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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

PSA: Stop using Spotify, they're predatory scum.

I really don't understand the hate for Spotify. Been a paid member for a decade and Apple Music still sucks for me (particularly when internet is bad)

they funnelled money and attention to joe rogan. I hate them - not as much as i hate microsoft or oracle - maybe about as much as adobe. but i'm using them because i have not found an acceptable alternative ... yet.

There are lots of alternatives. What makes them all unacceptable?

spotify's recommendation systems really work for me to discover new music i will enjoy, not just more music like what I already listen to

I don’t know how their behavior differs but I live in a country with patchy mobile coverage and Spotify and Apple Music are night and day with how they cope with this. Spotify is far more robust and I assume prefetches more aggressively.

Agree with this; I want to cancel my spotify subscription so badly. I already have Apple One, which includes Apple Music. But the recommendations and UX are so incredibly bad that I still pay for Spotify.

I was doing my yearly attempt at switching over to Apple Music and the 'similar music' radio had somehow saw fit to include Kendrick Lamar with my indie synth. Swapped back to spotify and immediately loved some of its similar suggestions.

My biggest gripe with Apple Music is shuffling. When I shuffle my entire library of thousands of songs, I'm hearing the same ~50 songs over and over UNTIL I add a new song to my library. Then suddenly I'm hearing songs I haven't heard in years. How does one screw up randomization that bad, and how has it not been fixed over the past several years?

They started with a pirated set of music (sounds familiar?), they invest in the military industrial complex.

Spotify sucks for artists because music isn't actually worth much and they don't like hearing that. A certain group of people, including some politicians, have concluded that it must mean that spotify is taking advantage of musicians despite spotify only reaching profitability in 2024.

Why take it on Spotify? YouTube Music pays even less and I've never heard anyone complain about that.

Well, for one thing there's that whole pushing their own AI generated slop music into electronica playlists so that actual artists get fewer plays.

That I'm starting to feel the pain myself, but the Spotify hate is way older than this phenomenon.

Oh yeah, it's just the latest thing in a long line of nasty. I cancelled my Spotify way back when they decided to fund the rise of fascism by giving money to imbecilic ham hock Joe Rogan.

70% of their revenue goes straight into paying royalties, always, if the music labels don't pay their artists enough due to predatory contracts shouldn't some of the flak be focused there? Even more: they've always fleeced artists, even when physical media sales were the only market.

All streaming services are predatory scum. Piracy is the way, even though it is sometimes less convenient. I pay for Spotify because it is cheap and I'm lazy

If you want to support musicians buy their merch, go to concerts. If they are smalltime, find their patreon, or join their YouTube thing, or buy their music on Bandcamp, etc.

Piracy is also predatory, just saying.

Which is why I included the second paragraph.

It isn't when it's paid off in advance in a form of the predatory tax, also on people and items anywhere close to "piracy": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

If someone lives in one of the countries where this tax is being levied, they're not "pirating", they're merely exercising their prepaid privilege.

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