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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

We should just be cutting out the middlemen like Spotify, and buying music directly from musicians. Then, we can just use standards compliant hardware, of our choosing, to play the music in any format we want (many modern musicians release as flac, old school musicians still sell CDs; either play as lossless, or recompress to chosen target).

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Sure. But we’ll need some sort of centralized market or exchange on which to discover these artists and send them funds.

Oh wait….

It's called Bandcamp

Did this for years. Finally gave up last year. It’s so much work, discovery is a huge pain, listening on all devices is a pain. None of it was worth it.

Now I just use Spotify and don’t care. I don’t need the extra work in my life.

all my friends use spotify and everytime i am with them i hear the same music. sure its the music they like, but its the same over and over and over again with no variation. They tell me spotify is great at discovery but i havnt heard it.

i listen to djs, radio stations and other internet channels that mix the music i like into new and exciting compositions.

Yeah, many people just don't care as much about discovering new music. I don't think it says much about Spotify though.

imo it tells that spotify has a conflict of interest were it sells "access to all music" and on the other hand has the means to steer customers towards economically advantageous consumption.

Yes Spotify is great at discovery. I've discovered plenty of music thanks to it during the years – lately, for example, tens of Japanese jazz recordings.

I was with Google Music for years, until the YouTube music fiasco then I jumped ship to Spotify.

I found discovery excellent in Google but Spotify is horrible, it thinks I want to listen to Pop because I put a playlist of "top" or "charts" on while I work, when really I want rock/metal albums and can't discover them for the life of me.

Doesn't it have those made for you thingies that change weekly or so? In my case it makes em for the varying genres i listen to so even tho i listen to some techno at work i can pick a metal playlist with new stuff.

I noticed some mixes it makes but it has talk shows, podcasts etc thrown in and I'm really not into that.

Also, because it has basically ruined my music preferences, despite me telling it what I want to be recommended, it makes recommendations for "Dua Lipa" and "Doja Cat". Nothing against either of them, but not really what I was looking for.

Hmmm it doesn't have any of that thrown in for me. Feels like we're having a completely different experience for some reason

I find many wrongs with Spotify, but this isn't one of them. My Spotify Discover Weekly is usually great, up to 50% great discoveries, and they're completely different in both genres and time periods to friends' lists.

I guess you just have musically eclectically challenged friends.

Yeah, I used to use Spotify for discovery when the radio function acted like...radio. Now it's just a 30 track playlist on loop generated based on things you have liked. So absolutely fucking pointless for discovery.

I am SCREAMING OUT for a service that was like the old Spotify radio.

Currently just going to gigs again and finding bands through bandcamp the organic way is what I'm doing.

Also, here is a script I wrote to download and extract a Bandcamp download link and import it with the beet CLI music library manager:

https://github.com/radiosilence/dotfiles/blob/master/.zsh.d/...

I then use Navidrome (modern Subsonic replacement) to serve it up:

https://www.navidrome.org/

Curated playlists should be your jam then, find an artist/DJ you like the taste and follow their curations.

The radio also generate different playlists over time, the tracks in a song's/artist's radio will change and not be a static 30-odd tracks forever.

Try this app I made for fun a while back: https://www.tuneful.app

It uses Spotify under the hood, similar to how the radio used to work.

Spotify's discovery sucks. I can never ever find a favorite song in Spotify's suggestions. The experience is very similar to Youtube's echo chamber.

Just wanna throw this out there: Plex now has an app for accessing music in a way better way than their movie/series-app, called Plexamp. [1]

I dont see it solving discoverability yet, but it worked completely fine on my Android devices. It also does some automatic tagging of your music to generate dynamic playlists.

it is limited to plex pass subscribers for now though. i'd say it's worth trying a free trial at least.

1: https://plexamp.com/

One method that has worked for me is following other users that actively buy music on Bandcamp that I like. I get an email digest when they buy new music. That's a strong signal to me: I already know they have similar tastes by seeing what they have purchased in the past, and I can conclude that they really like the music they are willing to spend money on.

This is true; I do reluctantly pay for Spotify. But that'll always be the case with more equitable, less profitable, ergo less well-funded alternatives. And it has been consistently (slowly) improving over the years. Worth supporting imo

Bandcamp really is a fantastic company. There are some barriers to listening to music on it directly (some intentional) but I've found so much great music through their recommendations.

I still pay for streaming due to the convenience of typing most songs and playing it instantly... but if I like something enough to click the heart button I'll often hop over to Bandcamp to see if I can pay the artist more than the $.0001 they get for the stream. Even dropping someone a dollar is literally 10,000 times more support.

This is the way. I also use Spotify because it makes most of my music available instantly on all of my devices and the discovery is good enough.

But that $150 for Spotify is only a small fraction of my yearly music spend. With most of it going to concert tickets, merch at concerts and merch/downloads on Bandcamp to support the artists I like.

Spotify and Bandcamp are not mutually exclusive

Yeah exactly, and with covid making concerts uncomfortable for me for the foreseeable future I've just been doubling down on bandcamp and merch purchases (but wow I miss live music).

it's a matter of cut

https://bandcamp.com

https://rateyourmusic.com for discovery.

Thanks I just tried rateyourmusic. Interesting but so many ads…

I'm using my app Tracknack for discovery and staying up to date with releases by artists and record labels I like. This app, of course, is very much integrated with Spotify and does not really work as a way of cutting Spotify out of the picture. It does, however, allow me to support lesser known artists via Spotify streams.

https://tracknack.com

what about last.fm. Got an account like 10y ago, connected to my stream. Looks alive and well, probably selling my data but is there anything to know from last 5y ?

I dropped Spotify after that Facebook fiasco, now I just listen to my local college radio. The website does a good job of telling me what music they’re playing, and it ranges throughout the day from old-school jazz to techno or new age. The radio is nonprofit with no ads, and I’m close enough to get both HD1 and HD2 channels, So if I’m not digging what’s on one channel, I’ll just switch to the second.

> now I just listen to my local college radio.

Hear, hear for college radio! The local college radio station is one of my favorite places to listen. They've got great variety. Depending on when you tune in, you might hear 'indie', folk, metal, electronic, or something completely different.

Why should we? You can do that if that's what you want. I prefer using Spotify because I can listen new and random artists without knowing their names and explicitly buying their music. Spotify provides me with a service I'm happy to pay for and I'm happy they take a cut from.

Well for one, if Spotify ends up being the only way musicians get paid, the pool of new and interesting artists is going to end up way, way smaller. I actively try to help independent artists succeed by giving them money directly, even though it ends up being somewhat inconvenient to me. Even the biggest-name independent musicians talk about how laughably little money they make from Spotify streaming compared to actually selling albums and tracks.

For another, pure streaming means you're locked into the streaming service's player, having internet access, and having a device you can run a client on. Just having the audio files is vastly preferable to me.

I prefer buying physical media. I am partial to CDs but that might just be my age.

When CDs were everywhere, getting them was easy and prices more competitive.

The last CD I wanted I had to order from Germany and the company really took far too much for the shipping. (€ 15)

Once it arrived in Norway (ECC, not EU) I had to pay taxes on top of it.

Media downloads from the artist is good in that I get to direct the money directly (or at least a direct as I can) to the artist (I guess most companies in that space take a cut)

But they are easy to forget, easy to delete etc.

CDs are harder to throw out accidently.

You are just old ;)

I have not lost a file in 10years. I have a NAS with backup to the cloud, nothing fancy just a single drive NAS with automatic rolling backups. Important files go to multiple clouds.

yupp. Both old and stubborn admit it.

There does seem to be an increasing interest in physical mediums. Or perhaps that fad has faded already.

I know some of the younger guys at work have started collecting vinyl. For a short period, it seemed like cassettes were hip too. I have no idea if that ever got going.

Many musicians already sell their music directly in unencrypted/no-drm formats*, mainly because of how widespread streaming is. The advent of music piracy is long over and the ones that still do it weren't going to use a music streaming service or purchase the record anyways.

* Obviously, not all of them, but i've purchased 'digital download' versions of albums from artists signed with UMG many times.

I use to be autistic about downl.. buying albums before, and listening in foobar or whatever

Spotify simplified my life in this regard so much, and the best is the random suggestions and music discovery. I won't be looking back

Netflix, Amazon prime and video services suck, and it's better indeed to download movies. Spotify is irreplaceable

Audius.co uses blockchain and ipfs to host files.

Also Royal by 3LAU is pretty interesting.

Audius as an idea is really interesting. I hope something like a decentralized streaming service really takes off

Decentralised pirating service.

At least as of a couple years ago, Audius was teeming with piracy: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20905384/audius-blockchai...

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