Wow. Fuck that. That should be illegal. Honestly, fuck you to Spotify in general. Fuck you for Joe Rogan. Fuck you for bringing about the next generation of ripping off artists and music...
The service recently instituted a policy in which a track that registers fewer than a thousand streams in a twelve-month span earns no royalties at all. Some estimate that this applies to approximately two-thirds of its catalogue, or about sixty million songs.
Wow. Fuck that. That should be illegal.
Honestly, fuck you to Spotify in general. Fuck you for Joe Rogan. Fuck you for bringing about the next generation of ripping off artists and music professionals. Fuck you for becoming gatekeepers for artists who for whatever reason only publish their music there. And fuck you for your continual destruction of the very concept of owning music.
This feels like an overreaction, and this is coming from someone who has music hosted on Spotify. You make .0003 per stream, so someone with less than 1k streams is out up to literally 3 cents. It...
This feels like an overreaction, and this is coming from someone who has music hosted on Spotify. You make .0003 per stream, so someone with less than 1k streams is out up to literally 3 cents. It almost definitely costs more than that just to process the payout. I am the first person to hate on spotify, but there are bigger fish to fry and I'm suprised they didn't already do this.
As someone who also has music on Spotify, I have to agree. I wish that was my biggest issue with Spotify. Personally, I'm currently more concerned about the risk of being randomly added to a...
As someone who also has music on Spotify, I have to agree. I wish that was my biggest issue with Spotify. Personally, I'm currently more concerned about the risk of being randomly added to a botted playlist that can get you banned from Spotify/your music distributor with little recourse.
It’s insulting to be told that you’re overreacting. Feel free to see some of my other responses but this is not about individual damages to me, it’s the ethics of the decision and the overall...
It’s insulting to be told that you’re overreacting.
Feel free to see some of my other responses but this is not about individual damages to me, it’s the ethics of the decision and the overall effects it has on the music industry as a whole.
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.
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.
I get how they're squeezing artists, but how are they squeezing consumers? It costs less for a month of Spotify than a music album, and they have a massive library that you have unlimited...
I get how they're squeezing artists, but how are they squeezing consumers? It costs less for a month of Spotify than a music album, and they have a massive library that you have unlimited listening time on.
Maybe financially it makes more sense to buy albums for someone who only ever just listens to a handful of albums or songs, but I'd imagine that for most people, Spotify is cheaper than buying all the music they'd like to listen to.
They increased prices, filled their feeds with podcasts, bought many podcasts just for exclusivity rights, and are now filling the platform & playlists with their own AI-generated music.
They increased prices, filled their feeds with podcasts, bought many podcasts just for exclusivity rights, and are now filling the platform & playlists with their own AI-generated music.
The RIAA says it's bad to use music without an agreement with the artist. Otherwise radio would be bad, but I don't think the RIAA is or was against the radio. It's pretty common just to floors on...
The RIAA says it's bad to use music without an agreement with the artist. Otherwise radio would be bad, but I don't think the RIAA is or was against the radio.
It's pretty common just to floors on payouts just because the associated friction of doing the payouts would exceed or be a significant fraction of the payout amount.
The payment floor article might have been a lot more persuasive if it weren’t 2/3rds of the catalogue. Also the article says it’s per track, not per rights/accountholder. Regardless of if the...
The payment floor article might have been a lot more persuasive if it weren’t 2/3rds of the catalogue. Also the article says it’s per track, not per rights/accountholder.
Regardless of if the rights holders agreed to it, it’s clear that Spotify has a great deal of leverage over them and can essentially force them to agree due to market pressure. They’re screwing people over. There’s no way to deny it.
2/3rds of the catalog isn’t saying much. Pretty much anyone can upload a track to Spotify. It’s basically the same as YouTube. 99% of videos have almost no views, and are not monetized, and were...
2/3rds of the catalog isn’t saying much. Pretty much anyone can upload a track to Spotify. It’s basically the same as YouTube. 99% of videos have almost no views, and are not monetized, and were never intended to be.
If you can’t even get 1000 impressions in 12 months you simply don’t have a product that can make money under any model.
In prestreaming days, these are the kind of tracks would be recorded on tapes and played to friends who go “yeah that’s pretty nice Joe, anyway do you want to bowling tomorrow?”
Such arguments might have been more effective if they weren't paying these people in the past. But they were. They just decided "hey, you're not worth paying money to anymore, so go fuck off".
Such arguments might have been more effective if they weren't paying these people in the past. But they were. They just decided "hey, you're not worth paying money to anymore, so go fuck off".
As Spotify grows, the long tail of songs no one listens to continues to grow. Administratively, I can easily see how it became not worth it. And that’s fine. No one is really worse for the wear....
As Spotify grows, the long tail of songs no one listens to continues to grow. Administratively, I can easily see how it became not worth it.
And that’s fine. No one is really worse for the wear. Honestly getting 50 cents from Spotify, of which 30c + 3% goes to the payment processor, so 20 cents, feels more insulting than getting nothing.
1000 impressions is honestly a much lower threshold than I’d expect. Bravo to Spotify for that.
Honestly I have no idea why you are trying so hard to defend something that is so obviously unethical and arguably immoral. Not only are you defending them, you're applauding them? That's insane....
Honestly I have no idea why you are trying so hard to defend something that is so obviously unethical and arguably immoral. Not only are you defending them, you're applauding them? That's insane. People are being robbed.
If it's such an insulting amount and it costs so much to give them payments, why not just hold on to the money until it goes to a threshold? And once again, they are doing this on a per-track basis, not on a per-account basis. I doubt there are many artists who have just one track to their name.
Because I don't think it's particularly unethical, and is pretty normal. The reality is that revenue/impressions is very low, at every level. On youtube, you wouldn't even be invited for the...
Because I don't think it's particularly unethical, and is pretty normal. The reality is that revenue/impressions is very low, at every level. On youtube, you wouldn't even be invited for the monetization program if your videos aren't at least in the 10k+/year range.
If you can't meet a 1000 impression limit, it just doesn't matter.
But once again it's per track. If a rightsholder has 10,000 songs that get played 500 times each in a year, do they not deserve to be paid for any of them?
But once again it's per track. If a rightsholder has 10,000 songs that get played 500 times each in a year, do they not deserve to be paid for any of them?
Yes. It’s a common exploit on these models, you basically spam low effort, these days AI generated, songs and try to get because the algorithm will give your songs a shot as a matter of necessity....
Yes. It’s a common exploit on these models, you basically spam low effort, these days AI generated, songs and try to get because the algorithm will give your songs a shot as a matter of necessity.
If Taylor swift gets 1 million impressions, is that the same as someone that uploads 1 million AI generated songs with 1 listener each?
In the end, 1000 impressions is just a pathetically low threshold. I can’t think of someone who would be making money off of their music in any model who couldn’t get 1000 impressions.
People who listen to Taylor Swift and people who listen to small artists pay the same subscription fee. Why should one taste in music be more worthy of payment than others? Even YouTube seems to...
People who listen to Taylor Swift and people who listen to small artists pay the same subscription fee. Why should one taste in music be more worthy of payment than others? Even YouTube seems to base their threshold for monetization on total hours watched on a channel. So they don't screw over those that many short videos over those that have few long ones. I see no justification for Spotify to do this model that isn't based on a grand total of listening time.
To prevent abuse, like I said. In what practical world does any actual semi-popular artist not manage to get over 1000 impressions? It’s not easy to make music. The main circumstance where you...
To prevent abuse, like I said.
In what practical world does any actual semi-popular artist not manage to get over 1000 impressions?
It’s not easy to make music. The main circumstance where you could make up for getting 100 impressions per song by sheer volume is if you’re uploading bullshit.
How can total listening hours be abused in ways tracks can't? Why does small artists needs to be screwed just because a billion dollar company can't prevent fraud? It still a 1000 streams per...
How can total listening hours be abused in ways tracks can't? Why does small artists needs to be screwed just because a billion dollar company can't prevent fraud?
It still a 1000 streams per track, not in total. Many niche genres may not have a 1000 listeners for smaller bands, but why does the subscription fee we pay to listen to not deserve to be counted? Youtube seems to be able do a model that doesn't screw over their smaller channels.
One way is by abusing the algorithm. A common spotify exploit was to basically upload songs with the names of actual songs which just an empty pause. Users would just think that spotify was just...
One way is by abusing the algorithm. A common spotify exploit was to basically upload songs with the names of actual songs which just an empty pause. Users would just think that spotify was just glitching out, but they were actually giving impressions to empty tracks.
Another is that the algorithm is designed to give new tracks a "shot", present it to people. Otherwise, how would new songs ever be discovered? But you can abuse that by uploading 100,000 songs a day, which all get their 1 minute in the spotlight. Because it's not actual good music, the algorithm will push it down after that, but hey, you got your 50-100 listeners.
Sounds like Spotify have created that sort of problem by themselves and you think it is completely fair to sacrifice small artists because Spotify can't think of a better way? It start to come off...
Sounds like Spotify have created that sort of problem by themselves and you think it is completely fair to sacrifice small artists because Spotify can't think of a better way?
It start to come off as pretty dishonest you keep saying 1000 impressions for an artist, when it has been stated multiple times that the main problem is that is per track.
I listen to some artists that may have 30-40 tracks that seems to have fewer than 1000 listeners. Across all their albums it is not unreasonable for them to get in a total some hundred bucks if they weren't counted per track. Youtube has a minimum payout of $100 per year based on total view time. I see no good reason why Spotify shouldnt be able to do something similar.
To be honest, I think we're just going in circles, but yes, I think it's fair for the model to work in a way that is practical for the platform and the artists.
To be honest, I think we're just going in circles, but yes, I think it's fair for the model to work in a way that is practical for the platform and the artists.
And you really think it just a practicality for them and not because they can save huge amounts of money by this? Youtube is by no means a good role model in how they treat their content creators,...
And you really think it just a practicality for them and not because they can save huge amounts of money by this? Youtube is by no means a good role model in how they treat their content creators, but they seem to be able to have a total view on time spent rather than adding an artificial constraint on tracks. It isn't technically easier to keep counts on all individual tracks that it would be to just keep count of a total. They have actively chosen a more complicated model, which makes it hard to believe it is due to practicalities or management.
Yes. You can add up the impressions on that entire 2/3rds long tail and it'd be nothing. I think it's entirely a matter of administrative load - which is cost in a way, just that I don't think...
Yes. You can add up the impressions on that entire 2/3rds long tail and it'd be nothing. I think it's entirely a matter of administrative load - which is cost in a way, just that I don't think it's about the amount of rev share.
Like I said, spotify has elements of their platform that make it rife for revenue hackers. Unlike youtube, a lot of people listen entirely by the algorithm, or use voice commands (that's how one of the examples did it).
Spotify could change that, but it'd make it worse for everyone as well. I'd argue if the algorithm tries to spotlight new songs less often, that's far more harmful to small artists than the 1000 impression cutoff.
Commonality and prescedent does not make the behavior more ethical. That's like saying it's OK to be in a lynch mob because you weren't the only person stabbing the black man. You're stuck on...
Commonality and prescedent does not make the behavior more ethical. That's like saying it's OK to be in a lynch mob because you weren't the only person stabbing the black man.
You're stuck on practicalities. The practicality is not the problem. The problems are ethics and morals, and that's why I'm so frightened about how you don't think this is a problem. You keep going back to YouTube and their policies are even worse, but YouTube is possibly one of the lowest bars you could have chosen, and Google is not a highly ethical corporation; those years are far behind them. You are completely ignoring the patterns of enshittification, and how this is a supply side squeeze that hurts real people. AI spam is a thing and there are ways that they should probably be fought against, but that isn't an excuse for hurting real people. It also doesn't matter that they are taking pennies away because the problem isn't the amount, it's that it's happening at all. They are abusing their market dominance and that is unethical in and of itself. If everyone thought like you we would be in the next gilded age. But heck, we practically already are.
I think the only way to change your mind would be to convince you with entire ethical frameworks, and I doube either of us have the time or patience for that. So I'll leave this conversation.
We tend to get into these heated arguements semi-frequently, don't we? Please don't take me getting upset at you to mean that I don't appreciate you being here.
Is what it is. Practicalities matter for me and my expectations. I am the other side, I've probably generated tens of dollars of revenue for platforms, I even got a payout from instagram once. But...
Is what it is. Practicalities matter for me and my expectations. I am the other side, I've probably generated tens of dollars of revenue for platforms, I even got a payout from instagram once. But I usually don't, and I don't particularly begrudge the platforms for my lack of $5, because I understand it's not practical, and it wasn't my expectation nor reason for creation.
I don't think any real artist is meaningfully harmed by this. Like any actual small artist, who is making money off of their music in any real way, will get over 1000 impressions on their songs.
2/3rds only sounds like a lot because 1/3rd of all spotify songs are literal recordings of fans by people trying to revenue hack the white noise radios. And that's fine - I'd rather spotify be somewhere where anyone can upload their tracks. But population statistics are misleading for these kind of platforms.
We tend to get into these heated arguements semi-frequently, don't we? Please don't take me getting upset at you to mean that I don't appreciate you being here.
I don't particularly take it personally. I honestly don't really get upset at discussions on the internet, so I don't mind.
It just seems like a really weird hill to die on honestly. It's robbery in the same way that taking a penny from the take a penny leave a penny jar is. Like, is there really a contingent of...
It just seems like a really weird hill to die on honestly. It's robbery in the same way that taking a penny from the take a penny leave a penny jar is.
Like, is there really a contingent of artists that is upset about not getting their $0.50 a year?
I think the paltry rate that Spotify pays per listen is the issue, not that they're not paying out artists who earned a few cents a year.
Have you ever seen Office Space? No seriously. They may be stealing pennies, but they are stealing pennies from everyone. The artists may not be losing enough to be upset about it, but it doesn't...
Have you ever seen Office Space? No seriously. They may be stealing pennies, but they are stealing pennies from everyone. The artists may not be losing enough to be upset about it, but it doesn't make it any less wrong. The amount Spotify pays per stream is paltry indeed, but it's putting salt in the wound when they decide that they can't even be bothered to pay the tiny amount they would normally be offering. I'm not only upset about this one thing. It's just the top of an entire mountain of problems that Spotify represents.
The money that Spotify pays out comes from a split pool and distributed based on streams to artists. If they save a penny not giving it to Unpopular Artist, that penny goes to the other artists....
The money that Spotify pays out comes from a split pool and distributed based on streams to artists. If they save a penny not giving it to Unpopular Artist, that penny goes to the other artists. Spotify doesn't get to keep the penny. Artists, as a whole, make the same amount but it becomes a little more lopsided amongst the artists.
But I wonder if the cost savings comes from what Spotify keeps or from what the artists keep; this part I'm not sure.
Wait, is that true? Then what happens when things don’t line up? I pay an amount for my subscription every month, and that doesn’t change based on how little or how much I listen, nor does it...
If they save a penny not giving it to Unpopular Artist, that penny goes to the other artists. Spotify doesn't get to keep the penny. Artists, as a whole, make the same amount but it becomes a little more lopsided amongst the artists.
Wait, is that true? Then what happens when things don’t line up?
I pay an amount for my subscription every month, and that doesn’t change based on how little or how much I listen, nor does it change based on the total streams across all users. It’s a fixed amount.
I’ve heard that Spotify pays artists something like 0.0003 per listen or something like that, but I’ve also always heard it as a fixed amount, not a “this is the average over the past year, but depending on Spotify revenue or total streams across the user base, it might go up or down” so I assume that as long as XYZ number of artists meet the payout threshold, they get paid that fixed amount.
So then, if the subscriptions revenue doesn’t total enough to cover the payout costs, is that just paid from Spotify’s pockets? Where does that money come from? Is this why they’ve “never made a profit” or something?
And you’ve mentioned this collective pool of available money, which I feel like I’ve seen articles describe in this kinda way, but does Spotify announce the total pool before the payout, or is it retroactively calculated because actually their payments to artists have explicit thresholds that an artist knows before they get their cheques in the mail?
If the pool of money available to pay artists isn’t defined before payouts but rather measured retroactively after they’ve paid, then I have to disagree with your assertion that pennies saved from one artist goes to another, because if the pool is not fixed then they can just pocket the difference.
Spotify operates on a pro-rata model. Any article that reports it as $X/stream is just straight up wrong. That may be what it came out to be, but that's not the payout model that actually happens....
Spotify operates on a pro-rata model. Any article that reports it as $X/stream is just straight up wrong. That may be what it came out to be, but that's not the payout model that actually happens.
If my subscription is $12/month, then $8.40 of it goes into a pool to pay out to artists. The percentage may fluctuate; idk if the 70% has changed over time, but that's the gist of it. They calculate the total number of listens, the total amount in the pool to pay out to artists, and then figure out the $X/listen to figure out which artists get how much.
I can have 1 listen a month or I can have 10,000 listens a month, but Spotify gets the same cut and artists get the same cut of my $12 regardless. There's never a case where Spotify had too many listens in 1 month than their subscription revenue can cover. The price/listen just goes down that month. Or if one month everyone decided to go on a digital cleanse, then the price/listen goes up.
Yep. This also applies to advertisement revenue for free accounts. It's pooled in the same way, minus the 30% that Spotify keeps. My understanding is they're still obligated to pay at least the...
Yep. This also applies to advertisement revenue for free accounts. It's pooled in the same way, minus the 30% that Spotify keeps.
My understanding is they're still obligated to pay at least the $0.0031/stream minimum royalty rate set by the federal CRB (unless I'm mistaken), but in practice the pro rata model will pay more than that for popular artists. The pro rata scheme is fairly well known to work out to roughly $0.003-0.005/stream on average, at least.
Then they round payouts down and don't pay rightsholders that make less than some number of cents in a year.
And, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, before streaming, the norm was to pay $0.99/track from iTunes. (Or pirate, more likely.) Apple would take 30%, so rights holders would get about $0.69 per track. (Note that artists signed to labels are getting a small fraction of any revenue source.) That works out to maybe 200 streams being roughly equivalent to one sale...which is very reasonable, given I easily listen to songs that much or more over a couple of years, and the threshold to try a song and save it to a playlist is far lower than paying $0.99 based on a ten second preview. It's continuous revenue.
If I understand their terms correctly it is 1000 streams per song. So smaller artists with less than 1000 different listeners could get in total get over 100.000 streams of their catalogue, which...
If I understand their terms correctly it is 1000 streams per song. So smaller artists with less than 1000 different listeners could get in total get over 100.000 streams of their catalogue, which under normal circumstances would give them a couple of hundred dollars. But with this model they get nothing if their streams are not centered on a few hits. It is understandable to have some sort of reasonable limit, but requiring it pr track and not some total amount really seems like an unsympathetic move to screw over smaller artists.
They could pass on the costs of making that payment. In the case of the 1000 or less impression tracks, that might mean charging the artist to make the payment.
They could pass on the costs of making that payment. In the case of the 1000 or less impression tracks, that might mean charging the artist to make the payment.
The artists are getting something out of it too. They are getting free hosting and searchability. Rather than having to produce physical media or run their own website, they can say "find me on...
The artists are getting something out of it too. They are getting free hosting and searchability. Rather than having to produce physical media or run their own website, they can say "find me on spotify."
If spotify isn't making any money off these artists (<1000 plays is almost definitely not making spotify any money), then 2/3 of the catalog is actually costing them money to host. If we wanted to make it truly fair in terms of cost/revenue, people would probably have to pay a small fee to upload their music. If we want to say that spotify has enough revenue from their popular music to dedicate some extra resources for small creators, that's exactly what's happening.
That's not what I'm saying at all. Not even close. Are you sure you're replying to the right comment? I'm saying they're providing free hosting, which is something that costs spotify money. If...
That's not what I'm saying at all. Not even close. Are you sure you're replying to the right comment?
I'm saying they're providing free hosting, which is something that costs spotify money. If these songs aren't bringing in a net positive in revenue, then it's still true that they are sharing profits with these creators, it's just that the profit is zero so there's nothing to share.
Of course I am responding to the right comment. It doesn’t matter that it costs money for Spotify to host those songs. It costs money to distribute art and they are making money from...
Of course I am responding to the right comment. It doesn’t matter that it costs money for Spotify to host those songs. It costs money to distribute art and they are making money from subscriptions. If it’s really unprofitable then they should remove the songs altogether. That would be the logical solution, no? But clearly they see more value in holding it than not.
Beyond that the entire platform is built with the expectation that rights holders will be paid.
Saying "logical solution" implies that the current situation is wrong and need to be fixed. If small creators find that they are getting enough value from the platform in terms of distribution,...
If it’s really unprofitable then they should remove the songs altogether. That would be the logical solution, no?
Saying "logical solution" implies that the current situation is wrong and need to be fixed. If small creators find that they are getting enough value from the platform in terms of distribution, and spotify finds that they are getting enough draw for subscriptions from the few artists that do become more popular, then the situation is ok and doesn't need to change. If both parties are getting what they want from the transaction, it's not theft or abuse of power or anything like that.
They may have paid smaller artists in the past, but they were also losing a ton of money in the past too. If the options were to drop the small artists or change the royalty structure, well, that's up to the users to decide if spotify made the right decision.
Except that that was not the terms of their original agreement. Spotify has pulled a Darth Vader. “I have altered our agreement. Pray I do not alter it further.” Artists have no leverage to negotiate.
Except that that was not the terms of their original agreement. Spotify has pulled a Darth Vader. “I have altered our agreement. Pray I do not alter it further.” Artists have no leverage to negotiate.
Fine, then. I'd love to get an agreement where I don't pay for the first 1000 listens of a song. I promise I'm happy to pay Spotify's $0.002 per play after that! Better yet, lets cap piracy...
Fine, then. I'd love to get an agreement where I don't pay for the first 1000 listens of a song. I promise I'm happy to pay Spotify's $0.002 per play after that!
Better yet, lets cap piracy penalties at Spotify's rate. 0.002 per song.
I think my interaction with new things on the internet just sorta stopped when I graduated high school in 2010ish. I never used Spotify, never used streaming services, haven't used Facebook since...
I think my interaction with new things on the internet just sorta stopped when I graduated high school in 2010ish.
I never used Spotify, never used streaming services, haven't used Facebook since before I owned a smartphone, I still play an mmo from 2001ish...
I just never really felt like any of these things brought value into my life, and it feels sorta like everyone else is coming to the same conclusion I did, just 15 years later. The old internet is still there for us, we just have to use it. TPB and other torrenting sites never stopped existing. Hell, IRC chat is still out there if you really want, I know plenty of people who use it.
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...
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 music.
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.
Can't disagree here. Honestly, doesn't even take that much space and isn't that expensive in the long run as long as you just keep what you want, rather than grab everything available from a feed...
Can't disagree here. Honestly, doesn't even take that much space and isn't that expensive in the long run as long as you just keep what you want, rather than grab everything available from a feed or something.
In only recently upgraded to some 8Tb drives and they're still only half full.
I do just my phone as my mp3 player, but that's because I tend to stick to phones that have a MicroSD slot. Soon as they stop offering those, I'll find something else.
Fellow bit-hoarder here. About 18 months ago YouTube (the music/premium ad free package) annoyed me to such an extent that I went back to using Plex for music again. I’m back to YouTube premium,...
Fellow bit-hoarder here. About 18 months ago YouTube (the music/premium ad free package) annoyed me to such an extent that I went back to using Plex for music again.
I’m back to YouTube premium, but that’s just because I can’t deal with the ads.
For music now I go back-and-forth. I like knowing I have my Endless Boogie and Bohren and der Club of Gore lossless collections safe and local, and can explore with YT for my next great discovery.
Yeah maintaining and managing backups is difficult if you’re not used to it I guess. Ive always just used my laptop to backup my desktop and vice versa. I know that wouldn’t be ideal in a fire, so...
Yeah maintaining and managing backups is difficult if you’re not used to it I guess.
Ive always just used my laptop to backup my desktop and vice versa. I know that wouldn’t be ideal in a fire, so I bought blu ray discs with the intention of using them for long term cold storage. I haven’t gotten around to actually doing that though haha. I think I backed up all the family photos so far and stopped there.
Always wanted to start a NAS or something similar, but work takes up all my brain energy so doing things is hard.
I see that. Honestly, I've lost my whole data collection more than once because I didn't do the NAS thing right. That all said, the off the shelf options are great. It seems counter intuitive, but...
I see that. Honestly, I've lost my whole data collection more than once because I didn't do the NAS thing right.
That all said, the off the shelf options are great. It seems counter intuitive, but buying somebody else's low use Synology NAS is also a way to save money. Lastly, just loading your desktop with hard drives that auto back up to one another is the easiest.
Ive actually never lost anything! Somehow the pc - laptop + multiple externals has never failed me. I do take reaaaaaally good care of my equipment, though.
Ive actually never lost anything! Somehow the pc - laptop + multiple externals has never failed me.
I do take reaaaaaally good care of my equipment, though.
Like the author, I’m starting to view services like Spotify as too convenient. Convenient to a fault and taking so much choice out of the process of consuming art that it can make it feel a bit...
Like the author, I’m starting to view services like Spotify as too convenient. Convenient to a fault and taking so much choice out of the process of consuming art that it can make it feel a bit soulless at times.
A few months ago, I committed to canceling most of my streaming subscriptions, including Spotify. I found out that with music, I enjoy and appreciate the music more if I go through a process of acquiring it instead of have an algorithm find new music for me. Going to the record store and buying a record, cd, or cassette has completely reinvigorated how I consume music and it’s a much more enjoyable activity now. Even purchasing an album on band camp or finding it on a tracker somewhere feels better than just searching on Spotify, even though searching on Bandcamp and paying $10 for an album doesn’t produce a meaningfully different result than searching on Spotify in a technical sense (in both cases I can listen to a digital album within seconds). It just feels better, I’m not sure how else to describe it.
I’m finding out the same thing with video as well. If I go through the effort to research what shows or movies are new or good or interesting, I get more excited to watch them vs if I just open the HBO app and it’s like “watch this movie”. This one is a bit harder because physical media for movies and TV is dying, though like with music, it still feels more intimate to find it on a tracker and download it than to just stream it.
For me, I’ve gone back to committing to taking action to acquire and enjoy media, I’m appreciating it more when I seek rather than let apps dictate what I watch. I even have an iPod classic now for music instead of just putting music on my phone (since I am also trying to reduce phone usage) and that’s also feeling great. Ultimately, I have started feeling more involved with my media now and it’s great!
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...
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).
I started the year off by cancelling my Spotify. Im going to try and get back to discovering music and listening to music the "old" way. Unfortunately physical media isn't something i can get into...
I started the year off by cancelling my Spotify. Im going to try and get back to discovering music and listening to music the "old" way. Unfortunately physical media isn't something i can get into currently but I'm going to use bandcamp as much as possible. So far in don't miss Spotify at all.
This also ties in with using my phone less. In fact I'm trying to be more purposeful with my tech consumption so I'm glad to see there are other like minded folks out there.
When I read articles like these, I feel conflicted, but only for a minute. Pre-Spotify, I pirated ALL my music. I didn't go to concerts. I didn't buy CDs, I burned them. I bought cheap Sansa MP3...
When I read articles like these, I feel conflicted, but only for a minute. Pre-Spotify, I pirated ALL my music. I didn't go to concerts. I didn't buy CDs, I burned them. I bought cheap Sansa MP3 players and drag-and-dropped my MP3s with Windows Explorer. For years. I justified it in various ways.
When Spotify came out, I tried it out. Then I subscribed. And I've been subscribed ever since. I've been paying for music every month for over a decade now. I'm happy with my music discovery and I listen to new stuff instead of being stuck listening to the same music forever.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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 know it feels that way. But unless your artists are getting literally tens of millions of listens they probably care very little about their Spotify income, because it's likely less than they...
I know it feels that way. But unless your artists are getting literally tens of millions of listens they probably care very little about their Spotify income, because it's likely less than they get from merch sales at a single concert.
Spotify pays out roughly 70% of a subscription's price to the artist/label, so $0 to $100/year ($11.99 * 0.7 * 12) isn't so bad when there were a lot of $0 in the past.
Spotify pays out roughly 70% of a subscription's price to the artist/label, so $0 to $100/year ($11.99 * 0.7 * 12) isn't so bad when there were a lot of $0 in the past.
To sort of try an answer the main question. Does anybody just listen to full albums anymore? It seems like a lot of this algorithmic determined music decision comes from people just listening to...
To sort of try an answer the main question. Does anybody just listen to full albums anymore? It seems like a lot of this algorithmic determined music decision comes from people just listening to recommended playlists or let the play just continue on "auto suggestion". Of course there is still the "Similar artists" feature which can heavily influence you and it takes active effort to break out of the taste bubble profile the service has on you, but I think it is more engaging to at least try an focus on a single artist for a full album. That gives a better impression of the artistic intent by the musicians, so it is just not an endless list of similar songs by anonymous creators.
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...
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 pretty much never listen to a whole album, and haven’t for at least 10 years. My two main modes of listening to music are listening to a playlist I made, which is only going to have the songs I...
I pretty much never listen to a whole album, and haven’t for at least 10 years. My two main modes of listening to music are
listening to a playlist I made, which is only going to have the songs I like, which is pretty much never an entire album
listening to algorithmic “radio”, which is also only going to include one or two from any given album.
Same here. I can occasionally put on a playlist with some favorite bangers, but then again - how can you listen to Painkiller and not listen to the rest of the album?
Same here. I can occasionally put on a playlist with some favorite bangers, but then again - how can you listen to Painkiller and not listen to the rest of the album?
I mostly listen to music that only comes in singles these days. House, J-Pop, etc.. It gets added to my own categorical playlists and I listen from there.
I mostly listen to music that only comes in singles these days. House, J-Pop, etc.. It gets added to my own categorical playlists and I listen from there.
I'm a metalhead too but most of my listening is in playlists I've made for myself where I add the songs I really like and discard the rest. If I love all the songs on an album then I'll listen to...
I'm a metalhead too but most of my listening is in playlists I've made for myself where I add the songs I really like and discard the rest. If I love all the songs on an album then I'll listen to them, but that's somewhat rare.
In general I like variety. A lot of the metal is prog or prog-adjacent. So to me it isn't that jarring switching from one artist/album to another. I'm used to huge dynamic shifts, changing instruments and styles mid-song.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
This is very rock-centric. Other genres have not released on albums for decades. New Order's Blue Monday was the best selling 12" single of all time. Dance music had been coming as singles since...
This is very rock-centric. Other genres have not released on albums for decades.
New Order's Blue Monday was the best selling 12" single of all time. Dance music had been coming as singles since the disco days in the 70s, and that progressed to 12" ones because they could hold longer tracks and were easier for DJs to work with. Now, EDM genres still primarily release tracks as singles.
Most of the J-Pop I listen to drops as singles too, either because it's independents expecting a YouTube/NicoNico audience or because the song was made for an anime opening.
Actually it's very soundtrack centric. The majority of my library are soundtracks to games, musicals, movies, etc. Most of my indie albums are more-or-less concept albums as well, though that's...
Actually it's very soundtrack centric. The majority of my library are soundtracks to games, musicals, movies, etc. Most of my indie albums are more-or-less concept albums as well, though that's almost certainly because of self-selection.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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 don't think I've ever used Spotify's radio or their auto generated playlists frankly. The most I allow Spotify's algorithm to influence my listening is by putting on shuffle, and even then I...
I don't think I've ever used Spotify's radio or their auto generated playlists frankly. The most I allow Spotify's algorithm to influence my listening is by putting on shuffle, and even then I prefer to listen to full albums at a time.
All of my music gets copied into one playlist that I shuffle, or I go to an artist's profile and listen to an album. I find new bands by looking up what bands the bands I currently like are touring with, or by hearing a band for the first time live and then going to check out their music. I also look up recommendations from real people (If I like X band, what other bands might I like? Reddit was good for that.)
An old friend is also a talent buyer at a small venue back in my hometown so I pay attention to what bands he's booking and check them out
I've always been a "data hoarder" that was staunchly against using streaming services. I ended up being pressed into paying for the Spotify family plan because my wife and kids really thrive on...
I've always been a "data hoarder" that was staunchly against using streaming services. I ended up being pressed into paying for the Spotify family plan because my wife and kids really thrive on streaming music even if I get the album and rip it for them. Since it was already paid for, I've used it when it was inconvenient for me to get the music other ways, and I do empathize with the author of this article. Spotify is "convenient", but soulless and filled with tons of micro-annoyances while also giving that thin gross vibe of knowing that they are hugely supporting some awful people (Rogan) while barely paying the actual artists anything. Despite all of this, I do still think that their client is better (from a UI standpoint) that any of the others by a pretty wide margin (I demoed a few of the other services).
It's interesting to me the note about UI; Tidal had some logout annoyances a year or two back but has been solid and easy across various OSes. The few times I've used Spotify (either someone...
It's interesting to me the note about UI; Tidal had some logout annoyances a year or two back but has been solid and easy across various OSes. The few times I've used Spotify (either someone sharing a playlist or using someone else's device) it wasn't intuitive for me and generally felt clunky.
I wonder if there's a design language Spotify uses that's replicated in other apps that you use and I don't that could explain the different experiences (or similarly with Tidal for me).
Join Qobuz and soon to cancel Spotify. I don't know if it's a cure for the Spotify syndrome or just its variant, but the recommendations are so much better.
Join Qobuz and soon to cancel Spotify. I don't know if it's a cure for the Spotify syndrome or just its variant, but the recommendations are so much better.
re: better recommendations, psst is a Spotify client reimplementation that allows you to tweak your own recommendation list for a song according to "danceability", "energy", "valence" and other...
Exemplary
re: better recommendations, psst is a Spotify client reimplementation that allows you to tweak your own recommendation list for a song according to "danceability", "energy", "valence" and other metrics. It's far better than Spotify's default/proprietary algorithm.
Haven't even looked at how it does recommendations yet, but the fact it's a native app alone makes it worth considering installing. "Official" Spotify Desktop is agonizingly slow at times.
Haven't even looked at how it does recommendations yet, but the fact it's a native app alone makes it worth considering installing. "Official" Spotify Desktop is agonizingly slow at times.
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...
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.
So I've had both Spotify and Quobuz. Quobuz is more for audiophiles rather than general purpose streaming. It's main focus is on high fidelity recordings that most of the general population...
So I've had both Spotify and Quobuz. Quobuz is more for audiophiles rather than general purpose streaming. It's main focus is on high fidelity recordings that most of the general population doesn't even have audio speakers/equipment that will be able to really fully utilize the higher quality to tell a difference. With that said I do believe they do a good job of at least trying to expose you to new types of music from various genre with the recommendations and new music sections.
The catalog has a lot of the songs you would expect it to have, but then there would also be random things inexplicably missing. There were numerous times that I would look for a song and it just wasn't there. Even more odd, sometimes they'd have like 2 or 3 songs from an artist, or 2-3 songs from an album, but then the rest of their works were just missing.
Ultimately I canceled my Quobuz, I couldn't justify the price at that point when I wasn't using it as much as I wanted. When I was using it, while it did have a majority of what I wanted, the annoyance of the random missing songs was enough to frustrate me to cancelling eventually.
I think some genres are more prevalent in their catalog than others. If you have decent audio speakers/gear that can take advantage of their higher quality streaming, and if you find most of the songs you want are on the platform, I think it's worth the switch.
EDIT: One more thing I forgot that frustrated me. Their apps were just bad. On my Android phone, I couldn't listen for that long before it would just unexpectedly quit/crash. In the car, Android Auto would either not work, be constantly stopping in the middle of songs, or just would refuse to play altogether. On Mac, unless they fixed it, their software didn't work properly with the M series chips, so I had to use the web player. To be fair, the web player (and Windows versions of their desktop software) worked great.
Thanks for sharing your experience. My partner apparently knew about this service from a TikTok video that claimed artists earn exponentially more per stream from this service than all the others....
Thanks for sharing your experience.
My partner apparently knew about this service from a TikTok video that claimed artists earn exponentially more per stream from this service than all the others. So that's worth adding into the equation as well.
I would say it's probably worth trying out for a month or two to see how it works for you. I know there's a tool that can transfer your Spotify playlists over to Quobuz. Might give you a good idea...
I would say it's probably worth trying out for a month or two to see how it works for you. I know there's a tool that can transfer your Spotify playlists over to Quobuz. Might give you a good idea of what songs that you normally listen to are or are not available, while also seeing how the apps or other music discovery works for you.
Wow. Fuck that. That should be illegal.
Honestly, fuck you to Spotify in general. Fuck you for Joe Rogan. Fuck you for bringing about the next generation of ripping off artists and music professionals. Fuck you for becoming gatekeepers for artists who for whatever reason only publish their music there. And fuck you for your continual destruction of the very concept of owning music.
This feels like an overreaction, and this is coming from someone who has music hosted on Spotify. You make .0003 per stream, so someone with less than 1k streams is out up to literally 3 cents. It almost definitely costs more than that just to process the payout. I am the first person to hate on spotify, but there are bigger fish to fry and I'm suprised they didn't already do this.
As someone who also has music on Spotify, I have to agree. I wish that was my biggest issue with Spotify. Personally, I'm currently more concerned about the risk of being randomly added to a botted playlist that can get you banned from Spotify/your music distributor with little recourse.
It’s insulting to be told that you’re overreacting.
Feel free to see some of my other responses but this is not about individual damages to me, it’s the ethics of the decision and the overall effects it has on the music industry as a whole.
Yeah I just think this issue is pretty low priority compared to the huge list of things spotify does wrong.
That might be why I listed some of them?
I think you have a 0 too many. Most places I can find it is listed as $0.003 which would be $3 for 1000 streams.
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.
I get how they're squeezing artists, but how are they squeezing consumers? It costs less for a month of Spotify than a music album, and they have a massive library that you have unlimited listening time on.
Maybe financially it makes more sense to buy albums for someone who only ever just listens to a handful of albums or songs, but I'd imagine that for most people, Spotify is cheaper than buying all the music they'd like to listen to.
They increased prices, filled their feeds with podcasts, bought many podcasts just for exclusivity rights, and are now filling the platform & playlists with their own AI-generated music.
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.
If the RIAA is to be believed, it’s bad to use music without paying for it.
The RIAA says it's bad to use music without an agreement with the artist. Otherwise radio would be bad, but I don't think the RIAA is or was against the radio.
It's pretty common just to floors on payouts just because the associated friction of doing the payouts would exceed or be a significant fraction of the payout amount.
The payment floor article might have been a lot more persuasive if it weren’t 2/3rds of the catalogue. Also the article says it’s per track, not per rights/accountholder.
Regardless of if the rights holders agreed to it, it’s clear that Spotify has a great deal of leverage over them and can essentially force them to agree due to market pressure. They’re screwing people over. There’s no way to deny it.
2/3rds of the catalog isn’t saying much. Pretty much anyone can upload a track to Spotify. It’s basically the same as YouTube. 99% of videos have almost no views, and are not monetized, and were never intended to be.
If you can’t even get 1000 impressions in 12 months you simply don’t have a product that can make money under any model.
In prestreaming days, these are the kind of tracks would be recorded on tapes and played to friends who go “yeah that’s pretty nice Joe, anyway do you want to bowling tomorrow?”
Such arguments might have been more effective if they weren't paying these people in the past. But they were. They just decided "hey, you're not worth paying money to anymore, so go fuck off".
As Spotify grows, the long tail of songs no one listens to continues to grow. Administratively, I can easily see how it became not worth it.
And that’s fine. No one is really worse for the wear. Honestly getting 50 cents from Spotify, of which 30c + 3% goes to the payment processor, so 20 cents, feels more insulting than getting nothing.
1000 impressions is honestly a much lower threshold than I’d expect. Bravo to Spotify for that.
Honestly I have no idea why you are trying so hard to defend something that is so obviously unethical and arguably immoral. Not only are you defending them, you're applauding them? That's insane. People are being robbed.
If it's such an insulting amount and it costs so much to give them payments, why not just hold on to the money until it goes to a threshold? And once again, they are doing this on a per-track basis, not on a per-account basis. I doubt there are many artists who have just one track to their name.
Because I don't think it's particularly unethical, and is pretty normal. The reality is that revenue/impressions is very low, at every level. On youtube, you wouldn't even be invited for the monetization program if your videos aren't at least in the 10k+/year range.
If you can't meet a 1000 impression limit, it just doesn't matter.
But once again it's per track. If a rightsholder has 10,000 songs that get played 500 times each in a year, do they not deserve to be paid for any of them?
Yes. It’s a common exploit on these models, you basically spam low effort, these days AI generated, songs and try to get because the algorithm will give your songs a shot as a matter of necessity.
If Taylor swift gets 1 million impressions, is that the same as someone that uploads 1 million AI generated songs with 1 listener each?
In the end, 1000 impressions is just a pathetically low threshold. I can’t think of someone who would be making money off of their music in any model who couldn’t get 1000 impressions.
People who listen to Taylor Swift and people who listen to small artists pay the same subscription fee. Why should one taste in music be more worthy of payment than others? Even YouTube seems to base their threshold for monetization on total hours watched on a channel. So they don't screw over those that many short videos over those that have few long ones. I see no justification for Spotify to do this model that isn't based on a grand total of listening time.
To prevent abuse, like I said.
In what practical world does any actual semi-popular artist not manage to get over 1000 impressions?
It’s not easy to make music. The main circumstance where you could make up for getting 100 impressions per song by sheer volume is if you’re uploading bullshit.
How can total listening hours be abused in ways tracks can't? Why does small artists needs to be screwed just because a billion dollar company can't prevent fraud?
It still a 1000 streams per track, not in total. Many niche genres may not have a 1000 listeners for smaller bands, but why does the subscription fee we pay to listen to not deserve to be counted? Youtube seems to be able do a model that doesn't screw over their smaller channels.
One way is by abusing the algorithm. A common spotify exploit was to basically upload songs with the names of actual songs which just an empty pause. Users would just think that spotify was just glitching out, but they were actually giving impressions to empty tracks.
Another is that the algorithm is designed to give new tracks a "shot", present it to people. Otherwise, how would new songs ever be discovered? But you can abuse that by uploading 100,000 songs a day, which all get their 1 minute in the spotlight. Because it's not actual good music, the algorithm will push it down after that, but hey, you got your 50-100 listeners.
There's lots of ways people try to scam money on spotify: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv
Is there like an actual artist who gets <1000 impressions that would, if the rule were changed, make more than $10/year?
Sounds like Spotify have created that sort of problem by themselves and you think it is completely fair to sacrifice small artists because Spotify can't think of a better way?
It start to come off as pretty dishonest you keep saying 1000 impressions for an artist, when it has been stated multiple times that the main problem is that is per track.
I listen to some artists that may have 30-40 tracks that seems to have fewer than 1000 listeners. Across all their albums it is not unreasonable for them to get in a total some hundred bucks if they weren't counted per track. Youtube has a minimum payout of $100 per year based on total view time. I see no good reason why Spotify shouldnt be able to do something similar.
To be honest, I think we're just going in circles, but yes, I think it's fair for the model to work in a way that is practical for the platform and the artists.
And you really think it just a practicality for them and not because they can save huge amounts of money by this? Youtube is by no means a good role model in how they treat their content creators, but they seem to be able to have a total view on time spent rather than adding an artificial constraint on tracks. It isn't technically easier to keep counts on all individual tracks that it would be to just keep count of a total. They have actively chosen a more complicated model, which makes it hard to believe it is due to practicalities or management.
Yes. You can add up the impressions on that entire 2/3rds long tail and it'd be nothing. I think it's entirely a matter of administrative load - which is cost in a way, just that I don't think it's about the amount of rev share.
Like I said, spotify has elements of their platform that make it rife for revenue hackers. Unlike youtube, a lot of people listen entirely by the algorithm, or use voice commands (that's how one of the examples did it).
Spotify could change that, but it'd make it worse for everyone as well. I'd argue if the algorithm tries to spotlight new songs less often, that's far more harmful to small artists than the 1000 impression cutoff.
Commonality and prescedent does not make the behavior more ethical. That's like saying it's OK to be in a lynch mob because you weren't the only person stabbing the black man.
You're stuck on practicalities. The practicality is not the problem. The problems are ethics and morals, and that's why I'm so frightened about how you don't think this is a problem. You keep going back to YouTube and their policies are even worse, but YouTube is possibly one of the lowest bars you could have chosen, and Google is not a highly ethical corporation; those years are far behind them. You are completely ignoring the patterns of enshittification, and how this is a supply side squeeze that hurts real people. AI spam is a thing and there are ways that they should probably be fought against, but that isn't an excuse for hurting real people. It also doesn't matter that they are taking pennies away because the problem isn't the amount, it's that it's happening at all. They are abusing their market dominance and that is unethical in and of itself. If everyone thought like you we would be in the next gilded age. But heck, we practically already are.
I think the only way to change your mind would be to convince you with entire ethical frameworks, and I doube either of us have the time or patience for that. So I'll leave this conversation.
We tend to get into these heated arguements semi-frequently, don't we? Please don't take me getting upset at you to mean that I don't appreciate you being here.
Is what it is. Practicalities matter for me and my expectations. I am the other side, I've probably generated tens of dollars of revenue for platforms, I even got a payout from instagram once. But I usually don't, and I don't particularly begrudge the platforms for my lack of $5, because I understand it's not practical, and it wasn't my expectation nor reason for creation.
I don't think any real artist is meaningfully harmed by this. Like any actual small artist, who is making money off of their music in any real way, will get over 1000 impressions on their songs.
2/3rds only sounds like a lot because 1/3rd of all spotify songs are literal recordings of fans by people trying to revenue hack the white noise radios. And that's fine - I'd rather spotify be somewhere where anyone can upload their tracks. But population statistics are misleading for these kind of platforms.
I don't particularly take it personally. I honestly don't really get upset at discussions on the internet, so I don't mind.
It just seems like a really weird hill to die on honestly. It's robbery in the same way that taking a penny from the take a penny leave a penny jar is.
Like, is there really a contingent of artists that is upset about not getting their $0.50 a year?
I think the paltry rate that Spotify pays per listen is the issue, not that they're not paying out artists who earned a few cents a year.
Have you ever seen Office Space? No seriously. They may be stealing pennies, but they are stealing pennies from everyone. The artists may not be losing enough to be upset about it, but it doesn't make it any less wrong. The amount Spotify pays per stream is paltry indeed, but it's putting salt in the wound when they decide that they can't even be bothered to pay the tiny amount they would normally be offering. I'm not only upset about this one thing. It's just the top of an entire mountain of problems that Spotify represents.
The money that Spotify pays out comes from a split pool and distributed based on streams to artists. If they save a penny not giving it to Unpopular Artist, that penny goes to the other artists. Spotify doesn't get to keep the penny. Artists, as a whole, make the same amount but it becomes a little more lopsided amongst the artists.
But I wonder if the cost savings comes from what Spotify keeps or from what the artists keep; this part I'm not sure.
Wait, is that true? Then what happens when things don’t line up?
I pay an amount for my subscription every month, and that doesn’t change based on how little or how much I listen, nor does it change based on the total streams across all users. It’s a fixed amount.
I’ve heard that Spotify pays artists something like 0.0003 per listen or something like that, but I’ve also always heard it as a fixed amount, not a “this is the average over the past year, but depending on Spotify revenue or total streams across the user base, it might go up or down” so I assume that as long as XYZ number of artists meet the payout threshold, they get paid that fixed amount.
So then, if the subscriptions revenue doesn’t total enough to cover the payout costs, is that just paid from Spotify’s pockets? Where does that money come from? Is this why they’ve “never made a profit” or something?
And you’ve mentioned this collective pool of available money, which I feel like I’ve seen articles describe in this kinda way, but does Spotify announce the total pool before the payout, or is it retroactively calculated because actually their payments to artists have explicit thresholds that an artist knows before they get their cheques in the mail?
If the pool of money available to pay artists isn’t defined before payouts but rather measured retroactively after they’ve paid, then I have to disagree with your assertion that pennies saved from one artist goes to another, because if the pool is not fixed then they can just pocket the difference.
Spotify operates on a pro-rata model. Any article that reports it as $X/stream is just straight up wrong. That may be what it came out to be, but that's not the payout model that actually happens.
If my subscription is $12/month, then $8.40 of it goes into a pool to pay out to artists. The percentage may fluctuate; idk if the 70% has changed over time, but that's the gist of it. They calculate the total number of listens, the total amount in the pool to pay out to artists, and then figure out the $X/listen to figure out which artists get how much.
I can have 1 listen a month or I can have 10,000 listens a month, but Spotify gets the same cut and artists get the same cut of my $12 regardless. There's never a case where Spotify had too many listens in 1 month than their subscription revenue can cover. The price/listen just goes down that month. Or if one month everyone decided to go on a digital cleanse, then the price/listen goes up.
Yep. This also applies to advertisement revenue for free accounts. It's pooled in the same way, minus the 30% that Spotify keeps.
My understanding is they're still obligated to pay at least the $0.0031/stream minimum royalty rate set by the federal CRB (unless I'm mistaken), but in practice the pro rata model will pay more than that for popular artists. The pro rata scheme is fairly well known to work out to roughly $0.003-0.005/stream on average, at least.
Then they round payouts down and don't pay rightsholders that make less than some number of cents in a year.
And, as I noted elsewhere in the thread, before streaming, the norm was to pay $0.99/track from iTunes. (Or pirate, more likely.) Apple would take 30%, so rights holders would get about $0.69 per track. (Note that artists signed to labels are getting a small fraction of any revenue source.) That works out to maybe 200 streams being roughly equivalent to one sale...which is very reasonable, given I easily listen to songs that much or more over a couple of years, and the threshold to try a song and save it to a playlist is far lower than paying $0.99 based on a ten second preview. It's continuous revenue.
If I understand their terms correctly it is 1000 streams per song. So smaller artists with less than 1000 different listeners could get in total get over 100.000 streams of their catalogue, which under normal circumstances would give them a couple of hundred dollars. But with this model they get nothing if their streams are not centered on a few hits. It is understandable to have some sort of reasonable limit, but requiring it pr track and not some total amount really seems like an unsympathetic move to screw over smaller artists.
They could pass on the costs of making that payment. In the case of the 1000 or less impression tracks, that might mean charging the artist to make the payment.
The artists are getting something out of it too. They are getting free hosting and searchability. Rather than having to produce physical media or run their own website, they can say "find me on spotify."
If spotify isn't making any money off these artists (<1000 plays is almost definitely not making spotify any money), then 2/3 of the catalog is actually costing them money to host. If we wanted to make it truly fair in terms of cost/revenue, people would probably have to pay a small fee to upload their music. If we want to say that spotify has enough revenue from their popular music to dedicate some extra resources for small creators, that's exactly what's happening.
That’s basically saying “we’ll pay you in exposure”, which is generally frowned upon in the creative world.
That's not what I'm saying at all. Not even close. Are you sure you're replying to the right comment?
I'm saying they're providing free hosting, which is something that costs spotify money. If these songs aren't bringing in a net positive in revenue, then it's still true that they are sharing profits with these creators, it's just that the profit is zero so there's nothing to share.
Of course I am responding to the right comment. It doesn’t matter that it costs money for Spotify to host those songs. It costs money to distribute art and they are making money from subscriptions. If it’s really unprofitable then they should remove the songs altogether. That would be the logical solution, no? But clearly they see more value in holding it than not.
Beyond that the entire platform is built with the expectation that rights holders will be paid.
Saying "logical solution" implies that the current situation is wrong and need to be fixed. If small creators find that they are getting enough value from the platform in terms of distribution, and spotify finds that they are getting enough draw for subscriptions from the few artists that do become more popular, then the situation is ok and doesn't need to change. If both parties are getting what they want from the transaction, it's not theft or abuse of power or anything like that.
They may have paid smaller artists in the past, but they were also losing a ton of money in the past too. If the options were to drop the small artists or change the royalty structure, well, that's up to the users to decide if spotify made the right decision.
Except that that was not the terms of their original agreement. Spotify has pulled a Darth Vader. “I have altered our agreement. Pray I do not alter it further.” Artists have no leverage to negotiate.
Fine, then. I'd love to get an agreement where I don't pay for the first 1000 listens of a song. I promise I'm happy to pay Spotify's $0.002 per play after that!
Better yet, lets cap piracy penalties at Spotify's rate. 0.002 per song.
...broadcast royalties are through ASCAP/BMI/et al; the RIAA never made money on radio play other than indirectly, by promoting record sales...
I think my interaction with new things on the internet just sorta stopped when I graduated high school in 2010ish.
I never used Spotify, never used streaming services, haven't used Facebook since before I owned a smartphone, I still play an mmo from 2001ish...
I just never really felt like any of these things brought value into my life, and it feels sorta like everyone else is coming to the same conclusion I did, just 15 years later. The old internet is still there for us, we just have to use it. TPB and other torrenting sites never stopped existing. Hell, IRC chat is still out there if you really want, I know plenty of people who use it.
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 music.
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.
Can't disagree here. Honestly, doesn't even take that much space and isn't that expensive in the long run as long as you just keep what you want, rather than grab everything available from a feed or something.
In only recently upgraded to some 8Tb drives and they're still only half full.
I do just my phone as my mp3 player, but that's because I tend to stick to phones that have a MicroSD slot. Soon as they stop offering those, I'll find something else.
Fellow bit-hoarder here. About 18 months ago YouTube (the music/premium ad free package) annoyed me to such an extent that I went back to using Plex for music again.
I’m back to YouTube premium, but that’s just because I can’t deal with the ads.
For music now I go back-and-forth. I like knowing I have my Endless Boogie and Bohren and der Club of Gore lossless collections safe and local, and can explore with YT for my next great discovery.
Look me up when you do make the shift - I'm happy to evangelize about my Hiby M300 to anyone who will listen
Yeah maintaining and managing backups is difficult if you’re not used to it I guess.
Ive always just used my laptop to backup my desktop and vice versa. I know that wouldn’t be ideal in a fire, so I bought blu ray discs with the intention of using them for long term cold storage. I haven’t gotten around to actually doing that though haha. I think I backed up all the family photos so far and stopped there.
Always wanted to start a NAS or something similar, but work takes up all my brain energy so doing things is hard.
I see that. Honestly, I've lost my whole data collection more than once because I didn't do the NAS thing right.
That all said, the off the shelf options are great. It seems counter intuitive, but buying somebody else's low use Synology NAS is also a way to save money. Lastly, just loading your desktop with hard drives that auto back up to one another is the easiest.
Ive actually never lost anything! Somehow the pc - laptop + multiple externals has never failed me.
I do take reaaaaaally good care of my equipment, though.
I'm just curious what 20+ year old MMO you're playing. Is it Conquer Online?
Oldschool Runescape hahahaha
Like the author, I’m starting to view services like Spotify as too convenient. Convenient to a fault and taking so much choice out of the process of consuming art that it can make it feel a bit soulless at times.
A few months ago, I committed to canceling most of my streaming subscriptions, including Spotify. I found out that with music, I enjoy and appreciate the music more if I go through a process of acquiring it instead of have an algorithm find new music for me. Going to the record store and buying a record, cd, or cassette has completely reinvigorated how I consume music and it’s a much more enjoyable activity now. Even purchasing an album on band camp or finding it on a tracker somewhere feels better than just searching on Spotify, even though searching on Bandcamp and paying $10 for an album doesn’t produce a meaningfully different result than searching on Spotify in a technical sense (in both cases I can listen to a digital album within seconds). It just feels better, I’m not sure how else to describe it.
I’m finding out the same thing with video as well. If I go through the effort to research what shows or movies are new or good or interesting, I get more excited to watch them vs if I just open the HBO app and it’s like “watch this movie”. This one is a bit harder because physical media for movies and TV is dying, though like with music, it still feels more intimate to find it on a tracker and download it than to just stream it.
For me, I’ve gone back to committing to taking action to acquire and enjoy media, I’m appreciating it more when I seek rather than let apps dictate what I watch. I even have an iPod classic now for music instead of just putting music on my phone (since I am also trying to reduce phone usage) and that’s also feeling great. Ultimately, I have started feeling more involved with my media now and it’s great!
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!
I started the year off by cancelling my Spotify. Im going to try and get back to discovering music and listening to music the "old" way. Unfortunately physical media isn't something i can get into currently but I'm going to use bandcamp as much as possible. So far in don't miss Spotify at all.
This also ties in with using my phone less. In fact I'm trying to be more purposeful with my tech consumption so I'm glad to see there are other like minded folks out there.
When I read articles like these, I feel conflicted, but only for a minute. Pre-Spotify, I pirated ALL my music. I didn't go to concerts. I didn't buy CDs, I burned them. I bought cheap Sansa MP3 players and drag-and-dropped my MP3s with Windows Explorer. For years. I justified it in various ways.
When Spotify came out, I tried it out. Then I subscribed. And I've been subscribed ever since. I've been paying for music every month for over a decade now. I'm happy with my music discovery and I listen to new stuff instead of being stuck listening to the same music forever.
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.
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:
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 feel like I just got a back of the napkin ted talk. And I love it.
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.
Before, I paid my favorite artists 0. Today, Spotify pays them anything, and I do go to concerts.
I know it feels that way. But unless your artists are getting literally tens of millions of listens they probably care very little about their Spotify income, because it's likely less than they get from merch sales at a single concert.
Spotify pays out roughly 70% of a subscription's price to the artist/label, so $0 to $100/year ($11.99 * 0.7 * 12) isn't so bad when there were a lot of $0 in the past.
To sort of try an answer the main question. Does anybody just listen to full albums anymore? It seems like a lot of this algorithmic determined music decision comes from people just listening to recommended playlists or let the play just continue on "auto suggestion". Of course there is still the "Similar artists" feature which can heavily influence you and it takes active effort to break out of the taste bubble profile the service has on you, but I think it is more engaging to at least try an focus on a single artist for a full album. That gives a better impression of the artistic intent by the musicians, so it is just not an endless list of similar songs by anonymous creators.
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 pretty much never listen to a whole album, and haven’t for at least 10 years. My two main modes of listening to music are
listening to a playlist I made, which is only going to have the songs I like, which is pretty much never an entire album
listening to algorithmic “radio”, which is also only going to include one or two from any given album.
Same here. I can occasionally put on a playlist with some favorite bangers, but then again - how can you listen to Painkiller and not listen to the rest of the album?
I mostly listen to music that only comes in singles these days. House, J-Pop, etc.. It gets added to my own categorical playlists and I listen from there.
I'm in the same exact boat. Especially when it comes to King Diamond.
I'm a metalhead too but most of my listening is in playlists I've made for myself where I add the songs I really like and discard the rest. If I love all the songs on an album then I'll listen to them, but that's somewhat rare.
In general I like variety. A lot of the metal is prog or prog-adjacent. So to me it isn't that jarring switching from one artist/album to another. I'm used to huge dynamic shifts, changing instruments and styles mid-song.
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.
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.
This is very rock-centric. Other genres have not released on albums for decades.
New Order's Blue Monday was the best selling 12" single of all time. Dance music had been coming as singles since the disco days in the 70s, and that progressed to 12" ones because they could hold longer tracks and were easier for DJs to work with. Now, EDM genres still primarily release tracks as singles.
Most of the J-Pop I listen to drops as singles too, either because it's independents expecting a YouTube/NicoNico audience or because the song was made for an anime opening.
Actually it's very soundtrack centric. The majority of my library are soundtracks to games, musicals, movies, etc. Most of my indie albums are more-or-less concept albums as well, though that's almost certainly because of self-selection.
That makes sense, too. I guess "genre-centric" would have made more sense.
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.
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:
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 don't think I've ever used Spotify's radio or their auto generated playlists frankly. The most I allow Spotify's algorithm to influence my listening is by putting on shuffle, and even then I prefer to listen to full albums at a time.
All of my music gets copied into one playlist that I shuffle, or I go to an artist's profile and listen to an album. I find new bands by looking up what bands the bands I currently like are touring with, or by hearing a band for the first time live and then going to check out their music. I also look up recommendations from real people (If I like X band, what other bands might I like? Reddit was good for that.)
An old friend is also a talent buyer at a small venue back in my hometown so I pay attention to what bands he's booking and check them out
I've always been a "data hoarder" that was staunchly against using streaming services. I ended up being pressed into paying for the Spotify family plan because my wife and kids really thrive on streaming music even if I get the album and rip it for them. Since it was already paid for, I've used it when it was inconvenient for me to get the music other ways, and I do empathize with the author of this article. Spotify is "convenient", but soulless and filled with tons of micro-annoyances while also giving that thin gross vibe of knowing that they are hugely supporting some awful people (Rogan) while barely paying the actual artists anything. Despite all of this, I do still think that their client is better (from a UI standpoint) that any of the others by a pretty wide margin (I demoed a few of the other services).
It's interesting to me the note about UI; Tidal had some logout annoyances a year or two back but has been solid and easy across various OSes. The few times I've used Spotify (either someone sharing a playlist or using someone else's device) it wasn't intuitive for me and generally felt clunky.
I wonder if there's a design language Spotify uses that's replicated in other apps that you use and I don't that could explain the different experiences (or similarly with Tidal for me).
You could be on to something with the UI language, but it has been over a year since I last tried Tidal so maybe it is better now as well.
Join Qobuz and soon to cancel Spotify. I don't know if it's a cure for the Spotify syndrome or just its variant, but the recommendations are so much better.
re: better recommendations, psst is a Spotify client reimplementation that allows you to tweak your own recommendation list for a song according to "danceability", "energy", "valence" and other metrics. It's far better than Spotify's default/proprietary algorithm.
Haven't even looked at how it does recommendations yet, but the fact it's a native app alone makes it worth considering installing. "Official" Spotify Desktop is agonizingly slow at times.
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.
So I've had both Spotify and Quobuz. Quobuz is more for audiophiles rather than general purpose streaming. It's main focus is on high fidelity recordings that most of the general population doesn't even have audio speakers/equipment that will be able to really fully utilize the higher quality to tell a difference. With that said I do believe they do a good job of at least trying to expose you to new types of music from various genre with the recommendations and new music sections.
The catalog has a lot of the songs you would expect it to have, but then there would also be random things inexplicably missing. There were numerous times that I would look for a song and it just wasn't there. Even more odd, sometimes they'd have like 2 or 3 songs from an artist, or 2-3 songs from an album, but then the rest of their works were just missing.
Ultimately I canceled my Quobuz, I couldn't justify the price at that point when I wasn't using it as much as I wanted. When I was using it, while it did have a majority of what I wanted, the annoyance of the random missing songs was enough to frustrate me to cancelling eventually.
I think some genres are more prevalent in their catalog than others. If you have decent audio speakers/gear that can take advantage of their higher quality streaming, and if you find most of the songs you want are on the platform, I think it's worth the switch.
EDIT: One more thing I forgot that frustrated me. Their apps were just bad. On my Android phone, I couldn't listen for that long before it would just unexpectedly quit/crash. In the car, Android Auto would either not work, be constantly stopping in the middle of songs, or just would refuse to play altogether. On Mac, unless they fixed it, their software didn't work properly with the M series chips, so I had to use the web player. To be fair, the web player (and Windows versions of their desktop software) worked great.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
My partner apparently knew about this service from a TikTok video that claimed artists earn exponentially more per stream from this service than all the others. So that's worth adding into the equation as well.
I would say it's probably worth trying out for a month or two to see how it works for you. I know there's a tool that can transfer your Spotify playlists over to Quobuz. Might give you a good idea of what songs that you normally listen to are or are not available, while also seeing how the apps or other music discovery works for you.