- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- music@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- music@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36348361
I noped the hell out of Spotify when I found out it was hosting the Joe Rogan podcast. It’s only enshittified even more since. And now this.
Ugh, I hate when services stray from their original purpose and add random features. WhatsApp’s status thing isn’t so bad, but Spotify’s user messaging is just clutter. I just want to listen to music, you know? Maybe profiles for discovering new music are okay, but messaging? Nah, not needed. Keep it simple, music only.
It’ll be more popular than Twitter in a week. Not that it’s hard…

The logos for Instagram and WhatsApp are interchanged.
That’s absolutely insane that there’s 3B+ people on Facebook. I honestly don’t believe that number is accurate at all.
Am I underestimating how many people have phones/internet access at this point?
I think it’s both. There are an unbelievable number of people on Facebook, and there are also a TON of bots and inauthentic users. Meta has every incentive to exaggerate their numbers and permit bad actors (at least up to the point that real users are driven away). Same goes for all corporate social media.
Everyone. Damn near everyone has a phone at this point, Facebook even handed them out to keep the user numbers growing at one point
People who live in dirt floor huts walk to churches or other gathering places to charge them. The cheapest smart phones are essentially worthless, so there’s no point stealing or selling them.
And cell service isn’t all that expensive to run, so it’s priced to what people will pay
Huh. That’s a wild strategy, as for the other stuff that’s interesting, thanks for letting me know
Sure thing, and for the record I’m a primary source. I’ve seen this directly, going back more than a decade
I’ve read recently that llms are starting to effect how recently discovered tribal people operate and it’s fucking up there social structures, that was interesting to
Did a Google engineer make his way to Spotify
People will use every one of these horrendous messaging subapps but scoff at the idea of downloading signal or even whatsapp.
It’s a good thing that people refuse to download Whatsapp/Meta crap
Taking a page out of googles play book are we?
WHY?!?
(yes, I know it is data mining, but still)
And they still don’t offer 2FA.
The post I was on 5 seconds ago was about imugur and how people where confused when they added posts and comments to the image hosting site. Everyone wants a poece of the social media pie…but we need the infrastructure, the websites that host stuff and do it free and efficiently.
…the websites that host stuff and do it free and efficiently.
It’s never free. The instance you’re using isn’t free; it’s paid for by donations. ISPs and server hosts don’t just give bandwidth out of charity or for the public good. One way or another, these for-profit companies are getting their pound of flesh, typically by selling targeted ad space.
The fact that these companies are adding chat features means they’re now going to try mining conversations for additional consumer profile data points, which they can then sell to advertisers.
This new change is gross, and I hope nobody uses it.
Which they can sell to
advertisersLLM and AI companies.It’s not talked about too much, because it is not in the best interest of the stockholders. But AI as it was popularized by openAI and both images and text generators already reached a boundary of data availability. There’s no more human made data. They are now resorting to synthetic data, which is to make one first generation LLM model create tons of data to train newer or more tailored weighs models. With the issue that this new models develop problems from inbreeding of the data. Training models on other genAI products poisons the models and corrupts their generative power in just a few generations. This is why genAI images are increasingly turning yellow, the same reason newer models are more fragile and hallucinate or go psychotic more easily than old models. So, the AI companies need new sources of human made data to mix in with the synthetic data.
The main problem is that we ran out, there’s no more data made by humans to train AI with. Humans don’t create new data fast enough to train all the new models with the new doodads and features the AI companies want to sell. So now these companies will pay anything just to get their hands on new fresh stuff. These is why any app in the planet will now pivot to do anything they can to get chats going. It’s a new source of data to sell to data brokers.
Barf. I try hard not to think about it, since it’s shoved in our faces at every turn, but you’re absolutely right that our data is going to these AI corpos.
Imgur had the social media element since mid-2010s at least, maybe longer.
Yeah I’ll never forget the first time I saw someone just casually browsing IMGUR and I was like WTF are you doing?
NSFW bots sending you spam links and crypto scammers. Yea !!!
Please let this be your sign to start ditching corporate platforms across the board. Enshitification will come for your pristine app experience eventually. Go spend your Spotify monthly bill on one album every month from bandcamp or something. Own your own media. Share it with friends. GET OFF CORPO AD PLATFORMS! I realize this is the fediverse, so people are already kind of on board, but I think music streaming is often given a pass, or sneaks by our focus when discussing these issues.
I’ve been telling people for years to buy 1-2 albums a month, and then after a couple years you have a sizable library. Spotify is renting.
But spotify is easy and fast, and some people think they listen to way more music than they do. I wonder how many people are paying spotify $10/month to listen to the same 4 albums for years.
There’s something to be said for curated “auto” playlists, both for background and discovering stuff.
That being said, Pandora is waaaay better at this. So are free broadcasts/channels like Radio Paradise.
I don’t trust spotify not to fill those playlists with AI slop, now. I also personally prefer to go deeper on a band, rather than thoughtlessly drift through a bunch of stuff I’ll never hear again.
I do like bandcamp’s “people who bought this also bought this” recommendations, though.
Spotify’s payment model also adds a ton of bias to their suggestions. Artists need to hit a threshold number of listens a month to get paid at all, so Spotify ends up just suggesting music from artists they are already paying, rather than letting other folks hit that threshold. It’s also why the “shuffle” feature never actually shuffles a whole playlist before starting to repeat songs. If you really pay attention the songs that get repeated by the shuffle algorithm are the ones from bigger artists to try and keep smaller groups from getting paid at all.
My wife is one of those people and I beg her over and over to just let me host her music.
But spotify is easy and fast,
So you mean it’s convenient. That’s a valid reason. Evil shit aside, that’s literally why music streaming exploded the way it did.
Unfortunately, the evil shit is pushing me away. Why can’t we just have a regular music streaming service that doesn’t inevitably suffer from feature creep and enshittification? Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?
Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?
I think that’s the nature of publicly traded for profit companies. The shareholders don’t care about the product. They just want their portfolio’s value to go up.
The leadership doesn’t care much about the product. Not in the long term. They get paid a big salary, and the higher-ups have equity they want to go up in value. So long as they cash out before the product dies, they’re golden.
The actual labor building the product might care. Some are just working for a paycheck. (I knew a guy who worked at spotify, actually. He didn’t personally care much about music. He was just a database guy). But the ones who do care don’t have any power.
So most of the forces that would push the company towards being long term good don’t have power. The forces that want more profits, now, do.
Yeah, I know how capitalism works, unfortunately… I’m just ranting into the void at this point.
Let me just listen to music please…
I picked up some mp3 players with Bluetooth for about $7 each on aliexpress. Just finished acquiring my entire Spotify liked list. In my house, we’re getting back on the correct timeline.
What did you use to acquire your Spotify music? They cleaned a lot of software that could do that a while ago.
I gotta ask - why not just play the music on your phone?
It’s 6 years old and the battery isn’t removable. Plus I can leave the mp3 synced to the speakers all day and not have to worry about calls or leaving the house interrupting it.
Ah, I see. I was for some reason only assuming portable use. Hope it’s working well for you!
Love that. How long did it take you?
In total, less than an hour of my time. Maybe 6 hours to copy the playlists and download all of them, but I only had to copy/paste and hit go on the software. Honestly, if I knew it was this easy I’d have do we it years ago.
There’s no room for growth! What are we going to do about it? IDK, so random shit that won’t get adopted to placate the VCs? Give that man a raise! (TGIF gift cards only. We are going to be hemorrhaging cash soon).
Recently ditched Spotify, and you should too.
what alternative did you end up going with?
I had a script to convert my main Spotify playlist (5000+ songs) to download from soulseek but…yeah that would take a VERY long time and I really didn’t feel like being a soulseek asshole going that route.
If there was something out there where I can take my spotify playlist and just convert it and use it on another/better platform I’d switch right now.
use ymusic with no ads for youtube
I would gladly have you leech 5000 songs off me in Soulseek if it meant Spotify was losing a customer.
Always looking for new members who love music :)
I am very happy with my recent switch from Spotify to TIDAL
not available in Japan what the HECK!!!
I used something called spotDL, it grabs your music from youtube. I also had to get several thousand tracks, but it still found almost all of them. Didnt find maybe 50 out all those.
ah this was EXACTLY what I was looking for! thanks!
There used to be some programs that ripped directly from Spotify API. Did those all go the way of the dinosaur?
zotify
You, good sir, ma’am or other, are a scholar and a gentle human.
I’ve been a happy Tidal user for years fwiw. The app is great as is music availability and discovery. I went back to Spotify for a while because I was missing its discovery features like discover weekly, but Tidal has greatly improved since then, and now features a daily discovery playlist (10 tracks, which I greatly prefer to Spotify’s weekly 30), plus 8 custom mixes based on genres you listen to. Track radio is also solid.
Also, it’s maybe the only subscription service that instead of creating new tiers, merged the two it had before into one, keeping the upper tier’s features at the lower one’s cost
Listenbrainz is the best for discovery no matter what platform. Its opensource last.fm
I wish there was a better way to scrobble from Tidal to Listenbrainz on Android. I know that the Listenbrainz app itself can read system notifications and get song info from them. But the fact that you need to give permission to it for all types of notifications is not an easy decision to make.
The last loop I’m trying to close is notifications for new releases from artists I subscribe to.
I found this, but it has no documentation so I haven’t tried it yet: https://github.com/provokateurin/musicbrainz-rss-generator
Edit: Nevermind, I somehow missed the Explore page in ListenBrainz that does this automatically (and has its own RSS feed).
Plus Tidal songs are easily downloadable in full FLAC quality for your personal archive.
Yep. Hint hint: streamrip
I switched to Qobuz. They use https://soundiiz.com/ to migrate, I think it was free transfering to them?
I think it reported a 90% success rate + a few that it picked, but got wrong. It mostly failed on my instrumental stuff, standard stuff was fine.
Another updoot for Qobuz. Very happy with it, and the migration process was even better for me than as you describe it. Also, I didn’t think I’d give a shit about it the higher-quality codecs but they’re actually amazing. Big fan, A+++, would Qobuz again.
Yeah the high res masterings are fantastic
+1 for Qobuz! Tidal firing 100 employees did not inspire confidence in their app being less shit
I still don’t understand why apps these sizes need that many people in the first place, what do they do!?!
Half of them definitely just making PowerPoints and attending meetings. You’d probably end up with 5 devs actually doing something and a marketing/advertisement department, I guess
Apple music. High bitrate and aptx on android. And they pay artists more than Spotify. I moved over a while ago but I used some website to transfer over all my music.
Edit: looks like apple music might have the ability to transfer your music built into it now?https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/26/apple-music-transfer-tool-6-more-countries/
I’m a Linux–Android user and Apple Music is the closest I’ve found to Google Play Music’s library management (the best there ever was). So it’s what I use.
+1 for Apple Music. I know, “boo Apple!” And all that, but it fits well within the Apple one subscription and they pay artists well. Sound quality is good, discovery is good, supported everywhere.
Same! It decided ‘fuck em all’ and just downloaded all my music locally. It took some time to find a decent music player, but ended up with Musicolet, it’s a fantastic local music player. The way I see it, I’ve paid for Spotify for years, so I don’t feel bad about downloading all the music I had on there. Any new music I want I’ll just straight up buy myself.
How has nobody used to mention that this ALREADY used to be a feature they had before they killed it. I remember in high school me and the girl I was dating used to send eachother playlists. I didn’t even know spotify had killed the feature until I went looking for one of those playlists in my inbox that used to be there.



















