Spotify used to be good but now they charge you the price of buying an album outright.
Might as well buy an album monthly and actually own it.
It was 9.99 for many years and now it’s 10.99, a ~10% increase. Not sure how a single, small price increase in years turns something from good to bad. Sure, there are many reasons to dislike Spotify, but pricing?
£10 = the price of every single album you listen to in a month, combined?
Yup. When I was kid and teen in the the CD era, I was buying 2 or 3 CDs a month for at least 10 to 20 bucks a pop. Or I would temporarily have my parents sign up for something like the BMG record club when there was a good promo where I could get 10 albums for cheap and then cancel. Fast forward to today and I can get unlimited access to all music for cheaper than a single album per month back in 2005. I don’t know how these economics can make sense even if you factor out physical media and physical distribution.
That works if you listen to just a small number of albums, but I average about 15 unique albums per month and probably 60 per year.
If I was really strict about paying for all my media (which I cannot afford now), I’d buy the albums gradually anyway, starting from ones I like most.
Also how do you discover so much?
To be honest I simply find Tidal + Plex integration to be more convenient than piracy. I’ll pay my $10 per month for the ease of use and still buy an album or two per month from artists I want to support.
My discovery is a combination of Tidal and last.fm similar artists/recommendations and people on various forums. It’s one of the few things I still go back to Reddit for. The other thing is that I like to listen to a band’s full discography when I discover them. I recently found The Ocean and all 9 of their albums are solid. That’s a lot to buy.
Not going to give substack any views, so I’ll pass on this one
They commodify and profit from Nazis on their platform. When called out for it, their response was “We don’t like Nazis either, but we won’t do anything about them and we’ll continue to take our cut from their presence on our platform”
Oh I remember hearing that quote. That was them? I had a conversation about it like a week ago. I read “substack” in the article but all tech names are pretty interchangeable to me. They all have the same groupings for the type of thing they are and substack sounded like image hosting or something to do with coding or some template bank for some kind of necessity like invoices or something. Point is, tech names are stupid and I didn’t even put the name to the site as I read it. Good to know, though.
They outright won’t ban Nazi content from their website. https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
If you’re so petty about it, use archive.org or archive.is to view the page
If you have an adblocker, and you’re not visiting any of those nazi sites directly, but do derail a comment section about a totally unrelated article? I say it is, yeah.
Then again, I can be pretty petty about circlejerks.
Viewing a website doesn’t mean supporting the website. Especially if you use an adblocker.
Last weekend I used https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic to copy my Spotify playlists over to YouTube Music, and the shuffle play is SOOO much nicer there! That was my primary gripe with Spotify, the shuffle play is idiotic
As far as I recall. YT Music pays even less than Spotify does unfortunately.
You cannot make a difference this way. Their music is a commodity they have signed agreements to sell. They probably (in the vast majority of instances) had almost no bargaining power in this and a lot of signed artists don’t make a penny from their work, at all.
If you really like an artist, contact them via their official channels and ask if you can send them money directly or donate to a charity they like.
here’s a TL;DR summary for what we’ve got:
- Spotify paid the artists $0,0032 per stream
- Apple Music got the average rate of $0,0056
- Google Play Music landed a $0,0055 payout rate
- Deezer fell slightly lower at $0.00436
From https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts#streaming-payouts-on-spotify-apple-music-google-play-and-deezer which is admittedly a bit old.
I believe YouTube music premium streams actually pay more than Spotify but the cross between YouTube paying way less and YouTube music paying more causes some confusion.
My current rules are that I’m gonna spend £10 a month on music (what I’d be paying Spotify) and try to buy directly from artists. I’ll allow myself listening to stuff on Youtube so I can gauge whether or not I wanna then go ahead and buy a song or an album if I’ve listened to it enough times and want it in my library.
So … it’s okay to listen to it for free on YouTube and maybe buy it directly, but not to pay a Spotify subscription and listen to it there (and also maybe buy it directly)? The whole rant about “Spotify doesn’t pay musicians very much” comes off as disingenuous.
The amazing mental gymnastics that these people go through to justify their piracy and inane behaviors.
Musician’s pay is just the excuse of the day for them to feel okay about what they’re doing. Honestly, if you are gonna pirate then just pirate, stop pretending that it’s for a good cause or higher purpose, other than to keep your own wallets stacked.
You could’ve replied to 100 comments on this thread about piracy but you replied to the one that had nothing to do with it.
Fai point, but regardless it seems to have struck a nerve with the piracy crowd.
I don’t have beef with piracy itself but I found it hilarious the number of pirates here standing on their soapboxes, pretending to be some kind of modern day Robin Hood and virtue signaling super hard.
Guys, you are still ripping off artists and content creators regardless of their deals with media company, just admit you want shit for free.
Honestly? No, while I do still pirate, I am slowly buying all the music I can buy in form of vynils records and CDs, other than digital downloads from bandacamp.
Watching for free on YouTube is not piracy, and laughably, I’d say it is better than using Spotify that quite literally exploits artists for cents.
No, while I do still pirate, I am slowly buying all the music I can buy in form of vynils records and CDs, other than digital downloads from bandacamp.
Good on you, the act of buying is what makes the difference.
Watching for free on YouTube is not piracy, and laughably, I’d say it is better than using Spotify that quite literally exploits artists for cents.
My comment is in the wrong thread as the other commentor pointed out, it was directed at the Robin Hood wannabes who thinks somehow ripping off artists and creators is okay, because they have a shitty deal with distributors / media companies.
Probably pirated almost every artist I’ve subsequently bought from and go to shows average about once a month. Have professional musicians in the family and they work as studio musicians, composers for media, teaching, play in bands that do covers for corporate events, or as a backing band for a front person. That’s probably the majority of musicians unless you’re lucky enough to be in a band that gains any notoriety. Most bands are passion projects between musicians who have day jobs and might only play a few small gigs at local venues. So when we’re talking about piracy as if it’s the most significant thing impacting musicians, really it’s a small facet of a very difficult industry to work in.
I don’t really think piracy is the single most significant thing impacting musicians, my main point to the “Honorable” pirates is just to cut the shit and admit you rip people off because you want to, not because you are some incarnation of Captain Jack Sparrow out to serve justice while you loot and plunder.
Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck was interviewed on CNBN about the Spotify IPO and gets around to making a good point about it here, “stop whining… me.” Artists don’t have to use a label and get paid in these “pitties” from Spotify, ultimately its a bizarre consumption model and likely unsustainable.
A while back I realized my phone has 256GB of internal storage and since I don’t take pictures or put anything else on it, I was running around with 256GB of free storage wherever I went.
And that’s pretty much when it clicked for me that I was paying Spotify for access to music I already have from the pre-spotify days for a convenience that no longer is valid.
I dove into my box of CD’s and DVDs and put the 30 something gigs of music I collected since the mid 90’s on my phone and haven’t used spotify since.
EDIT: and, yeah, I’ve re-instanced my music, movie and series downloaders and went back to sailing the high seas.
I switched to Netflix/Spotify, because of the convenience and timing of release they provided, they were also more reliable in terms of quality (“free” versions labeled ass 1080p often aren’t actually 1080p, etc).
But the sheer cost of Spotify, Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, etc, etc, etc to listen to and watch what I want, has made the convenience/cost calculation move from being acceptable to being even more than what it used to be buying CD’s and DVD’s.
On top of that the audio and video quality have deteriorated over the years, availability has become spotty, at best (like certain services removing movies and shows, even some removing movies and shows you paid extra for), we’re also dealing with these services pushing ads on top of us already paying subscriptions and fragmenting their market to the extent everything has become entirely unaffordable.
I used to buy maybe 2-3 CD’s in a year and a boxset of a show and a movie once a year.
Now simply subscribing to every service that has something I want for just 1 month costs more than what I spent per year previously.
Gabe Newels words are still right on the money.
Piracy is a service problem and the service provided these days makes Piracy the better option, again.
