The day I canceled my Spotify subscription | Hacker News Reader

The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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443 pointsRaed667498 comments

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come.

I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums.

My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands.

That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent.

Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted.

Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny.

I was born in 1986 and we have the same story but my road leads to punk and hardcore. Which I believe the records (CDs, cassettes) are very hard to find compared to metal. I listened to a lot of Dead Kennedys when I was young, so I really don't mind if the quality is lossless or shitty. I am just glad that I could listen to it on repeat.

If you were basically born with Spotify, like many of us here (or at least, had it or something like it from a young-ish age), then unfortunately there's no way we will ever appreciate it. It's like someone from a century go saying how amazing it is that we all having flushing toilets in our houses and refrigerators. It's just life now, it's the new normal, not amazing.

Although true in comparison, it is still relative.

I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time.

But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself.

I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me.

Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other.

Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.

How do you deal with availability overload?

First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did not feel sufficiently "mine", like a handmade copy on physical media did, despite being just as unlicensed. Very often, the records I did buy were quite a disappointment at first, before they started growing on me, and some of what I consider the best today would have never made it past that threshold if they happened in the abundance of Spotify or the heyday of unbounded internet piracy.

It's actually quite ironic: all my friends who indulged in Napster et al now have spotify accounts, whereas I have just stopped extending my repository of CD rips.

Very much similar! I started taping cassettes when i was like 8-10 years old. I erased some music from my mother’s cassette and she was furious hahah.

What do you mean with availability overload? I would say i am an active listener, my mind is rather a bit creative and i would dare to say that 80-90% percent of the time, i know what to listen. Even if it means to discover something new.

I used to like the Spotify recommendations but i disabled them since 2 years at they became like ads network “whoever pays more, gets more recommended”. I discover music now through personal recommendations, magazines (online), forums, references from artists i usually read about, or music produced by a producer i respect. How do you deal with?

But for example, right now i just wanted to listen some salsa/merengue (you can begin to guess where i am from) i always liked and made my own playlist with own songs.

Cheers!

Ok, but what is your point?

I'm also curious what do you/your generation consider amazing nowadays?

The point being that even though Spotify could/should be made better, it is arguably the best music play and discover tool ever invented.

There are people here alive that have used records, 8 tracks, tapes, CDS, mp3s and now Spotify. There is no comparison that Spotify is better for playback and discovery.

Note: I'm not talking about audiophile comparisons, just ease of use for the average listener.

When you were born I was a teenager in France recording music from the radio to a tape praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song. And that the song is not cut.

Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it.

Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy.

This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discovery functionality is great though

> praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song

Hahaha, I did that in Ireland too. I'm pretty sure DJs deliberately talk over the song intros to make illegal recordings unviable.

Hey, back in the time I was recording ZX Spectrum games broadcasted once a week over one of the radio stations.

Commodore 64 owners were jealous of us, since this couldn't work with C64 due to different tape recording system.

Maybe they were jealous but you still owned a Speccy!

Lots of us remember taping the radio... I have old recordings where I pretended to be the DJ announcing the next song. Oh man was I bad!

I remember using my 64mb MP3 player on repeat with 15 or so songs, but never really casette tapes.

I turned into Shazam doing that; I could recognize any song I liked by the first note.

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?

Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.

Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)

It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse

It's impossible to listen to some albums because of song replacement. You can try to do so, but when you click play on some albums it replaces several tracks with their single versions.

I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.

For me this is one of the most compelling reasons to own non-DRM'd physical media: its content is no longer subject to the whims of corporate bullshit after the point of sale. Replacing songs within albums with other versions is appalling.

Sometimes Spotify swaps them for others by the same artist. One of my favorite instrumentals got swapped out for the version with vocals which I can't stand. I can't for the life of me understand why it could be a licensing issue.

It's a multilayered issue:

- licensing could be expired, could change hands, could be removed, could...)

- naming and attribution:

A single song by a single artist will have a gazillion versions (ep, lp, original, re-recorded, re-released, re-mastered, re-re-mastered, best hits, best songs, essential, released for the European market, released for the Japanese market, Christmas special...).

On top of that distributors and rights holders have very shitty metadata that also varies between rights holders.

So if a song changed to a different version, it's quite possible both that the contract for that song changed hands between rights holders and the new rights holder uploaded incorrect/invalid/mangled metadata that Spotify disambiguated in this way.

Or, even simpler: original metadata pointed to the incorrect version, but now points to the correct version. Which is incorrect from your point of view :)

I guess the downvotes come from people who have never dealt with licensing issues or data from content providers. I have :) The above is about 2-5% of the crap content companies (streaming or otherwise) have to deal on daily basis.

Because all of the above doesn't even begin to deal with things like territorial restrictions, content restrictions, territorial content restrictions, territorial content requirements, take down requests from commercial and government entities, rights disputes, content embargoes...

I found your comments helpful. Thanks.

They do yes. But it seems pretty rare. The most recurrent case I've seen, is for remixes of popular song. Probably that labels can signal these.

I'm working on an app to help solve this. It's still waiting for Spotify's approval but I can whitelist some users while in development mode and some beta testing / user feedback would be appreciated. The profile shows my email.

The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise.

I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?

> The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.

The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.

The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.

Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.

> The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I was a roadie on my friend's metal band around 2000-ish, they were not in any record company and just sold their CDs through DIY, during live shows, word of mouth, etc. My point is not all bands are in a record company, most are just doing it via DIY. Now, these indie, DIY bands, whatever you call it can now upload and share their music worldwide. That's a huge win.

A win for availability and potential audience, but if it causes less people to buy your CD/USB stick/whatever at shows - perhaps a significant reduction on income for the majority of gigging bands?

Do any of the streaming platforms let you direct fans to your own website/Bandcamp to make a purchase?

Are more or less acts making a living off their music now or back then? Absolute numbers and percentage-wise?

How do we decide what number is "fair", or what we as a society want? Surely it's not reasonable that every band that's just started out in a garage should be making bank.

I don't think that it's more difficult to be a professional musical artist or musician today than it used to be, although the business model may be different. But even if it is, I think that's a decent compromise for all the benefits the streaming services bring.

My understanding is that essentially zero DIY indie bands are making notable amounts from streaming payouts.

CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise.

For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life.

KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.

Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.

Yes, KEXP is great! I regularly discover new artists there.

CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had.

They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular.

In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS.

Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)

That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).

In the UK my public library had CDs including metal and that was how I discovered music as a teenager.

Various libraries in Metro Vancouver still have CDs, though they tend to be more popular artists.

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT.

By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.

That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).

However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease.

There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.

> I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).

> However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

All you have you have to do is buy the music. From either the band’s website, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.

Bandcamp gives the highest % to the artist/label, and I would argue also the best place to buy music.

I rarely listen to a band. Or even to an album. I often listen to music of a specific genre, and for that Spotify (and similar services) are great: I discover artists I'd never discover otherwise.

Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account).

If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".

Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled.

It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested.

Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.

Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize.

Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.

There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount.

(And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)

On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song".

This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.

I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.

Ah true.

This is solved (well, not solved, but handled) by not having a direct link between usage data and the user. So you store your data as <usage, proxy_id> which references <proxy_id, user_id> which references <user_id, user PII>. This way you can always easily break the connection to PII (if the user requests deletion) while keeping per user data.

But true, it's not anonymized in this case.

Even though they just need a total plays sum to pay out to artists, Spotify for sure stores every play by person. You can request your data from them and see for yourself - it's of course necessary for their recommendation services, and even just providing the listening history back to you is a service many people want badly (it is the whole point of services like last.fm!)

Heh, I don't even doubt the legality, I was talking purely about subjective expectations, about how it feels to us.

Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch?

I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee.

Now the baddie is Spotify.

Sure did

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.

Worse than that, I remember reading articles about how some artists didn't "make" a single dollar from their first album that sold millions. It all went to the record company and paid for marketing and advances.

Sometimes they didn't begin to see revenue until 2nd or 3rd albums.

Labels did scum stuff like have sublabel go belly up (oops no royalties anymore), not paying royalties, not giving artists royalties when on VA album, and downright piracy, and enforcement of centralization via signing rights away to (equivalent of) RIAA. These are just examples from memory talking to artists.

Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website?

Why don’t more artists do that?

They do. Bandcamp is a thing, and it's pretty much that, minus a fee for the infrastructure.

But it's not a panacea. An old classmate of mine who's a decently successful Jazz artist now (by Jazz artist standard), had scammers upload her album to Bandcamp without her knowledge. They defrauded a lot of money from her actual fans, probably more than she ever made on Spotify.

Ironically part of signing onto a label is providing protection from stuff like this.

It's maybe what it's supposed to do, but her label didn't.

Was your classmate already on Bandcamp?

Yes, through the record company.

* Bandcamp, now owned by Songtradr, that promptly fired half its employees.

As bad as this is...as this thread points out, more of the money needs to go to artists, and supporting fewer employees should let them do this.

As long as it remains a viable platform. Hopefully the cuts weren't a "gut because we want to run this down on life support" move.

Classic Hacker News. “Companies shouldn’t spend money, except if it’s on developers!”

I bought it when he released it. It was good for him but arguably he lowered his worth and took a pay cut, and it also set a bit of a price ceiling base rate for comedy specials at 5$, which if you aren’t the #1 comedian at the time like Louis was you can’t bring in the same sales volume.

Amazing, thanks for mentioning this! I had no idea. He looks to sell everything on there, not just mp3s, and they are well priced! Just bought a couple of videos of his performances, and it does indeed include DRM-free .mp4 downloads. Even includes a .srt file for subtitles!

Doesn't Spotify share half its profits too? From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.

What profits?

It's actually 70% of REVENUE according to this: https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per....

>From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.

If that is the case, the artists can easily sue the labels for violating the terms of the contract. But the fair share is just what the two signing parties agreed to.

Which is definitely a fair deal signed between equals, right?

Yes, the music labels have a conflict of interest because they took financial positions (equity) in the streaming services in exchange for giving artists lower rates. So they don't really represent the artists. They instead joined up with the streamers to screw over the artists.

Most hits today are produced by Spotify. Actually they are record company. And they also have a really shitty contract. That at the end the revenue stream, for the artist is coming back to Spotify anyway.

It’s easy. 1. Search talent on TikTok. 2. Let them sign shitty contract. 3. Produce them. 4. Market them on Spotify.

5 . Win win. Win win for Spotify not the artist.

It wasn't that groundbreaking. Radiohead were already massively popular despite taking the anti-Britpop, anti-commercial rock route in the '90s. The online MP3 thing in 2007 was a bit of a publicity stunt -- the record was still distributed by XL , which retained all the traditional distribution channels.

I believe Smashing Pumpkins actually beat them to it by several years by releasing Machina II for free online in 2000 after the breakup of the band.

It was ground breaking, taking into account that Radiohead released a critically acclaimed album. In Rainbows had a digital release that was pay what you want, not exactly the same as putting something out for free after breaking up.

I feel like the biggest loss from the days of big record companies is that no one is going to front a promising young band enough to go away together and make their 'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'OK Computer'

* I know both bands probably could've self-financed those projects by that point in their careers, but would they have? And would their role as investors have changed their artistic decisions?

What is noteworthy about these albums that the artists would not have made them otherwise?

Pink Floyd’s next album had the cover and best song dedicated to saying how much they hated the record label

I'm not so worried about humanity's loss of peak works like these since I don't think any young band has it in them at the start anyways. What young artists need is an on-ramp and a way to stay in the business long enough to hone their craft and build a following while turning out a couple Pipers at the Gates of Dawn. Works like Dark Side and OKC are developed, not born, and we need that pipeline.

The problem was that the big companies had the good recording studios and the possibility to make records and distribution. This was very expensive.

Today are studios in abundance. And bands that are good are usually good connected and certainly know a good down mix engineer. Then they can distributed via Bandcamp.

Today it’s much better for artists who want to make music. The big record labels were just gatekeepers.

It was also when CDs were $19.99-25 which I distinctly remember because I was 10 in 1995 when I bought my first CDs (smash, it was written, dookie) and I could rarely afford to buy them.

And then artists still weren't getting paid but an even bigger portion of my income went to them. shrug.

Spotify's always been the baddie, they've just hid it well.

This could be solved by a "donate" button to reward bands you like. Edit: (such an obvious idea, they've already done it: "fan support" feature).

Yeah, or maybe a tip jar? Perhaps some PG at Spotify can copy the stripe tip screen and when before playing a song you get asked the infamous 18%,20%,25%,NO TIP question?

No thank you.

No thanks. E-tip jars belong on Twitch and Youtube Live. Something about that feels very "off", it feeds that parasocial interaction thing in ways that a band selling merch does not.

All music/sports/etc fandom has a similar parasocial element. Same thing, only different manifestations.

but... I generally don't want their 'merch'. I don't need another t-shirt, hat, keyring, whatever. It literally just adds to more waste that I don't want to contribute to. We'd all be better off if I had an easier way to just send $4 to a band/artist I like. I do that for some via patreon. I've known people overpay on bandcamp to get a few more $ to someone. There are artists that will never come to my area. There are artists that simply can't travel/perform due to any number of factors. "Sell merch via Shopify or Spotify" just feels like pushing people in the wrong direction.

It seems the 'fan support' feature is not available on the Spotify website, only the native app. Explains why I haven't noticed it.

So they finally added a way to directly support artists. That's nice, but disappointing they excluded the web app from this feature. Its omission hurts potential donations. Spotify also lowers audio quality on the web app, gee it's almost like they don't want me to use the web app.

You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.

The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.

> You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.

For fringe metal music? Not likely!

If OP was going to his local record/cd store and not some fringe underground market, he was 100% supporting some record company. Maybe not one of the ones listed, but in the 80s it would have been a company.

By "fringe metal", they're likely talking about mainstream thrash and groove metal. And those bands where on these exact labels;

Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)

This does read like a slight snark (the step from 'fringe' to 'mainstream' - who wants to be mainstream?). It further emphasises the point that in the 80s and early 90s looking for non-local 'long tail' music as a youth was pretty much impossible. Especially if / when too young for bars and concerts, all you could find had to be signed on mainstream labels. I had the luck in that I could go to local concerts, thus discovering local talent (and buying their cassette tapes). You needed venues and allowing parents for that. Currently listening to several artists with < 500 streamers a month on Spotify. Nothing in the 80s and 90s can compare with that discoverability.

Well, maybe. Around where I'm from, even the chain record stores would stock some unusual music (like metal) if it was locally popular, but the metalheads had their own stores. I think there's still one or two active in Oslo.

A lot of boutique labels are just sub(-sub) labels ran under the big three. Including metal.

Often they’re ran by artists under contract with one of those three big labels and their big sublabels, mostly as a perk/favor to those artists. They have a bit more creative freedom and leeway who they sign, but the money is still kicked upward and the marketing and recording budget still comes from upstairs.

I may be in the minority, but I just don't really find the "support the artist" argument that compelling. I have artists I like and I grew up with. If I saw them in public I'd get giggly and maybe try to say an awkward hello. But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.

I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them. If they sold their rights at some point in time for money, or pay their tax debts, or whatever, I assume they did so knowing full well what that means. If Spotify is no longer advantageous to them, they would pull their music off and I may search other ways to listen to it.

We have a system to deal with these sorts of things, it's called voluntary exchange and it's the only way things change. If artists pulled their music, Spotify would have to adjust. In the meantime I just don't have the time or energy to track every individual employee grievance

> But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.

What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future.

For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.

What does that have to do with Spotify? If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. Just sell me something I want at a price I find reasonable. I don't need a story about how it's so hard for you to pursue your passion or how you can't continue in the future.

> If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in.

To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in".

I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.

Again, it's about voluntary exchange. Imagine if someone did that to you? I worked low wage jobs before. If some do gooder started lecturing me about how I'm being exploited I would rightly tell them to f off. If they wanted to throw me some money I may or may not be appreciative but I have autonomy about my choices and I extend that same belief to others

"artists deserve to be exploited because they chose it." Thats a very childish assessment of the music industry and how artists are taken advantage of. It has absolutely nothing to do with "being lectured by 'do-gooders'" either, you're injecting an emotional story as an argument where there is none.

Yea, a lot of the "it's a contract" and "it's voluntary" arguments fail to recognize the huge power imbalance between a label and a band, or any agreement between a single person and a huge company. These agreements are almost never between equals, and are often one-sided and "take it or leave it".

Yes, technically I voluntarily entered into my contract with my ISP, my cell phone carrier, and my employer. But in all cases, it's obvious I'm getting screwed over because of the massive power imbalance. It's a fact of life, but it should at least be acknowledged.

What ethics are there to consider besides 'money can be exchanged for goods and services'? Everyone is a willing participant in the transaction.

I think it’s more of a function of mental leisure time. People like worrying about these things and wrapping up simple transactions (“I’d like to stream music this month for $10”) into some moral and ethical quandary as if they can resolve or contribute to an existing relationship between two other parties.

It’s nice that we have the luxury to think about these things. But for the most part, I ignore it and discount people who bring it up to other people, unless they genuinely think people aren’t aware of the situation.

Maybe it’s guilt over benefiting from this. Maybe it’s just internet points for demonstrating one’s knowledge and virtue. Beats me, I hope it reduces.

Off the top of my head.... -How was the labor sourced for those services? -Child Labor, illegal immigrant labor? -What are the working conditions for the labor?, is it sweatshop -what inputs go into the goods/services? -what do they do with their waste? -where do the inputs come from? My country, another country, my town, a town in my state...

you may think the government plays a role to enforce some of these, and they do to a point...

You can go on in your own head about all the things behind that simple exchange of money for something. If it's a perfectly competitive market sure, that may work but there aren't many if any markets in the US that are that level of competitive.

A personal anecdote for you. My uncle owns an auto parts re-manufacturer, so they rebuild car parts and sell them. I worked there a lot growing up. The normal input is buying "cores" from service stations....your starter motor isn't working and you get a new one, that old one is sold to someone like my uncle who refurbs it.

Often we had people come by with very clearly stolen parts....should we have just exchanged money for those? This ranged from a tweaker who would show up with one part, to full scale organized theft rings with pallets of parts...

So, do we buy those since the price is much, much better? There is a an ethical decision there...

I'm curious, do you personally buy any goods or services? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever purchase or use anything.

I'm curious, do you personally make any decisions? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever consider or decide upon anything.

I do make decisions and often times people many degrees removed get hurt or exploited as a result of it.

I choose not to focus on that though, whereas the person I replied to apparently does. I was curious how such a person manages to live a just life in the modern world.

Apparently those decisions don't include answering the question at hand.

"I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them." - Your assumption is wrong though. Artists aren't on spotify because it's economically advantageous for them, they are on spotify because they have no other alternative. It doesn't matter if it's streaming platform A or B or C, they are ubiquitous and as an artist you want your music to be heard, so you have to play the field. In this case, the field sucks and mirrors capitalism, skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid.

> In this case, the field sucks and mirrors capitalism, skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid.

What alternative do you suggest and why would it work better than capitalism?

Is there some other market system that produced better music?

This one has its flaws but it seems to be optimizing for a great variety.

> skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid

Hasn't Spotify been losing money for all/most of its existence? Or is there some other top of the pyramid?

Daniel Ek sure hasn't lost any of his own money.

One basic reason to support artists you like is just because you want them to make more stuff.

I think you're of the majority opinion actually. There are loud voices on HN whenever this topic comes up, but clearly most people don't think about these issues much, they just want to access music.

Spotify isn't really the problem. Record labels being the gatekeepers and a bunch of byzantine historic laws that they sit on are the problem. Musicians themselves are the problem - those few who've made it big could band together than change things in various ways for all, but that would mean giving up some money so...

You assume a lot, wrongly.

Artists don't have a choice. If the only viable marketplace is ripping off sellers, and sellers chose to remain there because it's the only viable marketplace, and the sellers gotta hear their buyer defending the owners of the only viable marketplace ripping them off, they're not gonna keep selling and you're not gonna keep getting new music.

This race to defend the most evil of corporations, ripping people off right and left, is rampant on HN over the last 5 years. It's like all the hacker turned into lackeys or something. What a shame. The first 10 years of this site the people here had backbones but now they're mostly just bootlickers.

This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely won't get $10 (-$2 in expenses), maybe it's $7 or maybe it's $12, but I don't see how you can go from there to "Beyoncé is getting all your money!?!?!" Are there any specific examples of artists that get much more or much less than you'd expect, or is this all just a thought experiment?

The share is determined by contract, not by some fair-minded algorithm. You would have to listen to that artist over 3000 times in a month for them to get $10 at the normal artist's $0.0032/play. Big artists don't see such low figures, though more obviously goes to the system that pays the salaries of the people who get those deals for them.

Well, sure, but whether an artist gets the full amount or a pittance from their label is not relevant to the question of whether Spotify's pooled numbers are unfair to some artists. The ultimate payout is not something Spotify has a say in.

It's pretty easy to do some math on this.

There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form.

You don't get exact numbers (because Spotify won't share them!) but there's no question background music is vastly more profitable on Spotify than the kind of music people go to concerts for, and it's at the latter's expense.

That's a good point and a legitimate reason to get rid of the pool, but I guess I was talking more about often-voiced worries that big artists are getting richer and indie artists are getting poorer due to Spotify's algorithm -- and those worries long predate the weird ambient stuff.

If background music is the reason people are paying for Spotify then what would you expect Spotify to do?

> By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

This argument can be used to justify basically any business practice. It's a weak argument. Should I be forced to buy 10 inedible doughnuts to find one editable one in the name of allowing people to practice making doughnuts out of random things they find in their kitchen? Should I have to buy 5 cars before I find one that doesn't break after a a month in the name of supporting the auto industry?

Obviously, this is nonsense.

I think there's a strawman here. I look for different things artistically and functionally about the things you mentioned. Cars should function well and feel good when I test-drive them, but I wouldn't buy a hideous car.

Music is somewhat functional (does the cd or record play? does it skip at all etc) but then you have to listen to it. Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.

> Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.

And I've definitely found songs that so-to-speak came along via an album purchase and which I might have initially dismissed, somewhat eventually growing on me after a while. Not saying that this always happens, and I'm not the biggest music listener around, so take that with a pinch of salt, but still…

Spotify uses a weighted average - you can't abuse the system like that. The tough reality is that 10k fans paying $10 a month and spending 1% time listening to an indie artist only works out to $1k / month even if all the money went to the artists. Unfortunately that's not the case - Spotify has overhead, artists sign with labels and other middlemen creep in.

As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change this is to get consumers to pay drastically more but that's what killed iTunes in the first place.

It's not hard to find artists who abuse the system like that: algorithmically generated music, from algorithmically generated artists, hundreds of which have almost the exact same number of plays (and thousands more than real artists I've followed for years.

Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.

> But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole.

But doesn’t that even out?

Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica.

If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener.

But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month.

What am I missing here?

The fact that you can say "Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever" when they basically pay the musicians nothing is amazing to me. Have we come this far into individualism? "It's good for me, so it must be the best thing ever".

But the post didn't say that. It just described the benefits of using it.

Would you say that the Spotify era is a worse time to be a musician than the UMG / Sony / Warner era?

I’m not a musician but it seems to me it’s always been difficult to make a living as an artist. I wonder if it’s easier to find an audience today than it was 50 years ago?

>The creator economy can't rely on Patreon.

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rel...

It is a joke now compared to what it was.

There are entire parts of the music industry that no longer exists.

There use to be working musicians in every city that were basically unknown outside the city. NYC or SF had their own entirely unique music scenes.

There use to be entire bars that were goth bars or punk bars in even mid sized cities. Imagine opening a bar in 2024 that only caters to people who like punk music? It doesn't even make sense.

Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media. To just compare the distribution channels misses the plot.

Every city use to have a knock off free paper of the Village Voice that was mostly for promoting live music. Now even the Village Voice itself is basically dead.

Anyone who thinks things are good now, simply can't comprehend what they missed out on.

Music teaching is a good example I think. There use to be all kinds of professional music teachers. If you were a gigging local musician you had the other income stream of teaching. Youtube is great for a music teacher that happens to win the music teaching lottery at the expense of all other music teachers. Of course, if you ask the youtube lottery winner they will say things have never been better. Scale that process across everything to do with music and that is the reality compared to the old reality.

You can't ask the gigging local musician who teaches on the side how things are because they are mostly doing something else now and don't count.

It is like asking the lottery winners if it is worth it to play the lottery. Not surprisingly they all say yes, best thing ever.

> Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media..."

I don't think this is the root cause of your findings. I rather think that this development started with the DJ and rap culture which made musicians virtually obsolete. It is and was much cheaper to hire a DJ than a band, and people don't seem to care whether it's just a guy pressing some buttons or a bunch of people with real musical instruments. There is no longer any appreciation for real musicians. The public is satisfied with a few sampled tracks or cheap sequencer arrangements. In consequence fewer and fewer people see a need to learn an instrument. As a result, fewer and fewer music teachers are needed.

All of this is because of the technological change (MP3, internet speed) not because of the streaming service.

All of this is *possible* because of the technology. The existence of the technology doesn't mean the software exists, or that the software is any of good/useful/cheap.

What I love about Spotify and think shows that their engineering culture is really solid, is their progressive web app. I only use Ubuntu on my different computers, and my first task after a fresh install is to log into Spotify and save their web app on my machine. It just works: the icon appears in my favourites, the app renders really nicely in a native-like window, etc. It is by far the best progressive web app experience I have had. I totally forget that it's just a website with the browser UI switched off.

I'd also add that, in comparison to its competition, it's fairly "open" API-wise.

TIDAL: no API. Soundcloud: API registration disabled. Apple Music: paywalled. Beatport: API registration disabled. Etc etc.

That isn't to say you can get everything via the API (you can't get monthly listeners, only an abstraction of it on a 0-100 scale, or artist's pick you sometimes see on artist pages), but compared to whom they're matched against, kudos to them.

> That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent.

Interestingly, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ so you could actually do whatever you want and listen to your music the way you want.

The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).

>, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€

Assuming you meant to write, "Spotify could have been as streaming service _and_ an MP3 shop" ...

No, Spotify didn't have the leverage in negotiations with Big Record Labels to offer streaming plus DRM-free mp3 files for 0.5€.

Apple is more powerful than Spotify and they eventually relented to Big Labels demands and added a more expensive tier of songs at $1.29 instead of all songs being just $0.99 pricing.

Too generalize... to consider the realism of any hypothetical alternative business models for Spotify to have, you also have to consider whether the Big Labels would have even made those ideas possible when Spotify was negotiating the licenses.

> The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).

It has never been easier to own an easily copiable and backup-able form of the music you want and use it with myriad ways to play it and listen to it.

People just don’t want to pay a dollar or two for their favorite songs.

Or... don't want to repay. I've followed some bands from vinyl to tapes to cds to now. I've bought some of the same songs 4, 5, 6 or more times. Listening for 'free' via streaming is good enough for most stuff any more, even if it means I'll lose access to some stuff. If I'm really desperate, maybe I'll look for a torrent, but I haven't done that in years.

if you have the CD why are you repaying? you literally already have the file on a physical medium that can be backed up and copied to whatever device you want

Spotify allows you to play local files, add them to playlists, etc. So no you can't buy the files from Spotify, but if it's important to you, you can buy them elsewhere and import them.

It's an unreliable and jarring experience, I had to give up on it. The app gives no indication when the synchronization would happen, and doesn't explain why when it does not work.

Spotify is a convenient and affordable way to listen to music, but it is not without its drawbacks.

They put the fucking unlike button 2 pixels away from the fucking play button. In the app and notification widget. It's irreversible, permanent, and immediately unsyncs the song. There's no development team I resent as much as Spotify.

Takes minutes to load cached playlists. Often stumbles on multidevice playback. It's constantly refreshing and hiding content I was about to click on.

If their recommendations weren't decent is happily yeet them. I guarantee their shit app loses them money.

HMV; WOW what a throwback.

> Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted.

My question would have been "But how do artists get paid?" Which is still a murky answer today if you're not touring like crazy and going hard on ancillaries, like merch, ads, etc.

Relatedly, the music industry has never really cared if/how artists got paid - all they care about is that the businessmen (and they have primarily been men, historically) get paid.

I understand you - I am a bit older and did similarly, buying cassettes in the 70s

Yet, I miss the undivided attention of that first listening, listening to all tracks in sequence (picking the track sequence was an art in itself, creating an atmosphere across the album). Feeling the difference between Side A and B.

Those 10$ felt like great return. Exchanging tapes with friends, recording mixtapes, listening sit downs.

A lot of this is lost due to streaming in general. When you can get any song in history in a few clicks, it takes away part of the “mystical journey” of finding your new musical beat. More self reinforcing stuff, just like Social Networks.

About Spotify, I agree with the OP. Interface gets worse, price goes up, podcast content is irrelevant for me (but drives price up). I find it grating since I already pay for the Apple bundle which includes Music (which is somehow even worse than Spotify). If Apple had a better interface I could ditch Spotify.

Guess I must try Cider again.

I trade songs with family on Spotify regularly. I suspect it is influencing our recommendations! You can also listen to music together using Jam, though I have not tried it: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-26/spotify-jam-personal...

> The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums.

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands.

Before the general population figured out ripping, you could often return things if you did not like the music.

I often went to HMV (333 Yonge, Toronto Canada), bought 6+ CDs, listen them for a week or two, and return the ones that I didn't like (keep 2-3). I would then repeat the process and buy a bunch more.

They stopped this policy in (IIRC) the late-90s or early-00s, as people were just ripping CDs and returning everything they purchase the day before.

> 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT.

except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

and it's $11 every month, forever.

> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

and was there but isn't anymore

There's even a third category: Is there, but only in a defective, incomplete fashion. (For years now, a number of Bob Dylan's live albums have been missing the gapless between-tracks transitions online. It almost feels as if Columbia ripped its own CDs for uploading and accidentally configured the ripping software to drop the pre-gaps…)

If I bought an album a month for the rest of my life, I would have 600 albums. In the last MONTH I have listened to music from that many albums on Spotify. So the forever argument doesn't really pain me.

not to mention that "forever" with online streaming services tends to mean, "until licenses change" or the company changes hands and they decide to invoke the clause in the ToS you agreed to that says that you dont own and aren't entitled to the thing you paid for.

See recently, Crunchyroll Funimation acquisition. People had bought blu-ray copies at extra cost for a digital copy which was honored by CR and retracted after the merger where they promptly deleted the media that these people owned and paid full price for individually.

If it works for you that's great. The comparison could be made that we can listen to music from [as many albums as we want] for $0 on Bandcamp, then buy the tracks we really like.

There's things missing from both platforms, of course.

> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

I can count on one hand the amount of times this has happened to me in the last decade.

Is it fair to say that you have fairly esoteric taste in music? I don't think it's the norm among Spotify users to feel that there is a ton of stuff that's missing from the library.

And if you are among the ones who can't find the vast majority of the music they want to listen to on that platform, then that's fair play - it's probably not for you. You likely have alternatives that suit you better. That doesn't really take away from the experience of the normies for whom it's got everything they want.

I wouldn't say esoteric but a lot of non-mainstream stuff; small bands; unoffical remixes that can't be licensed; etc.

I'm sure a sizable portion of tracks I enjoy are on there and agree that for most people it has most of what they want - most people listen to what is marketed to them. This has no bearing on the fact there's huge amounts of music available elsewhere that is not on Spotify/similar.

> and it's $11 every month, forever.

So the complaint is that not enough money is being paid for music and that it costs too much?

There's no complaint here.

But for me, yes paying $132/yr to not own anything isn't attractive.

I can't stand spotify. I need indy artists, DJ mixes, flips and remixes, so Soundcloud is my go-to. Free tier is less annoying too, less ads.

I love fast-paced, riff-focused metal. I didn't find out until I got Spotify that that genre was called thrash metal. I absolutely would not have found all the albums and artists I listen to daily without Spotify. It's one of the few proprietary apps I don't mind on my phone and PC.

I have a similar opinion, but with one big caveat (which means I'd be happy to drop Spotify in a heartbeat): I still have access to all those old albums I bought with my wages and allowance. I've digitized them, and they have migrated from computer to computer.

And a large number of those albums/songs... aren't on Spotify.

And all the songs I've 'discovered' on Spotify will also be gone some day, because they're not from mainstream artists. If I want to listen to them in another 10 years, I'll have to buy them.

I digitized the CDs I still had left a couple years ago. Over half of them were not on Spotify. And they weren’t even anything obscure, just electronica where licensing is often a bit complicated.

> And they weren’t even anything obscure

A noticeable number of Bob Dylan's live albums are all mutilated in online distribution (streaming and download, everything), because somebody somehow managed to drop the gapless between-tracks transitions. (Those missing bits exactly match the pre-gap on the corresponding CD releases, so it almost feels as Columbia just ripped its own CDs for uploading and somehow mismanaged the process).

Pandora is much better at discovery (Spotify is actually really terrible by comparison), and cheaper too. Unfortunately, they refuse to implement high quality streams for whatever reason, or I could finally ditch Spotify. As it is, I just use Pandora's free tier for discovery to help curate my Spotify playlists.

It is drastically better than Spotify. I am surprised this isn't more well known. Maybe people just haven't tried Pandora recently.

The most I can get from Spotify is about 40 songs in a custom Radio playlist that I can't refresh or update.

We're from the same generation and I also loved heavy metal... I learned about new bands by buying magazines specializing in metal, renting videos from the big bands which usually would include opening acts with new bands (or even the famous guys or their fans on the video wearing other bands' t-shirts), from friends, by going to festivals (there were lots of them around if you were willing to travel around a bit, though I was in a highly populated area so that may not have been an option for you)... there was always more bands that I knew about than what I could possibly listen and buy albums... of course, today it's so much easier, but I feel like the problem today is actually the abundance of choice! You could just listen to the best couple of songs of each band, and still have more than enough music to enjoy. That seems to be what happens if you let Spotify or other services pick songs for you. You can still dig in if you really want, but I feel like most people won't do that... and you start having very high expectations from what a good song is as you only listen to effectively, the "greatest hits"!

> Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny

Comparing a product to what it was like decades ago and declaring it good is not the same as discussing it on merit and as is.

Back in the day before Spotify existed you could use different options.

You could use Discogs to find similar music. Then you could use SoulSeek to find this music. Or simply join a metal channel/server on SoulSeek or IRC or DCPP and find other fans of similar music. But even before that you could also just look at a label catalog and travel to a vinyl or CD store (where you can listen before you buy...). Or you could use shortwave radio to catch a pirate station. Yes, this even worked for obscure genres like the one you mentioned. I have a broad taste of music and at times I've been into subgenres of the genre you mentioned.

Have I discovered new music via Spotify? For sure. Did different methods exist before? Yup. Is the Spotify method high signal to noise? Nah, the previously mentioned methods also worked very well. And I have virtually and IRL met tons of people, including people within the core of music subgenres. Thanks to Discogs, DCPP, and SoulSeek.

I do like one feature about Spotify showing shows near me (even though I have passed the age / time of my life where I went to artists as I have only time and money to do things like go to theatre with my kids). However that feature as well as buying merchandise also existed outside of Spotify long ago.

So, your overall spending on music is down about 90% now. I wonder, who took the most of this loss: artists, record labels or music stores?

This isn't different than knowing Amazon uses child labor and works people to death and still using it anyways. Its not really a "sign of how far we've come" so much as it is, "this is convenient for me, I do not care about anything else"

I'm a big metal and jazz fan. I don't use spotify (or haven't for a while) but on apple music I curate my own playlists and get most of what I would get from surfing the high seas and rearranging folders and albums in a fraction of the time. I know you can do the same on Spotify, so it's good enough for me.

I was lucky to have a few friends sharing my passion for metal. Anyway there were quite a lot of magazines about metal music. They really helped me to discover new styles, bands, and releases.

Oh how I enjoyed reading the reviews of the new albums back then! Some journalist were very talented in describing the music in tasty details and I was longing for the moment, when I buy and listen to the long awaited CD.

Oddly enough, I feel like streaming music service algorithms only reluctantly serve up new music. To me it feels like a constant reversion to the mean, not a portal to endless possibilities. It’s closer to listening to the radio than digging crates in a record store.

I absolutely can't relate. The monthly streams for the first 10 artists in my Discover Weekly this week are 45k, 90k, 89k, 30k, 121k, 931k, 231k, 25k, 7k, 14k. I would have zero chance to discover these bands in the wild.

To be fair you have to push Spotify a little by listening to tiny bands before it starts recommending more of them because the "gravity" of popular music is too strong. Like what do you recommend to someone who listens to mega popular genre defying artists like Taylor Swift? She's so ungodly popular that they could be a diehard metal head and still listen to her. There's no signal. The set of music TSwift fans also listened to is all music.

>> there were literally zero ways to discover new songs

Older than you, and into hardcore, not metal, but there were definitely ways to discover new songs back then.

First of all, I had friends that were into the same music, so when one of us got a new record, we all got a new record, I would borrow records from friends and if I liked it I would tape it, and friends made me tapes.

Radio did play hardcore, only they were pretty limited in what they could play, since if a band had a name like "The Crucifucks" or something like that, they couldn't even say that name over the air, but they still had hardcore radio shows that came on in college towns around 2 AM in the morning, and people would tape them and they would get passed around. We would go to a different town and drive around at 2 in the morning and tape straight from the car radio to a boombox just to find new music.

Next thing was compilation albums, so the labels would put out an extra cheap LP that was just a song or two from every band on the label, so for hardcore, Blasting Concept by SST, Rat Music for Rat People, American Youth Report, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, the Decline of Western Civilization, the Flipside comps, etc. Some of those you could even get at the mall.

Wasn't played on MTV other than a couple songs that were humorous (TV Party, Institutionalized) but you could find a little bit on Night Flight. Then there were the zines, Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside, later maybe Forced Exposure. If they compared a band you liked to another band, you would try to check them out. And of course going to $5 all ages shows, if you went to see a band you liked, 3 or 4 other bands were playing too.

So there were ways. I've never used Spotify but I know it is way easier now to find exactly what you want at the press of a button. But the search was part of the fun back then. The lack of technology did not stop us.

i had different experiences with music, partly due to the time frame, but i share your perspective.

however i don't think spotify helps with discovery for me any longer. it did play a major role until last couple years, even when my tastes changed drastically. now it is hard to find something new that is closer to what i like and is not pushed by the artists trying to promote their work. even using shuffle on a large playlist results in same set of tracks playing every day.

i think these sorts of sentiments are shared by the others here. from price perspective, i actually started spending on music with spotify premium. i still feel that it is worth the money after entering into a much better economic condition.

Long article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in.

For me I navigate my music via My Liked songs + my own playlists for particular moods. If I open the app and press play it defaults to where I left off.

The fact there is a home page which shows options similar to what I like is fine, sometimes useful. Yes I’d prefer to customise it. Yes the recommendations aren’t perfect. Not a reason to quit, I love Spotify and haven’t found a better alternative.

The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal.

> The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs, I love listening to remixes and covers, youtube, spotify or tiktok has plenty of songs I’d love in my library. But it’s a nightmare for a business model that respects artists and a cost structure that needs to be covered. Again, no real good alternatives that do this well + have a normal library + be legal.

But you can, if you have the audio files you can use them as local files [1] in your Spotify library.

[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/local-files/

Local files in Spotify is extremely iffy. It has forgot them many times for me.

The worst is on iOS where you have to be on the same wifi and wait randomly. And sometimes without warning the files just go away. This is unacceptable. People need to play music for dance, yoga, exercise classes for their job. You can't just randomly throw away the files to have them discover this when the class starts.

I wonder if it would be possible to setup a folder on a remote server, and use that as the directory for local files. Wonder if Spotify would play nice with that.

It doesn't play well with the Files system on iOS afaik..

Uploading music seems to work fine for Apple Music. It’s been a while since I’ve done it, but all the songs I’ve uploaded in the past are still available on all my devices.

I quit Spotify for the exact same reason, but I did not blog about it. I tried to host my own alternative, but I realized that it's hard to get the songs nowadays since everything is streamed. So, I switched to Deezer. It's nice that they have some support for local files for songs I already bought elsewhere and that are not on the platform.

However, there is something annoying on the Spotify homepage that drove me away...

soulseek has a looooot of music. Even obscure tracks or albums. Lossless, lossy, anything.

It's a critique/criticism of a service that has degraded, and why the author understandably is unhappy.

What is with the growing trend on HN of just being overly negative about posts that are shared here?

Criticism is welcome, wrapping it in LimeWire nostalgia and extra 20 paragraphs of fluff to make it long enough for a blog post is makes it harder to find.

Spicetify solves this homepage issue for all major OS. But sadly not on mobile.

> Long article for a single comment: I quit Spotify because I can’t customise the home page which pushes podcasts and music I’m not interested in.

The "podcast pushing" is an underrated reason to quit; It's why I did. I decided it was effectively a safety issue.

I subscribed to Spotify Premium when I bought a car and installed an Android Auto head unit, telling myself "this will basically be my radio and I can control it from the head unit without messing with my phone"

The breaking point for me was when I had to scroll past 3-4 rows of podcast suggestions (onto an entire other screen) to find any music on my homepage. At that point, I decided it was unsafe, and began the long, arduous path of going back to 2008 and buying all my music piecemeal to host on PlexAmp. I'm quite happy with the results now, though.

>The one major gripe is not being able to upload my own songs

You can do this on Apple Music. Upload from one device, and it's available to stream on any of your devices. For me it's the main reason I use Apple over Spotify. https://support.apple.com/guide/music/import-items-already-o...

I think people get frustrated when services change to try and acquire more revenue, which explains podcasts being shoved down your throat.

In regards to Spotify allowing uploading of your own songs, I remember I think they did have that at the beginning. I remember there used to be an option to import your iTunes library on Windows. I uploaded a small collection of MP3's and it worked okay, but was somewhat cumbersome compared to say Foobar or MusicBee.

You might like Deezer, it's very similar to Spotify but with the added bonus of being able to upload your own MP3s.

Apple Music also lets you do that

> The lack of customization feels like a slap. Like Spotify designers telling me “you don’t know what you want, we know better,” but the problem is they don’t, and they haven’t for a long time.

Warning: extremely broad stereotyping to follow. This is macro level stuff, not micro level stuff. Real individual humans are far more complex and nuanced than what I'm about to say and don't fit neatly into these categories.

This pretty much sums up all of my feelings on modern software. A good designer can be a real asset and make for a much better product. The problem is, only maybe 20% of designers are actually good designers, and the humility required to make you a good designer often makes you less pushy. The opposite 20% of designers who think they know better than everyone else happen to be the loudest and pushiest, so they often get their way. Everybody tries to copy Apple because Apple has had great success with telling their users how they should use the software, but this is a mistake unless you are only targeting Apple's user base.

Please stop looking at your app's UI as a work of art. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a beautiful looking app and I know the joy that comes from creating something beautiful. But remember, it must have form and function. Look at it first as a functional machine, and then beautify and polish it. A great designer can work wonders with what they have!

If your boots are beautiful but your toes are getting frost-bitten, they aren't good boots!

In closing, I love designers and I'm glad we have them now. They are important and can be great assets. We just need a mindshift, much like we did in engineering.

> If your boots are beautiful but your toes are getting frost-bitten, they aren't good boots!

Reminds me of a saying that a Scottish woman taught me:

"All fur coat and no knickers"

Although, as a Canadian, I can relate to your idiom a bit more.

Sadly it's not only designers but sometimes the whole product org who is biased… I lost on a potential design contract earlier this year because the company wanted a paid case study. 3 hours to improve their onboarding and customer activation.

I showed an outline of the direction I thought was best, highlighted the core concepts to watch for, and opened to further tests we could do to achieve the target KPI.

They told me my concepts were not “bold enough” and I wasn't defending it as hard as they'd like. It seems that to them, a designer should be confident enough to impose his vision after 3h of work on one of the most important flows of a B2B app.

No hard feeling against them, I was probably not a good fit. But it's not the first time people expect me to come in and “do the design thing” like it's dark magic.

There's an inherent issue with being both a paying patron and lay judge.

If I want greatness, I probably shouldn't hire an expert and then say "Eh, I don't like it"... but you constantly see that dynamic in management and creative consulting.

Argue on the merits and goals, sure! But why substitute a VP's taste for an expert they're paying?!

If someone needs an ego fluff, there are cheaper ways.

Yes thank you, great point. I've definitely seen the organizational leadership push designers to be more imposing, and that's a big problem. I think that a lot of VPs struggle to justify the cost (salary) of designers because it can be difficult to identify the contributions/value when you aren't intimately involved in the process. Because of this they want to see someone who they think will really take the reins and make the investment worth it. This is IMHO a big mistake, but it's the best explanation I can think of to explain what I've seen in the past. I think there's also sometimes an idea that engineers and designers are inherently in conflict and engineers will ruin things if not kept in check and dominated by a strongly opinionated designer. I think this largely stems from Apple and the Jobs/Ive era, but regardless, in most software I've been a part of this is a mistake. That sort of domination/conflict-based "teamwork" does not lead to the results they think it does.

Knock off a 0 from that number

I agree, 20% sounds about right. But designers are rarely high in the food chain—they receive requirements, they receive feedback, they receive timelines. A lot of the bad "design" comes before the interface gets worked on. These aren't really two way conversations. Much of the arguments engineers lose to non-technical leaders have the same dynamics. Except that the engineering function, if not an individual engineer, generally has more sway.

Tech companies aren't organized well to make good products. Functional managers, like a design manager, are pretty toothless—their role is a middle man between the designer and frankly nothing. And a product manager (in many ways, the designer's real boss) has their own priorities.

that simply means someone else a non-professional designer is acting as one. with the results being as they are, and that's how unsurprisingly we end up with bad design. but usually the company - for a while - ends up with a lot of revenue.

Interactive design should be interactive. I've always believe this. It's in the name. The very concept of interactive design should be that its user should be allowed to change it, and that's true of essentially any serious software application that's stood the test of time. They are malleable. The current, Apple-inspired "we know better" is just a cultural aberration that emerged from the post-iPhone landscape.

Everyone's thought was "the iPhone only has one button". Well yeah but it had a huge touchscreen that could do about anything. It was malleable. Software must be malleable, particularly in bigger screens.

Spotify's UI is unusually rigid. You can't resize or move anything.

> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd. While the indie artist I have been obsessed with gets literally nothing because they don’t meet a certain arbitrary threshold.

Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically. If I upload my music to a platform that pays me 100% of the royalties, I will get to keep the most of 0 dollars, because nobody will be there to listen to it.

I would argue that the issue is mainly relevant for indies who are past the "much-needed exposure" phase, starting to blow up, and now don't get a good (fair) share of it. That would be a great moment to go off platform, and take the audience with them, but many can't (won't) do that, because it may mean less exposure. So, after all, Spotify seems to bring something of their own to the table (a pool of listeners) that they want to be paid for. To get more exposure, they need bigger artists, to get those, they need money and crooked deals to convince the big labels to license it. So, while unfair at first glance, comparing a Taylor Swift deal to what I'm getting off of Spotify perhaps (I'm only guessing), I am happy to accept the deal for the random exposure I am now enjoying because of it.

I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from).

I mean they are revenue-share deals. So each label will get paid a % of Spotify's total revenue according to the number of listens they have and how well they negotiated the deal.

So labels like UMG are going to get a better deal than some indie artist who just has to sign up normally. How much the UMG artists end up getting paid is up to UMG.

The problem is really that 90% of people listen to a few big artists that are owned by these mega-labels. And that distorts the entire economy of the sector.

It's like if income tax brackets were inverted and the higher your income the less taxes you pay.

It's not always people. Spotify has a spam problem. With the distribution key Spotify uses (correctly, if not precisely, described in the article), you don't even need stolen account credentials. You can just sign up a thousand accounts, and listen to your own fake artists, and actually get paid more than you spent on those accounts. All you need to do is play a lot more songs than the average listener. Make your spam songs short (slightly more than 1 minute seems to be enough to defeat Spotify's anti-spam algorithms, judging by the spam I find), and you can rack up a ton of plays.

And if you do that, you should even have room to put in a few plays of the big pop stars. So that you have someone protesting if your spam accounts get closed by spotify and their plays wiped.

> Well, as a musician myself, I often feel a bit conflicted reading statements like these. After all, as uncomfortable as it may be, it is <insert big pop artist> that brings _most_ people to a platform, not the indies, typically.

I'm confused by your argument here. If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no? Let's say there are 1 billion music listeners worldwide (I pulled this number out of my ass). 90% of these want to listen to pop music and will subscribe to a platform that has the major pop artists. It then follows that these pop artists will naturally get 90% of listeners on the platform too, no? The only difference is the marginal 10% who want to primarily listen to indies.

In other words, a "fair" revenue distribution model would still direct most of the money to a handful of popstars, but now it wouldn't be so extremely skewed. Instead of 99%, they'd only get 90% - which should IMO be more than enough and crucially at least it's fair.

As it stands, indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists who don't need subsidizing anymore. It's completely the wrong way around.

I agree with all you say, but I probably didn't fully get the point you were trying to make with this: > indie musicians who need to money are basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists

I am not sure how my $8 of Spotify money subsidized Taylor Swift and/or how that is a problem? I would have $0 otherwise, not $10. Spotify enabled me to get to the $8. Fair is a hard word when the distribution power of Spotify is not accounted for, I'd argue. Again, I know nothing, it's just one perspective I often find myself in, and it feels weird (being someone who benefits from Spotify, i.e. the $8 instead of $0).

> If the big popstars bring people to a platform, then presumable there will be more than enough people to listen to those popstars and their share of the revenue will be naturally very high, no?

Ah, but what if those big stars have the negotiating leverage to get paid more per play ?

If the platform has a fixed-size pie and can afford to pay $0.005 per play, but Joe Rogan and Taylor Swift will walk away unless they get $0.01 per play, should small artists' slice of the pie be reduced to $0.002 per play?

That's entirely possible, I wasn't delving into the "why". For what it's worth, I agree with you that the big stars have a much more concentrated negotiating power. Unless the small artists unionize, they'll simply have very little leverage.

> basically subsidizing the extremely popular artists

I don’t think this is right. I don’t know much about revenue distribution, but I think you’re conflating listeners and money. The ratio between the two is not constant. And I think this was the GP’s point — the percentage of money a top artist gets is more than an indie musician gets. Why? Because they have a better contract with Spotify (and Apple, etc). (And that’s okay)

So, let’s say the pop stars get 90% of the listeners. And they then get 85% of the possible revenue from those listeners. For the indie groups, they only get 50% of the revenue for their listeners (and yes, I know these numbers are wrong, but they are illustrative).

Pop stars = 0.9 * 0.85 = 76.5% of subscription fees to the artist. (+ 13.5% to Spotify)

Indie = 0.1 * 0.5 = 5% of subscription fees to the artists (plus 5% to Spotify)

In this case — yes. The popular groups will take home a much larger piece of the total revenue. Smaller groups have 10% of the listeners, but only 5% of the total revenue (and ~6% of the total “artist” revenue (5/(76.5+5)).

But if pop stars bring in more listeners, the absolute revenue for the Spotify (et al) is higher, which is all they care about. In the above scenario, Spotify would get ~73% of their revenue from the top artists. (13.5 / (13.5+5)). Which makes the difference in contracts worth it from Spotify’s point of view.

But the smaller groups still get more (relatively and absolutely) than they did in the age of physical media. And they have a much larger pool of listeners that can be exposed to their music.

You can be mad that smaller artists don’t have the same deal as Taylor Swift, et al. But that doesn’t mean that they should. That’s what I took from the GP post. You shouldn’t look at what is “fair” because (a) that’s not how the market works and (b) there are many ways to define “fair”. If those artists bring more listeners, then it makes sense from Spotify’s POV to cut a better deal with those artists.

Instead, I’d focus on how much absolute revenue artists get. Is it more or less when compared with pre-Spotify/streaming. And can you make a living doing it?

From the listener point of view - your $X/mo (£,€,etc) still goes to whomever you listen to. If you don’t listen to <insert famous artist here>, then they don’t get a fraction of your monthly fee. Does your favorite Indie band get a smaller slice of $X? Sure. But that’s still >0.

I agree with your analysis, I just wanted to point out that this is effectively a regressive taxation. In this instance, Spotify is the state and from it's perspective, it makes sense to tax the pop stars less (as a %-age of income) than some tiny alt-nu-grunge-garage-under-over-in-out rock-jazz-house band. That's what maximizes Spotify's tax revenue. But it's still a regressive tax. The richer you are (in the Spotify ecosystem) the less of your earnings you have to give up. Whether this is fair or unfair is debatable - I suppose in a pure market economy, whatever the market agrees on is fair. But there's a massive disparity in negotiating power, which means that the small artists are naturally disadvantaged. Big popstars have a huge concentrated negotiating power. Small artists do not. It is thus less likely that they'll be able to negotiate a "fair" revenue model, whatever that might mean.

Again, fairness is debatable. As a society, we decided that regressive taxation is unfair, because rich people can proportionally bear much higher taxes than poor people without impacting their lifestyle. I'm not going to go into the realities of rich people ending up paying a much lower effective tax rate due to being able to afford to optimize their taxes.

That's because a small number of streaming services monopolized the market. In the old days, the mid-sized city I live in used to have like 15 mainstream music stores and 3 that carried mostly indie music and they were well-visited.

Streaming could be fair if they cut up the royalties by subscribes:

https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-o...

But the labels with major pop acts simply will not let that happen, because it'll drastically lower their revenue.

The average indie wouldn't even make it to these indie record stores though. They only have so much space and so much ability to carry slow moving inventory.

I think you've over-complicated this, or at least missed the point by quite a lot. The question is extremely simple: Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to? I don't care how much money top performers want. If I am going to spend money on music, it should go to artists that I actually listen to. And it does, because I buy music on CD and via Bandcamp and other websites, instead of streaming it.

And that's kind of the thing. If I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator. It's Literally only music that works this way, to my knowledge.

There's plenty of problems with music licensing, and to me this is just another one of them.

> Why should I pay money to listen to music I like, and then that money goes to music and artists I've never and never will listen to?

Well, you could simply bypass Spotify and just buy the music directly from the artist, no (which you indicate you do)? So Spotify isn't necessary for this, I'd guess?

Spotify isn't a payment app for artists (again, I feel super weird defending them, I am not a fan myself!), it's a distribution channel.

Even better, use Spotify to discover artists then buy their music! It's not mutually exclusive!

That's exactly what I wanted to say further up but you summarized it way better in less words. I still think Spotify is great to discover music, but yes, there needs to be direct monetization outside of it!

I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there. You could give a more charitable interpretation by just treating Spotify as a music discovery service, that's not really what Spotify is marketed or intended for. Spotify is meant to be the ultimate end-game of online music streaming: it is meant to flat-out replace your giant MP3 library. And that's exactly how many people use Spotify. Not just Spotify, but also Apple Music, Pandora, etc.

If it was a music discovery service, it would be reasonable for artists to accept lower payouts and whatever other garbage because it's just an additional revenue source anyway. However, streaming music is not just an additional revenue source. Streaming music is becoming the primary way that people consume music all of the time. It is a $25 billion/year industry.

Artists and fans alike can't control the way that the larger market moves, but the way that the larger market moves will for sure have major impact on the entire industry and that impact will trickle all the way down. There is no reason to think that we can't or shouldn't try to discourage and flat-out regulate unfair practices. It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes.

I don't really understand the point of defending what Spotify does, Spotify fights tooth and nail to try not to pay more royalties. When they were small they argued they had no choice but to pay low rates because otherwise they could never survive, and of course they never went back and changed their mind on that, because what incentive do they have?

So yeah. My opinion? Spotify sucks, the article was spot on.

> I take issue with this because it's kind of neither here nor there.

So people here are complaining about how Spotify does not pay the people who create music enough.

And there exists a zero friction option to pay the people who create music.

But people don’t want to use the zero friction option to pay the people who create music because it would cost $1 or $2 per song.

So yeah. My opinion? People are just really cheap, and what they want is to spend as little as possible on music, but at the same time feel good about it by blaming someone else for not paying the music creators more.

You want the people who create your music to be paid more? Go to their website, and buy it. Life does not get much easier.

Sure I buy music, but that's really beside the point and not at all to do with the problem that is being raised. We (at least me and whoever wrote this article) are in fact choosing to not use streaming services. But even if people are "really cheap" there's no particular reason their money should be split across artists they don't listen to, and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply must work this way, if it doesn't have to work this way for any other industry, it doesn't have to work this way for music. If we have to fix it with regulation, painfully, over a long period of time, then fine. I don't like that, but that's what happens when industries fail to self-regulate meaningfully.

> But even if people are "really cheap" there's no particular reason their money should be split across artists they don't listen to,

Listeners opted into buying a product sold by a business that does that. And the music creator also opted into it. That is where the market cleared. And people had and have the option to simply pay for the music directly, but they don’t want to.

>and there's no particular reason to defend this practice as if it simply must work this way,

Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).

>if it doesn't have to work this way for any other industry, it doesn't have to work this way for music.

Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.

The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money. So that’s how little people are willing to play (presumably because piracy is an easy alternative).

Edit to reply to below comment since I hit posting limit:

>Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries?

The biggest one is probably the ease of pirating music.

>And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested

The recent run up is still far from SP500 performance, which is basically break even. Since IPO, SP500 return is 11%+, and Spotify is 8%, which is basically a 3% per year loss.

Spotify’s biggest customers are the 3 big record labels (Warner/Universal/Sony) and exists as a negotiating tool against Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.

Anyway, to conclude, I would blame the broad populace for not wanting to pay more for music. Surely, lots of them knew how to, and then decided they would pirate it, until a sufficiently cheap monthly legal streaming option came along.

> Yes, there is. They opted into buying a product sold by a business that does that. And the music creator also opted into it. That is where the market cleared. And people had and have the option to simply pay for the music directly, but they don’t want to.

Most people don't and will never have a deep understanding of what they're spending their money on. They are paying money to be able to stream music, and that's as far as 99% of the consumer base has thought things through. It's, unfortunately, always going to be the job of far fewer people to try to get some oversight into bad practices, because the market won't just magically do that on its own. To many people, it comes as a surprise that it's fully possible for them to listen to an artist all the time and yet have the vast majority of their subscription payment go to an entirely different artist they don't even listen to. Legitimately, people are surprised to learn this. It's not intuitive at all.

(P.S.: The fact that something is the way it is today is not in and of itself a "reason", that's just tautological.)

> Anyone is welcome at anytime to come up with an alternative. With the internet, it has never been easier. The fact that this is the dominant model indicates that this is the solution that works for most people (due to them not wanting to pay more for music).

Maybe 20 years ago, but this is pretty crazy to say today. We're going a bit in circles though. I already kind of went in this direction:

> It's not that all things middlemen do are bad, it's that they routinely gain immense power in the market and then together they act against the best interests of nearly everyone other than themselves, while the barrier to entry remains so high that it may as well not be possible for all intents and purposes.

Barely anyone is actually capable of competing with Spotify in any meaningful way. Apple is one of the richest and most resourceful companies in the world and they already had a massive userbase of people purchasing music and it wasn't even that easy of a fight for them to get in the door with streaming. Spotify is still the global leader by a long shot.

> Don’t see why this has to be true, different businesses have different parameters and supply and demand curves that result in different solutions.

Unless you demonstrate some kind of reason why music would specifically have to work differently, I don't think it makes sense to simply take it at face value that it does. Which parameters? Why music specifically and not other industries? I think the answer is more cynical and less satisfying, which is to say, it was and is an industry that's easy to abuse, not unlike many other industries that have also suffered from pretty ridiculously unfair labor and payment practices, like anime, game development, or the VFX industry.

> The funny thing is even at this low price of Spotify, Spotify still loses money.

And yet its shares have been a rocket ship up the past couple years. If anyone is concerned about losing money at Spotify, it sure doesn't show in their operating margin data points, and it sure doesn't show very much with the people invested in it. They know as well as anyone does that competing with Spotify and the other handful of big players is basically impossible if you're not either extremely wealthy or already one of them, so there's probably little reason to fret over it. Even amidst their huge layoffs at the end of the year last year, I would place my bets on them continuing to lose money and keep investing.

The fundamental reason for why so much stuff is shit is because people ultimately above all else don't want to pay for it.

The internet largely sucks because of ads and tracking. But it's cheaper for users than paying directly, so it's what we are stuck with.

> if I go into a record store and buy a CD or record or something, that's what I paid for, that's what it goes to. Hell, even if I watch a monetized video on YouTube Premium, a portion of my subscription money goes to that creator.

In your examples, money goes to right holders, not necessarily content creators. That was true in CD-age and is true on Youtube. A big distinction to make I think

Sure, there has always been a bit of an issue with the money making it to the actual intended recipients with music. For some reason it feels like it's more egregious and weird with music than most other things.

True, but for the most part, the rights holders will be the labels representing the artists, and they'll have some kind of deal in play, so if you squint the artist still gets paid.

Sure, many label-artist deals are bad. But that's a different issue, and putting Spotify into the mix doesn't change the situation. Spotify is still paying the rights holders.

The only artists who aren't getting paid at all are the aging ones who sold all their rights to some conglomerates (Bob Dylan etc). They got paid via a normal record deal in the past, then they got some rights back after the old deals expired, then they sold their rights again for a lump sum and no promise of a return of the rights. Today, these artists get paid by their retirement portfolios not their music rights.

> I feel like I am betraying all artists just saying this, but I keep coming back to wondering why everyone feels like they deserve the exact same deal like a big-name artist (who bring their own audience I am benefiting from).

Because we want a level playing field that leads to innovation.

Just like we used to not tolerate monopolies in other areas of our lives. Or price fixing.

If you let the top few entities work together to extract most of the value for themselves and keep everyone else out, getting through will be nearly impossible for anyone else and you'll create a system where everyone listens to just a few artists.

It's well past time that anti-monopoly and anti-price-fixing laws get applied to situations like this. And to the disaster that is Ticketmaster.

Reading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they deal with. That notion, that the algorithm is more concerned with cash savings than serving you the songs you want to hear, really changed the way I think about these services -- and the idea of music recommendation writ large.

I currently subscribe to Apple Music, which I am sure is up to similar shenanigans. But to me their user front end is less egregious. It seems like Spotify barely wants to acknowledge that the 'album' is a thing. While Apple still offers me full records by artists I like or most like. This, currently, is the be scenario for my habits.

But yes, I would love a streaming service with a fully customizable front page a recommendation engine that allows the user to tweak the kind of suggestions they get, beyond the extremely vague "more of this or less of this" options.

> Reading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they deal with.

Gosh, that sounds horrible. With such a large market share and such monopolistic business practices, how did they escaped being named a gatekeeper for the purposes of the DMA?

I suspected this practice and ran a very rudimentary test which concluded they were not doing such things. I made a playlist with Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Justin Bieber and then an equal amount of songs from obscure artists with fewer than 1000 followers (this was back when followers was the main popularity metric, now it's monthly streams). I then played the playlist on shuffle, expecting for the 'popular'/ expensive artists to be played less. I tallied each song for a day of listening (that's as much as I could take!) and the popular songs were played equally as frequently and the non- popular. Like I said, very rudimentary but didn't yield the result I was expecting.

I believe statement is about the playlist Spotify makes, not those made by user. Those called "Daily Mix", generated on user listening choices.

Yes, these are the suggested playlists. As well as the popular pre-fab playlists. A notable one mentioned was their "Ambient" playlist -- which favors in house ambient artists with much less generous royalty deals than someone like Brian Eno -- who is be the best known artist in the field apart from maybe Aphex Twin -- but easily replaceable with a no-name for some people apparenty.

I admire the testing you did on the random plays, I would have gone in on the same hypothesis -- that the "shuffle" would prefer lower cost plays.

I swapped to Apple Music recently too (as I got 6 months free) and the UI is horrible compared to spotify + painfully slow to load on my phone.

Somewhat similar experience for me- I canceled apple music today because the Linux experience is... not great. The web client has an issue where the emoji font (Noto Emoji) makes all spaces full width. There's an unofficial client called Cider, but it has issues with favoriting items. And neither web nor Cider support playing to a networked speaker.

> It seems like Spotify barely wants to acknowledge that the 'album' is a thing.

I can't get Spotify to give me a simple list of all an artist's songs, it only gives me a list of albums, so I have to manually click into each one, and most have one song or duplicate songs anyways. If anything, Spotify grossly over emphasizes albums.

Goodness, feels as if I could have written this post :)

I have Spotify premium because I got a year long offer for less than 1/10th the price. Since I anyway used ad-supported Spotify I went for it. I really didn’t see any improvement:

- The UX sucks, more so - there’s nothing much to say here really

- They still push podcasts and different languages down my throat, more vehemently

- The recommendations still drive me mad

- They keep adding things, like that short video, that doesn’t let me listen to music peacefully, rather violently distracts me.

- So much so that I kinda limit myself to Liked. So that I don’t really have to interact with the app.

Then why I stay and stayed with Spotify? Because I don’t use Google (so no YouTube Music for me) and Apple Music sucks trucks and rails when it comes to India/Pakistan music, more so when I am looking for some old music.

Everything else is worse than even Spotify. But still it’s not worth paying for!

I thought of heading back to the high seas. But after W.CD that part is lost as well (no, nothing could replace that; O and R are not even a fraction of its shadow).

UX def sucks. I don't understand how a design-focused company that invests so much into its design teams (www.spotify.design) can create a user interface so cluttered and hard to navigate to find music. After years of using it, I've recently discovered (on mobile) that they've hidden the search and sorting on top of the playlists.

My home page is full of things I'm not interested in; there is no way to customize which are displayed. And enough of pushing podcasts.

I've created a (free) web app using Spotify API, Echoes, with a simple interface to see your top artists and songs, it also has a New Discovery section to generate playlists based on your listening algorithm.

https://echoesapp.io

That's because "good design" and "scrambling for profitability" don't go together. The UI is cluttered because they are trying to jam in multiple media types (music, video, long podcasts). Why? Because they lose money on music.

Was going to try this out, but the permissions required are too much for me.

     View your email
     Add and remove items in Your Library
    Create, edit, and follow private playlists
    Create, edit, and follow playlists
    Manage who you follow on Spotify
    Stream and control Spotify on your other devices

I understand. It seems like too much, but I've no intention of storing or doing something with the data. Spotify API lets us follow artists, like songs through the app, and create playlists. Also, there is a built-in player that we can listen to the songs and playlists directly without opening the Spotify app.

You should try, pretty cool.

I even got popups with premium, trying to get me to listen to there bullshit playlists... And then they gaslight you and call it support.

I'm ashamed I've paid them for years. I've spend, over the years, probably more the 5x what I would have spend on buying CDs as I only listen to a select few artists mostly.

What makes you think replacements haven't filled the gap left by W.CD? The community is definitely not as fun or interesting, but it's definitely done the job for me.

W.CD had everything. Literally (almost) everything. But the replacements are not even close to it. So unless you’re from a certain geography and looking for a certain language you’re just out of luck.

And community is downright, well, let’s not get into that.

the level of curation and diversity was second to none. i recall that a popular album had regional vinyl rips, which was mind boggling for me.

Deezer is actually a great replacement and competitor to Spotify. I like that their playlists are still human curated.

I'm genuinely surprised why noboby is mentioning online community radios as a source for music. Why would an algorithm of a billion dollar company provide a better selection of music than a real human being who dedicated his life collecting, playing and producing music? When listening to music I want to be surprised and discover new music. Spotify and its competitors only please you with stuff u already know or sound most similar, delivering the most boring experience one can imagine. Whereas with online community radios you even have a chance to interact with the selectors and the audience through chat or calls. Most of the time they even provide the playlist for the show. And if you so keen on buying the music, why not support dedicated record stores instead of these mulit-billion dollar companies which are killing the actual music and ripping of the artists?

Heres a very small collection only scratching the surface

Community radio stations: https://www.nts.live/ https://kioskradio.com/ https://dublab.de/ https://callshopradio.com/

record stores: https://hardwax.com/ https://www.oye-records.com/ https://clone.nl/ https://coldcutshotwax.uk

You answered your own question with a bunch of links most are not going to click on.

Most people don't care, they want to pay 10/mo, have a "reasonably" good UI and play music. They don't want to keep track of 6 different URLs to find music.

Note: I probably listen to Somafm through Sonos just as much as Spotify and I donate.

> Most people don't care, they want to pay 10/mo, have a "reasonably" good UI and play music.

Sifting through the comment section, it doesn't seem like Spotifys UI or their competitors is "reasonably" good, but the majority of the internet users need to have banner ads, discounts and influencer-BS shoved down their throats to feel valued as a customer. All of the aforementioned radio stations offer a modern and slick UI and UX instead of that annoying, omnipresent bubblegum-aesthetic used by those big orgs trying to lure in teenagers like tobacco firms in the 90's('get em' young!'). So instead of throwing money at a multi-billion dollar conglomerat maybe consider donating a fraction of the money to your favorite community radio station(which you allegedly do!) or buy some records from your local record store instead. Btw I am an UI/UX designer. And I use Arch.

I have been exposed to some absolutely great new artists from University affiliated radio stations like KEXP or non-profits like KRCL.

Why would an algorithm be better? Because it has 15 years of my listening history and can offer music based on my personal taste. You can even get the radio experience with human public playlists with the added advantage that you can skip songs 10 seconds into them if you don't like them.

Start a niche human curated playlist with death metal and Bieber. No ads and you can skip a song whenever. 10 minutes later you can change to a playlist with movie music and 90s rap. All in one app. You can even add your store purchased music.

Spotify does everything a radio station does, just better. The one exception is having a living person talk between songs about his day. They do have an AI generated DJ though if you're into it and want to hear the names of the songs.

Spotify's suggestions are horribly bland and insultingly unoriginal compared to Apple's.

I keep getting Black Sabbath's Paranoid, the song, in various "deep cuts" and "new music" themed lists and suggestions. It's from 1969.

Apple's lists and suggestions may actually have new music.

I feel the same like, I cannot get away from some songs even when I dislike them.

I got some AirPods and have a few Apple Music subscription I’ll try instead.

I’ve also just started listening to some good radio stations like FBI in Sydney Australia. Best way to find new music in my opinion. I add what I like on Spotify and it spices it up a bit.

I had never heard of FBI radio but it's right up my alley, and I've actually lived in Sydney for many years. So cheers for the inadvertent recommendation there

Yes, I request various bands from the 70s and I get live versions, bootlegs, covers. Never the original.

Going the artist link, it doesn't even list all the albums.

YouTube Music on the other hand has everything and more.

Spotify did a good job until lately. Apple is quite unusable for me, since they can't distinguish between me and my partner - whoever starts something on a HomePod, it's done with my account. We tried to reset Siri often, but gave up on it.

Another downside is the ~4000 Songs shared Spotify Playlist with some friends&co-workers which is not available on Apple Music, and sadly they make it (IMHO) ridiculous hard to import Playlists from other Platforms.

> It keeps pushing playlists that feel generic, bland, more based on demographics than my years of consistent listening history.

I don't really agree with this point. The personal playlists (both Discover Weekly and the Daily Mix ones) are very close to what I usually listen to and have made me discover dozens of artists I didn't know before. Maybe they work better for some than for others, but they don't feel like being based just on demographics at all to me.

Same, even if music is available freely through YouTube or else, Spotify's recommendations are the reason I am still subscribed

I don’t agree with the author too. My Release Radar is totally on point with my type of genre, it has been this way. I’m curious if author has a generic taste in music?

I feel like both of you are correct. It feels to me that Spotify's recommendations easily gets stuck in a 'local maxima' where it just keeps recommending the same music over again with little variation. I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated. Music just ends up feeling a lot more bland with Spotify, in my experience.

I don't even know what the Discover Weekly playlist is supposed to be. It frequently puts in not-new songs from not-new artists Spotify know I've been listening to.

Same experience for me.

I think the parent might be a new user. It was good for me for a few years but now it’s just stale as shit.

> I think the parent might be a new user.

I've been using Spotify since 2015.

I've had the same exact experience. I had to stop relying on Spotify-generated playlists because they just kept giving me the same familiar songs over and over again.

But spotify has human curated playlists for different genres, does it not?

The "local maxima" thing is interesting, because while with Spotify it is noticeable sometimes, it was a lot worse of a problem with Google Play Music which I previously used. By the time they shut that down, I almost felt trapped into listening to nothing but Tycho.

> I found much more variation from other music streaming services where the playlists are supposedly actually human curated.

Like which ones? I tried Tidal and music discovery sucks just as badly there too. I'm really craving a music discovery experience that brings back the humanity. Even when an algorithm suggests a good song, it still feels hollow and divorced from any cultural context.

I think Apple Music's playlists and algorithmic recommendations are much better and have more variation. Unfortuantely, Apple Music is terrible at playing music. OP can rightfully complain all they want about homepage customisation, but Apple Music, even on iOS, will just regularly refuse to play music files. Even worse with their embarrasing web or Windows clients.

I think Spotify's problem may stem from their quest from incresingly precise taxonomy for music https://pudding.cool/2023/10/genre/

+1 discover weekly consistently delivers a few new songs to my like list - I actually look forward to it each Monday when I start work.

My main complaint with Spotify's recommendations algorithm is that you cannot provide any clear negative feedback to it anymore.

I played a single Christmas album from an artist that my mom wanted to hear over the holidays, but I don't like that artist or style of music otherwise.

Now, every time they release a new song it comes up in my release radar, and random similar things pollute my discover weekly.

There's no way to say "never recommend this to me" or to remove past listens from my history. I'm just forever doomed, apparently, to get jumpscared with Christian contemporary music anytime I try to play these playlists.

Yeah fair enough, I have had the occasional few months where it goes a little haywire (too skewed to a genre / style I was just curiously listening to, rather than wanting more of).

It does seem to fix itself - although a negative feedback mechanism would be nice!

Not sure if it's a different team building the feature or maybe it is because they are more constrained by the actual choices of the existing playlist, but the recommendations I get underneath a playlist that I am creating are MUCH better than the generic playlists for the same genre that get promoted on the homepage / search results.

Yeah I find these recommendations (which I think are the same ones that play after an album or whatever has finished) to be really good on the whole. There are some songs it keeps suggesting and after a while it can get a bit “stuck” on the same artists, but I’ve discovered so much good music through them. The main For You playlists aren’t much good for me. I thought it might be down to the stronger signal of “this is specifically what I want to listen to”

I’ve moved to Tidal and Bandcamp.

Tidal has roughly the same catalog as Spotify plus high quality / lossless playback options if the album / artist supports it.

Tidal also integrates with a lot of DJ software like Rekordbox and Djay. These apps let you play from Todal but disable recording when using a streaming service.

Bandcamp is the real way to support labels and artists by buying music directly. You download the files and own them and can use them in DJ software and record, take them to the club, etc.

Spotify is a bummer. I made a jukebox app https://jukelab.com with their SDK but the SDK, developer TOS, catalog and whole experience continually is trending away from giving you control over the music.

Can you do the difference between 320kbits/s OGG Vorbis, 16bits at 44100Hz, and 24 bits 48000Hz lossless audio? Using the same master, I don't.

I’m an audiophile skeptic too, 320 kbps ogg is great for most casual listening.

But as a DJ and audio/video artist, I absolutely can tell the difference using lossless sources vs lossy in some contexts.

Again Bandcamp is great because you can get FLAC or Wav and take those to the club sound system or remix them in Ableton or Final Cut. Then record the output and compress it for SoundCloud or YouTube.

Recompressing compressed files is the main place I notice differences.

I felt this same way until I did a mixed blind listening test:

https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx

(Take a high quality lossless track, re-encode a copy as whatever lossy format, load both into the tester.)

Hurt my ego, but at least made me understand that I am just wasting money paying extra for lossless stuff.

This was with a high quality DAQ and a range of high-end headphones too. But perhaps the results would be different on a full blown high end stereo system.

I did the best test possible. I transcoded the Flac version to AAC VBR, load both inside audacity, invert one of them and play the mix. I also made sure to align the samples. The result was some high frequency sound from the instruments, and the vocals sounded like the artist was whispering.

I don't keep lossless just for listening, but storage is cheap, and I like the fact that I can switch transcoding profiles as I want to.

I don't know if you are testing for the same thing. Your test consist of highlighting the losses with some audio processing. But could you do the difference in a blind test?

Take your lossless files, convert them to lossy audio, and back to lossless. Mix the new files and the original files randomly with a script or by asking someone else, don't look at the sizes or spectrograms, play the couples and see if you are significantly better than guessing correctly which one has been loosely compressed 50% of the time.

It does not really matter to me, I enjoyed the songs either way. I even have a few 128kbps mp3 albums. Storage is cheap and my collection is only around 500gb. I still keep lossless just I have perfect rips of my favorite movies. Because lossy is lossy and I prefer to have something as close as possible of the original release. I still remember being happy about radio quality song and vhs, now not so much. Maybe they’ll discover a way to repair and enhance hearing, and we’ll look at lossy codec the same way we now look at 360p videos.

Nobody can hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit. 24bit makes zero difference for playback purposes.

Recording, editing, and remixing with anything higher than 16-bit makes a big difference though, which is important in this digital music age where everything is sampled

For recording and editing certainly, just not for your output file for distribution and listening to.

Bad design is slowly becoming an industry trend, which is surprising because Twitter today has more design influencers than ever before. Personally, I feel that the marriage of design with data has created such a huge mess that there’s just no good escape hatch.

It’s all about simplicity and the 80/20 principle today, which means that designers are bound to look at usage metrics and clicks as evidence of a successful design. Upper management doesn’t have to care as long as the bottom line is doing well and they’re able to kill competition in other ways.

From a user standpoint, though, once you get attuned to the basic functionality you want more power features that cost a lot of effort to build but don’t really make you pay more for them. You just can’t win.

This is why we need competition.

My theory of software design is that the designers who are designing software don't really understand how software works. They got into "product design" because it sounded creative and fun. They're glorified graphic designers rather than people who think about "products" as software. They think of software as sleek consumer goods. They're not engineers.

Perhaps that's why nearly every software engineer's blog that gets posted on Hacker News has significantly better UX than the websites of professional product designers, if those designers even took the time to make their own website in the first place.

I can't stand Spotify's redesign anymore. Looking for an improved Winamp-like app with very simple interface and playlists. What should I try?

Apple Music is a joke as well. I can't even play some of my custom audio files (they're not music, custom sounds) because Apple thinks they are not allowed to play in my country. I can't play my own audio files because of some buggy software Apple doesn't care about maintaining anymore.

Winamp still works.

The new Winamp has nothing to do with the spirit of the Winamp we loved and used.

Use the old one? I still do...

there is still QMMP

I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp. Everyone says they hate the interface but apart from the suggestions or the front page (which I don't use), what are the problems exactly? I have playlists with songs that I can double click to play. What more is there to it?

>I don't find Spotify that much different from Winamp

Say what? Have you ever used Winamp?

Yes, but it was at least 20 years ago so please remind me.

Default library view has a search box at the top and three main panes. Two on top, one on bottom. Top left is a list of all the artists in your library. Top right is a list of all the albums. Bottom is a list of all tracks that match the existing filters. Click on an artist, and it filters the albums and tracks, Click on an album, and it filters the tracks. Very information dense, extremely fast search, very responsive UI.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/RZcn2kEEAjWWV2jXYuJNUc.png

Compared to Spotify, where when I open it it defaults to a list of six playlists, a bunch of big fat tiles of podcasts I've never once listened to, a "Made for vel0city" horizontal scroll of auto-playlists, on and on. Extremely low density view, which is fine for a mobile device prioritizing touch but I'd like a denser view for desktop usage.

Winamp is a lightweight program that runs on your personal computer, loading files or folders of mp3s and other audio files that you own/control. The UI is pleasant, stable, customizable, responsive. Nothing will trigger the user's attention, no recommendations, UI changes or updates. No attempt to sell or monetize anything. No surveillance or tracking.

No login, no profile, no account management. Some light-hearted humor. Man, those were the days.

VLC is great for that. Just hit Ctrl+L to open the playlist view.

I use Doppler on Mac/iOS:

https://brushedtype.co/doppler/

It's not perfect (adding and syncing music from Bandcamp could be smoother; it requires their Doppler Sync app to sync over Wi-Fi/AirDrop instead of syncing via cloud storage, which would be my preference).

But the UX is decent, it supports playlists, and it just works offline. If you can see your music you can play it which — oddly — has not been my experience with apps for streaming services that are supposed to let you download playlists for use offline.

Maybe check out www.foobar2000.org.

I'm working on a new cross platform desktop music app with a clean modern interface. It should be ready for beta testing soon. Message me if you're interested in trying it.

I can't find your email address in your bio, and I don't know if you can message on HN. Can you update your bio.

Sorry about that. I’ve added it.

If you're interested in owning your own music and hosting it yourself, you could spin up a Plex server and use Plexamp. Plexamp is probably the best music experience I've come across in the last 20 years. I just buy music from Bandcamp, HD Tracks, and Amazon when those don't have what I'm after.

Indeed. I've felt alienated since they launched the Electron redesign. The old client was both gorgeous and intuitive, as well as easy on system resources.

See for yourself: https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1634601462645882880

When I used Spotify I tried to hold onto the old client for as long as possible, going as far as locking down the Spotify update directory in %APPDATA% to null the autoupdater...

The Author doesn't understand how the streaming business works, and as far as I can tell, no one in the comments here has shone a better light on it.

There is and there isn't just a pool of money that goes to beyonce, the weeknd and taylor swift... i say there is because what actually happens is, the collecting societies will collect the money, then distribute it based on streams correctly to the artists/writers/producers etc that are registered. now if it so happens that a collecting society can't find the correct person to distribute to, the money might sit for a while before it is divvied up between the biggest players, so that would mean taylor swift, elton john etc might get a share of any unclaimed royalties.

When i worked in the business, we would often have many a drunken night talking about how we should just record the rain on the roof, upload it and use the "royalties" as beer money.

for the most part, being on spotify does pay, but i think people don't really understand how the pie is cut and when the artist actually gets a slice. there are many routes to being on spotify (or any streaming service), the router for taylor swift will be different to the route for your dad's garage band, as will the payout.

Since you seem to understand how it works, can you explain the following to me:

Let's say I pay $10 to listen to my favorite indie band, for 1 hour each week.

Let's say another user listens to Taylor Swift 24/7.

Does my favorite band get my $10, or do they get $0.12? You see, when I pay $10, I don't expect $9.88 to go to Taylor Swift.

Or does my favorite band actually gets my $10, like it used to be when I bought CD's?

If you listen to a single band for 1 hour a week, then you should not be paying for a Spotify subscription, but rather buy the music of that band.

This situation is obviously constructed, but if you were in it and unhappy about it, it would be your own fault for misunderstanding what you're paying Spotify for.

people seem to be confusing the $10 spotify premium sub with actually giving money to music.

i think there's an over-simplification of how this works going on. When you buy a $10 cd from let's say your dad's friends garage band, that $10 is going to your dads friend, and obviously they might have expenses before they really see that $10 (buying CD-R's, printing, etc etc).

you spend $10 on spotify premium, and exclusively listen to your dads friends garage band, that $10 is not going to your dads friend, it's going to spotifys bank account which will then be used to pay for execs, macbooks, operating costs etc, but also be used to fund the artist pool. so your $10 and some other persons $10 that they use for elton john records, all sit in the same account. Elton John via EMI or whoever, might have negotiated a 0.000005c per stream deal and so gets that. your dads friend might be on a very basic rate of 0.000002c per stream (numbers made up), and will receive that. so yeah elton or taylor or other big names will get a better deal.

Spotify uses a pro-rata model, so your favourite indie band would only get $0.12 in your example.

This effect does not drown out once you scale up to a full user base either - it appears that the most popular artists benefit disproportionately. Other music streaming companies like Deezer apparently are pushing for a fairer model. See here for example: https://musically.com/2018/03/02/user-centric-licensing-real...

Swift owns her master recordings. So her bottom line on every listen is MUCH more than artists stuck with a label.

Spotify should add an option to pay an additional $3/mo that is in fact distributed to the artists you listen to.

However based on my past experience with general public users, it will be a rounding error number of people who will opt into it.

complaints about spotify payment will almost always have a critique along the lines of

"i pay $10/month to listen to {obscure band}, but only $1/month is going to that band and the rest is going to {popular band}!"

this is a technically true statement that seems to fuel a lot of anti-rich-getting-richer / popular-thing-is-bad-but-my-taste-is-good backlash. but the fact that is always overlooked is that while you are only sending $1/month to the obscure band you love, the millions of listeners that are into {popular band} will also be sending a tiny fraction of their monthly payment to your artist as well.

determining whether pro-rata payments or user-centric payment systems are more equitable is complex and is studied in the academic literature (e.g., [0]) but ALSO internally by streaming providers (i know from firsthand experience[1]).

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517652...

[1] it's interesting to note that the difference between the payment systems affects how payments are distributed to artists but not the total amount, so theoretically the streaming provider isn't biased toward one system over another for business reasons. the streaming platfroms don't really care one way or another and it's 100% driven by what the labels dictate during licensing negotiations.

I feel the same way about Spotify. It reminds me of Netflix in that it's hard for me to find interesting content to consume. I wish there was a way to become a power user, enabling me to better organize my audio library and delve deeper into their extensive collection to uncover new, intriguing music.

Moreover, the fact that artists seem to be paid so little makes me increasingly inclined to consider leaving their service for something else, like Tidal, or simply using YouTube Music.

By the way, if anyone is working on a Spotify killer, feel free to reach out. It would be fun to help out.

> I feel the same way about Spotify. It reminds me of Netflix in that it's hard for me to find interesting content to consume. I wish there was a way to become a power user, enabling me to better organize my audio library and delve deeper into their extensive collection to uncover new, intriguing music.

I have the exact opposite experience on Spotify, I canceled my Netflix subscription because I got tired of being stuck scrolling trying to find something to watch.

On Spotify I have my playlists, including an "Inbox" playlist for sorting later when I find interesting new music. On playlists it used to be able to start a "radio" for recommendations based on the playlist's content, that has moved to the "Enhance" feature which will interleave some tracks on an existing playlist, I can add the tracks I like to the playlist and ignore the ones I didn't like, then refresh the "Enhance" feature to get new recommendations.

When I'm listening to some weird ass music that I want to discover more artists/tracks on a similar genre I will start a track or album radio, when I stumble upon a track that I like I will add to a matching playlist or simply put into my "Inbox" one to sort later.

I've done that for the past 10+ years and have discovered many, many artists and songs this way, even completely new genres that I liked.

I'm also not a fan of the direction Spotify is going, but if I want to keep listening to music, I don't see a way around it - and I don't think other music services are materially different. I support the artists I care about most by going to their concerts and/or buying merch. I use services like last.fm for better discovery. Spotify doesn't have to be the only way you interact with music.

The author doesn't say how they're going to keep listening to songs. Are they going to start buying/torrenting all their music? Are they going to switch to a different service, and does that service address any of the listed issues? Or are they simply giving up on listening to music (in the quantities/variety available through a catalogue like Spotify's)?

> I don't think other music services are materially different

They very much do if you care about audio quality.

Spotify still doesn't support high-res audio e.g. CD quality and above.

For people that used to enjoy Spotify, such as myself & the author, this was never a main concern.

Which services would you recommend as alternatives for higher quality audio at similar price points?

Apple Music if you're in that ecosystem

What ecosystem? It’s on Android and Windows too, and has a web version for Linux use.

I have Tidal HiFi-Plus (19.99 Euro/month [up to 24-bit, 192 kHz]), but i can't really say that i would recommend it. There is also HiFi (10.99/month [up to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz]).

My biggest problems with Tidal (except for the price) are: - Music suddenly becomes unavailable (greyed out), only to be become available under the same name later again (but you need to manually re-add it to playlists). - Sometimes it just stops the playback and if i resume it always jumps to one specific song.

I cannot say anything about the mobile player, as i only use it on PC.

Alternativly: Just buy the music you like as FLAC.

Thanks. I tried Tidal for a while. The experience was pretty good and audio quality too. Not quite worth the price for me though. Will try Apple Music since I have that with Apple One.

I find Apple Music materially different on some of these. The UX of the music app for Mac sucks, but I use other software to interact with it (Raycast) so rarely touch the app itself – you can't do that with Spotify with anywhere near the same success. The Music app for iOS is really nice in my experience. The Podcast experience is entirely separate, and based mostly on open standards (although Apple have an opt-in additional proprietary layer). And Apple pay ~2x what Spotify do for streams. Lastly, it syncs my music that isn't on Apple Music, which Spotify cannot do, so I can still buy music elsewhere (like Bandcamp) and have it all in the same library.

It's not perfect, I'd still prefer streaming money to be distributed in a better way, and the apps could be better, but for me it's noticeably better on many fronts. I've also heard good things about Tidal in a few different ways – they pay even more for streams and have higher bitrate streaming I think. Both are good ways of pushing back against Spotify's control of the industry.

Apple Music pays artist pretty much double per stream vs. Spotify.

Just that alone is enough for me to support them rather than Spotify.

Along with the fact that Apple's discovery and new music playlists have gotten a lot better than Spotify's in just a few years.

I got pissed off by their product, so I just stopped paying them. Now I just hear ads every 10-20 minutes, which pisses me off even more. Now I really don’t wanna pay for Spotify anymore.

…it’s probably not the best business relationship, but hey, I didn’t start it.

If only it were the ads... I accidentally let my subscription lapse and the experience was so bad that it convinced me not to renew and leave the service altogether.

I mean yes, you get ads, but also your playlists get added random songs (which are pretty bad for my music), they play in shuffle only, and you can only skip a small number of songs per hour, turning the service into a radio you can sometimes fast-forward. I also had to reinstall the app because downgrading to free got it stuck - it wouldn't let me play my offline songs but it also wouldn't show me anything else. And for well over a year the only way to pay with a gift card on Android was exploiting a mild privilege escalation bug.

I imagine that there's someone at Spotify whose job is to identify how annoying your product can be before the number of lost ad plays surpasses the income from paid users, and I imagine their free tier is as close to that as possible. But that's a risky play considering they are not the only game in town.

Spotify are pioneers in brazenly enshittifying free tiers to bully users into paying for Premium.

I remember them pausing ads when they detected I turned the computer volume down or muted it, and resumed the ad when I turned it back up. This was in 2015 or so.

> but if I want to keep listening to music, I don't see a way around it

Buying albums works. It’s what I do. It is markedly more expensive than Spotify, though.

Playing them can also be expensive. A record player diamond tip can usually last 1000 hours, and they cost about as much as you are willing to pay, from a few € to idiotic amounts.

I have no interest in physical media, it’s all FLAC.

Are you talking about vinyl records? I don't think this technology from the last century has any benefit to digital recordings and apart from nostalgia or doing an archival it has no reason to be used still.

Yes, and I agree.

> It is markedly more expensive than Spotify, though.

A big reason I switched away from Spotify to buying DRM free albums is actually because I realized it's significantly cheaper to do the latter. I plan on listening to music for the rest of my life. I'm in my mid 20s.

Let's say I live for another 60 years. At current Spotify prices, that is nearly $8000. Obviously the cost of premium won't be $11 for the next 60 years though, so that $8000 is an extremely optimistic minimum.

While the cost of albums generally increases with inflation also, the cost of albums I already purchased never increases. For the rest of my life, an album I purchased for $10 will always be an album I purchased for $10. Even if that seems absurdly cheap in the future due to inflation.

Once you build up an initial library, it's very easy to spend less per month buying albums vs Spotify Premium. Over the last year, I would estimate my monthly average spending on music is around $2-3.

I have a very large library. My monthly spending (over the last two years) on Bandcamp is 20€, and I don't even spend that much there compared to others. I do spend a lot of time listening to music

And the fact is that you don't even need to listen to that many music. When I had Spotify, I only have an handful of playlists (managing albums sucked), that I listened to every day. Same with Apple Music, I only added the albums I already have in the library. I have like 500+ albums and when I want to add something, I spend time listening on Youtube (could go back to free spotify) if it's worth the effort to get them in my curated local library.

I use bandcamp, which is vastly materially different from spotify (at least for now) in both its value proposition to me and its commitment to fairly compensate artists. It offers phone apps on which I can trivially stream any music I've bought there as well as lots of music I haven't (though artists can also opt out of allowing this).

I can also purchase the music, which the artist gets a fairly significant cut of, and which the apps start yelling at you to do if you're repeatedly listening to the same albums. Doing this also lets me download it, either to local storage on one of the proprietary phone OSes so I can play it when I don't have signal, or as actual files I can put on my computer, which I personally then use to also stream it to myself on any linux device using freely available tools (mpd and shoutcast, often through an ssh tunnel)

I get that the last part of my use case allegedly requires me to be "technical" (IE set up a config file and use a command-line application or two), but the baseline use case of bandcamp provides streamable music without that, and it's not like it's some obscure thing no one's heard of either. What are you talking about?

Piracy, It works. You can even keep using Spotify without paying them or listen to ads.

> I don't think other music services are materially different.

I'm afraid you thought incorrectly, the following is true for basically every other service available:

* Better quality sound

* Payout to content creators is higher

* Cheaper

The nail in the coffin for me (as a consumer) was Ek's €100m A.I. arms tech investment.

The nail in the coffin for me as a content creator is likely going to be the new 1000 streams per song before getting ANY royalties; will have to see how it plays out, but I'm not having my music on that shitty platform if they're going to profit from it without recompense.

The worlds music at your disposal, and not satisfied... LOL

You can spend the rest of your life listening to all sorts of music, just by using the search bar and clicking around. Thats incredible!

I feel like after a while, we can take things for granted that are incredible and weren't even possible not too long ago. Not that we shouldn't strive for a better ideal..

Reminds me of a fortune cookie note I read a long time ago that I never forgot, mostly. Something to the effect of:

"I spent the time prepare the song, while the song is not being sung"

I do agree that artists should get a bigger share. Im sure if Spotify were super transparent about cost allocation, we would see room for improvement. Where there's money, there is greed.

>I do agree that artists should get a bigger share. Im sure if Spotify were super transparent about cost allocation, we would see room for improvement. Where there's money, there is greed.

What are you referring to that is not transparent from Spotify's side?

thank you for the post. The recommendation engine becoming generic and main page of pushed content were also the reason I moved away from Spotify Family to Apple Music family - added I was keen to see apple 3D sound which is not that great today. Pushing the age limit, even Apple Music seems uninteresting and I keep listening to the same music over and over.

The UX of Apple Music is also terrible: - awkward Music interface that you keep mixing library and cloud versions, and my kids still don't get it. - Testing my intelligence and memory on each menu item to find where my Pink Floyd album I keep playing is. - I don't care about any albums they push on the main page and no way to tell them Beyonce or Rap is not for me AFAIK. Why don't they offer simliar artists I can explore than generic categories? - no way to remotely access my kids play options when they fall sleep (got Spotify for this feature) - With the above items, low return value per Euro I invest, listening on the same albums over and over.

Curious if there is a better way...

The shocking thing about Spotify's UI was that it was never modeled to be a record collection or a record store. It was always modeled to be a database front end.

The ui design and the business model always reflected that prerogative: poor discoverability, poor user-favorites, poor classification, absolutely no blobs, credits or liner notes. An artist uploading is just another entry in the database - the service sells access to the DB, it doesn't sell music. By extension, the user is also more and more a "yet another entry" in the whole process of "consuming" the data.

It's just dehumanizing, yet consumers would rather this than having to deal with the friction of purchasing records (which are outrageously expensive, which also points to the record industry's responsibility in this...) or pirating under they eye of copyright trolls. Long story short: they'll fail, sooner or later.

i think this is largely due to the fact that spotify has shifted from being a streaming platform to being a content creator AND streaming platform.

they've got misaligned incentives now because one half of the company is trying to make the best audio streaming platform that they can, and the other half is creating content and trying to get it injected into as many ears as possible.

the big round of layoffs in january included pushing dawn ostroff and de-emphasizing the podcast moves, which (fingers crossed) will lead to less emphasis on the content creation side

I know this isn't a practical option for many, but there are still many simple audio players for self managed music collections.

I use VLC on Android, and Amberol on Linux. They're both folder oriented, and stay out of the way.

During the golden age of mp3/flac KDE's Amarok was awesome, later it had a subpar upgrade to 3.x and was forked off as Clementine, and now Clementine is also becoming creaky...

Aren't you confusing Audacity with Amarok?

Thanks - edited

I recently started using Navidrome to stream my old music collection and it's been a pleasure. It's also nudged me to actually download the music I've purchased on Bandcamp -- before that option inevitably goes away.

Same here - Navidrome has been a revelation. Simple to run, nice UI, only issue is that browsers can't support gapless playback, but lots of apps out there to help with that.

I know you didn't ask, but I recommend the Vinyl app on Android. It also lets you manage your music in a directory, but a bit more streamlined for listening to music IMO.

I would add Roon to this list. I run the server on my Synology at home and it organizes 2TB of music for me. Then I can use Roon ARC on my phone to stream it from anywhere.

I feel like I'm in a weird alt-universe.

I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed. Only if I scroll really further than I've ever scrolled before could I find it.

Spotify shows me:

"Made for xnorswap: ": 5 "daily mixes" which have always been a bit rubbish because they're not really mixes, they seem to pick a song I like then they're that song's radio. The "Discover Weekly" mix is decent, the daily ones are not.

"Jump back in:" Continue listening to various playlists or albums.

"Recently Played": Similar, but for things I finished the first time.

"Your Shows": Podcasts I've actually subscribed to.

"More like bdrmm": Picks an artist I've recently listened to and suggests similar.

Only then we finally get to suggestions for things I haven't actually engaged with:

"Audiobooks for you": recommended audiobooks.

"Editor's Picks:" Suggested playlists

"Episodes for you": Episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed.

"New Episodes": More episodes of podcasts to which I've subscribed.

"Shows you might like": Finally the recommended podcasts, about 5 pages down, and similar to podcasts I've listened to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan.

"Popular with listeners of Battleground": More recommended podcasts, again similar to a podcast I do listen to. Still no sign of Joe Rogan.

"Popular with listeners of Oh God What Now": More recommendations based on a podcast I rarely listen to.

"popular with listeners of TRiP": More similar podcasts.

"Popular with listeners of Scott Hanselmann": ditto.

"Spotify Original Podcasts": Finally, deep below anywhere I've scrolled outside of an exercise to look for it, I finally get linked to the Joe Rogan podcast, under a section where they link a bunch of Spotify podcasts.

Is Spotify UK totally different? Or has spotify put me in a "Likes music" category that has all the music recommendations above all the podcast recommendations?

Because I didn't even know Spotify Original Podcasts were a category until I scrolled 10 pages down to look for it.

>I feel like I'm in a weird alt-universe.

>I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed.

That you have followed or listened to a podcast in Spotify is what makes you different here.

I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify, despite being a user since the invite-only days, yet the UI recommends podcasts at the same frequency as you've described.

I imagine many of the other people here do not want podcasts to appear anywhere in the Spotify UI.

Never listened to a podcast on Spotify and on my Home screen i have to scroll quite a lot (its like 10 row, pretty much in the middle of Home screen in my case) to see one row "Episodes for You" and one row of "Shows to try". Don't see how it is "pushing podcasts".

I've never listened to a podcast and have zero podcast related content on both mobile and desktop. There is one audiobook recommendation section, the 9th section down.

Maybe it's you indeed. Spotify shows me Podcasts I should listen to supposedly based on the ones I currently listen to, but... I don't listen to Podcasts, and I don't subscribe to any. I listened to two episodes two years ago on vacation with my girlfriend in the car, and didn't even finish them, and now I need to listen to all this great stuff!

In addition to that:

"Jump back in" and "recently listened" are basically the same list of albums. I have tried to understand the logic behind them, but it makes no sense to me, and could very well be just one section.

I listen two some very much non mainstream media. I do have two or three sections of "please listen to random German Rap, or maybe Taylor Swift, everyone likes that". If they base everything on data, they really should know that this won't make me listen to what they propose, so why do they do that?

> I've heard frequent complaints about spotify pushing podcasts but I've never once had spotify show me a podcast above the fold that I haven't myself followed. Only if I scroll really further than I've ever scrolled before could I find it.

I accidentally listened to a podcast in Spotify once. That podcast has been on my homepage ever since. There is no way for me to get rid of it.

I pay for, love, and use Spotify to listen to music. And, I buy merch from the artists I really like. Sometimes that merch is e.g. LPs/Records, but usually t-shirts/sweatshirts/hats/etc.

I think the whole "buy MP3 from bandcamp!" thing is such a yawn. Sure, I get the whole "ownership" angle or whatever. I'm not about to run two apps to listen to music on my phone. I already have a Plex server. I could just load the MP3 onto that. But I won't.

I want variety. I want Spotify to constantly be throwing new artists at me. I love this. Spotify singularly helps me discover so many fantastic new artists, who go on to become my favorites, I go see them live, I buy their merch, Spotify does this to such a better degree than anyone else in the industry that its become literally impossible to quantify how much a "fair" amount Spotify should pay artists actually is. I never would have discovered `INSERT_BAND_NAME` on Apple Music. So sure, alternatives might give bigger pieces of the pie; but Spotify is the only player actually making a bigger pie.

I think the author would just prefer Apple Music. If you're boring and predominately only listen to the same few dozen artists, then absolutely you should be using Tidal or Apple Music, or buying MP3s, as these services will pay artists better.

Every time I get on an airplane and go to listen to my downloaded music on spotify, most of my downloaded library is gone and needs to be redownloaded. Sometimes when I play music on lte connection the app also would rather use my poor data connection to serve me a choppy buffering track of one I already downloaded locally, that apparently spotify app won’t chose over seeking a new download even on a cellular data connection. I have to put spotify into offline mode to force it to use downloaded music everytime, at which point you can’t search the rest of spotify because the switch is like an app specific airplane mode.

If I catch it dropping my downloads one more time, I’m done and going back to pirating flacs and transcoding that to my device. Convenience is king, I don’t care about being legal or not. The only reason why I was using spotify was that it was slightly more convenient than pirating music. If they keep dropping the ball on the one job the app is supposed to reliably do, play my music, I’ll just build a library myself over a weekend and save myself years of future headache.

I experienced all of this on a recent flight, much to my frustration. Once fully exasperated at having the podcasts id predownloaded not actually play, I turned to my audible app. This too spent the first minute of booting clearly trying to contact servers to call home with a locked up, unusable screen, despite me having a large local library for access.

App developers clearly rarely test their code in airplane mode these days, much to our annoyance!

It will forever drop your downloads, or fuck with you in offline mode in some other way.

I ride deep tube lines in London so offline content is a must have. I built an extensive library downloading flacs from Deezer with Deemix and serve it with Plex/Plexamp

I’ve felt similarly for many years, but remain trapped using Spotify due to a lack of decent alternatives. Tried Tidal, but it wasn’t really any better. Would love to hear what leavers migrate to.

Been using Apple Music for months now after being a paying subscriber to Spotify for nearly a decade.

Very happy I switched. The new windows app is well built, too

I Love how Apple Music is still the same iTunes interface, almost. It's a great app if you just want to listen to albums.

I do find Tidal to be a little better. I migrated due to comments on here and found it to not be the "no bullshit" experience that I hoped for, but it is a bit less obnoxious at least.

Are they still pushing MQA?

I switched to https://qobuz.com, mainly for the high audio quality (it goes up to 192kHz 24bit, which is worth it for me as I have the necessary equipment to make use of this), but it also supports "Spotify quality" i.e. mp3 quality/320 kbps, but I stayed for the experience.

It does not really have an algorithm, there is one playlist "My weekly Q", which updates each week with songs that you could like.

The only other algorithmic thing they have are song/artist radios like Spotify has, which also work relatively good.

Their front page features handpicked songs from people at Qobuz and songs that are trending on qobuz (these won't look at all like Spotify charts most of the time, as the audience is different). But you can customize the front page by filtering the genres you want to see.

But as mentioned I stayed for the experience, and this includes for some (by far not all) albums you can download the whole PDF of the CD inlet or see a description/history/backstory about an Album provided to you by Qobuz, also the choices that Qobuz handpicks are very often excellent picks which I immediately add to my favorites. And as these picks are not some algorithm that decides this, I don't end up in a rabbit hole of recommendations like on Spotify, but more often discover really new things that I would've never through Spotify. They also have their own magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine.

You can also buy songs, and they will be yours to keep forever, as you can get the songs directly as FLAC, WAV, ... without DRM and whatnot.

There is also an unofficial qobuz downloader, which is against their ToS, but works.

Though I still have not stopped using Spotify, as I'm in a family plan and don't pay anything for it, and sometimes Qobuz does not have some songs.

FWIW I also use https://last.fm for recommendations, and Qobuz can automatically scrobble to it.

All in all Qobuz has more of the "sitting in a Living Room and listening to vinyls/CDs vibe" rather than the TikTok/Instagram vibe that Spotify gives to me.

Otherwise, I found Deezer to be quite a good alternative to Spotify.

Sadly they all seem to be in a race to the bottom.

I switched to YouTube Music when Spotify made it clear they were going to spend a lot of money on podcasts, which makes it even more annoying that it looks like You Tube is planning on doing the same.

I end up missing Pandora (not available in most countries).

Deezer is really great, not enough people talk about it. It has a simple and great homepage, you can upload your own MP3s, playlists are still mostly human curated, it has a shazam-like feature built in, the playlist management is the best, and the recommendations are second only to perhaps Spotify.

Can very well relate to being annoyed with Spotify being an all-encompassing audio platform. I guess there is a market to that. YouTube Music is also bringing podcasts to their app.

But for someone who actually consumed a lot of audio content, that’s a terrible idea. If they had separate apps for these and showed hints to get you to download others, it’d feel way more organised.

I’ve completely moved to Apple Music for my music needs. The search is horrible and the suggestions are okay at best. But the UX and the audio quality is amazing.

I’ve also adapted to searching and listening to Albums instead of searching for one track and letting the platform decide what I listen to for the rest of the day.

Completely unrelated. But what Apple Music does with popular Album Arts is also incredible. I don’t have a problem with existing still image album arts. But there’s a real chance that animated album arts are the future

Yep. I'm a very happy Overcast user, so I will never use Spotify to play podcasts. The podcast panel in Spotify UI makes that part of the screen useless for me. It bothers me about the same as an ad banner would.

Furthermore I'm annoyed at them calling whatever they are doing 'podcasts'. To me, a podcast means an open RSS feed. Even Apple, the king of walled gardens respects this.

I don't think an all-encompassing audio platform is a bad business idea. After all audio is not a big market as it is. But it should be possible to turn features on and off. I have zero interests in podcasts and audiobooks either - I have no patience for that stuff.

But it's important to note that at least with (paid) Spotify you can simply use a different client which doesn't offer any suggestion. This is what I do.

Outside of music the one thing I would want in audio isn't there though :( It would be erotic ASMR-style content. But as usual big companies stay away from anything under the belt.

Oh and I would love nature audio also but I don't think they offer this either (and it's pretty repetitive so usually a short clip on repeat works fine).

> It was a pain > all worth the hassle for the teenage me

My perspective is this: If I accepted (like the OP) how "difficult" it was to set up a system for discovering music before, why wouldn't I accept a little "hassle" with Spotify? because I'm paying? No, personally, I'm paying for the music DB, not the app. dashboard? Ignore. Official playlists? Ignore. How difficult is that? It takes way less effort to get around Spotify "pain points" than any prior system, and none of these offer what Spotify does best: enriched API access to "unlimited" music.

But of course, we do need to complain to make things better (especially for the artists).

I prefer multiple times to buy an album each month, and make the conscious decision of what I am going to listen instead of relying in algorithms. There's time for random playlist based in genre. But really, in this case, less is more.

I don't use Spotify anymore for random listening either. I use it only for very specific cases where I search for one particular song (and that's usually because I'm looking at a score at the moment and want to listen to it too, i.e. a very specific use case).

For everything else I only see a mess, basically what the author described. Bluntly speaking, it's become useless. Now I actually put on a CD at home when I want to listen to something.

However, I do listen to a particular podcast, on podcasters.spotify.com (10-minute Japanese listening practice), and at least there aren't any ads there.

They have technical problems: Offline doesn't work sometimes when you seem to have a connection but it's not really working. The popups sometimes do not close and requires a restart. The client is heavy and can show videos and display lyrics, which is nice when properly implemented but it's a buggy mess.

They have algorithm problems: Suggestions became useless since a long while. The silly podcast push. All those generic placeholder playlist...

They also have conflicting interests with their users and the non-megastar artists.

Therefore I also cancelled Spotify a long time ago.

> Offline doesn't work sometimes when you seem to have a connection but it's not really working.

Definitely had this problem when you have a weak connection. Even if you have already downloaded the music, it still hangs trying to connect, in order to... I dunno, download the lyrics or something? Get related tracks? So I end up having to go into airplane mode just to make it play.

Just play the saved files, and wait on the API calls in the background.

Spotify has a "offline mode" setting somewhere in the app last I knew. This will force it to only show releases you've downloaded.

The crux of Spotify was the acquisition of Echo Nest back in 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/06/spotify-e...

I tend to think whatever good bits we see (Discovery being good) is sitting on the shoulders of that base work.

Yet, the product values of Spotify do not align with these people or musicians anymore.

People may not know what Echo-Nest is. Since I once worked quite deeply with it, here's my thought on how Spotify might be dislodged.

Echo Nest is a set of music analysis routines that provide high level information about songs, like tempo, time signature, key, chordal modes, and other features best thought of as compositional/musical. Beneath it is a deep stack of low level signal processing parts, libaubio for example, for onset detection, spectral flux, timbre analysis, pitch estimation. These build into intermediates like chord analysis, rhythm classifiers and whatnot. Above that you can build "genre" and "mood" then cluster into a similarity space because there's few enough parameters.

It seems to me, more as a "mathematical intuition" at this stage, that advances in NN for generative work could be targeted at blind classification, bypassing the whole expensive parametric layers and do machine listening on the raw audio.

Are there any recommendation and music search systems that work this way. I expect the training prospect is terrifying, but whoever works it out first will have an alternative and possibly better route into music recommendation.

If Echo Nest were as important as you say, then that's bad news, because Glenn MacDonalds, the Echo Nest chief engineer, was one of those who were fired in the recent downsizing.

I'm not so sure they deserve all credit for Spotify's discovery features - those where at their best right after Sander Dieleman and Aäron van den Oord were interns there, and both those guys were snapped up by Deepmind and have a ridiculously good publication history by now.

But that Spotify is going to get a ton worse without MacDonald, is pretty certain.

Spotify's virtues became table-stakes last decade. What was once deservedly lauded as top-quality design and an incredible, high-value product has become... well... just normal.

This phenomenon interests me broadly, beyond just Spotify. In the worlds of hardware, architecture, and human organization, innovations become iconic. They're remembered and studied for decades or centuries. There's an incredible staying power, where the implementation becomes the backing metaphor for the next iterative leap.

In the software world, this just doesn't really happen. For a few years a sizable portion of emerging consumer brands asked their design team to "make it look like headspace," and that gave way to the generic, faceless cartoons of corporate animations (ie, it just dissolved into the next trend). We've seen countless clever teams introduce clever tactics that quickly proliferated, leaving the original step in innovation largely forgotten. Spotify was (for an entire decade!) a shining star of impeccable product design, but now that's just normal. In software, culture just quickly and seamlessly moves on.

It's kind of crazy that everyone freaked out about "piracy" in the 2000s but every form of music filesharing in that era was materially better for music artists than what is by far the dominant platform for streaming music today, and that this is legal because it's been done in cooperation with the entrenched monopolies who own the right to make money off of music instead of in spite of them

I pulled up the Spotify app on a Samsung TV (haven't tried it on other smart TVs) and your options were a handful of playlists or search. When you pull up a song, there's no real way to drill down into the artist and their work, or explore the same genre. Just listen to that song and a playlist based on it or a playlist for the artist. Discovery is what makes music interfaces cool.

Not sure what Spotify does, but I gets worse in all kind of different aspects. I don't take a look at the start page anymore, just noise. I hear quite diverse Music genre, so it was quite nice that Spotify has Mix-Tapes so I could randomly pick one or the other. Release-Radar was a cool mix of new stuff. But lately it feels like they are pushing only on genre.

Verschlimmbessern at its best.

Probably the fate of each popular product.

This was 25 years ago: https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/, and nothing has fundamentally changed about the music industry in the interim. More and more digital tools are at hand for anyone to make professional-sounding music, yet it's harder and harder to be found in the "long tail," and it's a wash. Big corporations continue to monopolize distribution, performance, and search. We need a renaissance of anti-trust legislation and enforcement in the US. IMO, companies should be kept small enough to have at least a dozen competing players in a market. We already see what it's like to have a half dozen (which are colluding), so let's try forcing it to be double -- and suing the pants off of their officers for colluding -- and see what happens.

Spotify was always a fools errand.

You pay $12/month for an ever-worsening, always degrading, profit-funnel and expect to have new visibility of stuff and a happy environment?

Just like the RIAA members before, they figured out that controlling the music AND how people consume it - they could steer music and profitability as they see fit. This is now just Spotify doing the same.

What can you do instead? AirSonic is a great server platform that you can throw all your music in, be they ripped from CD's you own, or bulk piracy. And use MusicBrainz Picard to properly identify your music.

Also finding torrents is super easy with Yandex. Stay away from Google.

Yeah, it's harder initially, but you own your own path if you do this. Else, you're gonna be jerked around by what choice today scrapes more profit for Spotify. It's all 'fuck you, user'.

(And also piracy and Spotify pay pretty much the same. If you feel bad, go buy their MP3s or albums, and then pirate.)

I moved to youtube music lately after being like 10 years i think on spotify (or since when it started in the UK)... the youtube premium + youtube music was too much of a deal for me to take...

I still use spotify sometime with an app that remove the ads... but I don't get the attraction anymore

In YT music, is there a way to spot regurgitated videos as ‘music’ versus actual tracks that provide a decent streaming quality? My problem has been that their bitrate is so bad, like their videos. Thanks for any advice

I remember Spotify when it was a small upstart company from Sweden and their service wasn't available yet in the US. Using VPN's, proxies, anything to try the service out was fun.

I paid for a Spotify subscription for many years but cancelled in 2021 when I found I didn't like the recommendation system at all. Not to mention, if you listen to a lot of electronic music there are a lot of releases missing.

I previously had a FLAC collection sitting idle on a NAS and now use Roon to listen at home and use Roon ARC to stream away from home and it works very well. This along with a sizeable vinyl and tape collection works well for me.

Also want to mention Bandcamp if you can afford it. Artists see more money from a purchase than a stream, and it's an invaluable service.

As a mostly happy Spotify Premium user I expected to disagree, but OP is actually on point.

I realize I only use "search" and "like" and basically ignore the rest of the app. Spotify on mobile probably has the worst UX out of all the apps that I use regularly.

This might sound harsh but it is actually bad. The home screen is beyond useless.

I literally have a three year old album under "Popular new releases" and it's been there for two years and I have been listening to it regularly. Why is it there?

A section titled "Discover picks" shows me albums that literally have in my library and have listened to for many years.

If I scroll long enough, I get to a weird story-inspired feed that snap-scrolls with content that seems to have no relation to what I've been listening to.

I think the feeling that it's bad is made worse if you've been a long time user, because I remember that it used to be better.

I dislike that they pushed so much for the liked playlist thing, and that it's now a bit tedious to navigate into just looking at my playlists.

I also really dislike their annoying push for podcasts, and this would really be a super quick and easy opt-out section in the settings of the app. And I think from here it's a good transition into what this makes me feel: I feel like Spotify doesn't give a shit about me anymore and they are just trying to squeeze me. And that really rubs me the wrong way.

But I also have no alternative lined up.

I stopped using Spotify a long long time ago, for much more selfish reasons. I would try and "download" a bunch of songs before an international flight only to hop on the flight and discover that despite saying they were downloaded they wouldn't play. At the time I was flying internationally from Australia once a month.

I no longer take as many international flight but once you've left the platform it's hard to go back. Google gets some of my money, but only because they bundle the ad-free experience and the music.

Deezer could have had my money today, I forget they exist. But I'm in Romania currently, and when I try to use my UK credit card to sign up it decided not to let me, so I guess not.

> Instead, my subscription is probably pooled according to some black box formula and ends up paid to some of their top performers like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, or The Weeknd.

And Joe Rogan, which is why I cancelled my subscription and switched to Tidal.

>I listen to what it suggests and just accept that it will go away when it decides to rotate it out. Spotify trained me not to look too hard, to let the flow be, and if that awesome song is gone or removed, don’t worry, we still have a million more.

I just can't understand this mindset. The amount of people out there nowadays who simply listen to/watch/etc. whatever some algorithm tells them to consume, and fully accept being told "you know that one song you really like? well it's not available anymore so you can no longer listen to it, too bad", actually boggles my mind. I can't imagine an existence like that.

Spotify doesn’t recognize the album entity. It’s the most shocking and offensive thing a music platform could do IMO. For anyone who catalogs their music and actively grooms their library, Spotify is unusable.

I think Spotify is still quite good overall. They sometimes make very bad UI decisions. But the latest home screen desaster (of huge, almost full-screen size tiles) was luckily already rolled back.

My main gripe is that it carves overly deep channels around what I've listened to before. For discovering new music I find Shazam more valuable. I wish Spotify had some clever randomness.

A good example are Tarantino soundtracks with songs from all over the genre landscape. I've never seen Spotify create playlists like that.

When staying within a genre the autoplay can be amazing though.

I shouldnt endorse Google Premium, but they have replaced Spotify and iTunes for variety, remixes, covers and such. When I like a song, I also get alternative versions of it. And I can avoid Toutube ads.

Let's hear it for the slightly less sucky Apple music!

https://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-...

I'm a fairly content Apple music subscriber. The apps (iPhone and MacBook) suck - although it keeps podcasts and audiobooks elsewhere, but there's a good chance I can find even obscure tracks and I can also listen to the old CDs and unpublished music I uploaded with iTunes Match on any Apple device.

I was reading a book by a bassist (View from the Bottom, by Harvey Brooks) and it was nice that pretty much everything he talked about was on Apple Music. Some things, even famous things, just eventually get lost. It is nice that lots of music has been digitized and will be preserved both because of profit motive and by the Internet archive.

I'm eager to try the Apple Classical app but it's iOS only. My iPad is not my typical listening device.

Couldn't agree more. I hate Spotify and its UI. Like many modern big apps, user experience seems to be an afterthought.

Recently it started showing me some related playlists that makes no sense - I now have to ignore a big portion of the UI because it's useless, feels like I'm using an app with ads.

But it's hard to go back to downloading albums after trying the convenience of a service like that.

I tried Google Music, but somehow it was even worse than Spotify, but that's about of what I expect of Google these days.

I'll be trying Deezer, Tidal and Apple Music soon.

I once submitted a bugreport to spotify regarding a problem with the chromecast integration. The support-agent asked me the following questions in turn, which I all followed:

- Can you reinstall the app and try again?

- Can you describe step by step how to reproduce the bug?

- Can you make a screencast showing the problem?

- Can you factory-reset your phone and check if the issue persists?

I've never heard back after doing the last step. They probably didn't think I would report back again. (Thanks god I had an old phone lying around...)

Needless to say the problem is still there today...

> Can you factory-reset your phone and check if the issue persists?

This is a big red flag for organizational dysfunction. When the QA team puts up a big roadblock to even filing a bug, wants to play 20 questions for every bug report, it's a way to just avoid taking bug reports.

But why avoid the bug reports? Someone in QA is being measured on them, or a 2nd layer (the engineers) are being pressured by a 3rd layer (management) to ship new features at high quality and not "waste time" fixing bugs. Maybe the bug reports won't be fixed anyway.

Summary: Spotify was better when it was a dumb pipe for music that used the canard of "supporting artists directly" to get people to upgrade to Premium.

Spotify is a middleman for the Big 5 record labels. They and advertisers are the customer, not the scrubs paying $12/mo. They cannot just show you music, they don't make any money on that. It's podcasts all the way down because they can stuff it with ads, and don't have to kick back 90% to the rights owner.

I like Spotify, not because of the algorithm, but because of the availability of music and the ability to listen to it, I know how it was with casette decks, cd's and napster.

I think Spotify did set and still sets an example how content can be distributed and made available for a pretty acceptable price, I still have to see somthing like it for video.

And algorithms can be a nice feature, but fastly can become generic or a bubble, being able to actively choose what you want to listen to, that does if for me.

I've been considering cancelling my subscription as well.

It first started some months ago with the fonts being corrupted on Linux, and more recently they removed the "I don't like this song" button (or made the program ignore it in other instances).

I'll agree with the sentiment of "we know what you really want" UI-wise... going really wrong. I might give them a couple more months to turn things around, but to be honest, I really don't want to go back to downloading music.

I get Spotify for free because my dad's phone contract comes with a family plan, but right now I'm trying free Apple Music that I got for a few months for reasons I can't quite remember, and it's really not much better, in fact it's worse in many ways, particularly in terms of buggier UI and lack of remote control functionality. I don't think I'll switch to it any time soon. All of the music apps seem to suck in their own ways.

Try this application to download all your tracks:

https://github.com/vsharma2430/YtubePlay

The best Spotify playlist in my world was curated and constantly updated by a small business I had bought things from.

It lasted about a year or so - I don’t think Spotify wants that sort of thing to be created.

Today there’s a certain DJ at a certain community radio station that streams online from whom I discover much of my new music.

That said I do catch new things via Spotify but only by creating “radio” feeds for songs and artists I like.

I ignore the home page, I interact with Spotify via my liked songs and library.

My Spotify has only one row of podcast recommendations (in the All tab). The rest are my type of music or the last album I was listening to. Am I missing something here?

I canceled Spotify in favor of Plexamp.

I was sick of the algorithmic content funnel, and have been collecting albums for better part of 20 years. I find myself listening to and enjoying music from my own curated collection much more than I valued having every song at my fingertips. It helps that the plexamp app is slick and feature rich, I especially like the exploration features made possible by discog tags and sonic analysis.

I was born right into the age of streaming since I was born in 2008 (didn't this website exist before me?) and this is why I love CDs. I actually control decent quality music, I can pay the artist directly for their work and I control it without any ridiculous copy protection like AACS. I tried Spotify, Amazon Music, TIDAL, everything else and I cannot get used to it. I really hate subscriptions, and prefer to own things.

For things you might like to buy digitally there's Bandcamp, Junodownload, etc. that will sell you lossless files you can do whatever you like with.

The worst part of using spotify today is their random pop ups that interrupt you right when you want too quickly choose a song or Playlist and play something. Instead they block you with a random full screen dialog box with some unwanted bs in it. Oh and the dismiss button is a tiny hard to find text. Feels functionally similar to using an ad supported service, even though I'm paying.

I'm not hyped about Spotify (don't dislike it either) - but there's one feature I haven't found in any other service - it's recommendation engine (e.g. Discover Weekly) which I'm enjoying a lot. I've discovered great music using it and that's almost the only thing keeping me there.

Hivemind, do you know of a good alternative?

I feel similar about the UX and the poor AI playlists, but with a little effort you can find the gems and build a library

Regarding artists being shafted, when I find an album (yes I listen to albums) I love, I’ll buy it on Bandcamp or (for the major artists) somewhere like Qobuz so I can own it (come the day the streamers die) and support the artist a bit more directly.

The reality for musicians is that if you're on the middle of the bell curve in terms of ""quality/popularity"", in comparison to other professions, you earn the same as the people below the bell curve of other professions. This is massively unfair.

Imagine if all the software developers that make a living, had to be "10x"..

Planning on doing a show HN soon for our project Shomp: [https://shomp.co/timeline.html] we are a US nonprofit with the goal of covering transaction fees so musicians selling their music online will keep 100% of the proceeds.

Drop Spotify and go back to RSS which is having a revival. Podcasting 2.0 has brought tons of new features all open source. https://podcasting2.org/

Grab a new podcasting player with over 20 new features and move away from big tech: newpodcastapps.com

I dread the interface of Spotify. What do they employ massive numbers of UX people for? Nothing regarding Spotify's interface is any better than 2012. Cards, auto-play TikTok'ified video bullshit, weird navigation of menus and playlists, hidden core functionalities, lack of customization, funneling of user flows into garbage marketing content...

It's like they are sitting in a lab and professionally try to find out how to annoy people and make their lives harder.

In the end, I understand that they need to bullshit their way out of shareholder expectations but it's sad to see the enshitification of Spotify over the years. Let's see how long it takes them to nuke account sharing like Netflix and now Disney.

UX people just do what they think is right and follow trends. They don't do real research like how it was done in the 80's and 90's. And there's also dark patterns...

From what I've heard the Spotify UI is made by multiple teams. Each team makes their own section and other teams don't need to (nor can they) interfere.

I find the complaints kind of lame. I don’t like the podcasts, but it’s very easy to not click on the podcasts.

The music recs vary over time but music is a diamond in the rough thing. Every niche band I listen to is from a chance find on Spotify and that’s cool. Power user tools for exploring stuff would be cool

No, you are simply more accepting of a certain interface being pushed onto you. I find the podcasts incredibly frustrating because I like to keep my interfaces streamlined and minimalistic. I would much rather have my homepage focused on my content than a bunch of podcasts I don't care to listen to and a bunch of playlists in which I have no interest. In my opinion, the app is frustratingly bloated. Your opinion is valid, but this complaint is as well.

Shrug. I click search, and the search is good. It also quickly suggests New Releases which is the only playlist I care to explore.

That was a gloomy Saturday afternoon perhaps, several years ago, when I cancelled.

I agree with the author completley. And Spotify is just one of the practically all mainstream black pattern conglomerates ruining a nice idea and the entertainment with pushy and greedy selfish rhetorics, useless for me, driving me away. When you have little chance finding content you care about, when there is severly limited navigation with no reliable structure but secretive algorithms push mostly garbage or hype into your face and the 'improvement' of the UI is more like serving the companies need, sacrifying usability for you, then I better get back to the stone age of content access (end of '90, beginning of '00, others call it golden years actually), put in the effort building my own entertainment for the sake of own enjoyment rather than swallowing what they cook for me with secret ingredients, satisfying only those arrogant folks cooking it.

I built a home music server and a good HiFi system using Raspberry's and files (actually the immediate reson leaving Spotify was their stubborn unwillingness introducing HiFi quality after years and years of empty promises but degrading UI meanwhile, putting effort into that and other never missed rotted deliveries). With fairly basic player with its own annoyances, but at least those are unpolished incompleteness not intentionally forced through destruction of good old functionality along stupid self serving hollow sounding strategy, appearances instead of essence. Now there are no disappearing favourite songs anymore, re-learning behaviour of the software at each update annoyed out of me, no more feeling that I am for the software and not the software for me. I am more satisfied now.

Movie/TV streaming, watch on 'demand' (HAHH! more like watch on shoving it down your throat!) TV apps, music streaming, but I could count here all social media with their opaque and orderless presentation of not finding those I need but getting what other push at me kind of operation that repelled me enough not to get involved with them in the first place (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube after a while, and a lot more newer that is not considered stone age stuff by modern folks riding the trend like Texans ride bulls), most news sites or simply manufacturer web too that is not for informing you but to shove their whatever down your throat with force. I do not need that, thank you, try the others. It is a much better feeling to settle myself into a quiet but cosy corner of the Internet (HN included) than consuming what is poured at us.

There're decent communities of people who like to manage their own tech (example: r/selfhosted) and those that like to assemble their own library (r/musichoarder) and then everything in between - so there are options for this.

I was taking about usablity and reliability.

Wanted to use Spotify, used it, but cannot rely on it. It is not serving (this) client's needs but their own. I did not want to invest into self hosting and managing collections but the way content mmanagers do is just ruining fun. This is the least bad, doing by myself, so I can enjoy listening to music again (after the investment period of building it up). Without being tossed around by others want me to manipulate into their own kind of way, forcing me to get used to new ways of their own forced through, ruing desired ones already existed. That is no fun!

I might cancel it just because they keep showering Rogan with money, been testing alternatives already.

Yup, I quit spotify for similar reasons.

Overall, it seemed like with every update, it more aggressively was trying to strongarm me into listening to what they want me to listen to, making it harder and harder to make my own choices and have my own tastes.

Really sucks. Spotify used to be pretty good.

I just want a feature that plays new music I've never heard, based on things I've liked in the past, and doesn't have a bunch of bullshit suggestions based on their advertising, or a stupid fake DJ voice interjecting.

All I know is I pay for ad-free spotify and it fucking serves me pop-ups for things I'm not interested in. That's an ad you assholes!

As soon as I figure out how to export playlists in a aay that I can import to apple music, I'm gone.

You can supposedly move playlists with tunemymusic, but I haven't done it myself.

> As soon as I figure out how to export playlists in a aay that I can import to apple music, I'm gone.

SongShift[0] is the gold standard for doing this I believe, so much so that Apple is beta testing an integration with it.[1]

[0] https://www.songshift.com/

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/19/apple-music-spotify-playlists...

Spotify is a background noise generator. With hard work it can be used to listen more attentively by searching for specific albums by specific artists, although the amount you’re contributing to those artists is ambiguous.

I miss the Spotify 3rd-party apps, I discovered some great music through them.

If you want something that just works: YouTube Music + uBlock origin

Some may dispute the algorithms, others may note it's not as easy to get it to work on mobile, but it has an extremely large collection

I like pandora so much better than Spotify but it’s very difficult to purchase and access out of the us. Their recommendations and ui are so much better, it’s a shame.

Spotify has removed several popular features over the years, such as the ability to view lyrics while listening to music and the option to sort playlists by date added. These changes have angered many users. Spotify's recommendation algorithms have been criticized for becoming less personalized and more repetitive. While Spotify remains one of the most popular music streaming services, it is clear that many users are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the platform. Spotify needs to address these concerns and improve its service if it wants to retain its user base and maintain its position as a leader in the industry.

Is this comment auto-generated?

My way of thinking

In the future we will have to fail Turing tests to prove our humanity.

Take a look at their comment history- so many are clearly LLM. Oddly they claim it isn't, when they are called out. Very odd. Why bother commenting at all? Certainly won't get karma.

> the ability to view lyrics while listening to music

You can still do that? Am I missing something?

Spotify seems to be the only service that offers remastered or re released songs from the 70s and 80s. Some aren't available on CD either.

Here I am, a lonely soul, who discovers music through youtube mixes... Am i missing something by not using spotify?

spotify apps are cancer both mobile and desktop (but the mobile app is the worst), spotify connect doesn't work well, you cannot show / hide lyrics from spotify connect, lyrics are bad and often don't match or have no sync

but spotify also has very few songs missing from its library and the suggestions made me discover a lot of new songs / artists

good content but bad product

The post notes that Spotify pays $0.003-$0.005 per stream, and compares that to the average exec making $200k/year.

If Spotify diverted all that exec money to artists, I wonder whether the $0.003-$0.005 figure would change, or if that would be too only amount to <$0.0005 difference.

It might be fair to criticize Spotify's deal with rights holders of music, but the above line of critique doesn't hold so strong to me.

As it happens, $200k/year for an exec seems low?

Disclaimer: I don't use Spotify and instead manage my own collection.

It depends what is defined as exec. If there are hundreds in the company, that could make a difference.

In 17% layoff, the numbers was around 1500 employees fired. It means there are around 7300 employees left. So that includes some execs.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/04/tech/spotify-layoffs-thir...

Spotify doesn't pay the artists directly. Apple Music doesn't pay the artists directly. Youtube Musice doesn't.... You get my gist.

All those pay to the rights holders. Why does no one ever question the rights holders: EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group why the artists are paid pennies?

It isn't just the big labels. Apple Music has a list of distributors they work with:

https://artists.apple.com/partners

CDBaby is popular where 91% of revenue from Apple, Spotify etc goes to the artist.

So then it seems that the price per stream does make a difference.

Spotify has the same distributors. But the absolute vast majority of money goes to the big labels.

Spotify pays out ~70% of their revenue to the rights holder.

I also have trouble finding new music on Spotify. I find its nearly impossible and have a strong preference for the old design.

I'm thinking about canceling it as well but note sure about an alternative. What are you migrating to?

I rage-quit Spotify some years ago for similar UX reasons, and switched to YouTube Music. I can warmly recommend it, and that's from a Google-hater. Truly, it seems like all 3 competent UX designers at Google were put to work on YT Music.

There's no pushy podcast crap, recommendations are rather decent, "play album" button actually plays the album, playlists and queues work as you might expect, playback is gapless by default, you can turn off autoplay (yeah, really, a Google product lets you switch off the AI), it's all very nice. Just, all the stuff that should be table stakes is actually right.

And, of course, they got the biggest catalog of all because any YouTube video that the AI thinks might be a music video is indexed too! Lots of weird indie bootleg shit in my playlists.

It's not perfect by a long shot, but oh boy is it better than Spotify.

Note: I'm really only talking about UX here. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that YT Music pays artists like 10x less than other apps do, and the artists put up with it because YouTube (not YT Music) brings exposure and Google made it a package deal. Not sure how true this is btw.

I'd like to call attention to the incredible situation regarding Benn Jordan (The Lightbulb), Spotify, and TuneCore, which just beggars belief.

Jordan uses TuneCore to distribute his music to major streaming services. He has posted a series of videos critical of Spotify among other streaming services, including the most recent, entitled "How Money Laundering W/ Spotify Works", attacking fraud on Spotify.

Very soon thereafter Jordan's music was pulled by TuneCore from all major streaming services due to, incredibly, supposed "high amounts of streaming fraud". Lots of finger pointing have since ensued. Spotify insists it didn't tell TuneCore to do it, but it's looking pretty murky. They did it over the weekend so there was no recourse until Monday. They've since backpedaled and pseudo-apologized. To me (and others) this is very suspicious.

As far as I can tell, Benn is (1) beyond reproach here and (2) was only able to get both of them to admit error because he had a big enough audience. Smaller musicians would have to resort to, you know, posting to HN asking for help.

It's shit, but musicians really critical of "the system" have always had trouble with mainstream channels; nobody likes to work with someone who bites the hand that feeds them. Hence the whole punk thing - self-production, indie labels, etc etc.

I love to buy Cds.

I am not eustatic about returning to vinyl. I remember how grateful I was with Cds came out since they were far easier to care for and durable¹.

I like collecting them, I love listening to them, and I like owning them. Letting friends borrow them, and the rest of the freedom that comes from owning a physical object.

I liked going to the store, browse through shelves of cds to find something I wanted to listen to. Buying it. Going home, getting chores done, and then sit down and play from start to finish.

Spotify with increasing regularity remove some of my favorite songs and artists from their collection. Due to licensing, I presume.

Plus, the artwork is nice

Now it is nearly impossible to buy cds. The selection in the few stores that still carry them in Norway is atrocious, even when you try to order them from records stores in Norway. I dont listen to anything near the Top 10, and that is usually most of what they have. -

Amazon carrier a lot more but even their selection leaves out most of the cds I want to buy. (Plus the shipping is a killer)

For a while ordering them directly from the "merch" store the bands had (some) to buy cds, but even that is fading away as bands dont event produce/print cds.

It seems the best way to buy them now is to see the band live. But bands like selling vinyl at inflated prices. I presume because the demand is higher for those.

I can buy the digital tracks, with all the problems that entails. I have started to use them to burn cds with the artists' album. It is not the same with the lack of artwork and connection.

¹ Vinyl records can last a long time. If you are careful in how you treat it, do the maintenance, clean it, and have a deck that makes it easy to lower and raise the head. I was not good enough to ensure the longevity of my records, so they would eventually get scratched .

Love Spotify, saying that as a UI guy as well as a music lover. I've tried Apple Music, Deezer & recently Tidal - but find Spotify's music discovery alg. is killer for what I listen to.

> Love Spotify, saying that as a UI guy

Really?

Really. :)

Curious to know how a UI person would appreciate Spotify UI.

Nothing beats good old local MP3 library.

Just canceled my premium subscription.

I never use spotify's suggestions at all. I don't even see them in my client (spotify-qt). I don't want "discovery". I just want to listen to the stuff I already know I want.

Which is one thing I really like about Spotify, if you have a subscription you are free to use whatever client you wish <3

It also seemes to have avoided enshittifying itself, moving from free with ads to paid with ads like many TV streaming services have done. They still get a thumbs up for me.

In modern capitalism, the larger the company, the more it needs to grow in order to exist. Some, like Apple, manage to continuously expand into new markets. For now, at least. Others, like Spotify, are not positioned for that - once they reach their potential, they start to franticly juice their market destroying their product along the way.

Spotify is actually trying very hard to expand in different markets - audiobooks and podcasts were big moves. Unfortunately, these markets really don't play well with their core proposition.

I honestly don't understand why certain giant companies are obsessed by integration; instead of trying to stuff everything in one UI, why not integrate backends (to leverage economies of scale) while keeping UIs separate? So you can cater for each audience in different ways, and keep everyone happy. It's basically "MVC for businesses", just build a different view for the the models you already have. The savings supposedly obtained by unified UIs are so often offset (or worse) by massive losses of core customers.

When you have engagements as KPI, that's what you get. Everything stuffed inside the same platform and the user have troubles with their workflow. I keep thinking that Winamp had the best music player interface, because it lets you turn off parts of the UI you don't need (I did not use the media library, because my files were barely tagged), and the UI was very informative. I've just setup MPD and NCMPCPP and the experience is miles better than Apple Music.

My biggest peeve of Spotify is the feature discrepancy between mobile/desktop. Two examples:

    1. On mobile, you can see the top trending podcast episode.

    2. On mobile, you can filter liked songs by *some* genres.

Why? These seem like fairly trivial features to implement across both platforms. You have hundreds of devs. Wtf is going on over there?

Tangentially related: I switched from Spotify to YT Premium just because YT was only marginally more expensive and bundles ad-free YT app. If I were Spotify I would be furious and yelling antitrust all over this. Maybe the reason Google removed YT Premium Lite was so you couldn't point out that for some reason Premium is much cheaper than Premium Lite + Music standalone.

Jellyfin + torrents

Just this weekend I wrote a "Ask HN" post about an alternative funding model for musicians. [0]

The TL;DR: it would be a Patreon-style platform where people can choose what artists they want to support directly, but instead of the artists defining "support tiers", it's the users who define a total fixed monthly contribution and how to split this among the many artists they want to support.

The idea is that there are many people who would like to support many individual artists, but can not afford to give $5-$10 to each of them. With the contributions being fixed, the average contribution might be lower, but the total payout would increase.

Another advantage of this model (compared to Spotify) is that it evens out the playing field a lot. The superstars already make most of their money from touring/merch/extra deals. The ones that are just starting and do not have the means (or the audience) to go on larger tours can rely instead of a more steady income from their (relatively) small fanbase.

A quick look says that Spotify has > 600M users and ~1.5M artists. If this platform manages to get 400:1 ratio of users:artists, and each user donated $10/month, this means an average of $4000/artist/month. It wouldn't make everyone a millionaire, but it could certainly make for a lot more healthy industry than the status quo.

[0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39399121

I'd like to point out the particular enshitification of the left side bar on the Desktop app.

I do not understand which human is able to understand the logic of this thing or navigate to a particular item in O(1) without exhaustive search.

Sure, the UI/UX has degraded over time but I canceled my subscription when they started paying Bro Rogaine hundreds of millions of dollars to traffic disinformation and conspiracy theories.

There are countless examples but here's one from last week: www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2024/02/15/joe-rogan-provides-a-platform-to-hivaids-denialists

Honestly, I'm kinda tired of the constant whining about Spotify. But in many ways, it showed me, that when you have a wide customer base and your product is a simple "wrench", you will be surprised how different each people try to use the same tool. Most of them don't understand that you can't drill with it, nor you can weld with it.

Ok, what do I mean by this? People want to turn a streaming service into a music streaming and organizing tool that can fit every user's weird OCD. I mean there are people out there, who create a new playlist for EVERY ALBUM they listen to, removing and reordering songs in the album for their taste. This person was requesting a feature to be able to hide and reorder songs in an album because they're tired of creating a new playlist for every album. I don't want to judge people, ohh boy there are weird people out there...

Same thing with recommendations. You might see this all the time, you have a group of people who have a bad experience with Spotify discovery system, and then you have people like me, who are happy with it, and works perfectly well, for ME. But I listen to a specific genre of music, and if I like an artist I "follow" them on Spotify. I try to do my best, so Spotify has a chance to figure out what I like. Hence, Discover Weekly is mostly good, every 4 or 5 weeks (for whatever reason) it's fucking great.

> I might have been naive, but when I started paying for Spotify Premium, I thought my money was going to the artists that I was listening to.

Let's track back a bit...

> Growing up in Tunisia, piracy was the norm. Our debit cards didn’t work internationally, and publishing companies never thought of us as a viable market to bother with.

Harrr, surely there was no way to buy a single music CD in the whole of Tunisia.

But I'm not judging, I did music piracy in the past. But thinking that your €5-10 monthly subscription magically will feed every artist that you listen to is idd naive. I've been a premium user for the past 10 years. During this time I've spent x20 more money on concert tickets, merch, and music CDs than before. If I have a good year, I usually go to 10-15 concerts a year from clubs to arenas, and even travel abroad if I have to. Because this is the only way you can support your favorite artists. But let's just spend nothing on them, use Spotify, and complain about how Big Corp pays nothing to artists. Meanwhile, record labels are standing on the side, laughing at this, wiping the tears of joy with a banknote. There is nothing more exciting than Discover Weekly showing you a brand new band (for you) and you realize the band will play in your country in 2 months. Without Spotify, I would not know about them, let alone go to the concert.

I dunno why people seem to have these weird relationships with commercial companies where they get disillusioned, feeling betrayed even, and then have to go through what essentially is a break up with these tax entities. Is there a term for this psychological phenomena?

I've seen slides from marketing agencies where they're called Brand Fanatics. Apparently if customers are emotionally invested in a company, they pay 3x more or something like that.

The day I cancelled was May 19, 2020 and should've been yours too.

For context, this looks to be https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-05-19/the-joe-rogan-experi...

> should've been yours too

Different people like different things. That's okay.

I like being alive. Different people like different things.

Same. It's trash now.

Spotify is one of the prime apps for "mass consumption", should be given the UI, UX and other aspects are geared towards your average nerf herders - not the tech savvy, independent-thinking-valuing crowd.

Nerf herders were totally fine with Winamp. I remember old people using Winamp back in the days.

My Spotify use is 99% mobile. Am I missing something or is the reappearing Winamp comparison simply misplaced?

On the contrary, you're one of the few people who get the point

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