It's worth the effort to host your own media. There are privacy benefits, you own the audio files (presumably) and are no longer hostage to a platform that cares little (if at all) about artists.
The article is surprisingly missing the most important part: a cost comparison. I understand and share the frustration with rising prices and ads creeping into paid plans, but for people who value optionality and broad access, streaming is still meaningfully cheaper than owning content.
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.
"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?
The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.
> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote
1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own
2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).
And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.
Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).
As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".
And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".
Performative outrage is performative.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.
> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform
Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.
So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).
Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.
There's a reason Spotify might force shuffle play on the free tier. It isn't solely to annoy you into upgrading. Royalties are 2x - 5x higher for interactive vs non-interactive streaming plays.
Regardless of pricing you can't substitute one with the other... Spotify is a streaming service with a massive library. Self hosting means you must BYO media... and, news flash, populating a library with relevant content that rivals Spotify or would satisfy your average user will almost certainly require illegally acquiring said content.
Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for, and I will continue to pay for, because:
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own.
2. There are no advertisements in the paid service.
3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
Never used Spotify, never will. I also, as a producer, pulled my music off that service a long time ago.
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
I had a nice little app that I would run once and a while and it would take all my Weekly Playlist Spotify built, remove duplicates and make one playlist.
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I just did the same, but using a Pi + nvme drive at home. I did an initial setup with Mopidy/Iris, but just tested Plex, and it was such a better experience I am going to start paying for that instead.
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
I've tried self-hosting with navidrome [0] / plex / jellyfin but the thing I miss most is music discovery via radios / discover weekly. I've tried replicating it a few times with embedding vectors + vector search but at best it finds songs in the (sub)-genre with the tempo / mood being pretty different.
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
I stopped my Spotify subscription and gave Apple Music and Youtube Music a try for a few months. I'm now again a Spotify user, despite that Youtube Music is still included in my Youtube Premium.
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
Have you heard of Tidal? I swapped to them from Spotify back when Spotify did a big round of layoffs. Tidal had the music I was looking for (generally higher quality recordings) for the same monthly cost of Spotify.
I'm looking forward to trying jellyfin once DDR4 prices come down a little. I was slow rolling my server build as I added services, but the ECC ram sticks I was using jumped up to 150 USD from 50 USD. Hopefully the lesson I get out of this is just buy the damn chips already lol
44 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 63.1 ms ] threadI primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...
- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...
Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.
"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?
The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.
> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote
1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own
2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).
And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.
Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).
As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".
And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".
Performative outrage is performative.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.
> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform
Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.
So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).
Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.
I wanted a nice native client for Linux instead of using the web app so I wrote one in Rust. Shameless plug: https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
It’s a co-op of artists.
Streamers eventually own the song outright if they listen to it enough.
https://resonate.coop/
Still doing the modern version of mix tapes.
Haven't lost anything, and is with a smile I observe kids today being responsible for the revival of portable tape and CD players.
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own. 2. There are no advertisements in the paid service. 3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
[1] Qobuz has the highest per-stream pay rate in the industry by like 40%. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/discover
[2] Tidal is the widely-available service with the second-highest pay rate. https://tidal.com/
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I do not like them now.
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
It's not as independent but if you're already paying for YouTube Premium it seems reasonable if you don't want to host your own media server.
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
[0] - https://www.navidrome.org/
[1] - https://musicbrainz.org/
[2] - https://github.com/LAION-AI/CLAP
[3] - https://github.com/SonyCSLParis/music2latent
[4] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.06405
have a service running here if you're into electronic music and want to poke around https://cosine.club/
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
My Apple Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2mvmybjr225
My Youtube Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m5ms6fxsrs27