From the shitty artist compensation, to the AI content, to their exclusive deals with Joe Rogan you need another reason to stop using Spotify???
Don’t forget their donation to Trump’s campaign!
I used Spotify premium apk for near a decade. They shut down the modded apks so I stopped using them. Not a terrible service honestly, given I didn’t pay them a dime.
Android user from India. Only other alternatives available here are Amazon Prime and Apple Music.
Either buy the albums from the musicians or pirate that shit and just pay to see them in concert. Fuck all these companies.
Buy on Bandcamp.
Paying for music - in a world where the artist gets almost nothing and it’s all wasted on middle-men- is unethical. Music is art and even without the industry there would still be making music for free. Pirate your favorite and donate the money to a local good cause
Yeah… Give some love to Ticketmaster…
Sneak in and slip the roadie a 10 spot?
Don’t get me started…just…don’t.
Kind reminder that no streaming platform is very good on the ethical front. There are no ethical alternatives because the root of the problem is the legal strangle hold labels and record companies keep on artists and commercial music distribution.
I can stream from Jellyfin
I have found a bunch of my new favorite songs this year on Jellyfin. Some of them are pretty old too, lol.
It worked pretty well doing it the old human-based way, where I got a bunch of albums because I liked the band or even just a particular song. Listening through those or just playing the whole pile on shuffle led me to find plenty of gems that I stuck in my playlist.
Yes!
Tidal puts artists first, and pretty awesome.
Can’t promise that’s how they are forever, but that’s how they are today.
Tomorrow is Bandcamp friday people.
In case anyone isn’t aware, this means that Bandcamp won’t take their usual cut, so the artist gets more money from each sale. It’s this Friday only.
Isn’t bandcamp on a road to enshit? I thought I heard they were. I love it though. Feels like a record store online.
All roads lead to enshitment
Except FOSS. Because if you can fork it, it cannot be enshittified… every time they attempt to, another fork can be made.
Doctorow is never wrong.
yay for corpo generosity?
Anyone want to poke fun at me for thrifting physical media now?
That’s still not good for the artists though since they don’t see a cent from that.
They saw cents when the songs were sold originally; it’s not like I’m running a music charity.
Is there another music streaming service around, so I can leave? I use it damn near everyday and the accessibility is what I crave.
I switched to Tidal a couple years ago and I’m happy enough with it. It’s cheaper than the comparable membership tier I was paying for with Spotify. The higher fidelity streaming is nice and supposedly it pays artists the most over any other steaming service. Their recommendation algorithm doesn’t index so heavily on your favorite tracks like Spotify’s does, so I’m discovering new music a lot more.
The UX isn’t quite as smooth as Spotify’s. I can’t cast from the browser app and it doesn’t remember what I’m listening to between devices. When I first switched there were a lot more bugs but I haven’t noticed as many over the last year.
After Tidal inevitably succumbs to corporate rot, I’ll be switching to owning my own collection and self-hosting. But until then, I’m happy with Tidal.
Tidal is owned by Square (the mobile payment app/company), and I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) owns that. So, probably safe to say it’s already pretty corporate.
That guy sucks.
Why?
This is just the first article I found
https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/jack-dorsey-layoffs-streaming-music-app-tidal-block-leaked-email/
Honestly I respect the way he called musk on his bluff and forced him to pay 40+ Billion for Twitter, but this article cements him as an asshole in my book. Whenever you see a CEO saying “we need to function like a startup” what they really mean is “I have no fucking clue how to run this business, so I’m going to go back to the one thing that worked for me”, not realizing that it was mostly luck not startup culture that cemented their early success.
Talking in CEO speak seems pretty mild compared to being on the board of an AI military company. I know there is no perfect billionaire so I’m not going to advocate for Dorsey. But if that is the worse thing about Tidal, I think I’ll still support it.
Sure! I was just trying to answer the question. I’d point out that his current attitude is exactly how enshitification starts, so the writing may be on the wall for Tidal. After all, it was started as a passion project by a group of actual musicians and then sold, so the soul of it is likely gone too.
Spotify used to be the good guys, too.
As someone who was briefly interested in his podcast/video blogs, it becomes highly apparent that his approach to everything - even something as personal as music - is completely backwards and wholly centered on poor metrics around perceived efficiency as opposed to anything remotely logical. His ideas are fully derivative of the latest trends in the worst way while missing the point on how to implement them in any kind of reasonable way. He’s just another member of the modern-category Silicon Valley CEO: hoodwink everyone, hop on bandwagons, get yours first for the least amount of cost, market yourself as an enigma, who cares about the actual product, when in doubt do lay-offs.
Yes, but it’s a million times better than Spotify, Google, and Apple.
Isnt Tidal responsible for the problems of high quality music formats like .ogg? Making it hard to find and download from them.
Honestly thata the issue I ran into. Napster and tidal were both in the running for a minute, both were more expensive, tidal is ran by Jay z and Napster is owned by a tech bro. Honestly, I’m more inclined to go back to cd.
Its such a massive PitA to self-host things. Dont get me wrong I love the idea of it, it works in theory, and then you get an update for one of the multiple services you have to run to make it work ex-prem, or your isp does some funky stuff and drops out. There is such a massive time sink into self hosting that its not a reliable answer for 90% of people.
I use a Revanced YouTube Music app that doesn’t play any ads, and it functions almost exactly like Spotify.
I feel like this might not work as a mobile solution but will look into it
I use this too on android. Works great for streaming, but you can’t download tracks to listen offline afaik.
There’s a Revanced community on Lemmy, and they have a discord with all kinds of resources and tutorials to help get it all set up.
Revanced is a project that works exclusively with YT content as far as I can tell, right? This is an interesting project, i will try to follow along.
Tidal pays the highest per play amount to artists, and Apple Music also pays high (second highest for mainstream artists after tidal last I checked), and they have a massive library -but obviously they’re an evil megacorp so use your best judgement.
I personally use Apple Music but then I’m fully ensconced in the Apple ecosystem, so it works for me.
How is Tidal evil? I’ve never heard anyone complain about anything but the old mqa standard they have since dropped.
Apple is the one I was calling evil.
I use YouTube music because I all ready pay for premium, but YouTube and Google are getting worse everyday though.
Back almost a decade ago I was using Google Fi and it had access to YT Music when that existed. It was easy to use, but the content was limited and I found it very hard to find new music.
Are there any alternatives that aren’t associated with a tech giant?
Yes…self host on a nas ;)
Agreed, looks like I have my solution!
Are there self hostable alternatives to their discovery algorithm?
I’ve been using tidal for a couple years and enjoy it
Tidal is owned by Block Inc which is owned by Jack Dorsey
damnit!
Serious question. Is Dorsey more ethical than the Spotify CEO? Is he still paying artists more for their music?
Ethical billionaire is an oxymoron
Have to sail the high seas, and send money directly to people like Butch Vig.
Try Deezer. It’s owned by a publication traded French company. I’ve been enjoying them for the past year.
Theres a link posted in this thread about deezer and how its own by a russian oligarch and donates to the Right in the US at least
It’s owned by a Russian oligarch bastard
Founder of that company is a Russian oligarch under sanctions by Ukraine. Man also was part of a big business group chat focused on “changing the narritive” about the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza.
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Spotdl is a command line program that is easy to use, you just need to feed it the playlist link and it will download all the songs off YouTube.
You can then self host with azuracast or airsonic. Azuracast is what I use but it makes it into a radio station more or less, sonic I think is more of a spotify clone. There are a few other options.
The subscription fee can then be used to support your favorite small time artists through other means, without the middle man.
Seriously, just torrent your music, downloading songs off YouTube sounds like an awful idea, automated or not.
From my understanding, it’s a bit of a bother downloading less popular music through torrents. You need a private tracker I think. For big names though, definitely the way to go.
Give soulseek a try, finding less known artists is a bit of a pain but i have had good luck finding everything i had looked for with a bit of digging.
Soulseek is still a thing? Rad. I’ll have to keep that in mind.
P2P will never die!!! (Hopefully)
That’s fair!
Bandcamp waives their share on Bandcamp Fridays
August 1th
September 5th
October 3rd
December 5th
Bandcamp is owned by union busters. Fuck bandcamp.
I agree, fuck Bandcamp, so I only buy on Bandcamp Fridays.
Forgive me if it’s obvious, but what does “waves their share” mean?
“Waives” instead of “waves”
They won’t take their percentage on the sales, and leave them to the artist
Like Bandcamp or not, i can’t ever find the bands i’m looking for.
I’m not subscribed anymore, but as someone who uses the desktop client mainly it’s hard to find a good alternative (good UI, snappy)
Deezer and Qobuz are meh. I won’t use Apple or Amazon. edit: or Google.
Maybe Tidal? Are there other ones?I just found a third party player for Qobuz though. Not enough features but cute:
Tidal is good so far. I don’t think it has podcasts though as far as I’m aware which is kindve a bummer
I like Tidal
Napster is back, believe it or not, as a legitimate streaming platform
Would love to see a bandcamp revisit. Not as popular as Spotify but at least sales go to artists now. edit: wasn’t aware about the union busting. kinda sucks there are no good alternatives.
I left Spotify when they tried to force tiktok ui update out of nowhere and I wasn’t even paying for it
I downloaded Spotify once and deleted it within a few days. F-them.
When I requested the data they have of me thanks to GDPR, I learnt they shared my information to other apps and websites. I deleted the app as soon as I got the info.
Thanks for the reminder! They shan’t get another cent from me!
[Helsing, based in Germany, says it was founded to “help protect our democratic values and open societies” and puts “ethics at the core of defense technology development.”]
Show me your democratic values, open societies and the ethics at the core of your murderous defense development … then I’ll show you mine.
