Goodbye, Slopify
alexeystar.com
alexeystar.com
This was one of the reasons why I left Spotify. There are hundreds of posts about this issue on the Spotify community site, e.g.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Option-to...
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Spotify-P...
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/I-Sent-a-Playl...
Spotify is also funny for maintaining the existence of their feature suggestion community boards while just utterly stonewalling for years while thousands of paying users beg for stuff like…being able to hide a section of the home screen, or not have long-standing playlists magically change.
At least on Tidal you can email customer support about it, but they are slow (probably under staffed) and it usually takes weeks for them to fix things and now with the constant flood of AI-made music, the crap accumulates faster than it can be cleaned up.
I ended up moving on to Apple Music where the situation in relation to attribution is not as bad. I chose Apple Music because it's among the services that has better rates for artists, although lower than Tidal https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a...
my one I've been asking them for years for is the ability to quickly swap profiles on a family plan. (first world problem i know!)
My daughter, not being able to swap to her profile on our main media machine has utterly destroyed the utility of Discover Weekly for me, and for a time that was my favorite spotify feature.
Starting at some point around 2 years ago (it seems they A-B tested this for a while because it went back and forth), the radio option became so highly customized to your user account that most songs it plays will be ones you've heard a billion times, even songs that aren't remotely similar in any way other than that you like them.
And the playlist radio option, which was the most powerful one for discovery, has been completely removed.
I used the radio option for years to discover new music, and I really loved it. Now I feel a twinge of sadness mixed with rage when my memories of the good days get me to open Spotify and I remember what it's become.
This sucks for you and me but is Spotify giving the masses what they actually enjoy.
I wonder which suffix is more popular, -ify, -ly, or -r.
I guess the hope is they won't end up in the toilet and they might, in the future, be able to buy a domain not prefixed by "get"
.com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance.
As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).
Would you mind explaining please?
that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.
Spotify is awful for me, I concur with the original article. YouTube Music is heading slowly the same way. At this rate I'll have to cast around for another phone that can take an SD card again.
The service I really miss is eMusic, they had little in the way of well known music so leaned into small label music and it was wonderful.
- A section with 8 of my recently played playlists
- A section of "Made for <my name>" with 6 Daily Mixes (which I generally like), Discover weekly (which I like now that it's tailored to me: I used to hate that it only contained pop/hip hop hits), Release Radar (love it), and the AI DJ (which I find very annoying)
- A section called Recently Played which looks like all legitimate things I've played
- "New Releases for You", which are all by artists I've listened to very recently
- "Jump back in", which has several playlists and artists I've listened to recently
- A sidebar of all of my playlists I've created or followed
Of the ~50 actionable items on the page, the only one I dislike is the AI DJ, but it by no means feels forced on me since it's just a single square.
The last time I used Spotify (and the reason I left) podcast were constantly featured on the start page and it was impossible to remove them (and I have zero interest in podcast in my music application).
There's one prolific ai musician producing logo beats (boring) and psychedelic ambient (pretty much random drones) that I just can't shake from my playlists as they release lots of stuff under several different names.
https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/mit-l...
It's just so good, IMHO.
I have a very long list of features in my head, that seem incredibly obvious and simple to implement. Some of these features were present in other music library applications ~25 years ago (Winamp et al.).
For example, "following" an artist doesn't actually seem to do anything useful as far as I can tell. I've followed a million artists, but I often find out they released new albums and I had no idea. Even something as simple as a notification badge as I scroll through my followed artist list would do wonders for discovery.
And when I consider that the features they do have in their applications don't work all that well to begin with... One egregious example is saving music for offline listening on my phone. I can't tell you how many times I've boarded an airplane to find out the app just decided to purge it all.
Another super fun issue I ran into that actually cost Spotify money since I canceled my family subscription - There are no parental controls or any other method for blocking podcasts. And the podcasts now include videos! So I go through all the trouble of locking down youtube, etc on every device in my house and suddenly find my kid watching Logan Paul videos on Spotify!
They just feel like a company that has the velocity of a snail.
I want to me able to give my 10yo an app on their phone to listen to music, and not have to check to see if they're actually watching videos, or listening to (possibly wildly inappropriate) podcasts - or worst of both worlds - watching video podcasts.
Qobuz isn't perfect in terms of UI, but they seem to care about, and only care about, music. I trialed Amazon Music, but it (unsurprisingly) is an ad platform, too. Apple Music was a contender - the only reason I didn't end up with it is because (also unsurprisingly) it doesn't integrate well with network streamers.
Qobuz is a bit more expensive, but so far it has been worth it.
I've not heard of Qobuz before, thanks for the recommendation.
It's a shame all good things have to slowly tend towards sucking, instead of getting better. Bitwarden, one of my beloved apps, has done the same with a god-awful UI redesign.
Youtube music is just as bad with pushing unwanted content. I can't believe the answer after 10 years of this is to go back to doing it myself, downloading MP3s and using something (currently Jellyfin) to curate them.
At least Youtube music lets me upload my own music to it, so that's the main reason I'm still mostly using it.
PS: Please don't reply and tell me I just haven't found the right podcast. The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
When you inject personal opinions like this which are obviously at odds with millions of other people, it's difficult to take the rest of the comment seriously.
Having such strong feelings about something you can just ignore is unhealthy.
FWIW, I cancelled Spotify last year and their focus on podcasts was one of the reasons. But there are plenty of other services that cater to music lovers so I just increased my bandcamp spend and moved on with my life.
You meant "at least a tiny fraction of". That's all. When you say "many", we should read "at least a tiny fraction of".
> You're living in a bubble.
This is a bit of a strange comment.
You refuse to believe that millions of people hate podcasts, to the point that you apparently need a survey with millions of people saying that as evidence. You live in a bubble of people who haven't told you they hate morning DJs and podcasts. If I instead told you that millions of people detest vlogs, would you also require hard evidence?
If you read what I wrote, you'll see I never said that. I don't know why you think it's worth replying to something other than what I wrote.
I responded to something you wrote. Maybe I didn't respond to what you meant to write, but the solution to that is for you to write what you meant.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/2tLoFkQ
I agree this format of podcast is terrible, but there are many podcasts that are more like one or a couple of people each giving a presentation and I enjoy them a lot.
Ukraine the Latest by The Telegraph and The History of Rome by Mike Duncan are ones I particularly enjoyed.
+1. Given it's open source I'm tempted to revert to the older one, though it will probably stop working over time as other things change :(
Yeah same for me too. The only podcasts I can bear are monologues, when there's more than one people at least they're each talking to me not to each other. Things like Hardcore History, Anthropocene Reviewed, and most of 99% Invisible.
I subscribe to Qobuz and buy a lot of lossless DRM free music and can recommend them as well, tho there was recently a big swath of the available music dropped due to licensing issues (hence the utility of downloading DRM free music). I also price shop against the digital albums and often a CD on eBay will be cheaper, I don’t mind missing out on the “24bit 192khz hifi” to save a few bucks.
Edit: I can't imagine swapping HDD for flash saves more than a few grams, can it?
I ultimately replaced it with a Zen Stone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen#ZEN_Stone/Stone_P...
With the classic iPod you've got a bad UI instead of a good UI and a large object instead of a small one. And while it will be lighter without the hard drive, it will still be a lot heavier than an mp3 player. It's pure downside on several different dimensions.
If you want to play your music on a device shaped like an iPod, it's even easier to use your existing phone.
some of the older models were definitely better, but at 20-40 bucks each and no real dependencies on the rest of my personal computer ecosystem it's a fair trade.
it's only that Spotify and YT music are easy to use that I haven't bought a new one. with enshitifacation being a thing I might go back
There's also local independent radio stations, many of which have streaming now.
WYCE is my personal favorite - https://grcmc.org/wyce
You can use services like listenbrainz or last.fm.
- 500GB+
- Ability to sort by the albumartist tag (listen to heaps of compilations)
- Ability to export play log
- Functions like any other external storage device for transfer purposes
Anything out there? Last I checked (10 years ago) there was nothing that hit all these marks. I had a Sansa Clip with Rockbox and just dealt with the low storage capacity.
Dedicated players are getting harder to find though. I had a Cowon mp3 player for a few years which was pretty nice. Maybe see if they've got something you like? http://www.cowonglobal.com
I don't get it why people but Samsung S99 Pro Plus Maxi for €9999 when cheap phones for developing markets are objectively better, minus the camera, and cost like €300.
Now I’m wondering if anybody sells a USB-C adapter to iPod dock connector.
One of these days the parts are going to end up at my doorstep. Boredom and a couple of beers away.
Have you got the old iTunes installed? I was pleasantly surprised Apple still offers the old binaries for download
"New music is shit. Kids these days have no taste."
You're not going to be forced to upload an Ableton project and video of you recording the instruments. AI music usually is heavily processed and arranged by a human anyway, it's not yet like pushing a button (if you want to get listens).
At most it's the 'artists' self-admission of copyright via stuff like Distrokid + some automated analysis for sample royalties.
So likewise AI at most will just be a checkbox they'll choose to ignore during that process just like people who repost other artists music.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
ctrl+f "summer afternoon in Brooklyn"
I also have a personal list of hundreds of albums I want to hear. If I don't feel like anything in specific I pick one at random since Spotify usually has it. Having such a list, I don't see the appeal in listening to Spotify's curated playlists.
I've found some excellent picks I wouldn't have heard of otherwise from this service. Plus RYM alone is good for manually browsing user-generated lists. Also their genre categorisation is community-driven and by far the most detailed I've come across. Unfortunately their API is not open yet but they're making headway into officially releasing it this year. Hopefully by then I'll be able to auto-add all my curated to-listen albums.
Woe befalls the Audiobooks team, who lost that war. Sad for them.
Sorry, throughout that diatribe I forgot to even mention what Courses were, or why anyone would want them. That could only be because, I have no idea. Seeing it written in my Library tab, "Podcasts and Courses" is like hearing the echo of a feature that doesn't exist. Where do I find these courses? What do I search for? Are they included in my plan? There's none on my home page... wait, I just realized how little I care.
I think, or rather hope, we're entering an era of tech business where money gets more expensive, thus sensibility must return, you can't just be focused on growth you need to make money, keep customers happy, and not worry less about the next hundred million customers. I'm seeing it in some products. Not in Spotify, to be clear. Here's the sensible thing Spotify could do: Create a $22/mo plan, hi-fi audio, a big "Super Premium" badge around your avatar, custom app color themes, customize your home page and sidebars, this literally writes itself, people would buy it. Would it make enough money to justify the investment? Hey Dan: Did building Podcasts and Audiobooks? Yeah that's what I thought.
The only feature of spotify that I've ever been interested in was discovering new and new to me music. I'm not interested in AI slop though, and I can't imagine a lot of people would be (maybe the background noise use case don't mind so much which is fair, I suppose). Is this going to get to a tipping point with spotify for it to go under (or lose a LOAD of value), or is it going to be like 'smart' TVs where non-'smart' TVs essentially don't exist because almost all manufacturers have realised they can make more money from forcing ads and spyware? I see that it's been a problem for nigh on a decade according to that Wikipedia page but with the floodgates for AI feel a lot more open than they used to.
Kinda related, does anybody use soundcloud any more? Just interesting that it seemed hugely popular and was then derided (terms like 'soundcloud rapper') and I haven't heard about it in a while.
I suppose netflix still exists despite derision for their awful originals, killing the good originals, and having little content (especially internationally!).
Spotify will be fine, especially with how little they pay artists, but it's probably a shame for a lot of users.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...
Every time you load the page it recommends a random album from Deezer’s catalog. The algorithm is pretty silly: loop Math.random() * MAX_ID until you find an album id that actually exists and return it.
The goal was to recreate that feeling you’d get going down to someone’s basement and thumbing through an old record collection.
Also 1001 Albums to Listen To Before You Die is a pretty decent collection of canonical albums from the record industry that’ll keep you busy for quite a while.
I think it's neat though, enjoyed refreshing and seeing loads of weird album art!
Yeah, I'm all over the lists. So many are so narrow in scope, which can be frustrating.
I recently jumped off Qobuz exclusively because of their drunk recommendation algorithm, or lack thereof (it seems I'd often end up with whatever is on the front page). I wound up on Pandora: their whole value proposition was finding music you like, and music you might like. I haven't been on Spotify in a hot minute, so I can't make a comparison, but Pandora has been pretty good.
The killer app of Spotify has been expanding my horizons past the 30 tracks on my MP3 player. But that seems to have stalled. I do like being notified when bands I like release new music. I am hopeless at keeping up with music so thats useful.
One of my main complaints with Spotify is how lousy it is with that for me. Release Radar is usually a pile of songs almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what I listen to. Bands it knows I follow since it makes playlists for them will have new tracks never show up unless I go to their page or it comes up randomly.
I have no idea what the "follow" feature does because it doesn't notify me for new music from followed artists, and "What's New" doesn't include new releases from all of them. But it has given me four notifications that Journey is coming to Nashville in case I didn't get it the first time.
Release radar does seem useless.
People have these ultra narrow niche picky preferences and then ragequit when they don’t get their way.
“I want a machine learning customized playlist but it should have perfect intuition about what is made by humans and what is not and if you can’t make that I’ll call you ‘garbage.’”
We can’t even sort email properly with algos and we’ve been trying for over 30 years. We can’t block phishing.
If you hate Spotify so much go back to your cd collection or try pirating mp3s again. That service is a miracle — dozens and dozens of startups burned hundreds of millions trying to build something like that years before - and all people can do is whine. “Mehhh, it’s electron, waaaaa”. Ok go make your own service in c++ or whatever and then get all the major labels on board and then make it popular and then make it profitable. I’ll wait. Or actually I won’t I think I’ll go listen to Money for Nothing on Spotify on any of five or six operating systems.
Tech is wasted on people like this. Show some appreciation for the miracles around us. Spotify is one of them.
My question to the haters: If Spotify is so bad, as you claim, why haven't we seen a flurry of competitors emerge? My guess: Licensing a large enough set of music to make a compelling alternative is the primary moat.
Last point: While I believe people and their stories about AI gen'd slop appearing in their playlists, I have not experienced the same. Are my musical tastes so bland that they just don't bother? (No trolling to others on that one... Just poking a bit of fun at myself.)
its not a space i follow so i have all the details wrong.
- the godawful ai dj they tried to force on pple
- buying gimlet media and running it into the toilet. some of the world's best and favorite podcasts, gone because some swedish billionaire decided to throw all his money into foie grasing a perfectly fine niche media company.
- buying anchor and going absolutely nowhere with it. it was never good so whatever. nice try i guess.
- locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting (to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive)
- they habitually screw over musicians https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- reggie watts: https://www.instagram.com/p/DEhAr7lx7CI/?igsh=bXBpZ25kczMyZ3...
- bjork: https://variety.com/2025/music/news/bjork-spotify-streaming-...
- they faked spotify wrapped numbers https://x.com/hello__caitlin/status/1864367028758565216?s=46
- this is petty but they are a big step back from winamp and that is just slop https://x.com/riomadeit/status/1878556039676666024
i will say ONE nice thing. Gustav Soderstrom himself does make a pretty damn good podcast about spotify https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-11/introducing-the-new-... . its a real shame his product is mostly riding the highs of early good decisions.
Not to mention blowing >$250M of their subscription revenue to lock down one podcaster when most of their subscribers joined for not podcasts. That money could have gone towards paying music artists better rates like Apple Music and Tidal do.
The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now.
[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/26/universal-music-...
All streaming platforms realistically pay out close to the federally-set royalty rate.
They couldn’t allow for users to opt out of the constant A/B testing and user herding in the ever-changing official client by using a sane third-party client that just acts like a normal music player and obeys the user’s preferences. The ability to shove the music that’s most profitable and whatever other non-relevant audio content in users’ faces by mandating official client use is too valuable to give up.
Somehow even Apple is better on this front, with there being multiple alternative Apple Music clients out there that are build with official Apple SDKs and aren’t reverse engineered, which is crazy. They’ve out-Apple’d Apple.
It exists... but only for employees: https://xcancel.com/rogueops/status/1656349863968112680
It seems like most podcasts do everything they can to make downloading an MP3 impossible. This isn't just a spotify problem. Just about every website for every podcast I've seen does the same thing.
- get youtube premium, has youtube music with it. youtube music is basically straight superset of spotify.
That would explain why mine were definitely wrong too. Although I wouldn't attribute it to malice since it makes little sense to tell me I used their paid service much less than I thought, at least compared to the opposite.
If Spotify offered AI-generated tracks of stunning beauty and sterling production quality, I might even consider subscribing to it. But apparently the "slop" which the post refers to is far from this heavenly ideal.
So I stay with YouTube premium and keep buying music on Bandcamp from the authors.
Of course, the best way is to buy either digital or physical releases, which I do for the ones that stick with me.
Note they don't host songs themselves, but will auto-search youtube/bandcamp/etc. and play the closest match. So YMMV.
Between churning licenses, AI and session slop, it’s not a usable platform nor one worth supporting. It didn’t even start as a music platform — it was advertising first and music was determined to be an affordable draw.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
I'm 99% my discover weekly hasn't had one yet... and I have a full archive of all my discover weekly's from the last 4 years... Can anybody show me a simple way to check for AI Gnerated content in this list?
> proprietary search technology which continuously scanned the Internet to identify the hottest new music in the world.
For a short period is was the best way to discover new unknown music. It was bought by Twitter, folded into Twitter music (even though they never created a comparable feature) and killed along with it.
If anyone knows anything like this that exists today, please let me know.
It’s a Chromium Embedded Framework app, and they publish nightlies of CEF.
Maybe they’ve moved over, but I doubt it.
Maybe this is one of the few pro-social use cases for crypto, some sort of alternative net where people are verifiably real and content is authentic. I genuinely cannot understand how platforms are not taking more aggressive measures against this stuff.
Haven't noticed anything AI-created yet. That would really suck if it did happen..
There are some honestly funny and interesting AI generated songs out there.
Never looking back!
This is what Spotify was from the beginning. It was always going to be exploitative, it was always going to turn to the dark side and embrace the every form of enshittification possible because it was born that way.
It was born out of sleight of hand between broadcast and retail.
It was born out of papering over the economics of piracy with a thin veener of false legitimacy, where the word decimated doesn't begin to cover what actually happened to artist payouts because it's off by more than an order of magnitude. The shameless scale of it would make Walmart blush.
It was born out of collecting consumers with convenience and a dash of zeitgeist.
It was born screwing the people who create the work the platform depends on and passing the savings on to you.
Screwing with you was inevitable, it was just put off until later.
The older I’ve got, the more I think on kindness.
With kindness, there is no ‘other guy’. Sure, this was funny. It is funny. It really is! But it’s _not that funny_. And I feel I couldn’t have said it wasn’t that funny until I’d seen enough (got old enough?) to understand.
Like you I think I’ve thought about being the other guy or not. As for Spotify — I don’t subscribe. I don’t want to be part of it.
> the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial
I edited to add: what extraordinary wording.
Thanks for the kind words!
The problem with the AI content is that it cheapens real content . I'm not talking about the money, i mean the intrinsic and emotional value experienced when connecting with the content. AI pictures make you feel less engaged when you see a real picture from a friend.
This one is also really good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hX8iQvs2mw
I’m curious about some of the newer services such as Qobuz or Deezer or Tidal. Are they any better?
I'd say that they, however, are very similar to Spotify from a UI/UX perspective as that seems what the consumer base wants. Unsure if the specific issues you have with Spotify also exist though.
Spotify truly isn't a software company the same way your health insurance company has a web portal but isn't a software company either.
I enjoyed the Weekly Discovery and Made For You playlists for years and its suggestion mechanisms were just what I needed. I could tolerate the terrible UI and other minor flaws of the app as long as the excitement of discovering new music continued. I also didn't like the special promotions, podcast recommendations, and other novelties, but the real value was there and it kept me paying for the service.
The changes started around 2020, when the playlists started to contain fewer songs and artists that I could call discoveries. I found myself in what could be called a music bubble, and it didn't feel like it was growing much.
Also, when I first started using Spotify, I spent a lot of time in the app and was more involved in the listening process. Now I was mostly just hitting the button, minimizing the window, and listening to music in the background. It became less interesting. I'd come back to the app occasionally to skip (or block) a track I didn't like. And then came the AI-generated tracks, which was the last straw for me.
Not that I hate Spotify, it's just sad to see it go the way of enshitification. It probably still meets the needs of millions of other users, but I'm no longer one of them. In fact, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be more conscious about my hobby again. I still have my mp3 library that I've been building since the late 1990s, and I still buy and donate to artists from time to time, so I just have to relearn how to do the things that AI algorithms have tried (and failed) to do for me.
edit: personally if I just use my playlist spotify is fine for me, except the 4GB ram issue on 64bit but that's rare/may be old news now
Long time paid Spotify user. Soon to be ex-paid user. This resonates with me. For a while now, I have been pretty unhappy with the way I consume music. Yes, because Spotify has become shit. The UI is hostile. Their business practices makes me feel bad for using it. And everything else already mentioned in other comments. But there's something else.
My spotify Liked has about 2400 songs. And I can't name most of them. If you played one for me, chances are I wouldn't even know the artist. It all feels so... disposable. How did I get here? I hit like a few times on Discover Weekly, each week. And now...I have this mess! Spotify recommends me songs that sound exactly like other songs...that I can't remember the name of. I can't go back to check. Weeks later I hear it! Or is this the new one that sounds like the old one? I don't know. It's all so surreal and so different than the before times.
In my yutes would buy albums and absolutely devour them whole. Every track. I would listen to just that album for days or weeks. I couldn't afford to buy all the music, so I squeezed every drop of enjoyment I could out the music I had. I think I enjoyed the music much more, back when I had much less.
So, with that nostalgic feeling in mind. I'm starting a new system of music consumption. I'm going back to the old ways! Instead of paying Spotify $12/mo to shovel all the shit in my face, I'm going to spend $12/mo on Bandcamp (or equivalent) to buy an album and pour over it for the whole month, until I buy the next album.
I don't know if this will work. I don't know how I'm going to handle discovery. But I have to do something; And this is something. A few weeks ago I bought some music. Threw it into a Beets.io library. Setup a Navidrome server inside my vpn. I listen with Symfonium on my phone (good offline features there).
Now I'm trying to really listen to the music again; not just mindlessly consume it like disposable content. It feels like this muscle has completely atrophied. Lyrics don't stick like they used to. I don't instantly remember the track order. Listening to an entire album takes some effort. Maybe though, that's the way it should be.
Unfortunately the free version of the Spotify iOS app is absolute unusable garbage.
You can pay per track/album to actually own the music as lossless flac files or sign up for their streaming service that uses the same lossless format, but doesn't let you save them.
I do a bit of both and load the flac files onto my fancy DAP for real listening.
And where to go?
I’d like Apple but their apps are horrendous and they completely bastardized the classic Music app pre streaming.
Options for acquiring media:
- Buy vinyl/CDs
- Ripping from streaming services (Deezer was well-known for that a few years ago)
- yt-dlp for niche picks you can’t find in better quality elsewhere
- Rip CDs from local library
- Bandcamp, Soundcloud
- Various what.cd successors, if that’s your thing
I’ll give a counterpoint: with a subscription, Apple Music for iPad is quite literally the best personal music exploration/listening app on the market. A quiet room and good pair of headphones is all the rest you need.
- youtube music
Prior to this like many other people I was a hardcore Grooveshark fan/user. There were other services, but their names escape me at the moment. I was looking for a replacement and platforms kept coming and going, but Youtube Music (for all of Google's faults) seem to have stayed all this time. I'm still using it, it's still not pushing slop on me. I'm happy.
As an aside, accepting that I'm in the minority here speaking on behalf of them, I am not someone who would write a blog post announcing that I'm leaving some shitty platform. I'll just cancel my sub and move on. I don't need nor want to grandstand regardless of AI or just people's shit taste.
My jam was Audiogalaxy.
One thing that has always pissed me off is the heavy-handed way the Big 3 labels have dealt with this.
https://www.tips4design.com/2010/08/ai-draw-grooveshark-logo...
Without someone writing the post you wouldn't be here discussing it. I applaud the author for writing his short post on his own personal website. He's hardly "grandstanding". You're the only one who claims to be "speaking on behalf" of others.
I work in a public-facing environment. I already hear every single one of these songs, none of which I liked to begin with, to a sickening extent over the radio. Leave me to my esoteric tastes and take the chart-toppers elsewhere.
This is an issue I've had across the board, though, be it Spotify, YT Music, heavily curated Pandora stations, or any other streaming service I've tried; nowadays I strongly prefer simply listening to my local library (which I've played to death, but at least it's to my own preferences) instead.
Show me a platform that stays in its damn lane where I can listen to what I want to, and I'll gladly hand over my cash; I'm not gonna do that to be made to listen to the same junk that scored me making that cash to begin with.
Same thing with the AI DJ. There are some days where it just never misses, and I can listen for hours without skipping a single song. Other days, it feels like every other theme is "here's an artist we've been paid to advertise", and I end up getting tired of it pretty quickly.
Make a new word! Slop has so many meanings already.
/half-s
Damn, you went from pinocchio to real boy is 2 seconds. Your anthropomorphic assumptions will lead to the classification within various species. If you are gonna pay an AI for it's output, but not bees....you may want to re-evaluate your premise.