Leaving Spotify for freer pastures
d00k.net
d00k.net
I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery.
I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caused me to speak with my $ and stop using it…plus its music discovery is no better than YTM.
I still use LastFM as my primary source for recommendations and it does okay.
But I will never forget how wonderful Rdio was to use…it felt (atleast to me) like a service for people who loved music and discovering new music
Which features made rdio so good?
- It had label support. For example, if you wanted to find all releases by Deutsche Grammophon, you could
- It’s handling of classical music seemed much better than anything I can recall using
- It’s recommendations seemed to be better…like they went above and beyond basic genre recommendations
- For ‘radio stations’ you could dislike a song or artist and it only affected that station. So if you love Bowie but don’t want him on your funk station, you could dislike the artist but still have all the Bowie you wanted on other stations…same for songs
- The social aspect seemed to bade recommendations on people who had similar taste as you…kind of like Dig that would mention but it was built in to the service
Again, this is all based off of memory but I’m confident I discovered more artists and music on that single service vs the plethora of varied services I use today.
As to Dig, I have tried it but it’s such a manual thing I haven’t kept up. I tend to listen to local jazz / classical radio nowadays for the majority of my time and periodically use various services for discovery. I’ll have to give it another go.
Side note, similar to OP, I have found BandCamp (specifically their weekly show) to be also good for discovery.
This year I'm going to start writing out the songs.
Fair enough, but beside the point — if Music is as good or better than iTunes was, it can hardly be an indictment of the quality of Apple's recent system software.
This included:
-Playlists
-Streaming history for the past year (you can request history for the lifetime of your account too)
-A list of items saved in your library
-Search queries
-No. of followers, accounts you follow, and blocked accounts
-Payment and subscription data
-User data
-Family Plan data
-Inferences
-Voice input
-Podcast interactivity
-Spotify for Artists data
Disclaimer: I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs.
I usually pick off the songs I like from these recommendation-based features and then I go to listen to at least their album, while adding tracks to mood/subgenre-based playlists for other activities. I dedicate time out of most of my days to just listen to music while walking.
I don't remember ever seeing a bug on the android app. Which's a bit odd now that I think of it.
Really polar opposite experiences from both of us. It seems that they're catering to people with my usage patterns, however it may be that they differ from yours.
Is it possible to make them export it for you - via a GDPR request?
As I mentioned in a previous comment in this thread, I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs, we don't block you from extracting your data if you wish.
In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio.
I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one album. When I listened to a track I'd then lookup the album for the track, find the most similar albums and then play some random songs from those albums, but with some controls to make larger jumps possible. It was not using a vector database like FAISS so it was kinda slow and had other issues and with too much bitrot I'd need a complete rewrite to get it working again, but I found lots of new music with it.
Maybe there's some services like that out there now that can hook up to streaming services like Spotify?
Specifically, I discovered amazing artists through the Discovery Weekly and the Artist's Radios. But also the "Fans also listen to" section in an artist profile. I found all sort of things, even obscure indies with a few thousands of listens and other "hidden gems". I'm really happy they now added the "Enhance" function to playlists.
What I noticed though, is that I have to be very careful with my interactions on the platform to "train" the algorithm in the right direction. I have to like only specific genres that I want recommendations about, use playlists for anything else and use a lot the "i don't like this" feature on the discovery weekly. There was a period where I listened to more casual genres than usual and it completely broke my profile. My Dicovery Weekly was terrible at that time, it was a bummer.
What I think would be great is if Spotify would be more open about this. I would love to be able to tweak the discovery by myself (like suggest specific genres or artists, blacklist others). Maybe even create different discovery profiles for different genres. Instead I have to play the game of interacting blindly with the platform and see the results next monday on the new discovery weekly.
I have been looking to recreate this discovery through kindred-spirits-in-music ever since.
I'd love to have discovery require a little bit of work again, there was a lot of fun and playfulness in digging.
Going through my recommendations feels like a bunch of bad cover bands of things I like.
On the topic of vector search, I'm fairly certain that Spotify still uses Annoy (https://github.com/spotify/annoy). Like Faiss, it's a great library but not quite a database, which would ideally have features like replication (https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md), caching, and access control, to name a few.
I was also experimenting with finding a popularity score for songs and artists. The last.fm API worked well for this, but then that was just using an API, so there was a lot of other sources that I was looking into, like using pageviews on the Wikipedia article for an artist.
I've thought about making a new open source version at some point if I get time. I think I've got a decent idea how to make something work quite well now, basically make a vector with the genres/styles, do dimensionality reduction and then store in vector database, so you get like an embedding of the album essentially. A bit like those language models embed words in a vector space, but you don't need a neural network to do it, since that job is done already by humans who have listened to the music and tagged it.
They were acquired by Spotify in 2014 and according to announcements at the time, the intention was to enhance their recommendation/discovery system with the deeper insight they got into songs as a result (Infinite Gangnam Style, anyone?), but I don't know what came out of it.
Anything that I find myself liking a lot I head out to one of the very few record stores out here and buy it on vinyl. But then, I'm old and like having things in my hands and not just streamed. I buy paper books too.
The only thing that's always new and recommended is the latest hiphop song that's popular right now (i.e. video posted 12 hours ago, 3M views), and it should know I don't listen to hip hop, at all.
Eventually there were enough things missing on Tidal that I gave up and cancelled the sub and went back to Spotify.
Spotify does everything well enough for me that it's still the best streaming service. The fact they listened to Adele and changed the functionality of how album playback works has a good side too!
For me what would be awesome would be if they paid artists more. But that's true of any and all platforms like this.
I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land.
Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember what I listened to this year.
Maybe I will try “enhance” more (will save me from manually creating so many playlists; the centerpiece of Spotify which also sucks to manage). Thanks.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc (Sorry, youtube made it a short and I don't know how to make it a video.)
Do you have a write up or src hosted anywhere?
I used to do the ipod thing with winamp back in napster days, then i kept a personal library just of cds i've bought, then i tried the subsonic thing i really liked dsub app for android. It was great but i really dont want to do server stuff at home...metadata on discs and bringing it over to digital audio, its never perfect and bugs me to where i'll spend hours cleaning it up...
I've been using Youtube music/Google music for many years, abandoned my digital files and i find a lot of my music on youtube and recommendations on YTM. I usually pick the bands im into and they have similar artists and drill down that way, im not a huge fan of auto discovery playlists.
YTM are going to be raising their rates, i pay for family premium, $15 -> $22/mo in april for me. So now im looking at alternatives and trying to avoid running a server and/or managing files. I think YTM has more music because of the youtube side but the client side UI sucks.
That being said.... nothing ever changes. Any cloud music platform has always been just another radio-- whether they brand themselves that way or not. For the year or so that I used spotify I did find some gems, but I would forget about them as quickly as I found them.
I think of my media library as something I have to put work into to have it be meaningful. Organizing it, deciding what you keep and what you toss out, what to pay for what to skip, all make it more important to you and more memorable. Having a library in itself is also of course a useful UX thing to remind yourself what you like and continue to go back to it.
It’s helped me rediscover some of my own local music and find it to be a much better experience for listening to music via Plex.
I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art.
I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band.
Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire.
Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify:
beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope
Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope
Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes
Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff
Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify
One Last Kiss - Utada Hikaru -> Yes
follow slowly - Nekomata Master -> Nope
Masada Gestalt - Zen Albatross -> Nope
Yin-Yang - Victor Wooten -> Yes
Zipangu - Wednesday Kanpanera -> Surprisingly, yes
Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope
Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes
Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No
The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes
So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate.
That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term.
Plus I've also got loads of stuff that isn't on Spotify, Apple, and the rest.
And as for discovery, the free Spotify still gives me some of that (I also like a bit of Smooth Chill or similar running in the background on ye olde voice assistant speaker).
My only gripe with Plex is that the only voice assistant that interacts with it is Alexa, and it requires me to have my Plex server shared over the Internet. On the other hand, that’s been handy a couple of times when I was out and about and wanted to stream a couple of songs (which it did as well as Spotify).
Just go to YTM?
I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much).
Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now.
I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.
Honestly, if you're paying for Youtube Premium, you might as well use YT Music, but it's all around worse than Spotify.
I'm currently giving Deezer a try.
i do have vinyl as well for some of my favorites. but digital is still my primary listening mode.