. If I come across some and enjoy it, great! I'm not going to let that impact my enjoyment of music as a whole.
285 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadI wonder which suffix is more popular, -ify, -ly, or -r.
that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.
I guess the hope is they won't end up in the toilet and they might, in the future, be able to buy a domain not prefixed by "get"
Would you mind explaining please?
.com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance.
As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).
You're not going to be forced to upload an Ableton project and video of you recording the instruments. AI music usually is heavily processed and arranged by a human anyway, it's not yet like pushing a button (if you want to get listens).
At most it's the 'artists' self-admission of copyright via stuff like Distrokid + some automated analysis for sample royalties.
So likewise AI at most will just be a checkbox they'll choose to ignore during that process just like people who repost other artists music.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
ctrl+f "summer afternoon in Brooklyn"
Unfortunately the free version of the Spotify iOS app is absolute unusable garbage.
You can pay per track/album to actually own the music as lossless flac files or sign up for their streaming service that uses the same lossless format, but doesn't let you save them.
I do a bit of both and load the flac files onto my fancy DAP for real listening.
- the godawful ai dj they tried to force on pple
- buying gimlet media and running it into the toilet. some of the world's best and favorite podcasts, gone because some swedish billionaire decided to throw all his money into foie grasing a perfectly fine niche media company.
- buying anchor and going absolutely nowhere with it. it was never good so whatever. nice try i guess.
- locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting (to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive)
- they habitually screw over musicians https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- reggie watts: https://www.instagram.com/p/DEhAr7lx7CI/?igsh=bXBpZ25kczMyZ3...
- bjork: https://variety.com/2025/music/news/bjork-spotify-streaming-...
- they faked spotify wrapped numbers https://x.com/hello__caitlin/status/1864367028758565216?s=46
- this is petty but they are a big step back from winamp and that is just slop https://x.com/riomadeit/status/1878556039676666024
i will say ONE nice thing. Gustav Soderstrom himself does make a pretty damn good podcast about spotify https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-11/introducing-the-new-... . its a real shame his product is mostly riding the highs of early good decisions.
- get youtube premium, has youtube music with it. youtube music is basically straight superset of spotify.
- https://github.com/jam3scampbell/music
Not to mention blowing >$250M of their subscription revenue to lock down one podcaster when most of their subscribers joined for not podcasts. That money could have gone towards paying music artists better rates like Apple Music and Tidal do.
The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now.
[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/26/universal-music-...
All streaming platforms realistically pay out close to the federally-set royalty rate.
They couldn’t allow for users to opt out of the constant A/B testing and user herding in the ever-changing official client by using a sane third-party client that just acts like a normal music player and obeys the user’s preferences. The ability to shove the music that’s most profitable and whatever other non-relevant audio content in users’ faces by mandating official client use is too valuable to give up.
Somehow even Apple is better on this front, with there being multiple alternative Apple Music clients out there that are build with official Apple SDKs and aren’t reverse engineered, which is crazy. They’ve out-Apple’d Apple.
It exists... but only for employees: https://xcancel.com/rogueops/status/1656349863968112680
It seems like most podcasts do everything they can to make downloading an MP3 impossible. This isn't just a spotify problem. Just about every website for every podcast I've seen does the same thing.
That would explain why mine were definitely wrong too. Although I wouldn't attribute it to malice since it makes little sense to tell me I used their paid service much less than I thought, at least compared to the opposite.
I’m curious about some of the newer services such as Qobuz or Deezer or Tidal. Are they any better?
I'd say that they, however, are very similar to Spotify from a UI/UX perspective as that seems what the consumer base wants. Unsure if the specific issues you have with Spotify also exist though.
Of course, the best way is to buy either digital or physical releases, which I do for the ones that stick with me.
Maybe this is one of the few pro-social use cases for crypto, some sort of alternative net where people are verifiably real and content is authentic. I genuinely cannot understand how platforms are not taking more aggressive measures against this stuff.
And where to go?
I’d like Apple but their apps are horrendous and they completely bastardized the classic Music app pre streaming.
- youtube music
https://www.deezer.com
Options for acquiring media:
- Buy vinyl/CDs
- Ripping from streaming services (Deezer was well-known for that a few years ago)
- yt-dlp for niche picks you can’t find in better quality elsewhere
- Rip CDs from local library
- Bandcamp, Soundcloud
- Various what.cd successors, if that’s your thing
I’ll give a counterpoint: with a subscription, Apple Music for iPad is quite literally the best personal music exploration/listening app on the market. A quiet room and good pair of headphones is all the rest you need.
Damn, you went from pinocchio to real boy is 2 seconds. Your anthropomorphic assumptions will lead to the classification within various species. If you are gonna pay an AI for it's output, but not bees....you may want to re-evaluate your premise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo
There are some honestly funny and interesting AI generated songs out there.
I subscribe to Qobuz and buy a lot of lossless DRM free music and can recommend them as well, tho there was recently a big swath of the available music dropped due to licensing issues (hence the utility of downloading DRM free music). I also price shop against the digital albums and often a CD on eBay will be cheaper, I don’t mind missing out on the “24bit 192khz hifi” to save a few bucks.
Edit: I can't imagine swapping HDD for flash saves more than a few grams, can it?
I ultimately replaced it with a Zen Stone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen#ZEN_Stone/Stone_P...
With the classic iPod you've got a bad UI instead of a good UI and a large object instead of a small one. And while it will be lighter without the hard drive, it will still be a lot heavier than an mp3 player. It's pure downside on several different dimensions.
If you want to play your music on a device shaped like an iPod, it's even easier to use your existing phone.
some of the older models were definitely better, but at 20-40 bucks each and no real dependencies on the rest of my personal computer ecosystem it's a fair trade.
it's only that Spotify and YT music are easy to use that I haven't bought a new one. with enshitifacation being a thing I might go back
"New music is shit. Kids these days have no taste."
Now I’m wondering if anybody sells a USB-C adapter to iPod dock connector.
One of these days the parts are going to end up at my doorstep. Boredom and a couple of beers away.
https://moonlit.market/
Have you got the old iTunes installed? I was pleasantly surprised Apple still offers the old binaries for download
https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/software
- 500GB+
- Ability to sort by the albumartist tag (listen to heaps of compilations)
- Ability to export play log
- Functions like any other external storage device for transfer purposes
Anything out there? Last I checked (10 years ago) there was nothing that hit all these marks. I had a Sansa Clip with Rockbox and just dealt with the low storage capacity.
Dedicated players are getting harder to find though. I had a Cowon mp3 player for a few years which was pretty nice. Maybe see if they've got something you like? http://www.cowonglobal.com
There's also local independent radio stations, many of which have streaming now.
WYCE is my personal favorite - https://grcmc.org/wyce
You can use services like listenbrainz or last.fm.
I don't get it why people but Samsung S99 Pro Plus Maxi for €9999 when cheap phones for developing markets are objectively better, minus the camera, and cost like €300.
The only feature of spotify that I've ever been interested in was discovering new and new to me music. I'm not interested in AI slop though, and I can't imagine a lot of people would be (maybe the background noise use case don't mind so much which is fair, I suppose). Is this going to get to a tipping point with spotify for it to go under (or lose a LOAD of value), or is it going to be like 'smart' TVs where non-'smart' TVs essentially don't exist because almost all manufacturers have realised they can make more money from forcing ads and spyware? I see that it's been a problem for nigh on a decade according to that Wikipedia page but with the floodgates for AI feel a lot more open than they used to.
Kinda related, does anybody use soundcloud any more? Just interesting that it seemed hugely popular and was then derided (terms like 'soundcloud rapper') and I haven't heard about it in a while.
I suppose netflix still exists despite derision for their awful originals, killing the good originals, and having little content (especially internationally!).
Spotify will be fine, especially with how little they pay artists, but it's probably a shame for a lot of users.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...
Every time you load the page it recommends a random album from Deezer’s catalog. The algorithm is pretty silly: loop Math.random() * MAX_ID until you find an album id that actually exists and return it.
The goal was to recreate that feeling you’d get going down to someone’s basement and thumbing through an old record collection.
Also 1001 Albums to Listen To Before You Die is a pretty decent collection of canonical albums from the record industry that’ll keep you busy for quite a while.
I think it's neat though, enjoyed refreshing and seeing loads of weird album art!
Yeah, I'm all over the lists. So many are so narrow in scope, which can be frustrating.
I recently jumped off Qobuz exclusively because of their drunk recommendation algorithm, or lack thereof (it seems I'd often end up with whatever is on the front page). I wound up on Pandora: their whole value proposition was finding music you like, and music you might like. I haven't been on Spotify in a hot minute, so I can't make a comparison, but Pandora has been pretty good.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
https://www.fastcompany.com/91170296/spotify-ai-music
It's a shame all good things have to slowly tend towards sucking, instead of getting better. Bitwarden, one of my beloved apps, has done the same with a god-awful UI redesign.
Youtube music is just as bad with pushing unwanted content. I can't believe the answer after 10 years of this is to go back to doing it myself, downloading MP3s and using something (currently Jellyfin) to curate them.
At least Youtube music lets me upload my own music to it, so that's the main reason I'm still mostly using it.
PS: Please don't reply and tell me I just haven't found the right podcast. The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
When you inject personal opinions like this which are obviously at odds with millions of other people, it's difficult to take the rest of the comment seriously.
You meant "at least a tiny fraction of". That's all. When you say "many", we should read "at least a tiny fraction of".
> You're living in a bubble.
This is a bit of a strange comment.
You refuse to believe that millions of people hate podcasts, to the point that you apparently need a survey with millions of people saying that as evidence. You live in a bubble of people who haven't told you they hate morning DJs and podcasts. If I instead told you that millions of people detest vlogs, would you also require hard evidence?
If you read what I wrote, you'll see I never said that. I don't know why you think it's worth replying to something other than what I wrote.
I responded to something you wrote. Maybe I didn't respond to what you meant to write, but the solution to that is for you to write what you meant.
Having such strong feelings about something you can just ignore is unhealthy.
FWIW, I cancelled Spotify last year and their focus on podcasts was one of the reasons. But there are plenty of other services that cater to music lovers so I just increased my bandcamp spend and moved on with my life.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/2tLoFkQ
I agree this format of podcast is terrible, but there are many podcasts that are more like one or a couple of people each giving a presentation and I enjoy them a lot.
Ukraine the Latest by The Telegraph and The History of Rome by Mike Duncan are ones I particularly enjoyed.
+1. Given it's open source I'm tempted to revert to the older one, though it will probably stop working over time as other things change :(
Yeah same for me too. The only podcasts I can bear are monologues, when there's more than one people at least they're each talking to me not to each other. Things like Hardcore History, Anthropocene Reviewed, and most of 99% Invisible.
https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/mit-l...
It's just so good, IMHO.