When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
I really wish there was a better alternative to push my friends to. I do use Bandcamp, so at least I know more of my $$$ are going to the artists and I can take the music with me, but I’m not sure about the platform long-term.
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.
🙃
It seems like https://resonate.coop/ is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).
deleted by creator
Ah yes, and unsanctioned art will be classified as a form of terrorism.
And most people will be perfectly happy to consume that and nothing else ever.
Not sure if this is exactly good news, but Epic Games doesn’t own it anymore, it was sold to Songtradr.
the largest music licensing platform in the world
Doesn’t sound too good to me. Bandcamp used to be where I could get music from smaller artists who couldn’t afford clearing samples (as they weren’t making money) and I worry a lot of that will be lost.
Still is, for now. I run a small vaporwave tape label via Bandcamp. No significant changes under Epic Games or Songtradr that I’ve noticed. That could change, though.
It will change, I promise you. I am so confident I will literally bet my girlfriend’s chihuahua on it.
better hope lefties and artists get their shit together you tiny little monster
Everyone on Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole should be aware of this pattern. I just hope something can fill in before it gets too bad.
I’m keeping an eye on Faircamp.
That’s how it always begins.
But on a more positive note, care to share the label or more about your experience about it? With regards to Bandcamp and more generally.
Sure, https://mysticspools.bandcamp.com/
Most of it is pretty fun- find music, reach out to artist, make a few tapes. We just do small runs of 25-100 tapes depending on how much will sell. The worst part IMO is order fulfillment, you either pay a third party a boatload or you DIY and packing 100 cassettes is a bit of a drag. Coming up with good art if the artist doesn’t already have something is quite difficult. The label is on a short hiatus for that reason, but I think we’ll do some more tapes now that some labels have dried up. There’s waxing and waning periods when it comes to these little micro labels, and I can tell people are feeling the economic squeeze.
The most fun part is mastering to tape and dubbing. I’ve got a Nakamichi Dragon and 3x NAD 6300, and I’ve dubbed probably 500-600 tapes across them all. Dunno what it is about tapes, but I really like em.
🤷♂️ not really, none of these corporations are real in any sense that matters other than sucking up actual companies that actually make the world a better place and mining the goodwill out of them until they are cynical, worthless husks that corporations use to fleece consumers into buying products from before they realize their favorite company/brand is dead in everything but name.
As bad as Epic is, probably worse…
Even though Bandcamp was profitable the new CEO said this after buying it
the financial state of Bandcamp has not been healthy
So they’re probably looking for any way to cut costs. They fired half of the staff on day 1, including anyone who tried to unionize
How about https://qobuz.com ? I’ve bought some flac files from them.
You can’t use Qobuz if you’re behind a VPN. It makes me sad because I wanted to try this.
It seems that ampwall.com may come sometime as an alternative to Bandcamp? Time will tell…
I use Napster. I chose it way back when Spotify paid for the Rogan podcast, from a list of platforms that pay artists more. I’m not sure if that’s true any longer, but look it up! I’ve been really happy with their service. (And it’s really full circle for me, since I used their original service decades ago.)
ETA I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this site, but it says Napster is still one of the top-paying platforms.
How does this compare to Tidal?
According to that site, Napster pays more. Here’s the info on TIDAL:
I just downloaded Bandcamp, and after searching for my favorite artists, almost none are on the platform aside from 1-2. Did a search on like 20-25. This is why I use Spotify. Maybe if artists started acknowledging Bandcamp as a legitimate alternative to Spotify, then of course I’d listen there. But right now most stuff by my favorite bands are either covers or remixes.
Chicken and the egg, be the change you want to be, but also I am not absolutist about using Spotify.
I just think Spotify and other streaming services are vehicles of class warfare against musicians that also happen to play music. I understand if you like the playing music part!
Is Pandora any better than Spotify at paying artists?
Qobuz
Soon we’ll have AI music generators and most people will be perfectly happy to only ever listen to what those churn out.
I mean, we’ll see.
Maybe.
Maybe we will just look back at the period that is rapidly coming to a close as a golden era of music (and video games for that matter) where the tools became sophisticated, affordable and distributed for music production but venture capital hadn’t yet destroyed any last vestiges of the monetary value of musician’s labor (audio engineer’s included) in recording contexts.
Of course, I am sure Spotify and other streaming services are coming around to the value of recorded music being unsustainably low, I mean everybody knows it deep down right? That is why they are going to continue to raise their prices. From the perspective of Spotify, the artists that actually do the work of making Spotify a valuable company aren’t in principle excluded from their share of the pie when the line starts to go back up and the company has a chance to reverse some of the belt tightening and sacrifices everybody had to make to keep the lights on… but every single one of these vapid losers believes deep down in their bones that the rules of the game say that it isn’t the responsibility of shareholders or upper management of Spotify to just hand the musicians their fare share of the increasing profits, or even alert them to the fact that profits are in fact increasing in the first place. Musicians are not the customers nor the shareholders of Spotify, they are the commodified, interchangeable contractors that aren’t much different than the day laborers who hang out outside of most Home Depots in the US looking for handyman work.
This is like when the English saw that the only crop Irish peasants could afford to grow on the side for subsistence farming to feed their families, potatoes, were getting destroyed by a potato blight, and decided that it would send the wrong message to let those Irish peasants have any of the rest of the crops that Irish farmers were growing to sell to foreign markets to simply pay the English rent for their farms … crops that were not significantly impacted by the potato blight because it would make the Irish reliant on handouts and encourage a problematic tendency towards apathy and entitlement stubbornly latent in the Irish population.
🔥 Burn 🔥 It 🔥 Down 🔥
(with love)
All the streamers suck; plus Spotify definitely sucks the most and it has the most subscribers. So I do my best to support artists I love by buying their albums in some physical form (vinyl if possible because it encourages active listening), t-shirts when I need a t-shirt, fan clubs, etc. It’s all I can think to do.
It’s all I can think to do.
I think you thought of a lot of good things to do!
I don’t mean to be overly cynical about people, this is a problem of systems and normalization of things that shouldn’t be normalized primarily, the people are mainly just trying to survive.
sigh
I say this a lot to people on Lemmy, but everyone here (including you) is honestly so much nicer and more emotionally intelligent than people on other places on the internet
Many of us here might even be toxic in other contexts (I am certainly not perfect at keeping away from being overly negative or argumentative with people), but what matters is which version of someone we invite in the door to our community.
We can invite in any version of people we want, and I agree in general I think the fediverse invites in the better version of people and it is one of the primary reasons I love this weird, loosely connected blob of non-corporate social media.
The thing is, you’re buying from their record labels, not directly from artists. And then it depends on their contract how much they actually get. But they are still getting more from it, I guess.
It helps when the band runs their own label.
Walk me through this.
Before Spotify, I’d buy a record (physical or digital) and listen to that. I pay the artist once. After Spotify, I buy a record and listen to it on Spotify. I pay the artist the normal record price and there’s a long tail from stream payouts (unless they don’t reach the payout threshold).
Before Spotify, if someone heard a song and didn’t buy the record, they didn’t pay the artist. After Spotify, if they still don’t buy a record, the artist now earns from stream payouts.
Finally, before Spotify, if someone bought a record but stopped buying after Spotify, the artist loses that record purchase. This is definitely bad. Was Spotify the real reason? Would something other than Spotify have pulled them away? What levels of fame are materially affected by this?
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
the artist now earns from stream payouts.
Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?
The issue is that artists don’t make any actual money on Spotify, they are being forced to put their music on Spotify because that is where you have to put your stuff if you want to be a successful recording musician.
Meanwhile a couple of years ago the Spotify ceo said in defense of completely destroying any semblance of money making from recording music:
“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek.
Streaming is great, but the structural evisceration of musicians and the value of labor in composing and producing is basically negative at this point given the huge amount of time that must go into a track to get it 100% there and ready for listeners.
The thread you linked says what I said.
I’ve been doing DIY music since I was a kid. The vast majority of bands are never going to make any money ever. Spotify didn’t change that. Streaming didn’t cause that. The reality of every kid with a guitar thinking music is about making money not having fun is what did that.
I don’t subscribe to this cynical of a viewpoint, it isn’t inevitable that recording music is not valued labor, it is a cultural choice same as any other.
I live in the richest country on earth, it is a subjective choice to devalue the labor of musicians and decouple it from the profits of music companies.
Who the fuck has a label? Do you know anything about music that isn’t already incredibly corporate? When was the last time you went to a DIY show and bought handmade merch off a band touring in their minivan? Compare that to the last time you bought a record from a label or merch from an online store run through not the band.
There are more than likely 300+ bands in a 20 to 50 mile radius around you. Do you support all of them as much as you’re pushing people on the internet to support all music? What about the really bad cover bands? Them too?
Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.
Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.
Again I don’t see any quantitative evidence to accept this framing of the status quo as inevitable or reflective of some fundamental tendency of human artists to overproduce art.
Capitalists have systematically stole the labor of musicians and normalized and absolutely absurd vision of austerity where the only way to make money is by doing things that people don’t want to do. It is absurd, and this ideology is pretty easy to locate the motivation behind, it makes us good compliant factory workers.
So you’ve bought every album from every artist you’ve ever listened to? Or, like the rest of us, do you have a limited amount of resources and have made strategic decisions about who to support? Because if you’re not dropping $20 in the tip jar of the next busker you see, you’re a huge fucking hypocrite.
I have not devalued music at all. You have, multiple times. You’ve also said that music has to be about money which is pretty fucking capitalistic. I’ve highlighted it’s about fun multiple times. You keep advocating for labels and ignore DIY which means you’ve already established a class system in music. You’ve provided no quantitative evidence to show you support any music and seem to hype up record labels whose business is built on licensing.
Should everyone get paid for all their music? Fuck yeah. Can I afford to pay every band? Fuck no. Did Spotify or streaming or even the fucking radio do that? Nope. Sure fucking didn’t. The market saturation did because music isn’t about money, it’s about fun. If you want it to be your job, good fucking luck. That’s just simple commerce. Not capitalism. If everyone on the commune is just making bead necklaces and there’s only one customer looking to buy one necklace, is that customer fucking all the people on the commune except the person they bought from?
In my experience those kinds of people are Ice Spice fans.
Who think that SSSniperwolf arriving at another person’s house live on Insta and doxxing them during a manic episode is ‘slay’.
Wut
There’d a lot to unpack here
… Class warfare?
How much do they really care? I’m not usually a quality snob, especially since I frequently use gear of varying quality making it moot, but wouldn’t most people who are really into music at least consider the competition that offers higher quality files at similar if not the same price?
Or are they the type to only have local FLAC with their DAC? Because I like my collection but streaming is still worth the convenience for jumping into a new album.
Edit: I didn’t really make it clear, my interest in services like Bandcamp wasn’t higher quality music, it was that it was run by at least a relatively benign company that seemed to treat artists like actual human beings who artistic labor was inherently valuable. I would buy craft beer/cider/meader even if Budweiser or Coors Light was actually better quality beer, what I care about at the end of the day is my money going to someone or something good
I have spent a lotttt of time messing around with music production and learning what is pseudo-science (a whole fuckton of it) and what is real science. In all of the ABx testing I have done, read about, and seen demonstrated in person myself a quality MP3 with a decent bitrate encoding (idk 128kps or so?) using a decent algorithm and hell even a sampling rate of 41khz will produce an audio recording that when played back on a hifi audio system and level matched (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, it is well known in mastering and mixing that a louder mix always sounds better at first glance) is indistinguishable from the source .wav file to the human ear (I don’t care how super human you claim your ear is).
People make this silly mistake of thinking that digitization introduces these sharp staircase edges into audio waveforms, which is actually kind of a hilarious misconception (which I completely understand, not trying to insult people’s intelligence) because the entire idea of converting a waveform (an analog non-bandwith limited phenomena) into a bandwidth-limited digital waveform is utterly reliant on the idea that the analog reproduction of a digital square wave/stair step function with a voicecoil and diaphragm, physical hardware components with shape, size and crucially mass, must necessarily create a smooth analog waveform because physical hardware components have mass and momentum, they aren’t theoretical ideas. It is better to think of a bandwith limited digital waveform as a series of movement commands for an RTS unit in Starcraft 2. The unit will naturally path between discrete points in a way that creates fluid movement, fundamentally it wouldn’t make any sense for the unit to just teleport directly to where you click and then teleport directly to where you click next etc…
I mean let us consider Vinyl records for a second, maybe you like most people have a vague perception they are kind of a hifi audio thing for people that reallllllly care about audio quality and don’t want to listen to chopped up and compressed digital audio files using a gasp consumer DAC that came stock in their laptop.
This quote from an old reddit thread discussing how CDs actually have far better signal-to-noise ratio fidelity than Vinyls (and really all decent quality digital audio files) about sums it up.
As for quantitative audio quality differences between the two mediums, the CD is superior. CDs operate at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. These are discrete points, versus the continuous signal produced by a physical vinyl groove. However, the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem explains why a 44.1kHz sampling rate is sufficient for completely reproducing frequencies up to 44.1 / 2 or 22.05 kHz (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem ). True response will actually be lower than 22.05 kHz due to the various anti-aliasing filters involved in the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion process to prevent frequencies above 22.05 kHz from aliasing down into the audible range (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing#Folding ).
Furthermore, the CD is recorded with 16 bits of resolution, results in an output with 65,536 discrete voltage ‘steps’ on the output. This does introduce some quantization noise, because the real signal is ‘rounded’ up or down to the nearest of the 65,536 steps. This is another area where some people claim vinyl is superior due to the lack of quantization of the output. But in practice, vinyl only has 9-10 bits of resolution (IIRC) due to manufacturing tolerances. To achieve around 16 bits of resolution, the tolerance of production for the groove would have to be on the order of 1/65,536 or ~0.001%. That’s not going to happen on those tiny grooves. Also, you have to consider the non-zero inertia of the physical pick-up moving across those tracks, which will introduce a separate set of distortions as it moves around.
Believe I’ve gone down a similar path. I agree, but I assumed the layman dedicated music fan would at least be curious.
And on another note we need more discussion music and audio production around Lemmy.
Please, people, for the love of the gods, stop using Spotify. There are numerous other services that are so much better value for your money and don’t treat artists (as much) like trash.
And that being said, try to support your beloved artists directly as much as you can. Buying digital downloads or physical media will give them more money than a lifetime of streaming ever would. Plus you get to keep the higher-quality music even if the platform or artist goes tits-up.
Could you give me some examples of alternative services? I’m paying spotify right now, but i’ll love to ditch it.
Sure, although keep in mind this will vary by region due to licensing issues.
Deezer is probably Spotify’s best direct competitor. They are priced equally (depending on region) and now offer high-res streaming as default instead of a paid extra. They’ve been expanding with new features such as lyrics, collab playlists, song identification, and they recently improved their recommendation system. They also offer a discount if you buy subs yearly instead of monthly so you can save if you like the platform.
Apple Music is also an option now that Apple has put in some work to make the platform easier to use on non-Apple devices such as the recently added Windows app. It’s not as feature-rich as Deezer but if you don’t use those added features anyway then it is an option. I personally would phrase it as “has less bloat”. If you own any Apple devices already then it will have tighter integration with them.
Tidal is the old favourite of audiophiles and music appreciators. They have been expanding their platform with new features and music and, somewhat recently, have also lowered their prices. High-res streaming is now included in the base sub tier. All of these alternatives pay artists more than Spotify but Tidal has one of the best artist payouts.
Qobuz is similar to Tidal and is a premium platform with a focus on quality. They are a newer service and are still expanding their regions, so I don’t have personal experience with them as they only recently opened up to my country. Their price and feature set looks competitive, though, and their UI does look slick. They also have better artist payouts.
Amazon Music apparently has better payouts for artists but Amazon is a shit company so I’ve never looked into them further. I’ll include YouTube Music here as well which has shitty payouts and is a shitty company.
Amazon Music
I invested heavily in the Amazon Music ecosystem, I bought hundreds of albums on there, and the platform is now very nearly unusuable. I cannot even listen to the songs that I paid for without also having to listen to ads. And the Android app now hides the downloads in some hidden folder so I can’t even download them and listen to them on another player. It makes me furious.
I’ve actually gone back to CDs, if you can believe it. It’s kind of nice sometimes, especially for full album plays, but I do miss a nice big playlist of my favorite songs from all artists.
I can believe it. I still have multiple libraries of physical media, and I pretty much never buy anything new that I can’t likewise physically own. I might rip and make MP3’s or transcode or emulate, or whatever, for convenience, but sometimes it’s just nice to be able to stick the disk or cartridge in the machine and have it just work without any of the associated modern ancillary bullshit.
Everything wants to be a service now. I just find that so irritating.
Apple Music also has Dolby atmos and much higher quality audio files compared to Spotify.
The only thing Spotify has on everyone is excellent playlists. I just use SongShift to copy the playlists over.
Tidal is okay but I prefer Apple Music since it has a better UI, cheaper price and is more user friendly for my non-audiophile family members.
if you use Apple Music and have a desktop/laptop look into Cider 2. Incredible streaming music player. https://cider.sh/
None of these have good app support compared to Spotify, sadly. Not supported by my car, nor my Linux desktop, or home speakers.
Oh and Deezer pays even less to artists than Spotify.
Oh and Deezer pays even less to artists than Spotify.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Care to provide your source?
Just looked into these. It doesn’t look like any of these have official Linux apps :(
Apple Music has a web based player
The interesting thing about Tidal is that is was originally owned by artists (Jay-Z, Beyoncé; Kanye West; Madonna; Jason Aldean; Alicia Keys; Arcade Fire; Coldplay’s Chris Martin; Rihanna; and deadmau5) Who have since sold off a majority share to Block, while Jay-Z kept a board seat and other artists still have shares. Curious if it will last.
Tidal is the only one for me since it’s the only one with an unofficial HiFi Linux client, which is a wrapper around the web version but with HiFi enabled.
I’m happy reading that they are decent on pay for artists.
What’s the USP of Deezer over Apple Music now that the latter has lossless streaming as well (and live lyrics for longer)?
I’m enjoying Tidal
Thanks for the recommendation, I was worried they would be missing some of my artists but they had 99% of my music. Can’t wait to ditch Spotify.
ETA: dear lord the sound quality is so much better. I had no idea what I was missing.
Yeah, happily using Tidal as well. Haven’t missed any music that wasn’t also missing from Spotify, so…
Yeh, it’s pretty amazing.
Only thing I miss from Spotify are the user generated playlists, where I can search for something like “liquid drum and bass” and get a bunch of playlists
Does Tidal have a lightweight Linux client that’s kept up-to-date?
Tidal on Linux is a crap shoot, which sucks because pipewire is awesome for HiRes music since it can change sample rate on the fly to match a source. Best bet is Firefox and their web player, and using the middle tier “high” that’s blue colored, and letting pipewire play @ 44100
Check this web player wrapper, it allows for high and Max quality
https://github.com/Mastermindzh/tidal-hifi?tab=readme-ov-file#features
That runs on chromium, which in Linux is HARD locked to 48000, so every single song will be resampled.
Idk what the other two are saying because Tidal HiFi is an unofficial client that let’s you reproduce high quality music, being basically the only one that let’s you do it on Linux. Yeah it’s a web wrapper but with HiFi enabled or whatever, I don’t really remember but the default web version doesn’t have HiFi and the app does and it’s noticeable.
https://github.com/Mastermindzh/tidal-hifi?tab=readme-ov-file#features
Unfortunately, I’ve only found a wrapped up web client thing. Using the web page is probably similar.
The wrapped up web client works better than the native client on windows, tho. Not sure on sound quality, I haven’t had an issue tho
If you are talking about Tidal HiFi, the UI might be similar to the web version but apparently itbruns on a modified version of chrome that allows HiFi music? I did test it some months ago and the quality difference is noticeable.
Yeh, the electron wrapped Tidal HiFi for Linux. I just checked the GitHub, and it says it supports High and Max settings thanks to Widevine.
I swapped from Spotify to Tidal on windows and was blown away. Shortly after I started daily-driving Linux. I haven’t done an A/B between the Linux electron version and the windows desktop version, but it hasn’t annoyed me like Spotify did.According to another commenter chromium on Linux is hard capped on quality, so although it’s noticeable vs the web version, it’s not actual Max quality. I haven’t noticed it although my headphones should be able to show the difference (sony MDR 7506, I know, yes, for everything, people say that it doesn’t sound nice, I don’t care I love it) so idk.
As an Apple hater; Apple Music. Cheaper, good cross-platform frontends, more equitable to artists (though by no means satisfactorily so), has a Wrapped equivalent (though who actually cares). Maybe Spotify added something it doesn’t have in the several years since I switched but, I doubt it
Apple Music is on Android?
Yup
It is, but the app is frustrating. It has a mind of its own sometimes and, subjectively, basic UI functionality was an afterthought. Also no support on a galaxy watch.
That said, it sounds great and has a solid catalog (except the DJ Krush/Toshinori Kondo collab, Ki-Oku. Grrrr)
Qobuz/Tidal/Deezer?
Apple Music and Tidal.
Napster pay decent artist royalties and offer a Spotify migration service for your playlists etc. as well as lossless music.
It’s too convenient. Most people just want easy access and don’t even think of the downstream impacts. If a song or two goes unavailable, probably won’t notice. There is gonna need to be an alternative that is cheap and feature rich along with Spotify missing some steps. It’s here for awhile.
You are not wrong, but there are other services that are just as convenient and for less money. Spotify knows they are the “default” music streaming platform and they are exploiting that.
A quick Google puts the top two at Apple and Amazon. So that is a big no for me boss. I am pretty sure the next ones listed are just torrent front ends. I have a life now so no time for that…spotify it is.
I use Tidal. It may not be much better than Spotify, but it’s better than Spotify.
Audio quality is better and they pay the artists the most of all the major streaing platforms. I’ve been using Tidal for 2 years and have been very happy with the switch
While it doesn’t have well known artists, indie streaming Resonate prides itself as having the most generous (or at least, close to) payments to artists. To support this, it has an innovative payment model akin to higher purchase. You pay a little for the first listen to a track, but the price increases through subsequent listens. After 9 listens, you own the track outright. The total cost of ownership is around $0.9
That’s a cool model, at least at first glance
What is a better alternative, aside from just buying the media directly?
Well better than Spotify is a real low bar. I’m on an apple music family plan and I like it but if I weren’t I’d probably get tidal. And they actually dropped the price of their high quality tier.
And they actually dropped the price of their high quality tier.
This is what we call competition, kids… i know most people don’t understand the concept but it is supposed to make consumer make a change by providing a good deal.
This is the opposite we see nowadays, where they fuck you and say it is fine because “reasons”
Tidal will no longer keep its high-res, lossless and spatial audio content locked behind a £20/$20-per-month “HiFi Plus” subscription. Instead, it is now moved into a single individual user plan, costing a lower-cost, Spotify-matching £11/$11 per month.
Previously, users paid that price for CD-quality FLAC files, but needed to opt for the pricier plan to unlock 24-bit/192kHz tracks and Dolby Atmos content.
That’s now all changed as of 10th April, which saw the new £11/$11 per month plan implemented.
And specifically to your point
This price drop only puts further pressure on Spotify to improve the quality of its catalogue, which is currently capped at 320kbps in its Premium tier, and has no native support for spatial audio tracks.
That alone should be enough to get people considering other options. I’m sure there’s more beyond the big three too.
I got a few months of Apple Music with some device, was happy to ditch Spotify. Not very good, preferred Spotify’s UI and logic, but still a better alternative, and at least not pushing podcasts in my face (which I have zero interest in). I will never use Spotify again
That’s another big one to me too. I opened Spotify recently and you can plainly see the music is no longer the focus.
I used Tidal for a year but went back to Apple Music. I don’t understand what people like about Tidal that Apple Music doesn’t offer.
They pay the artist more. And I like how they handle interacting with collaborative works.
It’s really 3 peanuts instead of 4. Streaming just doesn’t provide a lot of money for artists.
That’s true. I still use Bandcamp. But as someone who listens to a lot of rap when I’m on a track and “view artist” I appreciate Tidal allowing me to choose which artist. Apple music defaults to the firs listed artist.
I’m enjoying Tidal
One of these services needs to release a feature like Spotify Connect, can’t switch without a replacement for that.
Spotify Connect
Unless I’m reading this wrong, is this just Spotify’s solution for listening with friends? If so, that’s far from a Spotify exclusive feature.
Edit: Okay. So it’s their version of Airplay. It’s too bad Apple never opened it up. Streaming to remote devices has works for almost 20 years now in the Apple ecosystem.
Pretty much, I use one computer to remote control the music on my computer that is hooked up to my headphones or speakers.
Nobody else supports that functionality last I checked.
It’s not really just Spotify. I’m a hobbyist music producer. I uploaded my entire catalog through Distrokid about two years ago. Distrokid serves just about every streaming service. It costs $20 a year for the most basic package. I’ve got ~8 million listens according to Distrokid, and that nets me about $40 US. So, I made my money back. Not bad for 20 years of work. Haha!
I don’t really care about the numbers, like I said, I’m a hobbyist. I make music because I enjoy making music. It would never be my career unless I dropped everything and struck out touring trying to make it in an industry that traditionally chews up and spits out hopefuls. I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either.
not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect
What gets me is that, for the right style of music, age or attractiveness shouldn’t matter as much as it does. You should be able to create your art, whatever kind of art it is, and have the art itself be judged on its merits. Instead we’ve got a bunch of our culture still somehow wrapped up in these veneers of attractiveness. It’s kind of maddening, to be honest. If you’re in your 50’s and making 90’s style Acid House or 2000’s style Trance it shouldn’t matter what you look like. If you’re a DJ it shouldn’t matter if you look like Shirley Temple or Shirley Manson. And yet here we are.
8 million listens netting you only 40 bucks really is insane, isn’t it? I used to think radio royalties were bad: I remember Sting talking about how every time Roxanne got played on the radio someone somewhere got 3 cents. He didn’t say who got the 3 cents, nor did he say how much of that 3 cents went to him. I’m not 100% sure about those numbers (“my memory is muddy, what’s this river that I’m in?”) but they’re a damn sight more impressive than whatever crumbs the streaming companies are paying, somehow a thousand times less than the radio. Spotify’s announcement last year that they weren’t even going to bother paying for songs with less than 1000 streams per month was a shocker - what stops them from making it 2000, or 10,000?
Still, being a hobbyist isn’t all bad. I’ve been releasing jazz cover-versions of pop songs for about 2.5 years now, and have netted about 25 bucks so far :) Who knew jazz versions of Toxic or Rusted From The Rain could be so popular?
If I made 3 cents a stream, I’d have a quarter of a million…
You could always don a stage persona like Marshmello or Daft Punk. Then nobody cares what you look like under the mask.
I’m in a similar boat, but I never feel fully satisfied to release a song (probably cuz I am a hobbyist and I suck lol).
But regardless, I think there is an element of selling your soul to Hollywood to really make it big, and I just don’t have that kind of commitment at this point in my life. I like relaxing and anonymity.
I’m in a similar boat, but I never feel fully satisfied to release a song (probably cuz I am a hobbyist and I suck lol).
There’s never a better time to put yourself out there! I resisted it for twenty years. My most “successful” release is one of my least polished tracks. I recorded it just out of university on a Pentium with a stolen microphone, pirated software, a freebie guitar, and a ZOOM 505. It’s got 4 million listens and is responsible for half my income. By comparison, I’ve released stuff that I think sounds like it was professionally recorded in a studio that no one listens to.
It’s funny like that, isn’t it?
You catch lightning in a bottle in 5 minutes using Reaper, then spend 100x the time on another song that just vanishes.
Peaches most popular song was a tape recording off the sound desk in a German bar.
Yep.
Another one of my most popular tracks is an atonal hour-and-twenty-minutes of cubic spline curves, granular synthesis, and other assorted noises I programmed in Csound.
I appreciate this. Can I have a listen? I also make music… Sometimes.
I release everything as “Underwaterbob” - my username. You can find me just about everywhere. If you don’t have a subscription, it’s all on YouTube, too: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ_MZ9yX0STsY1l2Ml2zBFw
I make a wide variety of music.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/channel/UCQ_MZ9yX0STsY1l2Ml2zBFw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either
Idk. I was happy to pay to hear Mic Jagger live and he looks like shit.
Worst case scenario, just become the new Gorillas
Not sure I’d use one of the most iconic sexy lead singers in history as an example. No matter much how much he looks like shit now.
I’m not exactly the age or attractiveness that most people expect in a touring musician, either.
Just start making IDM. Looking weird and/or unattractive seems to be a requirement (and, don’t get me wrong, I’m here for it)
weekly PSA that spotify is a dumb company who makes no money because they’re stupid.
To put it bluntly, between the artists, and the musicians, there is the publisher (the traditional music company) the money pretty much only goes to the publisher, because spotify doesn’t want to make money, nor do they want artists to make money. And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.
Go support your local musical artists.
And the artists put their shit on spotify because people believe that spending 15 dollars a month on a service that doesnt pay artists, apparently pays artists.
It’s probably more a case of artists acknowledging the fact that streaming services are one of, if not the, primary sources of music discovery and consumption for many these days. Even if they won’t make money off it, by not being available on these platforms, they may as well not exist for most people. That’s something that only huge, already established names can pull without feeling it.
you know what else streams your music? The fucking internet, that shits free! Literally just posting your shit on a torrent will give you tons of traction to work with. Especially if you already have a pretty significant listener base. Plus you also get the benefit of people like me who are significantly more inclined to buy physical releases of media.
Regardless, streaming is a good way of getting people to hear your shit, if you really want to use a streaming service, don’t go through a publisher, or at the very least, a mainstream publisher. They tend to fuck you over.
Sure, but the barrier to entry is significant enough to still deter most people. Even assuming they aren’t bothering with port forwarding and seeding, most people seem like they can’t be bothered with any pattern of consumption more complicated than finding content on major streaming platforms, and the music streaming services haven’t yet gotten annoying enough for most people. They’ll take a peek, go “Do I want FLAC, V0 or 320? WTF is an APE?” and bail again.
We can disagree as to whether it should be that way or not, but I’d wager that the reach of streaming services for a new band far exceeds that of uploading a torrent to a random tracker and hoping it takes off. Unless people already know of you to look for your music, you need to hope a huge number of them are just auto-snatching anything new. On private trackers, sure, you’ll get a bunch of people who auto-snatch any FLAC upload from the current year, but you’re talking about <50,000 users in those cases, and a good chunk of the auto-snatchers are just people looking to build buffer who won’t even listen to most of what they snatch. On the other hand, nobody is auto-snatching all the torrents going up on public trackers, they’d run out of space in no time at all.
i mean yeah, though nothing stops you from putting it up on both services so, don’t come crying to me lol.
Your publisher might but that’s because they’re a cunt lol. Up to the artist though, personally i’d only release it underground, give it to the people who deserve it. It might take off from there, i’m not going to stop other people from spreading it via clear web mirrors or uploads onto streaming services like youtube or anything.
This is all assuming that availability is the top priority for all artists. I think spotify has shown 99.999% of artists that their model of maximum availability at all costs simply doesn’t work, either in terms of contacting an audience, making any money or valuing music. It just results in the vast majority of artists being insulted and demoralised and the remainder producing music of a relentlessly narrowing artistic scope. Are you more likely to get around 3500 plays on spotify or get £1 in donations off the back of giving your music away for free? It sounds absurd and that’s because it is. Most artists will get the same out having their music on spotify for a year as walking out onto the street with an acoustic guitar for half an hour on a Saturday. At least out on the street you’re not propping up a capitalist giant and a tiny ‘elite’ of ultra commercial music producers. For me spotify and it’s ilk have been the final nail in the coffin for integrity and reward in releasing music and I would encourage the 99.999% to boycott it and forge ahead with alternatives. Nothing better will emerge until then and artistic culture will continue to become more and more bleak.
What are your thoughts around generating traction with a torrent? I have two friends who are both sitting on their albums and thinking about how best to release them. I hope to release something one day too and refuse to use the likes of spotify on principle.
hmm, if you do release them, it would be prudent to release them with related material, throw in a txt file with some additional little trivia facts or tidbits, as well as some links to places to buy your material, or even donate directly to you. Oh also you should probably throw in some interesting stickers or prints or something, things that aren’t clothing and CDs can be interesting sometimes.
If you want to do a multi platform release, do an exclusive release on the torrents, i.e. throw in some extra unreleased material, or a second mixing/mastering of a track or something. Throwing something in to make the listeners feel appreciated is always good.
Obviously generate some public attention for it, you’re probably only going to attract existing torrent users, but drumming up some sort of conversation around music rights, supporting artists and all that is going to be a good idea. Notably, since you’re the artist putting it up, you have the rights over it, so it’s perfectly legal. If you want to get really funny you can openly license it, so that way people can torrent it without “technically” breaking the law. Though that’s not explicitly required i don’t think. Naturally the most obvious way is to title a song “pirate this” or something lmao. “exercise to the user” as us TMC players would say.
yeah im pretty much out of ideas here lol, hopefully that helped.
To add to this, buy their merch and physical copies of their albums. Also, go to shows! Lots of small bands would love a bigger crowd and can be seen for cheap or free.
exactly this, buy merch, buy albums, give them your money directly if you can. (artists, please just let me give you money, i like your shit, maybe i don’t want to buy shit tons of plastic ok?)
Spotify negotiated shit deals when they were a startup and they’ll basically forever be not profitable because of it.
they should’ve became a publisher, or started one on the side, the profit would be immense if they thought of doing that.
Seriously. They had a completely open market, then essentially signed a perpetual deal where something like 40% of gross income is paid out to the labels. It’s absolutely insane how poorly run they were in the beginning.
If they had become a publisher, distributor and/or a label, they’d be on top of the world now.
yeah pretty much. They’d be the single biggest publisher globally, and almost certainly the most profitable.
Their strategy was probably the classic startup strategy. Grow at all costs and figure out profitability later. These days it’s rather obvious that this strategy sucks and is doomed to fail (for most cases).
The big record labels are shareholders in Spotify so they’re happy to get less money in streaming royalties because that’s the part they have to share with artists, but the value of their shares they get to keep all for themselves.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/who-really-owns-spotify-955388/
ah of course, schizo economics, how could i forget. “trust me, i will hold shares for you, i promise” Though this still isn’t a good position to be in, because now the publishing companies essentially run spotify, so spotify fucked themselves even more lol.
Go support your local musical artists.
I miss X Fest… :(
i’m still riding the high of all the older artists from the 90s till now that i’ve missed out on. We’ll see how long that lasts lol.
“Let’s throw away all of our physical media! All digital streaming music, movies and books will be so much better! Everything we want, always available, anywhere!!!”
Somewhat true if you’re a seasoned sailor of the high seas, not so much if not…
I’m fighting this fight with phone and sd cards. It’s part of the reason they are killing sd card slots to get people to put everything in the cloud.
Sadly most people are morons and are doing exactly that.
You don’t need to be a “seasoned sailor”. It’s incredibly easy IMO to get what you want if you’re willing to put forth a tiny amount of effort.
The seasoning helps to know where it’s safe to put into port though.
We are entering the golden age of self hosting and I’m gonna go all in!!!
And for those wondering what about artists, two words: live shows
Just cancelled, have been a customer since 2015 or so.
I’ve said many times I would gladly pay more, if it were an elective extra cost that goes 100% to the artists you listen to.
So $11/mo to Spotify, then I could elect to pay another amount of my choosing that gets split up based on what I’m listening to and goes 100% to the artists. I don’t love it but it would be an acceptable solution to me.
A better solution would be for Spotify to be fair and pay artists accordingly from the start… buttttt Capitalism, and Spotify is publicly traded so no chance of that ever happening. I’m out.
Tidal is your friend
The nice thing about Tidal is the attention to detail about the music or album you’re listening to. You get writers, producers and recording musicians for all the tracks. Sometimes additional Artwork.
Apple had the right idea all those years ago when they were selling those enhanced digital albums. Almost felt like purchasing a vinyl or cd and getting all the goodies that come with it. INCLUDING properly crediting the artists. Not sure they do that very well anymore.
I wish. But it says it’s not available in my region. Which is really weird in the current globalized world.
(Note I’m not super familiar with Tidal)
I had a look earlier in the year and I believe Napster pay very decent artist royalties and offer a Spotify migration service. I will be moving to them after this.
This is why I went for Tidal:
Tidal takes a look back at a HiFi Plus subscriber’s top streamed artist at the end of every month, and then allocates the direct payment to that listener’s most played artist. Qualified artists who enroll in the Direct Artist Payout program will be able to collect the payouts allocated to them on a monthly basis.
But they recently changed their pricing and I’m no longer paying 20 so I’m not sure if they still do that or not. I have heard good things about napster too.
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I cancelled too. they were resetting my password and forcing me to create a new one once or twice a week. all because i would use spotify on my desktop and my phone.
they only help they would offer was “you password is not secure”. yes, my 16character random generated password is not secure. fuck em.
I mean, Spotify is a great service for the consumer. One reasonable monthly fee for most of the music in the world.
If a similar video streaming service existed for 40€/month, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat. Now I have a plethora of arr apps and a vpn, and Plex. But it’s a hassle sometimes.
We’re all aware of the issues it created for the artists, and I’d be willing to double the fee if that money directly went to the artists, but this is where the capitalist model fails, as that won’t maximize the profits for shareholders.
If we ever come up with a way to fix the underlying greed models that come with publicly traded companies, that would be great.
As it stands, it is what it is, but I’m glad we have this, instead of a “different Spotify per music publisher”.
I’d pay 40€ a month for an officially licensed private torrent tracker. If they gave discounts based on the amount seeded I doubt they would even need the stupidly expensive infrastructure.
I don’t even have the arr stack because it’s cheaper, just because it’s more convenient and no one can take it away from me
Maybe it’s because my schema for torrents is dichotomous with licensed uses, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around this.
Is the distinction you’re making here between your proposed ‘licensed private tracker’ and something like a subscription-based catalogue (à la Audible) simply the way it’s distributed (in this case a centralized vs peer-to-peer)?
I like the idea of distributed media networks, but I really doubt any copyright owner would go for a distribution network that they don’t have any level of control over. The idea of an ‘officially licensed private torrent tracker’ seems incompatible with how that industry works.
I’d happily pay for an unlicensed private torrent tracker, though.
Totally agree, they’ll never go for that. I meant licensed as in that the media is being legally distributed. But they wouldn’t go for it as it would mean that customers might have an amount of ownership.
The distinction is that the private tracker is legal to run, as you’d be paying the licence holder for the ability to torrent using their private tracker.
I like the Audible idea of “you have X amount of GB a month that you can download, and you can pay more for more GB”. It gives the customer a reason to keep paying, and therefore allow the business to exist.
Licence is probably the wrong word as I’m not anywhere near an expert on this
Spotify is a great service for the consumer. One reasonable monthly fee for most of the music in the world.
Plus ads.
instead of a “different Spotify per music publisher”.
I was perfectly happy with Napster, before it got blown up.
As it stands, I’ve been leaning on SoundCloud and Bandcamp when I’m hunting for something indie and pirating or going vinyl for anything mainstream.
Spotify’s model is doomed to fail over time. Far better to own the media than stream it.
Not sure about the ads? If you mean when the app notifies you about live gigs etc. then yeah, that’s shittification. Luckily it doesn’t happen on my desk or car, but I wish it didn’t sometimes appear on my phone. That’s the one thing that might push me to add music to my video streaming arr stack.
Certain content (podcasts, most notably) insert ads into the feed above and beyond what Spotify Premium ostensibly removes. There’s also Spotify’s persistent need to blow up your phone with notifications and bloat your in-app screen, but at least some of that you can silence manually.
My wife has Spotify and she’s noticed the increased pressure to be always-online, as well. We were on a flight, and she’s got her take-off chill music, when she discovered putting the phone in airplane mood before starting up the app caused a bunch of bugs in her selection screen. Which - in the middle of a take-off that she did not enjoy - fucking sucked.
The service is definitely getting worse over time. And when you can keep an enormous library of music locally, the service becomes harder and harder to justify imho.
I’m perfectly happen to send $30/mo to Patreon for a few of my favorite artists. $12/mo for Spotify just feels like money down a well.
I’m not familiar with the free tier, but if you don’t pay anything, I think ads are fine.
Paying and seeing ads is wrong on the other hand.
Spotify’s model is doomed to fail over time.
This right here. At the very least, unless they are not beholden to shareholders, it will eventually reach market saturation and will have to cut artists’ share, hike prices up, or add more paywalls to keep the line going up
I’m glad we have this, instead of a “different Spotify per music publisher”.
What would be wrong with a model where artists had their own website where they could distribute their music? That’s what Faircamp does. Then people could actually download it, rather than use a companies crappy client with DRM.
Is there a median breakdown of the split on Spotify. How much the artist get, the label and Spotify. I get that the split between artists and labels could probably vary a lot. But I get the feeling that Spotify aren’t the only one whos beeing greedy
You’d be correct
The greed isn’t inherent in the system, in the humans. We have to fix our self-serving nature first.
In 2023, Taylor Swift got $100 million from Spotify. How much should she get?
Not sure what the relevance of this comment was, considering what I said
I already commented somewhere else in this thread, but I’ve been just buying music via bandcamp and I feel pretty good about it. If I buy about one new album a month for $8, it’s cheaper than spotify and after a couple years I have a large library of music I own outright.
This works with my listening habits, which are something like “I have like one new (-to me) album on heavy rotation every couple of weeks”. Someone who’s more of a “i never listen to the same song twice” extreme wouldn’t have as good a time.
Definitely thinking about cancelling with this. I’ve used Spotify as long as I can remember, after finally switching over from pandora radio.
Their shuffle and discovery algorithms suck so much now that it’s nearly impossible to listen to more than 20-30 songs they just keep repeating.
Add on the extra, inserted ads in podcasts, there’s really no reason to continue to use their platform.
Then again, I’m probably going to YT music, which is only marginally better, but since I pay for YT premium already there’s no additional cost
I wish they had something between “top songs” and “completely random” when listening to a band.
Like, sure, Sweet Child of Mine, Welcome to the Jungle, and Paradise City are great and all, but there’s only so often you can listen to them, and the only alternative is to be reminded that Chinese Democracy exists.
YouTube music has something like this. You choose a few artists you like then tune the randomness of what it plays. I have discovered more new artists Ina few months of using it than I have in the decade before that.
Never used it, but I just want to appreciate the design of these three icons: just a speaker radiating sound coming to something resembling a solar system. Simple, yet cool.
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For me it’s near the top on the apps homepage. Looks like this
haha, so true. On the other hand Chinese Democracy is not that bad ;)
If you find a better place to discover music please lmk (no sarcasm)
Their discovery sucks lately and I hate it.
I like Tidal and rhey pay the most per play to artist’s.
I thought that was Qobuz. At least I can actually buy music through Qobuz I guess.
I have tons of playlists and saved music on spotify; how is Tidal at importing data from other services? It’s not really a deal breaker, but I’m really picky about my music (so I don’t really care about “radio” features or curated playlists), so it’d be a real pain in the ass to start from scratch.
They have a feature to import your music from other sites…
It does have Spotify in it.
Technology is so amazing. It is finally possible to pay artists in exposure
Stop using this shitty service. There are much better options. I like Tidal, but even Apple music seems decent compared to Spotify.
The audio quality alone should be telling people just how bad spotify is.
If I still used Apple products I’d still be using Apple Music. Good sound with the ability to upload my own music library to mesh with it seamlessly to cover the gaps of what wasn’t available? It was my ideal music streaming service.
Now I’m on Deezer but every streaming service has gaps in their catalog for what I listen to.
Slowly working on getting my own music library together to get rid of streaming services entirely. Plan on using Plex for now, but eventually I’ll just move to a phone that has an SD card slot.
Mix of purchases and stuff downloaded and saved from Deezer.
I am okay with YouTube premium with the music app. I am no audiophile so I can have all the gaps filled with music videos and just play the audio.
I dunno. Spotify stopped billing me for the family plan I was paying for some years ago and at this point I’ve got five accounts mooching off of them and I’m using powershell to download gigabytes worth of music off of them…
Like, Spotify is evil but at this point I’m a negative number for them every month. I’m gonna keep on going until they decide to shut off the hose.
Oh, but I do go to concerts and buy records.
Does Tidal pay artists better?
Two to three times what Spotify pay artists per stream.
Thanks for including the link!
The trouble I’ve found with Apple music for me is that a lot of the classical stuff that I listen to on YouTube Music (RIP forever GPM you were the best) isn’t on Apple, but a lot of other content that isn’t anywhere else is there. So you’re having to choose between one or the other and their stuff kind of sucks.
Really, really long sigh
TIDAL.
😂😂😂
In seriousness, what is the payment to artists like nowadays on TIDAL? Dare I even ask?
As far as I know, it’s $0.025 per stream. Spotify’s rate is $0.003. Pretty substantial difference. TIDAL has the highest rate in the streaming industry.
EDIT: If you really want to support artists, go to Qobuz and buy albums. I’m planning to get a Sublime subscription so I can own my music and support artists even more (while not missing out on freedom to play what I want on demand).
Also, fixed the decimals and changed TIDAL to a more accurate average.
I think that you are off by about an order of magnitude. Spotify pays $0.003 per stream, and title apparently pays $0.01 -0.05.
I think this is correct. In cents, this is 0.3¢ and 1-5¢ respectively. Zeroes are too hard for my mushy brain…
that’s a lot more evin more than deezer at 0.0064$
I love how no one mentions that the great success business Spotify got all their starting music from the mp3 warez scene.
Early Spotify songs still had the meta data from those files, including misspelled song names and years of issue.
I fucked off Spotify after the Jo Rogan debacle.
I’ve been with Tidal since. I miss the Spotify recommendation algorithm but that’s it.
I’ve been a paying member for almost a decade. I’ve been training it that entire time with what I do and don’t like. I’ve also been using their suggested playlists for years and further refining what they recommend. So their algorithm is a huge part of it for me. I am constantly finding songs and artists I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise.
That said, I’ve been holding my nose while I renewed the service for the past couple of years. I’m willing to part ways for Tidal if it’s a comparable service with better benefits to the artists.
Same
i paid for the best tier Tidal for a year and it was a worse experience than spotify. Their catalogue is incomplete compared to spotify
Joe Rogan debacle?
There’s plenty of info if you google your comment.
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/07/spotify-joe-rogan-artists-subscribers/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/arts/joe-rogan-spotify.html
Etc etc
No matter what you think about Apple, Apple Music pays multiple times more than Spotify
And Tidal pays multiples more than Apple.
It’s up to you if you want to support artists or not.
I switched to Tidal after Spotify announced the price increase. The catalogue is basically identical, the apps are much more intuitive, and the audio quality is higher (they recently rolled their premium FLAC subscription into the basic one).
I had to retrain the algorithm for a bit, but that was not so difficult. There are services that can migrate/convert playlists which might actually work for favourites as well.
Also, it’s easy easier to download stuff from Tidal, which is very nice for listening to Audiobooks with a dedicated player.
Thank you for the information. Not a fan of putting the blame on the consumer here though. Spotify is the asshole here, not the people who want to pay for the music.
I wouldn’t assume a corporation is a moral entity, Spotify’s only goal is to maximise profit. Maybe it’s a problem of our economic system or regulations around monopolies.
I don’t think it’s about assuming anything… it’s about not burdening the consumer with regulating industry when it is clearly impossible to do so.
OP (of this thread) pitches Apple as an alternative… do you want to help artist a tad while also assisting a multi billion dollar company to continue to squash any possible ownership and right-to-repair chance the consumers has?..
There isn’t ONE large corporation that has not shown they would kill people if that made them money… so no, the consumer cannot, in practice, “vote with their wallet” into forcing any corporation anywhere near an ethics “green ground”
It’s worth noting though, that Spotify has been bleeding money since the start. I know they may be wasting a lot of money on side hustles but still. They’re not raking home any money. The only way the founders got rich is by the overinflated stock price.
E: typo
I think they actually just started making a profit.
Just want to add an extra FU to Google as a consumer and Android user. Killing off GPlay Music for YT Music was just a nasty nice, especially given that the latter has no mechanism to purchase music and a lot of the content or mixes in from YouTube uploads seems of pretty dubious legitimacy
Does YouTube music pay its artists? I prefer an Android platform. A lot of the stuff I want isn’t on Apple Music for classical is also why.
