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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is the last subscription I'll cancel. It's been life changing since it came out.

I never wanted it to curate music for me, I wanted a massive catalog I can summon at will. The fact that it does an ok job at curating lists is just bonus.

Not trying to argue that it's a "bad product" but it's good for you, I'm not so sur it's a net good for produces, musicians and people who like to maintain a library of music which is important to them long term?

I still pay for Spotify despite getting YouTube music with premium. But Spotify is still worlds better than the competition.

And I agree that it is monopolistic that Apple gets to both have their service preinstalled, and allow subscriptions in app without an extra charge.

Napster, perhaps ironically, pays musicians the most. That honestly doesn't surprise me because despite it not being the same company now, it's roots are in music lovers instead of money.

>and they constantly delete music on me.

And this is precisely why I moved to bandcamp. If I can't download an mp3 or flac, then that music will just disappear without recourse.

If anyone here seriously listens to music, I would definitely invest the time into setting up some kind of subsonic server (I'm using the music app with Nextcloud at the moment, Ultrasonic as my phone client and Strawberry as my desktop client, works pretty well for my needs); you can still get all the ease of listening to your music on the go without the fear of losing it.

I would care more if there weren't so much hypocrisy going around.

Spotify doesn't allow me to replace their payment processor with my own or provide a full API to allow me to build a fully-fledged thirty party client.

Why would Spotify allow you to replace payment processor? App developers make this complaint about Apple and Google because the App devs are actually selling something. In this case you are buying a service from Spotify. It literally makes no sense in this case.

What API do you see missing from developer.spotify.net?

I can't build:

a) hardware devices with Spotify capabilities without their approval.

b) third party clients since I don't have access to full streams, record-label level of information on artists, songs etc.

Both are limitations from contractual obligations with music labels that don't allow full streams to be shared as well as most of the record-label level of metadata. It's not Spotify's fault.

Like others have said, Spotify is my favorite platform that I pay for. Their generated weekly playlists are fantastic for discovering new music and their yearly "Wrapped" playlists are fun

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