Spotify Shuts Down ‘Unwrapped’ Artist Royalty Calculator with Legal Threats | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Shuts Down ‘Unwrapped’ Artist Royalty Calculator with Legal Threats

digitalmusicnews.com

219 pointscpach272 comments

They had to call it "Spotify Unwrapped". Bad move. Too close to a trademark.

If they'd called it "Crappy Streaming Service Royalty Calculator", Spotify would not have had any legal grounds to complain. Even if they used a Spotify logo to identify the Spotify calculation option.

Honestly getting it shut down is a much much better move.

Don't banned books or movies benefit from increased attention?

Yeah, this Streisand Effected itself and probably wouldn't have garnered as much attention here otherwise.

This is how I learned about it!

Yes but only because books and movies are easily accessible after being banned. If no one can use this calculator then the added buzz does nothing.

but the calculator's math equation is shown right there and the idea will get out.

I still don’t get how YouTube (premium + music) isn’t a clear winner here. Why use Spotify if you can get all that for the same price?

UI/UX? YT is the most hated UX of anything I ever use. It’s different in terrible ways on each platform, too.

On desktop I use YouTube music because of how bad the Apple Music app is. On mobile, I use Apple Music.

What about the app don't you like? I ask because I'm done with Spotify and looking for the next service.

Apple Music has a really bizarre interface for managing playlists. It’s so cumbersome and takes way too many clicks. Probably as a side effect of being mobile first

Can you describe how? I actually find playlist editing to be really easy on Apple Music/iTunes.

Wow I just tried it out and it's quite awful, you're right. The way Spotify allows you to see what's in the 'radio' station and then add additional tracks to a playlist is great – there's almost no similar functionality in Apple music.

Actually bonkers that discovery is this bad in Apple music

The desktop app is the same as the mobile one, what issue are you seeing?

You might like https://cider.sh/

YouTube music on iOS and Android is very similar to the other music apps. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-music/id1017492454 with a 4.8 on iOS, so people seem to like it.

https://music.youtube.com/ is similar to the web apps.

If you're using the video YouTube for music, you're not on the right app.

I have both Apple Music (via One Premium) and YouTube Music via YT Premium, and I lean on YT Music overwhelmingly. Its algorithmic playlists are just a universe better.

Similar but not great. That last 10% is 90% of the experience.

Last I tried it, you couldn't even click through different songs in an album without it jumping to the now playing screen. No way to disable that behavior in settings.

Absolute trash of a UI.

Spotify has plenty of warts but it is at least functional.

On top of that, account management, setup, building new playlists is just horrible. It feels like the person who wrote it doesn't listen to music.

Literally anything is better than Youtube music. Given that Google music was actually pretty good back in the day it is hilarious how badly Google has screwed it up.

I guess people have different needs out of their apps.

I was a long time Spotify user. When they decided to give hundreds of millions to Joe Rogan, I switched to Apple Music. Then when I got YT Premium for the video benefits, I randomly tried YT Music and it has been my primary since.

And I have zero complaints. I search for artists and albums and songs and play them. Often I start algorithmic "radio" playlists based upon one of those. It plays the music. I save things to my library. I add things to playlists.

I listen to music and I think it's a great app. And again, 4.8 on the app store, so the people for whom it's a terrible app might be the exception.

Not really, all the Google apps get five star ratings from all the spam accounts to try and make them seem more legitimate.

Neither major app store has done anything about ratings spam for a decade and the system is entirely useless.

What do you want to see in the playlist behavior? I admit I build them without much effort in YT Music and never felt constricted, but I may be missing out.

I switched from Spotify from YT Music solely for UX reasons. Spotify is a weird flimsy thing to me (or at least was, back when I rage-quit it). Things like, their Android app didn't even have a "play album" button. Random simple stuff just was made needlessly hard. Queueing was weird, it seemed to nudge you to shuffling / algorithmic playback, they had this weird podcast thing going on that was just in the way, and so on.

YT Music on the other hand, has excellent UX in my opinion. This surprised me, given Google's generally mediocre UX design, but they really got a bunch of competent people on this one. All the basics work the way you'd expect (and that's not trivial to get right). Play, queue, play next. Play album, shuffle, it all just generally does what I expect it to do and I can mostly find the buttons I want easily. You can turn off autoplay. Gapless album playback is on by default. It.. just works!

Also I find the algorithmic autoplay to be pretty great, found some great new artists that way.

The fact that the catalog is bigger because it includes weird bootleg recordings and live sets and anything music-y ever uploaded to YouTube, is a nice bonus. But for me, the UX sells it.

The YouTube Music UI fails at very basic things. Play a track that Google seems is "for children" and you are unable to navigate to another track or browse without it stopping playing, because the service inherited YT's clumsy COPPA compliance solution.

The UI can't cope with long titles. It uses space badly. It doesn't surface content well (no Christmas playlist on the front page during December).

It's a UI mess. I tried switching my family to it since we pay for YT Premium anyway and faced a total revolt.

I found Spotify to be very playlist-oriented. Not great for people who listen to albums straight through. Things like pushing albums to a queue were not possible on the platform (IIRC the best you could do is play albums "next").

you can add albums to the queue. Have been able to for a long time.

I believe there is some royalty-related reason why Spotify prefers playlists over albums.

Spotify is so playlist oriented, we need a button to turn a search into a playlist just to make search usable...

I just learned that Spotify apparently likes to charge you for Taylor Swift while their algorithm pushes their own AI generated music into your ear buds which costs them nothing. That's how CEOs sell a couple billion dollars of stock options. Question is... Are you gonna continue to support him/them/they? I'm not. I'm gonna go for a bike ride right now and leave the ear buds home and listen to the sounds all around me. Take care y'all.

Where did you learn this about AI generated music on Spotify?

Not OP but there's both accusations of AI generated music [0] and the slightly overlapping issue of Spotify owned music in playlists [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42526803

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530

I need to correct my comment. I had read the ghost artists story here on YC and that was my referral. I didn't know Spotify was hiring musicians to create music that Spotify then owned the rights to and they pushed onto the consumer essentially paying themselves.

Spotify hires creators to create content that Spotify owns, then uses their platform to push it onto their own playlists. They aren't subbing out real artists songs for ghost artists when you ask for a specific song.

Literally the exact same thing that every video streaming service is doing. Isn't Netflix the biggest production company on earth at this point. At least if its a cover of a song the original artist still gets royalties.

Especially compared to one of their core competitors in the US market: Amazon Music.

I don't know who pissed off who in the world of Amazon, but I'm shocked at how broken the Amazon Music app has been for the last few years. Random stops in the streaming, weird behavior on flagship phones after the app has been in the background for a while, their app store reviews tell more.

At the very least they fixed a (long-standing) bug that caused the scrollbar to conflict with side panel UI elements, making it stop/halt when you tried to view long lists of songs. Their fix was: remove the scroll.

FWIW, I prefer YT Music simply because the same app on the same phone works beautifully. It ain't perfect (my favorite is the random cross-talk with YouTube at times on 'likes', or when I occasionally see the interface change for a particular song in my play list), but I don't have to reset stuff just to listen to a few tracks in a row.

Oh my lord, reordering the queue or playlists on Amazon Music on iOS is one of the most frustrating interfaces I have ever used. It makes me so mad just thinking about it that I can hardly even pinpoint what’s wrong other than “it is almost but not quite completely broken.”

If the Spotify UI was the only way I could consume music, I would never listen to another song again. It's ugly, barely customizable, wastes space, wastes time, and it's flat-out user hostile, just like recent YouTube UI changes. Except unlike YouTube, I cannot reasonably modify the style and functionality to my liking, or easily use third-party clients.

It seems to me the most ethical mode of consumption which doesn't compromise consumer integrity and freedom is to use YouTube, or pirate, and to make up for lost royalties by directly supporting creators and encouraging creators to cut out the middlemen.

Vanilla VLC still feels like the best user experience to me.

Im still on Winamp, still got the keyboard keys in my muscle memory.

Agreed! Still my go-to across desktop and mobile.

Spotify has such a terrible app, at least on iOS. If you download a song and have a weak cellular/WiFi connection the app prefers the connection over the downloaded song, so you just can't listen to music unless you turn on offline mode.

Similarly, if you have a weak connection and go back a song that song isn't cached which is infuriating.

This mostly happened when I was getting into my car which is barely in WiFi range but the connection wasn't stable enough to be usable, so I'd have to start driving before I could interact with Spotify.

Anyway, I switched to Apple Music a year or two ago. Spotify is trying to lock users in with the social aspect (e.g. Spotify Wrapped) but it's just not worth it.

Man, there's few things as infuriating as the Spotify app refusing to play a downloaded podcast unless i connect to the internet. can disconnect right after it starts playing, so it makes no sense.

I've been on a streak of days-long roadtrips using YouTube in my car for about a year and the experience has been great for me on the whole.

The audio quality of most music on YTM is abysmal.

??? Studio provided digital masters will of course be identical across all of the services.

Apple Music has the upper hand on the very high end with full lossless streaming, but that's irrelevant to almost everyone listening in a compromised situation -- like 100% of bluetooth headsets -- and YT Premium's 256Kbps AAC is extremely high quality.

If it has been uploaded with that quality. It's not like YouTube is giving it's replacement tool to anyone regular to use, for better-quality uploads.

You, along with many others, seem very confused about this. No one is talking about random people uploading their MP3s to YouTube the video service.

YouTube Music is a separate service. The music is provided by music labels in exactly the same way it is provided to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and others. Music labels provide digital masters and the streaming service encodes as necessary for their users.

YouTube Music definitely has just standard YouTube videos uploaded by random people. It's one of the only reasons I use YouTube Music - listening to vinyl rips of things that were never released in other formats.

When you are on YouTube there is a Music section that includes music videos, random uploads, etc. A lot of people are talking about that in this discussion and it is causing a lot of confusion.

That is not YouTube Music.

These are YouTube Music-

https://music.youtube.com/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-music/id1017492454

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Random rips that people upload on YouTube are not available on YouTube Music (again, not the Music section on YouTube, but the separate YouTube Music service). The only music available is through a sanctioned distributor like Amuse, and of course the labels have direct feeds to these services.

You are mistaken. User uploads, unofficial remixes, mixtapes, anime music videos, entire video game soundtrack rips, etc. All in the YouTube Music app.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc-MRIbtyP8&si=m5A0o6QLomb...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=bPtF-hvruDQ&si=iK5SGGZMup2...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=tMWvoJjflfc&si=Uqz_a-dzl4q...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3dBLZXt18U0&si=ExNqN60VG6e...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=I6pPpKjA-FY&si=jlVoeBhuXGH...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=xddHYuXEXik&si=k0tWdhMzv-H...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=1Oq5BS8E5D0&si=u6OEMhWODWZ...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=YQRXJVF8lic&si=JR6tiZVBLR_...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=oKD-MVfC9Ag&si=tRHXKwDzB7Q...

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=u8GCIBWztoY&si=z9JRzBBZp-6...

To +1 the general "youtube music is youtube": every time I've given the YT music app a try, I've started listening to [what I wanted] only to end up in random youtube mixes (not YT-music-mixes of just studio-uploaded stuff, youtube videos titled "mix" or otherwise, sometimes 10h long, with accompanying looped graphics and sometimes VPN advertising segments and like-and-subscribes strewn throughout randomly) after a few songs.

YTM is YT plus music, not a separate thing. It's very clearly intentionally forced to be that way. It's the primary reason I think it's an awful service (the general UX is a very close second). It does, however, have the benefit of niche user uploads like this existing because it's YT.

Bizarre.

Either you used YouTube Music about a decade ago, or you're just making shit up.

You can verify the claims for yourself, just check those links above. They're not even slightly abnormal.

I believe the links. The guy is searching for fringe stuff. You can even copy watch ids from YouTube, which is likely what was done here.

But if you are any ordinary user and you are searching on YouTube Music for a playlist and somehow you got a 10 hour random person's video, either you're spectacularly terrible at search, or you're full of shit.

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_k1r7WuL0tHO3...

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=RDCLAK5uy_nEp0Hf_BHJ...

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lkXb3jknk1xq...

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lSPskzOTM8Lq...

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=RDCLAK5uy_lsb8F7kGME...

Look, I can link to random stuff too. A couple of YouTube curated playlists, and some of millions of albums. All songs direct from publishers. Zero imaginary ads, or bizarre "videos".

Why are you so sure that your experience is the one true YouTube Music experience, and several other people telling you they have other experiences are "making shit up"?

> which is likely what was done here

Incorrect. All of those links are taken from the YouTube Music app on Android via search. Some are contrived, but the point is that there is a wide range of counterexamples to your assertion that YouTube Music is this siloed thing that's only music direct from publishers.

Here's a more straightforward example. I search for "action bronson blue chips 2" [1]

The top result is "Action Bronson Blue Chips 2 ((Full Album)) - Please Subscribe" from user 'Lpmixtapes compilation and mixtapes...'[2]

The official release [3] is a page scroll down.

So, I don't think it's reasonable to call people "terrible at search" when these things literally come up as top results in search and are fair game for the recommendation algo to slide into your stream, or "full of shit" when they can give you specific examples of how things you've said are wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Chips_2 (2013 release under a major label imprint, not "fringe", whatever that means)

[2](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ji4qgTD6M&si=ZlwtChMuSym...)

[3] https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_n9qboVggQncM...

Mea culpa.

Having said that, having done thousands of search for countless bands, albums, and songs, and having listened to countless playlists, I have never, ever encountered an unofficial track. It has always been first-party official releases.

I guess it's that I'm not looking for stuff for which there isn't a direct licensed track. But the earlier comments about "uploaded with that quality" and talking about replacement tracks is simply wrong for the vast majority of people. You're going to be listening to the music distributors version.

I guess if you're looking for anime music or something where an official listing simply doesn't exist then it's the alternative to nothing.

I use normal YT with premium for music all day, never even felt an urge to try out "YouTube Music". What would be the value add? I already have playlists on normal YT and all my music is there.

Yeah, YTM isn't a _completely_ separate service. It's just a different frontend to YouTube. If you search for one of those "official" music label uploaded songs on youtube, you'll get the exact same video ID as you get on YTM. Conversely, if there isn't an "official" copy uploaded, you'll get joe's random 128kbps triple-encoded upload.

YouTube Music is one of the worst pieces of software ever created. That's the only reason I use Spotify at all. YTM on Android crashes randomly, playback stops randomly, it forgets your playback position in podcasts randomly, sometimes it breaks itself so hard that you have to hard reboot your phone to fix it. It's incredible.

One doesn't even need to pay for YouTube. Just install Brave browser.

Habits and familiarity are pretty powerful forces.

Spotify has awesome playlists, both from the community and curated by the company itself.

YouTube is much worse at that, last time I checked. Mostly shitty spam, as with everything Google.

I don't really listen to individual songs or albums, but look for "classic rock for workouts" or "relaxing instrumental for work" etc. Spotify is great for that.

How do you find decent community curated playlists

I just search as normal and look in the playlists. Usually something in the top 2 or 3 results is a good one. I think they're ranked by number of saves or something? Not sure. The official ones labeled "Spotify" are also quite good.

I switched to YouTube Music from Spotify years ago, but have friends who refuse to switch, my understanding is:

- The YTM UI just feels worse than Spotify

- YTM has no official desktop app

- Moving all your liked songs and playlists over is annoying

- The whole shutting down Google Play Music just to release Youtube Music did a lot of damage to their "brand mindshare"

- People think it just means watching music videos on YouTube

- Everyone they know uses Spotify and they like seeing what their friends are listening to and it's easier to share links to songs within platform

> - Moving all your liked songs and playlists over is annoying

I've switched music streaming services a few times and this is always a pain, no matter which streaming service. I really really wish there were some universal export/import format that all these services shared to make switching easier (but I understand that might not be in their interest).

A universal track id number combined with m3u?

To convert links, try this: https://idonthavespotify.donado.co/

From my end the decision to not use the Google product comes from two places. Firstly, any money I send to Google is probably a net negative for the human race as a whole (though the same could probably be said for Spotify). Secondly (and much more importantly for me personally), YouTube is quite addictive, and having premium would enable me. If someone offered me a music streaming subscription with a bit of free crack cocaine on the side, I would not take it over someone offering me just the subscription, regardless of the price (up to a point)

As a counterpoint, YouTube is a vast chasm of highly educational and worthwhile media. There's no other space like it for long-form independent educators, and it's a creative space we need to protect by keeping it economically viable for YouTube. At least until comparable spaces (with sustainable audiences) exist.

There are plenty of better alternatives to YouTube for independent educational media. For example, Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera which allow independent educators and don't rely on poor recommendation algorithms or incessant advertising (both from the platform and in sponsorships)

Better alternative in some regards, maybe, but for discoverability, there is no bigger platform than YT. It's the Walmart of media consumption with a "you're going to make it up in volume" concepts

I've sampled all of those services. None of those have comparable, sustainable mass audiences like YouTube. They also lack integration with my other consumption, which YouTube provides. And in general, the quality of independent educational content I find on YouTube is quite good and is often a product of YouTube culture itself, now that we are no longer in the first generation of YT creators, and I quite like the culture and its aesthetic.

Udemy, Skillshare and Coursera have failed to create a product which attracts me, and the general population. Their focus on specific content and consumption habits is both a blessing and a curse, depending on who you ask.

I don't know about Udemy or Skillshare, but I gave up on Coursera a long time ago because almost everything on there seems to be of a "X for non-X-majors" variety. They tend assume no prerequisites and are generally super watered down.

YouTube is also a vast repository of conspiracy bullshit with a recommender algorithm that is happy to start feeding you as much of it as you can autoplay.

This is my objection to paying them. They push a lot of ragebait. They have a lot of longform advertising that is just raw conspiracies or medical quackery.

My understanding is that 55% of your YouTube premium payment goes to the creators you watched to compensate them for lost ad dollars (and I believe creators actually earn slightly more per premium viewer than per ad-supported viewer). So in some ways, if you pay for YouTube premium you are actually paying to drown out conspiracy theories and ragebait content with whatever content it is that you prefer.

Spotify directly funds/endorses Joe Rogan.

Yes, and you should disable autoplay and browse with intent. You should network with others and use your network as a discovery pipeline instead of relying on an opaque algorithm.

After a while, the algorithm aligns somewhat anyway and you occasionally get a good recommendation from the front page or related videos. But first, you have to curate your tastes so that it knows what to pull.

I could generalize your comment to say that the world wide web itself contains a vast repository of useless or malicious content and is a dangerous pipeline to extremism. But we find corners of it that don't facilitate toxic content, and we ensure the livelihood of those who produce useful things for us. They benefit from a narrowcasting service with a large audience and ad network such as YouTube. Until one of us can provide them a better service, that's what they're stuck with.

Companies with billion of dollars in profit yearly are not charity cases and no one should feel bad about not giving them money.

Who cares about a corp, my comment was focused on keeping creators employed. I do think the splits are terrible, and I recommend directly supporting creators you enjoy.

You said keep Youtube economically viable, not directly pay creators.

keep Youtube economically viable... so that creators can get paid.

Or Apples family offering. For ~€40 we get Apple Music, Apple TV+, 2 TB of iCloud and probably something more for the whole family.

Newpipe is great here too, as well as Freetube.

YouTube music's biggest issue is that it's run by Google. The second biggest issue is that they kill their best apps every 5-10 years. YouTube music is only recently getting to Google music parity.. the app that they killed 5 years back and replaced with YT music.

Also, they've ruined whatever they offered for podcast management when they killed google podcasts and tried to direct users to YT music -_-.

their podcast integration works. it's not amaaazing but no issues with it.

the migration from Google Play Music was pretty uneventful for me. (i assume folks with huge uploaded libraries might not share this impression.)

I would be more interested in YouTube music if it allowed users to play the audio of any video. Right now, a video has to be tagged by the creator as music for it to be made available on the app.

YT Music is generally as good or better for casual listening. There's a potential deal breaking quirk in that some tracks are user uploads. You can find obscure stuff that's not easily available elsewhere, but I've found quite a few tracks that are low quality CD or vinyl rips, and concert bootlegs. If you build a playlist, it's not easy to weed out the trash.

YouTube doesn't let me add certain tracks to playlists because it has mistakenly labeled them as for kids. It's a stupid platform with way dumber limitations than Spotify.

I never cared for Spotify, but I was an early Google Play Music user. Loved it. Then they forced me to YT music and I left for Apple. The YT UI was so bad.

Now I have both AM and YTM because of bundling. AM stream quality is noticeably better. The YTM UI has gotten better over the years and I think the sheer size of YTM means there are tons of playlists which I like.

My preference now would be to duplicate all the YTM user playlists to AM.

I use Apple because of the One plan. Not about to pay for anything else.

I tried switching to it years ago after I was forced to migrate from Play Music (which was superior, IMO). I was _very_ turned off to YT Music matching songs in my library with random audio tracks from YT videos. Perhaps they no longer do this, but I went with Apple Music, which is what I've used since.

And now I'm mad about Play Music shutting down again!

(They, Amazon Music and iTunes/Apple Music had a true "music locker" service where you could upload songs from your library, no matter the source, and play them anywhere. iTunes/Apple Music is the only one left that does this, and even then, I'm not sure if the iTunes part works on Android.)

I'm not sure if the upload part works, but once it's uploaded it plays just fine.

> I was _very_ turned off to YT Music matching songs in my library with random audio tracks from YT videos. Perhaps they no longer do this

I was also mega turned off by this... initially. At some point it stopped happening to me unintentionally and now it only really happens if I start playing from a YouTube video (which is actually quite help for some obscure songs/remixes). You can also turn off this functionality all together in the settings.

> a true "music locker" service where you could upload songs from your library, no matter the source, and play them anywhere

You can upload your own music and then stream it from any device on YouTube Music now

For me a few reasons:

* cost isn’t really a factor, a couple of quid either way ain’t gonna impact my life

* what I’m interested in is the artists I rate getting paid.

* Google are even more evil than Spotify.

I've been using YT Music for years and have all my playlists there, but am now considering switching to Spotify because _everyone_ I know sends me Spotify links. I then also feel bad sharing YT Music links when their entire ecosystem (car audio etc) is centered on Spotify, and YouTube is likely to play an ad if they're not a subscriber. Music sharing is kind of a big thing for me and it sucks that I'm now paying for a service I don't use just to share links with people >.<

I hear you, just a bandaid but maybe checkout https://github.com/sjdonado/idonthavespotify

Oh that might do! I'll try it, thank you.

I’ve seen https://idonthavespotify.donado.co used for converting between services but when I tried it just now with some Apple Music links it identified albums wrong

Sharing anyway in case YouTube music links work better

I just tried this via that site as well as the Raycast extension and unfortunately keep getting server errors :(

Spotify has albeit unofficial headless client for linux. None of other services I know does. It implements the same interface as smart speakers so can be controlled remotely by any gui client.

Yes! Spotify evidently does something. You can watch the Netflix show, that takes the original approach to explaining its success from the different angles of key people involved, to review one of the best approaches to answering this question for a company I’ve ever seen.

In a world where musicians and listeners have all the other choices to connect still, IMO Spotify completely deserves its position. I detest the low effort complaints by ppl on Reddit saying their financial success is not deserved.

Recommendations and playlists.

Spotify isn't primarily about playing music for me, it's about finding new music to play.

And Spotify's just where all of that is. The quality of the radio recommendations, the fact that there's always a playlist for every TV show soundtrack, that artists put together their own playlists, the quality and variety of playlists overall, and it's where cool people I know create and update their public playlists.

None of the other services seem to come close in terms of that. I see links to Spotify playlists all over the internet. I don't think I've ever seen a link to a YouTube Music playlist?

YT Music recommender algo is pretty good.

Easy to start a mix/radio from any track/video or playlist.

There are public playlists, though I have no idea how well curated they are.

It's also got a lot more niche music in it. I've switched because that. Practical everyone is on YouTube(willing or not), good luck finding that one self published song from 2009 uploaded from an abandoned account on Spotify though.

Exactly. Recordings of live sets, strange/interesting post/doom/stoner metal albums, and - for better or worse - all the bootlegged stuff that Spotify doesn't have because legal disputes as user uploads.

The Spotify app started suggesting me albums it labels as "Sponsored recommendations" a few months ago and it's really put me off. Now it's hard to trust how good it is at finding new music if Spotify is admitting to deliberately excluding most of its database and prefiltering down to its sponsors.

You're right though, the rest of the things you mention do make it much tougher to decide on whether to switch and what to switch to.

I consider Youtube negative value. It is a service explicitly designed to suck up as much as possible of my time / attention, and youtube doesn't change how their algorithm works just because you pay for it with real money. The watchtime maximizing works the exact same time as at the very least all the content produced withing the ecosystem still needs to be watchtime maximizing.

Why would I ever pay for that?

Edit-to-add: Not to mention that I have yet to forgive google for killing Play Music, a much superior service.

People don't talk about this much, but much of Play Music lives on in Youtube Music. I am not sure if its because I was grandmothered in or something, but all my mp3s that are definitely not otherwise on YouTube still shockingly exist in my Youtube Music "Library".

The storage and library is, yes, AFAICT. It's a "full" migration, everyone I know who used Play Music heavily has had no data-retention issues at all with YT Music.

But the UX is so much worse, it's just mindblowing. Basically all of them left for something else eventually.

Does youtube music have a desktop app yet? Or do they still expect me to hunt down one of my many tabs in one of my many browser windows any time I want to change a song? It's a ridiculous UX killer.

I also don't want my music to stop when I restart my browser.

> do they still expect me to hunt down one of my many tabs in one of my many browser windows any time I want to change a song

Pin the tab? And chrome has a button to show all playing media in all tabs.

You could also use a separate profile to solve both the finding and the browser-closing issues.

They could also just release a desktop app like a normal company

I'm not a Spotify user, I'm an Apple Music user, though if there wasn't Apple Music I'd use Spotify.

The reason that I'd never use YT Music is that I never trust anything from Google: their interfaces are ugly, everything's user-unfriendly, and they have the habit of discontinuing a service at any time. Also it has the impression of not really being well-thought as a product: why name a music service after a video service? I know it's not the case but it always reminds me of those low quality music playlists where people collected low quality unofficial music videos back then in YT just for the music: simply not the right tool for the job.

A lot of people listened to music from YouTube as their primary source besides an FM radio before Spotify was available as it is now. YouTube somewhat famously signed deals with music labels back in the day. Content ID was the controversial, but necessary compromise for the music to remain on YouTube. I am pretty sure a very significant percentage of music listeners globally listen mainly from YouTube, I did it and I also saw a lot of people doing it.

It may seem stupid or counter productive, but it is easy and good enough. YT Music is a clear upgrade for those users.

I think YT Music makes more sense than many of the Google initiatives and it will continue to make sense as long as they will have deals with music labels.

Those people generally didn’t care about audio quality, YouTube for me seems synonymous with unreliable bit rates and disorganisation.

Quoting a reddit post:

> Youtube's best audio is format 251: Opus with a variable bitrate target of 128k. Note that 128k Opus is approximately equal in quality to 320k mp3 (as in, it's generally considered transparent)

I care a lot about audio quality and I use YT premium for music just about every day. You also get enhanced bitrate on some videos with premium.

I use regular YouTube (not Music) for discovering music by way of playlist mix videos sometimes (such as the retrowave/chillwave/etc mixes by soulsearchanddestroy), but if I like a playlist well enough I’ll rebuild it in my Apple Music library with a combination of tracks on AM natively or in some cases with Bandcamp purchases. Music being tied up in YouTube long term is cumbersome, even with YT Premium offline downloads as an option.

Google already shut down their first music streaming service.

Trying to get your playlists out was a complete nightmare too, some moron at Google decided on a ridiculously poor data structure. It was something utterly absurd like a zip with a CSV file per track, that generally had only that track in it.

Not going back to a Google run one.

Shut down seems a bit much, it was transitioned from google play music to youtube music.

I still have all my google play music playlists from 2015 in youtube music.

Well, they shut down two music services. The first was Songza, which they bought. They then took everything Songza had- namely their awesome mood-based, artisanally curated playlists- and put it into Google Play Music. Then they seemingly let go of everyone who maintained the playlists and never updated them again? Those playlists on Songza were _excellent_ and the Snoop Dog collabs were just delightful.

Not sure how Google internally makes decision but I imagine it works entirely quarter by quarter trying to measure individual Impact with no overarching vision or direction.

YT Music really is odd. I pay for YT Premium and so have played with it a few times but it feels rather ill-suited for its purpose… as you say, the video streaming heritage is quite evident. Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, heck even Amazon Music last I tried it have much more music-oriented UIs.

YouTube is also actively hostile to third party devs in ways that at least Apple isn’t, somehow. Third party Apple Music clients have existed for years using official Apple-provided APIs, which YouTube isn’t going to ever allow even for paying customers.

Because the Youtube Music app is garbage. I already have Youtube premium and tried cancelling my Spotify for a few months, even transferred my saved playlists over, and it was a horrible enough experience that I'm back to paying for both.

That’s a little pot calling the kettle black. The Spotify app has been horrendous for years, ever since they started jamming in all the podcasts and garbage.

100% this. I pay for YT Premium so I have YT Music for free, and I still choose to pay for Spotify because the YT Music app is that bad. Spotify's app is not perfect by any stretch, but comparatively it's amazing. I really miss the old Google Music service. But so goes almost any product run by Google for long enough -- slowly and inevitably into the ground (at least in terms of user experience, if not always in market share).

Wow. YT Music must be extremely bad if Spotify is comparatively amazing. There are so many UX and general usability issues that drive me crazy and crazier still that they have made essentially 0 improvements to the app UX in the last 5 years.

Other streaming services are unfortunately not an adequate replacement for myself, so I'm stuck with Spotify for now, unless I become determined to download my entire 8k+ library of songs for self-hosted options.

I have youtube premium and music. I've never tried spotify but I have to believe it's better than youtube music. It's hard to believe it could possibly be worse.

Standard Google stuff.

For context, I'm an ex-Googler, worked there 2016-2023 during this. For entertainment's sake, I'll list it as I experienced it, rather than just rotely saying "lol disorganized"

- 2008-2015: Huge, absurd Apple fanboy. waiter => create startup => iOS dev. Sold it.

- 2016: Apple rejects me b/c no degree, suggests calling back in a couple years. Google makes me an offer. I join Google.

- October 2016: Wow Pixel looks cool...I work on Android watches...lets try Pixel.

- November 2016: I've been missing out on so much with web services!!! Google is in the future while Apple is in the past!! Even just Google Play Music: Google has iTunes in the browser. Wow!!!!

- 2017: Aw they're shutting down Google Play Music...but hey, I get it! I can see the internal musings and it makes sense, YouTube can commit more resources and has a great content catalog!

- 2018: Wow this dogfood version is great! Lots missing from Google Play Music, seems like a thin shim over YouTube x "play audio only" button x music rights, but there's plenty of time to iterate before release!

- 2019: Ehhh meh this is starting to feel weird, hasn't really evolved much. I do love the recommendation feed better! There's still some stuff to add back, I know they're working on adding your own files back, and they have that excellent Google Play Music/iTunes in the browser UI to be inspired by!

- 2020: Goodbye Play Music, sunset, gone. Ehhhh nothing really changed with YouTube Music, but at least I'm saving money compared to Spotify

- 2022: Podcasts is gonna get sunset and merged into YouTube Music? Makes sense, I guess.

- 2023: Oh man, they sunset Podcasts and YouTube Music wasn't actually prepared for this, they had the absolute MVP for Podcasts...Oh man, look at public backlash.

Man, BigCo management is hard...at the top, they only have bandwidth for Game of Thrones stuff of "We should take podcasts!!" but "delegate" the actual work and people are people, they do exactly what they need to with exactly the resources they have. I guess its cool they're publicly owning the backlash.

- 2024: I am still using YouTube Music. I see your comment on HN, and realize I would have been happier on Spotify all along.

Terrible app, variable quality since they clearly re-use music uploaded originally as video with a static background. Apple Music is king of streaming quality, however neither Apple Music nor YTM can beat Spotify's algorithm as far as the kind of music I listen to is concerned.

I pay for YouTube Premium but still don't use the music app because of how bad it is. They are not a real competitor to Spotify.

I don't pay attention to Spotify, are you saying YT Music is lacking features? If so, which one(s)?

Why use either when you can download songs from normal YouTube (via yt-dlp) for free?

I've indeed been asking myself that, as a current Spotify customer. The whole point of paying for a streaming service is the convenience of it combined with the monetary support of the artists on it. If Spotify is decreasingly convenient, and Spotify is decreasingly paying artists their fair share, then at some point I might as well just go back to torrenting whole discographies like it's 2005.

On this topic, I'm sick and tired of Spotify's recommendation algorithm and ready to jump to a superior service, would love to hear HN's recommendations. Happy to pay for a good service.

My listening style basically comes down to vibe, e.g. "I want to imagine myself as a jaded ex-con planning my next heist" and "I'm duking it out with an aggressively hegemonizing von Neumann swarm in the asteroid belt"

Apple Music is quite good. Better masters, good recommendations, no fuss - and they pay artists more, supposedly.

Recently made the switch and have been very happy with the service.

> they pay artists more, supposedly

They don't. Spotify pays out roughly 66% of their revenue as royalties, while Apple Music only does about 50%. [1]

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-music-reveals-how-much-it... https://archive.is/lRZns

Dang that sucks.

Man, I really, really hate this situation.

No, they misread.

That percentage doesn’t really explain anything. What if Apple has more revenue? What if Apple users stream less, so royalty costs per subscription are lower? In both cases the AM payout could be fairer for artists and the percentage could still be lower.

The article you cite actually claims the latter is true, so it seems looking at just that statistic is misleading.

Did you even read what you posted ? "Its average per-stream payout rate is lower"

That comes down to Spotify being mostly ad supported users and Apple being all paid. If Spotify got rid of their free tier their 60-70% rev share would be more than Apple's 50%. But then the number of streams would go down by 50-60%, counterintuitively the total payout would only go down like 10-15% tho.

Desktop app that doesn't work any more suddenly and there's no actual support to speak of. That's already five steps below Spotify.

Plus actually shitty UX/UI people like to call good, but it lacks plenty of really really basic features. Like having control over if a song is added to the queue to be played next or last, or just being able to preview what stations are going to play (it's a minefield of an UI to try and find new songs while also not interrupt the current one).

I'm not sure I can reproduce some of these complaints. Play next and add to queue are both there for me. What do you mean by "doesn't work any more"? I just opened it; it's definitely in need of a UX update but seems to work fine.

Maybe it's just the tvOS version that lacks the option I described? I was disappointed in Spotify on tvOS so I'm using Music there. I guess platform inconsistency is an another negative of Music.

And by "doesn't work" it just says "an error occured" and nothing helps. I've even reinstalled it. Judging by reddit posts about it, it's a common issue. (Its logs also provide 0 hints about the error it encounters.)

A big drawback is that they erase your data whenever you stop subscribing (playlists, liked songs, etc).

Oh that's fascinating. That's a privacy trade, isn't it?

After nearly 10 years of Spotify I think I have heard it all. Now my discover weekly is filled with rock covers of pop songs or music I'm just not into. So either the algorithm got bad or I discovered all music I like.

I can recommend everyone this video by Rick Beato: The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo

That pop cover stuff is getting out of hand, it's was nice dose of nostalgia at first but I now skip every one because its such spam and I don't want to be recommended them

While I agree that music has become more homogenized and crap than ever before, I think Rick here is just applying incorrect beliefs to this process. I think the only point he makes that is valid is that finding signal through all the noise is harder than ever (and is something that can be said about music, tv, movies, writing, nearly every creative pursuit).

Music is too easy to make? So people like producers and record executives don't have the power they used to. That's a good thing. The history of music proves this.

Music is too easy to consume? I legit don't know how to respond to this. Just because music isn't part of kids' identities anymore doesn't mean that's because it's too easy to consume. Times change, Rick. Whereas they used to share music now they share streamers and YouTubers.

The main argument that derails Rick here is in the first few minutes. He claims that music all sounds the same because of the tools available. He claims that music sounds the same because someone is comfortable with sounds that are familiar. He doesn't really say whether it's record companies or artists or consumers. Just some nebulous 'they'.

It's always been like that. Always. When a band gets popular, other bands pop up just like them to try to steal their popularity and money (Fats Domino and Chubby Checker is the oldest example I can think of without googling it). There are 'sounds' of decades. You can name sounds from the 50's, or 60's, or 80's, **all from way before this technology he's blaming existed.

Overall that video comes across as an old person who longs for the better days of their youth and is upset they can't make money in ways they want to. Welcome to the fucking world. Times change. Change with them or don't, it's your problem.

It takes intentional effort to streer the algorithm back to anything reasonable. Skip the garbage and "like" anything you want to see more.

I don't know why they have to make it so hard for people to express their listening intent.

Try tidal. Their app is a bit worse in terms of device compatibility but their discovery is better and seems to give you more on theme similar tracks.

All of the streaming services are awful at discovery. They'll introduce you to stuff that you already like or stuff that people in your cohort like, which, 90% of the time, is what you already like.

I landed up going back to college/community radio for true discovery (i.e. you'll find stuff you hate AND stuff that you love from genres that you didn't know existed). I use Bandcamp to find/buy new music in genres I love and know well.

For people reading this who are interested in trying this out, these are the stations that I listen to:

- KEXP (Seattle, WA/Bay Area)

- KTRU (Houston, TX) <-- home station

- KPFT (Houston, TX) <-- home station

- WMSE (Milwaukee, WI)

- WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA)

- KVNO (Omaha, NE) <-- classical

- KCSM (San Mateo Area) <-- jazz

- SomaFM Indie Pop Rocks!

- SomaFM Metal Detector

You can also try scanning the lower end of your radio dial (under 93 MHz), as this is usually spectrum that's reserved for community and college radio stations. Some college stations still broadcast in AM, though this, and AM radio writ large, is dying out.

---

While I'm on this soapbox: Apple Music's shuffle absolutely biases towards bigger/more popular artists.

I once had a few (like, between 10 and 20) Taylor Swift songs in my library in a 2000+ song playlist I used to shuffle in the mornings. I don't listen to her very often, and I didn't have any of her albums in my library at the time.

EVERY SINGLE TIME I'd shuffle all of the songs in this playlist or my library, Taylor Swift would get queued up way more than she should have given my listening history. I removed all of her songs from my library to get it to stop.

I get much more variety when I shuffle all of my _downloaded_ songs (which, I believe, is everything in my library).

Thanks for plugging local radio that also stream! I support my local radio as well and for the same reasons: discovery. Listener supported also has the benefit of zero ads.

Here are my two stations that I listen to:

- WBER https://wber.org

- WITR https://witr.rit.edu

Nice recommendations. Thanks! The no-ads bit is great; I agree! (I donate to keep that train going!)

Do you know why USA radio systems are all named Kxxx or Wxxx? Some kind of code assigned by the governement?

It's a radio callsign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...)

> The FCC policy covering broadcasting stations limits them to call signs that start with a "K" or a "W", with "K" call signs generally reserved for stations west of the Mississippi River, and "W" limited to stations east of the river.

OK thanks. That's cool. Presumably our local radio stations also have them, even if I can't find them with a quick duckduckgoogle.

This is a relatively new invention as well. When radio first started in the US (late 1890s), callsigns were arbitrary. I believe the Kxxx and Wxxx divide started in the 1920s. Also, this callsign convention applies for TV broadcast as well.

Thank you for your thorough and informative post!

I’ve been a big fan of the shows on Apple Music! They have a pretty decent variety and you can listen to a backlog of shows and with their own distinct vibe. There’s a couple I tune into but my favorites are Matt Wilkinsons daily show at noon GMT and classical connections with Alexis Ffrench. I do appreciate the human curation with a lot of these programs they’ve been putting out.

My best experience is deezer

This is a seriously left-field suggestion, because, it's neither a streaming service nor a recommendation algorithm, but over the years I've never found anything better than last.fm for classification of music.

For as long as I can remember, last.fm has had the ability to show you similar artists when given any one particular artist. And it's remarkably good, in my opinion.

With it, I've discovered so much great music that I'd have never stumbled upon organically.

It's also totally free to browse and without signing up. For example, browse artists similar to Jean Knight: https://www.last.fm/music/Jean+Knight (scroll down to "Similar Artists", or just tack on /+similar to the URL)

Damn. Nice. Thank you.

So how do the other streaming services compare, this isn’t sustainable.

So pretty much there all the same, SoundCloud though is different

https://blog.groover.co/en/tips/how-much-do-streaming-servic...

To pu it another way, what level of Royalties should be paid? It just seems to be market to the bottom. Gigs and merch.

Most streaming services take a similar cut of the revenue.

Spotify pays out 70% of revenue they receive to owners of the music, BandCamp 75%, SoundCloud 80%. Could be slightly better, but it's not outrageous.

The real problems for artists are:

a) they are not the owners of the music, their record label takes most of it, and the rest is split between the artists, songwriters, producers, etc.

b) bad deals with (but good for) the customers - ~10/month for unlimited music too good value

One of the (only) things I think Spotify gets wrong as a service is they’re too cheap. I pay for prime, Spotify and Netflix in my house - (we occasionally sub Netflix for Disney). A price rise to Netflix or prime would cause us to reconsider, but I think I would stomach Spotify doubling their price quite easily with no change in service.

Counter example, if they raised their price by more than $1-2, I'd cancel it. The music discovery hasn't been great and it mostly suggests playlists of the songs I already listen to. Inertia is the only reason I haven't cancelled and bought all the songs directly

They did and I did

See I think how you feel about Spotify is exactly how I feel about Netflix. I don’t use the discovery of Spotify much, if at all. The value is the catalog.

Spotify is already steep in my eyes when I compare it to Netflix. Probably because I'm looking at video bandwidth vs audio bandwidth but paying for music more than you pay for movies feels weird in my monkey brain. No shiny picture, less money monkey say.

For me the value proposition is that there’s zero fragmentation. I know that by paying what I do for Spotify, I have access to pretty much everything. That’s worth a decent premium to me.

The problem with Netflix is the same as console exclusives in video games - fragmenting the ecosystem means I look at the service for the content it has vs the other services. But with Spotify it fills that niche entirely.

> I know that by paying what I do for Spotify, I have access to pretty much everything

Apple Music, Tidal etc have almost identical libraries.

Catalog size stopped being a differentiator years ago.

I mean compared to video streaming sites - Netflix and prime have vastly different libraries. If Spotify and Apple Music had different libraries to the same degree, id probably bounce between them both and be more price sensitive. The fact that Spotify (and apple and tidal) have the full catalog mean the network effect is likely to be my main decider.

Spotify maybe cheap compared to Netflix.

But it is way overpriced compared to Apple Music (definitely) and Tidal (arguably).

Not having lossless audio and paying artists less is ridiculous.

We have duo for my wife and I, so Spotify is £8.50/month each. Apple Music is £11/mo.

60% of my listening is through a pair of AirPods over Bluetooth, 30% on a Sonos system and 10% using semi decent wired headphones. Lossless isn’t something that is a differentiator for me.

I have some music on both Spotify and Apple Music - the reality is that even with a few thousand streams per month we haven’t even made back the cost of 2 hours of rehearsal space. The reality is that for artists making a living off this, the problem isn’t the difference between 75 and 80% that Spotify holds onto, it’s the fact that the artist only sees 15-20% of what’s left over.

Not sure where you get 75% for Bandcamp. They take a 15% cut for digital sales, 10% for physical, plus processing fees.

Also, they’re not really a streaming service: you can preview a lot of music on the platform, but it’s primarily about buying music. It’s not really a good comparison to Spotify at all.

But does Spotify pay the same rate to each artist, or does the rate depend on what deal an artist's record company has with Spotify?

Doesn't Spotify still have a free tier? I think that would account for the biggest discrepancy in their payouts.

(a) is the real problem for many of the musicians who have vocally complained about this. If you look at most songs produced by record labels, you will see 5 songwriter credits, 10 producers, and a whole band to pay. Not to mention the army of recording engineers and the marketing staff.

Those people are doing real work, it's normal they're paid too. If musicians want more for themselves they could cut middlemen and produce and commercialize themselves their music.

Absolutely, and they are pretty much all equal participants in the creation of the sound you are hearing. It's just one worker (the headline artist) who gets all the attention.

It seems to be happening more and more these days. JPEGMafia is a good example

I saw an artist say recently on insta reels that if their fanbase switched to Apple Music it would go from beer money to more than their day job. And apparently even more from Tidal. They acknowledged that spotify is the elephant in the room with 80% of their audience on it.

Let's not assume that in a world where Apple has 80% market share artists are getting paid better...

Both Apple Music and Tidal (and Google Music, Amazon) can afford to lose money as long as leadership want the service to stay online.

I don't think it's sustainable for musicians to rely on cross financing via other services or VC money. Further consolidation under under big tech conpanies would be a negative IMO

Might want to take a look in the mirror with regard to tech...

Is there an actual breakdown somewhere on how much, exactly, an artist makes on each platform, similar to this calculator?

Apple and Spotify both pay 70% but the devil is in the details. Apparently Spotify gives out 70% of its revenues based on what percentage of streams the artist has that month. What that means is that regardless of what you listen to, a percentage of what you pay will go to the heavy hitters like Taylor Swift. There's an excellent chance that the obscure artist you listen to doesn't get much of anything.

If Apple actually pays rights holders based on what you actually play that would be a huge difference.

Most probably because a large amount of their fan base uses free accounts. So of course it would make them more money if they switched to Apple Music, because they’d start paying.

The website appears to still be up, I literally used it minutes before posting this comment. Is this the correct URL https://www.spotify-unwrapped.com/ ?

No, this is a copycat - the original was at https://www.spotifyunwrapped.org/. (Although it does seem that one of the articles linked in the source made the same mistake!)

in a serious society, Spotify (and related business models) would never exist. the profession of music producer is almost a voluntary job with negative ROI

Why? The underlying business model of "being a middleman and take a 30% cut" seems pretty solid. Is it because nobody would be musicians? This almost sounds like "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". If nobody wants to produce music because the ROI is too low, then some musicians will drop out, and the ROI for the remaining musicians will go up because there's less competition. The only way this will fail is if people aren't willing to pay any amount for music, but that seems unlikely.

>> Why?

because the streaming business model and the convenience of having any song from any artist in the palm of your hand has canabalized any and all other possibilities for musicians that would otherwise pay better. you have a few people/fans that insist on paying for the music in platforms like bandcamp, but thats uncommon. from the user's point of view, it's the perfect world, where he pays a little to have access to the entire musical catalog on the planet.

It's not like revenues from streaming are that bad these days, they're the highest they've been in ~20 years. The late 90s massive profits of CDs were more of an aberration rather than some natural order. https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-for... https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Lots of words about a legal threat, but I didn't actually see what those words were that were so threatening. On what grounds does Spotify have the ability to shut down a satire site? How spineless are Unwrapped to immediately cave?

The entire discussion here is people's opinion on the Spotify service compared to its competitors, yet no actual discussion of TFA.

> How spineless are Unwrapped to immediately cave?

Most people are going to back down straight away. Seriously, most people won't even stand up and have local employment laws applied. Many will keep silent about things they saw even when there is no possible retribution. Most people aren't willing to battle over things.

Because the legal/administrative costs of a lawsuit will bankrupt the poor. It's not worth the risk unless the a group like the EFF expressly backs them. This is systematic.

Even if it doesn't cost people will generally not fight. Seriously, go look at all the people complaining on Reddit about their Bosses but don't even bother to fight back by looking for a new job.

Not all costs are (directly) money. Looking for a new job costs time, and stress, and possibly the costs of relocating, which can include being farther away from friends and community you currently have.

To me, that's just reaching. Fight or flight is a thing. Not everyone is going to fight. Just face, generally, it's not a cost thing, it's a "they're not a fighter" thing.

You can't discount precedent as a major force in human nature. Domestic abuse is one good example. Another is taxation, a system originally built off of ritualized extortion from pillaging hordes of nomads and empires in conquest.

> You can't discount precedent as a major force in human nature

I'm not even sure what your point here is.

> Domestic abuse is one good example.

I don't think you truly understand domestic abuse. It has multiple layers. The first step in to find someone who is vulnerable aka someone who is not a fighter.

> Another is taxation, a system originally built off of ritualized extortion from pillaging hordes of nomads and empires in conquest.

And literally the reason for multiple wars and overthrowing of multiple governments/regimes/monarchies/etc. To this day, the reason it's accepted is because we consider it going to the common good and pooling our money to save ourselves money. Healthcare is a good example of pooling money to save money. But you see plenty of people fight against it to this day.

>To this day, the reason it's accepted is because we consider it going to the common good and pooling our money to save ourselves money.

Have you ever lived in the developing world?

Their taxes are so high because of the national debt. They got that debt to provide things that were urgently needed. Anyways, this has nothing to do with the subject at hand since there are people who campaign against these things aka fight.

Most of the debt was/is taken on to pay off political patrons, mostly characterized in the form of marked-up procurement. The IMF then turns off the tap as soon as a new regime takes power and decides to default. They don't stop making the maintenance payments because their rivals will pay off the patrons they can't and they would lose their support.

Their taxes are high because cronyism is pervasive and society is structure in a rigid caste-based hierarchy.

Hot take: Maybe music consumption and production has changed enough that it's basically a commodity now, and maybe not worth paying "full" price for anymore most of the time?

There's a tiny handful of artists for whom I'd go out of my way to buy an album directly from them (or a t shirt, or concert or whatever, just to support them).

But for most of my day, music is more just a background thing, like having the radio on, and I don't really pay attention to what's playing or know or care who makes it. Most of it could be (or maybe already is) AI generated and I wouldn't know the difference. I would not pay $20 for an album of that stuff.

I think it's interesting to compare the music industry with the video games one. Both have a glut of suppliers with many invisible titles and producers trailing behind a few famous ones. Both had physical media and big publishers in the 90s and 2000s before transitioning to downloads and streaming. The PC games market moved to pretty effective market segmentation divided between full price new release titles, Steam sales for older games, and first or third party subscriptions like EA Play or Ubisoft Plus or Microsoft Gamepass. Each reaches a different part of the market and can accommodate both players who rent and those who buy. There's also room for smaller indie games, between Steam and Humble Bundle and GOG.

The music market seems archaic, oligopolistic, and predatory by comparison. Where's the Valve of music, offering a great service for both consumers and producers? We do have Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc., but why can't they make the finances there work when the also expensive video games market seemed to be doing OK (at least until the post covid bubble burst these last two years)?

I'm curious when AI generated music will displace most artist-created music on Spotify or similar platforms, and if we will even notice. It will probably cost a few dollars per track to generate.

Maybe we'll be left with a handful of Beyoncé's or Taylor Swift's that expand beyond just music, and the rest is generated.

> I'm curious when AI generated music will displace most artist-created music on Spotify or similar platforms, and if we will even notice. It will probably cost a few dollars per track to generate.

I sure hope not. I may not buy lots of music, but I have been to see many of my favourite artists in person, in venues that range from a few hundred people to a few thousand - certainly nothing on the scale of Swift or Beyoncé. And I discovered many of those artists through streaming.

Likely relevant: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2397-there-is-a-theory-whic...

I suspect that AI generated music will be widely produced and consumed in the same way AI movies will largely be used for say commercials or cutscenes, AI images for commercial illustration, and LLM text for content writing; interstitial filler material that is obligatory but no one really seeks out. So you’ll hear royalty-free AI-generated muzak when you’re on hold watching network TV show procedurals/sitcoms, meditation apps and low-fi hip-hop beats channels. When there needs to be sound that you’re not actually focusing on.

the Valve of music might be Bandcamp.

The Epic Games Store of music, surely.

The Gorbino's Quest of music!

I'd buy albums off Bandcamp for artists I already know, but I wouldn't use it for discovery. Do they even have discovery features? (I honestly don't know)

Steam's recommendations (and more importantly, sales) are how I discover new games. And there's a lot of titles (both games and music) I'd happily pay $2 or $5 for, but not $20 or $50. There's a lot MORE titles I'd be happy to try for a monthly all inclusive subscription.

For music, I wish Spotify would add a "Like this track? As a Premium subscriber, you can buy the whole album for only $5!" function. That's way less than a full price album but still way more money than the artist would get from streaming.

They kind-of do. The main page allows you to browse popular albums by genre. Each individual album also has a "recommended by this artist" footer, or "people who bough this also bought" (if there aren't any recommendations set).

I also check profiles of other people who purchased an album I liked and see if anything catches my interest.

I do not use Spotify, so I'm not sure if the above counts as a proper discovery tool.

Click the tags on any release to jump into to their discovery system, or get there from the genre/tag/countries buttons on the homepage.

https://bandcamp.com/discover/

Disagree. Bandcamp doesn't require a bloated desktop app that needs to install a bunch of updates every time you open it. Songs you download are yours to play and distribute as you please. They don't require an active Internet connection to check your license and track your listening habits.

Besides that, Steam is the go-to place to publish games. The only reason you wouldn't distribute on Steam is if you are a Nintendo or Epic-level megacorp that has its own store and exclusivity rules. On Bandcamp, the decision to upload an album comes down to whether the record label allows it. So a lot of times, artists will post early works to BC and drop it as soon as they sign with a label.

Yeah bandcamp is closer to GOG, because it's DRM free, and you can get all your games in offline installer format if you so desire.

That was probably true before Epic bought them. Less so now.

You’re one sale behind the times, Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr in 2023

As someone who regularly buys music on Bandcamp, I can't say that I've noticed any substantial changes throughout the acquisitions.

It also seems that most bands that I listen to prefer people to buy their music on Bandcamp before other platforms, so presumably it's still a better deal for the artists as well?

I believe so yes, they make their payout % clear and are continuing to do days where they waive their cut entirely.

> when the also expensive video games market seemed to be doing OK

I’m pretty sure ballooning AAA budgets leading to studio death marches, lack of courage to innovate and deviate from a winning formula, the demise of mid-budget games, etc. have plagued the industry for over a decade now.

Whereas in Olde Hollywood, streaming has eaten its lunch, theaters are struggling to stay afloat, the demise of mid-budget films (when’s the last time you’ve seen a comedy in theaters?), and so on.

The book publishing industry is made up of copyright hawks, I can only assume because the internet has allowed self-publishing and unending amounts of free text to compete with.

This is not a good time for content in any format.

> (when’s the last time you’ve seen a comedy in theaters?)

A month ago, for Beetlejuice2.

IMO a comedy is one of the only reasons to still go to a theater. The communal experience of everyone laughing is terrific.

Ah, an exception that truly proves the rule. A sequel stuck in production hell for thirty-six years. Granted, it appears to have the mid-budget of what we used to see plenty of (in films such as comedies), but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the Sydney Sweeney rom-com that also came out this year are rarities; it’s been widely known for years that comedies have fallen out of favor from the cinema. (Some say MCU-style superhero quip fests replaced them.) Sample coverage:

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/6-reasons-why-comedy-in-fil...

https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/comedy-movie-not-dead-busi...

https://whatculture.com/film/it-s-official-movie-comedies-ar...

There are opportunities to laugh at the movies, but they tend not to be specifically comedies.

I think people have a short memory. It was not that long ago that you’d have to pay 10+e for an album, where most of that would go to the record labels. Now I can pay 10e a month and listen to almost every song ever made, and I’m not going to be willing to pay much more than that.

Artists make their money with live events nowadays. Spotify’s average profit for the last 4 years is around 500m per year. Investors need to be paid and distributing some of that profit among a handful of top artists isn’t going to go a long way.

So how do you suppose we pay the artists more royalties?

(From a sibling comment of mine)

I wish Spotify would let me "upgrade" individual albums to purchases. Like I'd still pay for my monthly sub, but if I particularly like a track or artist, I could buy that album for a discounted price (like $5, ideally) and the artist would get like 95% of that revenue.

It doesn't really solve the problem of "your music is so generic nobody wants to buy it and nobody can tell you apart from the other similar artists", but maybe it doesn't need to? There's already enough excellent, good, and mediocre music out there to last me several lifetimes even if nothing else gets made. There's way more supply than demand. Everybody wants to be creative, I guess, but not everyone is actually good at it? Maybe it's OK for most of that music to fall by the wayside and only the 1% of the 1% to really make it. Streaming is a good proving ground, and upgrades could help the really good artists earn a bit more.

To me it's not really that different from the infinite supply of shitty books, articles, games, movies, software etc. Most of it just isn't good enough to stand out.

>I wish Spotify would let me "upgrade" individual albums to purchases. Like I'd still pay for my monthly sub, but if I particularly like a track or artist, I could buy that album for a discounted price (like $5, ideally) and the artist would get like 95% of that revenue.

I don't get it, your proposal is that you want to be able to buy albums for less the usual price of $15-20 or whatever? Why would an artist want to do that? Or is the idea basically a tipping function where you "buy" an album for $5, but don't get anything in return?

Qobuz allows purchasing some music (flac).

Qobuz does have its share of problems.

I often found its catalog lacking.

Its plagued with edited versions of albums that aren't labelled as edited.

It lacks filters. I'd like to filter out singles and just browse albums.

If you're looking at Spotify's profit to redistribute, you're looking at the wrong places. The right places would be the payola agreements worth billions they already have in place with the major labels, and the fact that they explicitly allow bot plays to prop up the profits of said labels. Starting in January, they won't even tally royalties for songs that get less than 1000 streams- which means most of their catalog. They will just take the money, and consumers are ok with it because less than a thousand people per artist will care. But hey, it's convenient.

Survival of the fittest? I really don't have a problem with this. Artistry is hard - not everyone can make it. 1000 plays is a failure - financially. It probably costs Spotify more to payout the transaction for such a low amount of plays than the amount they are paying out.

This is a non-excuse. All the accounting is done through distribution partners, not to individual artists, and they have computers available to calculate numbers. They have been doing it until now just fine while making money. So have literally all the other streaming platforms.

Is a million times a thousand plays still nothing?

Artists have always made their money with live events. Back when people bought CDs, artists got a tiny fraction of a fraction of the sale price. These days they get a slightly larger fraction of a smaller price. A handful of artists at the top of the charts can make bank, and the rest struggle, as always.

I don’t see any solution short of some massive government arts program. It comes down to supply and demand. Most musicians play for a love of music. They would (and many do) play music even if they got no money for it at all. That makes for a glut of musicians and a really low equilibrium price of labor.

We see a similar phenomenon (on a much smaller scale) in tech with games. Lots of people really like making games. They’d do it for free. Getting paid for it at all is a dream. Result: pay is not great in that segment of the industry. Not many of us dream of adding some features to CRUD apps and as a result that pays better.

> Most of it could be (or maybe already is) AI generated and I wouldn't know the difference.

I wonder if a complete AI disruption where background music can be generated will increase the demand for live bands, even if at a local pub.

Indie/local book shops have had a revival in the wake of the Amazon bookseller behemoth even as big box stores like Barnes & Noble have flailed or Borders have failed, so you may be onto something there. Counter-market cultural trends lead people to value locally-sourced productions.

>Where's the Valve of music, offering a great service for both consumers and producers?

How do platforms like spotify not offer "great service for both consumers and producers"? They offer the same 70/30 split as steam, and I'm not aware of any widespread consumer discontent for spotify, aside from maybe their reputation for underpaying their artists (see previous point).

Right, so then why don't the economics of Spotify work out if similar margins work in the games and apps industries? Is music really that much more expensive to make than video games? Are music labels much greedier than game publishers? What's different about music that makes artists especially poorly paid vs games?

Or maybe it's just that Spotify is a subscription split between all the listened tracks whereas Steam is individual purchases? It's probably be fairer to compare the economics to Microsoft Gamepass.

>Right, so then why don't the economics of Spotify work out if similar margins work in the games and apps industries?

Can you clarify what you mean by "economics of Spotify work out"? Are you talking about how much money artists are getting from spotify compared to steam? If so, I think the answer is pretty obvious. Video games derive an overwhelming majority of their revenue from selling the product itself and associated DLC/microtransactions. All of that is done through steam or whatever storefront, so the storefronts can rightly claim they're paying hundreds of millions to the publishers/developers. This makes them look "fair". On the other hand for music, streaming is only a fraction of overall revenue. Artists also derive revenue from live performances, merch, and album sales. That makes streaming platforms seem "unfair", because they get so little revenue from them, even if the revenue split is the same. I don't see this as an issue though, only an issue of public perception.

Artists are free to take their works off streaming platforms if they don't like the deal, but I suspect most don't because the free publicity they get from being on streaming platforms drive other revenue sources. Streaming is a loss leader. Artists complaining about this makes as much sense as news publications complaining about how little money they get through subscribers, when their real revenue source is advertisers.

(smallish) artists complain about it because they also run a loss when they try and tour. It’s quite difficult to make any money in this industry, and that’s fundamentally the source of discontent. It feels absurd to make a product then get paid nothing for making that product when lots of people use it.

>It feels absurd to make a product then get paid nothing for making that product when lots of people use it.

It really shouldn't be considered absurd, especially to people on hacker news. Many software projects are used by billions of devices (eg. linux, curl, openssl), but nobody is creating websites protesting how little github pays them. Just because people use your product, doesn't mean they're willing to pay money for it. If you can't make the economics work because nobody is willing to pay for your product, or there are tons of people lining up waiting to undercut you, blaming the platform is barking up the wrong tree.

The main developers of those projects you have listed have all made a living thanks to them.

But those are the rockstars of the FOSS world, the equivalent of Taylor Swift or whatever. I doubt she or artists like her would be complaining about how she doesn't make enough money from music.

The typical way to make a living from open source is to use your work as a portfolio to get a job doing closed-source development. Then if you keep working on your open source stuff it’s either for fun or to keep your portfolio up to date for when you want to switch jobs.

I don’t think there’s a musical equivalent to that strategy.

big names complained too.

also, of course it's a very frequently voiced "observation" that some percentage of a big amount of money... is a big amount itself, yet the marginal cost is - and you might not believe it, but - almost zero!

that's why people complain about taxes, bonuses, etc.

the usual complaints from small artists are usually about how the network effects are "biasing" the payout distribution toward big names. (ie. the fixed monthly subscription revenue split amongst all the artists weighted by plays.)

Thing is, one of the reasons why so many people use the product is because it's so cheap for them. Given the sheer amount of content being produced today, I don't think it's reasonable to expect most of it to command the price that it needs to be for the makers to make money off it. This is separate from the issue of parasites like Spotify, which can still profit in this arrangement by skimming a little bit from everyone.

>I don’t think its reasonable to expect most of it to command the price that it needs to be for the makers to make money off it.

Would it be that much though? Consider an artist with 20k unique regular listeners, which is successful territory but nowhere near big. If albums cost 3-5 bucks, an artist could make a good individual living releasing albums every 8 months or so, which is plenty of time to make em. Songs could then be maybe 30-50 cents. We’re never going back to such a model, but it wouldn’t be that expensive to fund artists.

Spotify boasts a huge free user base, when I looked at their financials, I mathed that a paying user generating 6x as much revenue as the ad supported users. They simply can't raise their payouts and support free users.

Spotify are busy pushing consumers towards ‘Made for Spotify’ music that they don’t beed to pay royalties on

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

There is a Valve for music, it's called CD Baby. Ten bucks buys you instant distribution on all the platforms. That's as good as it gets for both producers and consumers.

http://cdbaby.com

It can't solve the problem of getting artists compensated because Americans do not value music. You yourself even expressed your own opinion of the lack of music's value. This is the fundamental reason why we've allowed Spotify to pocket 99% of the total value of music. If Americans valued music and the musicians that labor to make it more, they would care about artist compensation. But they don't, trusting the 'free' market to do it for them.

>This is the fundamental reason why we've allowed Spotify to pocket 99% of the total value of music

Source? A quick search shows spotify is only pocketing 30%.

https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per...

I thought the hyperbole was over-the-top enough to discourage a strict interpretation, but hyper-rational HN will never crack! And 30% is a lot considering the remainder has to pay the rights holders first.

I think it's pretty telling that they don't have an option for the ad supported users, when they make up like 70% of Spotifies userbase.

Who doesn’t have an option?

Do you get all the audiobooks included with Spotify premium if you use YT music? Spotify is worth the price just for the audiobooks.

It's not "all" audiobooks but there's a massive collection available with your subscription. Definitely worth it in my opinion.

for $30 you can get Roon + Qobuz subscription, i found that it’s impossible to navigate apple music or spotify if you like listening to albums

I struggle with Spotify's anti-album stance as well. I assume it makes them more money because it's easier for them to "guide" you to the songs they make more money on?

Playlists allow spotify to create a moat. It encourages you to listen to (and build) playlists, that wouldn't then be easily available if you try to switch platforms

For those unaware, there are services like TuneMyMusic [1] and Soundiiz [2] that allow you to transfer playlists between platforms for a fee.

Spotify did shut down certain API endpoints last month [3] though, so there's no guarantee these services may continue working for Spotify. Worst case scenario you'd have to download your data [4] and then figure out a way to create playlists on the other platform.

[1] https://www.tunemymusic.com/

[2] https://soundiiz.com/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42260481

[4] https://www.spotify.com/us/account/privacy/

> …i found that it’s impossible to navigate apple music or spotify if you like listening to albums

I can't speak to Spotify, but listening to albums in Apple Music couldn't be more straightforward — (1) choose album, (2) play.

Roon's apps give "generic music player". What about it specifically allows you to play albums successfully, where Spotify and Apple Music trip you up?

On Spotify it's also (1) choose album, (2) play. I'm failing to see how it's any different. There's library sidebar with an albums only filter with a variety of view options, list with covers, compact list, grid of various sizes - if you want to have a hundred of albums on your screen, you got it. There are play buttons on the little album cover thumbnails in that sidebar, or they can be just double clicked to start playing them, there are green play buttons on album cards on artist pages and in search, and on album pages. Am I missing something?

Reminder: A frontend-only web app can be anonymously deployed for free on Github pages, Gitlab pages, Netlify, Zeronet (with a proxy?).

No reason to tip your opponents about your real identity, even if you break no laws, we have the developers of Tornado Cash in prison for crimes they didn't commit, OpenAI's and Boeing's whistleblowers where found dead in mysterious circumstances.

The language of the article implies that Spotify rips artists off while their executives earn millions.

The problem is the millions the executives make do not come directly from Spotify's revenue, they come from stocks which are only loosely related.

Don't get me wrong, Spotify has many issues. And should be rightfully criticized. but if you are going to parody them makes sure it is a humoristic pretence that most people would understand. Juxtaposing CEO stock selling revenue with how much artists actually make, is more misleading than it is humoristic - as stocks prices are merely loosely linked to company income, and by extension loosely linked to the artist's cut.

So I would assume that if a case to be made for taking down the website - it is because it did not convey it is a parody and was edging defamation.

Who do you think created all that stock value for him?

Who do you think creates all the stock value for social media companies? Do you think such users should be equally outraged that their social media site has billions in market capitalization but paid them $0?

um, many users are absolutely. this is still one ot the most frequent critique of these sites. for example Reddit with its IPO, and their bossing around of their unpaid mods, and so on.

at least YT pays some money to creators.

I wasn't aware it takes years of training and possibly expensive schooling to make a social media post. My bad

Effort doesn't entitle you to money. You could get a phd in mongolian basketweaving but that doesn't mean you should be entitled to a decent living from selling baskets. If the economics are not there (ie. the average person not valuing music at more than $10/month, tons of artists lining up to drive down the price) but you go into it anyways, you only have yourself to blame.

What creates stock value is public hype and arbitrary numbers. Company revenue is only loosely related to stock value, and more strongly related to the trend of the stock.

Also a big part of a stock price is how much currently is circulated by big funds in that particular investment sector.

If you want to compare how much yhe company actually takes away from creators - you should substract income from ads and subscriptions from money paid to creators. Not stock selling price which are are speculative at best.

>So I would assume that if a case to be made for taking down the website - it is because it did not convey it is a parody and was edging defamation.

IANAL but under US law that most certainly wouldn't apply because spotify isn't a "non-public person".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_light

My guess is that they used the (still spurious) excuse of trademark infringement, since it uses "spotify" in its name and you could plausibly argue that consumers would be deceived into thinking it's an official spotify site. Most would probably realize it isn't, but the use of "spotify" in its name, and the fact it doesn't disclaim the it's a non-official site probably exposed itself to legal threats.

Serious question - is there no "lite" version of bulletproof hosting where they're not as willing to host e.g. silk road but happy to throw cease and desists by the likes of Spotify for this sort of nonsense in the bin? Surely this is a good opportunity for some enterprising Russians? With how relations are nowadays, it's hard to imagine Putin would give a toss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com