- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- Technology@programming.dev
I’ve done it. I’ve finally reached my “old man yells at cloud” moment. Why, why, WHY is Spotify adding features straight out of the social media playbook?
Anybody have recommendations for alternatives?
In my head there’s:
YouTube music (google, gross)
Apple music (no way they’re not on a similar trajectory)
Bandcamp (limited, but at least bands see some money from it)
SoundCloud (weird reputation, though haven’t come back around to it in a good 10 years)
Tidal maybe? Would love to hear some recommendations.
Edit: I neglected to mention why I don’t like the messaging feature. I’ve never used it, yet with a few of my friends there are already dozens of song exchanges in the thread. It’s clear that spotify has been using user-specific links for a while now to track who sends what to who. That’s a pretty clear anti-feature for me, and is enough to make me jump ship.
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I’m so glad I still just buy and maintain my own local music library.
spotify started with more social media feel
Tidal is great as far as streaming services go in general.
I hear people saying Tidal is unethical because of where its finding is coming from, and the ties its investors have.
Qobuz seems to be the shit as the next alternative.
Hm, I watched Fantanos streaming service tierlist and from what I’ve seen, they seem to be on the better side businesswise. And I do like the product much more than Spotify nowadays, but I’m one of those weird people that listen to whole albums and not to algotorial playlists to study/relax/makeyourtaxes to.
Fantanos streaming service tierlist
I’ll have to check that out. 👍
I’m one of those weird people that listen to whole albums
Same, bro. Me too. ❤️🎶
Honestly, Apple Music is not that bad. Tried to love tidal but the app just really sucks with frequent crashes and terrible ui.
Thus far Apple Music feels like old apple playing the streaming game and I have yet to find enshitified features being added. Even the recommendations are more in line with my expectations, think of artists with new or upcoming releases that the app knows you’ve been listening too.
Ui wise I still miss Spotify, it WAS just better. But it’s going further from that everyday. Apple Music also has flac quality if that interests you and you don’t have to pay extra for it. In terms of paying artists, tidal still takes the crown and apple is second.
Apple Music also has flac quality if that interests you and you don’t have to pay extra for it
Spotify has this now as well and you don’t pay extra for it
But Spotify adds ai features I don’t ask for
Winamp died because the company that acquired it tried to turn it into an everything app.
Winamp died because the jump from 2 to 3 (if memory serves) was a profound hit to system resources… Followed by the dev team apparently fucking off on anything that wasn’t optimization (see above for likely reason.)
Add in a dose of music platforms figuring out streaming and you can put the final nail in that coffin.
Winamp died because pirating music mostly died. That’s the only reason.
I recently cancelled spotify and switched to a selfhosted navidrome server to stream my personal music collection.
I’ve done the same thing. Works real nice. Using Symfonium on my Android phone
Spotify customers created a bigger evil
Just don’t use the feature. Not everything is screech worthy.
That’s a fair response to the original post. Made an edit to expound.
My problem with it is that I’ve never used Spotify messages, yet there’s already a few threads on my account with dozens of “messages”. My best guess is that the thread tracks unique links that I’ve sent to friends outside of the app and they’ve opened while logged in with their accounts. I don’t like that.
It’s because we live in late stage capitalism. Our systems require infinite growth, so when Spotify tries to grow in an over saturated market. How else can they increase profits? Throw shit from all over the place to see what works. This issue is why every company jumped on the Ai bandwagon because it was the first real leap in a Market since the internet. Problem is 51% of all money spent in America was spent by the top 10% of the population. That top 10% only needs one Spotify subscription per person. The bottom 90% aren’t going to waste money anymore on subscription services.
It’s because we live in late stage capitalism
This place is so high on its own social justice warrior juices I’m so glad normal people don’t know I post here
Spotify adding a share music with your friends feature is late stage capitalism my gosh are you being dramatic or what
And Duolingo now has chess. What a complete joke; both those corporations and the people using everything uncritically.
At least they went with an intellectual game instead of some brain rot, addictive, pay-to-unlock-levels bullshit.
I had Tidal, but sending music to my home Sonos devices was too much of a pain in my butt so I reverted back to Spotify.
Try Metrolist for android. I don’t know what is available for pc in this manner. And if you’re one of the “If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing” people, then there’s option to save the mp3 files from both Spotify’s and Deezer’s database. Any telegram bot titling this kinda thing will do the job.
Thanks for the recommendation! I explored the app (hopefully this is the project you were referring to), and I couldn’t find an option to connect to Spotify to save MP3s. Can you elaborate or point me in the right direction?
Yes. This is the one.
And for the telegram one, go to the searchbar and type : @DeezerMusicBot , then in the chat menu, /start the bot. Choose simple “search” and it’ll appear in inline mode. Then type any song title and wait 3-4 seconds for it to appear. You can type Artist’s name additionally if the song title is too much common.
After you make the bot appear in inline mode for the fist time in its own inbox, then go to the “Saved Messages” section of telegram and just type @
It should pop up the option to choose the entire bot. If it doesn’t, simply continue further writing as shown in the picture and you’re good to go.
Lemmy summarised:
When streaming services don’t pay independent musicians with 10 listeners per month a living wage: 🤬
When Lemmy users pirate music and pay artists literally nothing: 🤓
So, I’m a bit of an enigma, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt. I use Tidal. It does the best, out of all my criteria.
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- Friendly privacy policy. It’s very straight forward, and from what my lawyer friend said, it’s pretty solid.
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- Hi def streaming. It’s a must for me, as I have some nice cans and speakers I wanna listen through.
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- Payout to artists. Although they don’t pay as much as Qobuz, they pay a substantial amount relatively, and the aforementioned points make up for the rest.
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- Ease of use. The app is really great and it’s easy to use and I find that after curating my music for awhile, I get solid recommendations and the radio stations always hit well. Although, I do wish there was more variety in the stations. Sometimes, it plays the same tracks across stations.
All in all, I’m very happy with Tidal and I don’t think I’m switching anytime soon.
spotify has hi def now
Yes, they do. However, they don’t meet the criteria of my other three points.
Payout to artists
They pay out more to artists than literally anyone else?
For another year, Spotify was the highest-paying retailer globally — paying the music industry over $10 billion in 2024. This brings total lifetime payouts to nearly $60 billion.
Ease of use
I don’t find Spotify difficult to use at all
No idea about privacy policy
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Payout per stream is a more effective delineation than the total payout. I listen to some niche artists and if I’m streaming, I want to maximize their profit off my streaming.
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Regarding ease of use, my issues with Spotify came in the form of all the AI slop they have pushed. They may have toned it down, but I won’t subscribe out of principle.
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They have not respected user privacy, therefore their policy is useless.
May I ask why me having a positive opinion of Spotify is important?
They have not respected user privacy
What do you mean by this? How haven’t they?
I listen to some niche artists and if I’m streaming, I want to maximize their profit off my streaming.
That’s funny so do I, I listen to a lot of music and the majority are not popular, this helps increase the share of the pie so the artists I listen to get paid more
May I ask why me having a positive opinion of Spotify is important?
It’s not
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Sun Times literally just released this article regarding the most recent privacy concerns.
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The graphic from Statista below shows that Tidal is one of the higher payouts for streaming. Spotify does not pay as well as Tidal. This is factually accurate.
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Yeah, that was weak on my part. I shouldn’t have said that. I let my emotions get the better of me, and for that, I am sorry.
did you have the actual concern? i read the article and didn’t see any actual privacy issues besides:
the company’s algorithm-driven model that relies heavily on user data collection
do they really think i care that spotify knows what i listen to and when i listen to it in order to give me recommendations?
it’s one of the rare cases on the internetweb where im more than happy to give them as much data as they want in exchange for giving me better recommendations for artists and songs that i might like and listen to
The graphic from Statista below shows that Tidal is one of the higher payouts for streaming
that chart isn’t accurate at all because that’s not how pay per stream works
it might be true that tidal has a high payout rate per stream, but if you notice on the right is how many listeners there are, tidal has n/a vs spotify’s 265 million, i believe its up to 276 million now
there’s straight up just more people streaming which dilutes the pay per stream because there’s more people streaming than ever, billions of streams every hour
spotify’s streaming rate is variable for each artist because it’s your number of monthly streams x your total share of all streams
the more streams you get, the bigger the share, the higher the payout, there are millions of artists getting plenty of streams and are very happy with what they’re getting
spotify also has different rates depending on where you are and what your plan is, so im on premium and live in australia so my payout per stream is near the top, someone on an ad supported plan in india is paying out a fraction of what i do, but maybe that ad supported indian user will get a good job soon and enjoys spotify but hates the ads so he gets premium, adding to the pool that gets paid out to artists and spotify is #1 by a long way
also funny that the company with unlimited money (apple) has such a low payout rate on that inaccurate chart, vs spotify which pays out 70% of its companies revenues to rights holders
Spotify pays out about 70% of its gross revenue to rightsholders. That’s a significant portion of their income. In accounting terms, their cost of goods sold is 70%. Tidal also pays out around 70% of its revenues to rightsholders
https://blog.discmakers.com/2025/06/why-does-spotify-pay-the-lowest-royaltie/#h-TOC_01
whatever works though
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Spotify has been on the way to ruin for a while already. The UI is partly Tiktokified/Instagramified.
I like streaming music, I dont need to own it, but I have been struggling to find a good music streaming service.
I used Spotify for years but the amount of garbage they keep adding made me cancel my subscription. The last straw was when “smart shuffle” kept automatically turning itself back on.
First I switched to YouTube Music but the user experience is honestly trash and I moved on pretty quickly. The separation between video and music service was ridiculously inconsistent.
I used Tidal for a few months and I appreciated the simple UI. However, the recommendations are insanely bad. Not once have I found a new, good track on the daily mix to add to my library, it was driving me crazy.
I started using Qobuz only a few weeks ago. The track radio is honestly pretty bad so far. I start the radio on a lofi track and start hearing video game ambience noises 5 tracks later. Literally bird sounds with whitenoise from an OST album. I havent tried the daily/weekly queue a lot yet, but I hope its decent because I dont know what to try next.
I wish Spotify hadn’t entshittified, it had the best recommendations/radios by far but its just not usable for me anymore.
Funny that i switched from YT music to Spotify for a while and found its recommendations much worse. The app was cool and flashy though, especially on tv
I think what helped my Spotify recommendations a lot was the option to “exclude from taste profile”. I might listen to lofi for 12 h straight but I dont want any lofi recommendations at all, so that feature was nice.
Also I never pressed “like” on anything, I only ever disliked things in order to keep recommendations more open. It felt like Spotify understood the assignment while e.g. Tidal kept blasting me with a genre that I accidentally listened to one track of and kept “disliking” every single artists.
