Is there any escape from the Spotify syndrome?

Data hoarding can have it's issues but frankly, I love having copies of all of my music. There's a fun -- dare I say it -- media prepper attitude that goes along with downloading, backing up and storing your magic.

It's even inspired me to stick to the mp3 player as my destination listening device as current devices are nothing short of amazing for functionality, sound quality and storage.

Welcome (back) to the real world!

I have three subscriptions currently - Floatplane (LTT), Nebula and Google Drive (for ease of first backup solution; I archive photos by myself in the second wave). I never had any movie or music subscription and always went for physical (or seldom digital FLAC) media and ripped them myself. Ripping 100 CDs and 300 DVDs/Blu rays is quite some task, but I won't step down from this kind of consumer behaviour.

As you described - this makes you actually pursue what you want to listen to or watch. You either have to find a download of it or go out and buy it in physical form. This is what also makes you shape your taste, your style. You become your own master, you are no longer slave to them (meaning you are not listening to algorithm or following their recommendations).

Good for you!

Yeah, watching Spotify take over and then slowly squeeze both artists and consumers has been infuriating. It’s pretty disgusting how little most artists are getting.

Presumably if you can’t even get 1000 listens in a year you’d get like 50 cents from Spotify anyway, I don’t see how it matters.

Yeah, anecdotally, most the folks I know who consumed music at all regularly - pre Spotify - we're pirating most of it. I'd be curious what overall £s into the industry looks like now compared with a decade ago.

My instinct is that Spotify payments are better than no payments, and my sense is that it probably balances in terms of record/streaming sales. But then with added benefits from discovery leading to ticket sales. I certainly go to more varied gigs than before, from artists Spotify has discovered for me

You pay Spotify for your music. But Spotify pays artists so little per play that it's debateable if you're truly paying even your favorite artists anything, unfortunately.

Buy a t-shirt or a record or go to a concert once every few years. Don't trick yourself into thinking that Spotify is actually paying those artists.

I did the math on it during the last "blame Spotify for the economics of a world of vast and diverse musical options." You probably make your favorite artists more money over time than the iTunes days of $0.99/track sales.

when the going rate was a one off $0.99 to purchase a track, minus 30% for iTunes or whichever store you used. $0.69 is 70% of a $0.99 sale and 200 plays of a track is $0.67 at $0.0031/play. I have songs I've listened to more than 200 times in a year or two, and it's much easier to add a song to a playlist than to pull the trigger on a deliberate purchase.

We do have artists who are making ridiculous amounts of money from streaming. Taylor Swift makes hundreds of millions of dollars annually. However, it's a zero sum game: people have finite attention, so every person listening to Taylor Swift is funneling money to her and away from smaller artists.

But at the same time, the production and distribution playing field has been levelled. Basically anyone can record and mix a track on their computer and put it on streaming platforms through LANDR/DistroKid/Tunecore/etc, for a nominal fee. I can find lots of cool House or Vocaloid music by independent artists who did just that, or random 90s Eurodance that has been out of print for decades.

It's market economics: we have an abundance of musical options, finally free of the record label gatekeepers, but two things are happening:

• most people still only listen to a handful of very popular artists
• the taste of the more musically engaged people is diffused over a larger set of musicians, so that slice is spread thinly

If we magically went back to a world where everyone was paying $0.99/track (realistically, piracy would come back in a big way), Taylor Swift would still have hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of small artists would have pennies. And far fewer people giving their work a chance, further consolidating the stranglehold of established artists. If the CRB doubled the royalty rate this year, Swift would have a lot more money and most would have twice basically nothing.

I can’t comprehend not listening to a full album and choosing to listen to one song from it instead. That said, I’m a metalhead and much of my music is structured where the whole album flows rather than being 10 entirely distinct tracks.

I never really listened to full albums, mostly because there was always inevitably a few songs on the album I didn't care for, and I usually like listening to a variety of songs. Even in the days before streaming, I would simply burn various CDs that would take my favorite songs at the time, rather than just having it be mostly just one artist.

I listen to full albums all the time. It's pretty much the only way I listen to music if I'm listening alone.

With my family around there'll be a playlist or something shuffling, or in the old days, Now Music compilations or similar.

Very rarely. I used to torrent whole albums, whole discographies. I wouldn't necessarily listen to everything an artist had, especially if the had a huge discography, but yeah I'd do a whole album or two or three. And from there make my various playlists. Another thing I rarely do these days.

While I still find some decent new music on Spotify once in awhile, the one place I've found a lot of luck is actually YouTube. I don't have YouTube Music, but I'll watch music videos. Some evenings I'll just sit for hours, going video to video, based on the algorithmic suggestions/recommendations.

Interestingly, it's on YouTube where I'll catch myself listening to multiple tracks from an artist in one sitting. Aurora, St. Vincent, Jungle, and Rainych Ran are all artists whose videos I've recently watched/listened straight from their profile page. One after another. I found about Jungle through YouTube (they have the best dance videos). I've had a song or two from both Aurora and St. Vincent in my Liked/Favorited songs in Spotify for years. But I never really looked beyond those songs. It was YouTube where I finally did and gained a greater appreciation for these artists.

In my mind I tend to categorize the kinds of people who don’t listen to albums as the kind of people who are uncritical about music. They don’t try to understand it, and in some cases they may not care about much more than the lyrics. Listening to single songs is fine for pop music, at least for a particularly vague definition of the term, but most of the music I listen to are in the forms of concept albums or sometimes even rock operas. A lot of King Gizzard songs just kind of don’t make sense without the context of the album. Nonagon Infinity, for instance, is designed to be played in a loop, which brings you into this flow state that can go on forever. If you just listen to a single song from it you not only completely miss out on that but you’ll also get really abrupt beginnings and endings.

Never stopped. I have 335 Albums on my phone currently and while i often just shuffle all the tracks, it's still curated and often I'll come across something I haven't heard in awhile and listen to the entire album.

Music has always been an active relationship with me though. My wife enjoys music and has preferences, but it isn't a "hobby" for her, for lack of a better term, so she's content to mostly just stream. The only reason she has music on her phone at all is that streaming rats up our data if she's out of the house.

Full albums are my preferred method of listening. Unfortunately Spotify pushes playlists so hard that I switched to a personal music collection because listening to albums on Spotify was just inconvenient enough to make me hate it.

My partner uses Apple Music mainly for discovery. It's a fair bit better than Spotify for managing artists and albums. But still a bit worse than managing your own library.

I've always been the sort of person who plays a whole album rather than shuffling or a playlist, but my first real forays into listening to my own music were Broadway soundtracks, where that's a more common thing than it is in other genres.

I use YouTube music and once I figured out how to turn off the "autoplay similar songs after the album ends" feature it's been pretty painless to use for listening to whole albums.

I've been a Spotify user since they first launched in the US, and I've never used any algorithmic anything. I look up artists and build my own playlists. Or I look for playlists other users made and discover new things that way.

The suggestions, radio type mode and algorithmic playlists have never done anything but populate themselves with music I already have on the playlists I made, making them basically useless.

My usual listening modes are:

• select one on my playlists and shuffle (my norm for driving)
• search for artist, select album or single
• open an other user's playlist and listen, skipping heavily, then adding to my lists.

Have you been able to find all the same music in the catalog, or are certain publishers/labels/artists missing?

And that is a terrible name for a service. I don't even know how to pronounce it nor could I remember how to spell it without some significant repetition. I read why they named it that in their About Us and it reads like they went out of their way to find that name.