As apparently, this move is made to target audiobook listeners and podcast listeners, can I recommend https://audiobookshelf.org
Just a heads up to everyone, quitting Spotify and buying / “procuring” your own music and playing it via a music player makes reading this quite cathartic. Do it for the moral superiority and self esteem boost for no effort you come to the internet for anyways.
There’s quite a few ways actually:
- Bandcamp (preferred)
- just google it
- Artist’s official website
- contact artist via social media
If none of the above has worked, this is no longer an issue about whether you want to pay for the product or not, it’s a supplier problem.
Can I play devil’s advocate a little bit here, because I was really unaware that this ever worked for anything except indie artists on Bandcamp. So Bandcamp works for them or for discovering new music obviously.
I didn’t know artists ever sold digital music on their websites, but that does make sense, so I checked - if I google Taylor Swift and go to her website, there it is, digital music purchase. Great.
I went to U2’s website, and the only music I can buy there is vinyl. I don’t want vinyl, I want digital. You can buy merch, but I’m after music, not merch. Looking further, there’s all sorts of galleries and information about each album and song, but you still can’t buy the music.
Other mainstream artists I googled didn’t even go that far. Googling them brought up a wikipedia link, social media links, tours. All stuff I don’t want. Now your list has “contact artist via social media” - setting aside the fact that it’s unlikely a popular mainstream artist will even reply to anyone at all about anything, this is a real point of friction. I don’t want to have to contact an artist to find out some alternative way to get their music. If I’m buying something online, there needs to be some way to buy it online and ready to go. If we have to wait a couple of days or weeks for a reply that may or may not come - the process failed.
If I had to guess, they would probably say something like “it’s on spotify”.
So yes it probably is a supplier problem, but it seems to me that this is happening for the majority of popular artists if a majority of music people like is mainstream. I assume if you like the majority of indie music then that’s probably not the case.
Also, when it comes to specific platforms, Apple Music is quite good, though they make it rather painful to buy music if you use Linux
Yeah the moral thing to do is pay a third party company $130 per year who then pays an artist $0.20 per billion streams of their work.
I mean the moral thing is just to not buy the product if you have an issue with it.
I have no problem with piracy, but pretending you’re some sort of hero for doing it is ridiculous
Do you hate when people break in and steal from stores, etc? Because that’s you.
Also, if EA, Ubi, etc. are so shit, why are you stealing their games?
I always try to buy my music first, digital only though. I don’t have space for CDs or the like. If the option is not available (not common), the tricorn goes on. And normally I would go through any loophole I can find to get it legally. But damn, the Japanese really don’t like doing business with foreigners.
But damn, the Japanese really don’t like doing business with foreigners.
Truer words have never been spoken
