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Comment by acureau | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for, and I will continue to pay for, because:

1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own. 2. There are no advertisements in the paid service. 3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.

I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.

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You should check out iomoio.com

They have an impressively large amount of music available. In addition, they price songs at $0.16 USD/song —- or cheaper if you deposit more money onto the platform and.

This isn’t piracy (money is flowing to artists) and you get to own at a fraction of the cost of iTune, Qobuz, or other platforms that charge around $0.99/song

You would be better off pirating all of your music and buying just one piece of merch from an artist. These rogue foreign licensing agencies provide no real value, and in fact are functionally illegal and unrecognized outside of Ukraine. It's also highly unlikely much money flows back to the artists.

https://law.stackexchange.com/q/499, https://archive.is/EZ2U3

Ah, gotcha thanks for the heads up! I read that this site was legal and assumed that they managed to stay aboveboard by offering artists slightly more than they could get from Spotify or other streamers.

But seeing that they're operating under dubious licensing, it seems much more likely that this isn't the best way to go.

I was going to say that merch fulfilment isn't free either but I guess that's your point. A few dollars from a $50 t-shirt is significant compared to the infinitesimal fractions of a penny from streams.

At least in my case, I'm pretty sure I can afford to own all the music I listen to. I only listen to 5,000 minutes per year of mostly the same few hundred songs. I've spent 8 years x 12 months x 13 = $1248 on Spotify in my life so far, so even at $.99 per song (which is above average if I buy albums), I'm losing money

I do enjoy the Spotify Wrapped stuff, but after moving partially to selfhosting Navidrome for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases, I've been scrobbling everything (including Spotify) to Last.fm, which has a similar end-of-year round-up. It's pretty good, got mine a couple of days ago.

> for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases

I did the math once for my Spotify liked songs list [1] and it came to $52k for the last 15 years, or $288/month, if I were to self host, without piracy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133622

Yeah, mine is also a little bit ridiculous. I think Spotify encourages a certain overconsumption of music; for me, the things on my liked list are not necessarily things that I value equally.

I buy things that I either already know or have discovered on Spotify and that I enjoy enough that I want to own, so I amass a collection of favourites over time. I would never buy everything I've ever liked on Spotify, but that is also because my personal goal is not to become entirely independent of Spotify. The goal is to be a bit more intentional, to have a bit more autonomy, and to avoid good things vanishing into the inky blackness of distribution rights being withdrawn.

Music pricing is pretty ridiculous compared to streaming. Self hosting will pretty much always require piracy until artists decide they want more fans to buy their music than stream and price accordingly.

Tidal has smaller library but higher quality (assuming your speakers allow you to tell the difference).

Actually Spotify finally introduced lossless quality, after teasing it for something like five years!

Spotify lossless support was added last year [1].

[1] https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-10/lossless-listening-a...

Spotify only streams 16-bit lossless as far as I have seen (though they claim 24 bit in this post). Might require artists to reupload the audio?

Tidal has much more 24 bit options when I did an A/B.

The dynamic range difference is very material on quality sound setups.

As a side note Bluetooth (at least for Airpods) only does 16-bit!

There's no benefit to more than 16-bits. 16-bit allows for a dynamic range of 96dB. No music is mastered anywhere near this dynamic range.

24-bit helps in production pipelines for mixing, but for end user playback it's pointless.

Maybe pointless, but if provided why not?

By the same logic, if pointless, why?

As quoted from the OP.

> 24-bit helps in production pipelines for mixing, but for end user playback it's pointless.

If you have two versions of something, where one is better than the other and the resource cost is more or less the same it makes more sense to provide the better than the worse.

Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works. The end-user won't know the difference and the new apprentice has a copy that they can work with.

That's not a loss, that's a benefit even if pointless to the end user.

> Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works.

16-bit is enough for mixing. 24-bit (or 32-bit floats, even better) are useful _within_ the mixing pipeline, so you don't need to care if one of the steps results in clipping as long as the final result is within the bounds.

Because it's a complete waste of bandwidth.

I doubt you can listen to the difference, unless you really have golden ears.

We have been doing double blind test in HydrogenAudio.org for a while, and it shows most people won't notice (at certain levels of encoding).

https://hydrogenaudio.org/index.php/board,40.0.html

I own the KEF LSX II speakers and I can hear a slight difference in sound clarity between Spotify and Tidal in acoustic songs like i.e. "landslide" by "Fleetwood Mac".

Note that Tidal is supported via "KEF Connect" or while Spotify is available through Chrome Streaming, not directly IIRC.

Is it worth the big price tag? Not sure tbh. I don't play music very loud and I don't listen all that much outside working hours where my attention is elsewhere.

No ads in the traditional sense, sure, but they do push artists and albums for example with their stupid "pre-save" functionality, even if I don't have anything to do with them. I'd consider that an ad.

I always found their algorithm to be crap. Can't remember a single good song I've found through it. I like yt' s much better

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