Thanks for the reminder! They shan’t get another cent from me!
[Helsing, based in Germany, says it was founded to “help protect our democratic values and open societies” and puts “ethics at the core of defense technology development.”]
Show me your democratic values, open societies and the ethics at the core of your murderous defense development … then I’ll show you mine.
Tomorrow is Bandcamp friday people.
yay for corpo generosity?
In case anyone isn’t aware, this means that Bandcamp won’t take their usual cut, so the artist gets more money from each sale. It’s this Friday only.
Stealing this link from another comment, but there are actually more than one Bandcamp Fridays coming up
Isn’t bandcamp on a road to enshit? I thought I heard they were. I love it though. Feels like a record store online.
All roads lead to enshitment
Doctorow is never wrong.
Except FOSS. Because if you can fork it, it cannot be enshittified… every time they attempt to, another fork can be made.
Sounds like an enshittification hydra.
It kinda is. One head enshittifies (coughOpenOffice), two more grow to take its place.
Well yes, probably. But, if you buy on Bandcamp or sites like it you can download the songs and host and store them yourself so it’s not like you have to start over when they eventually get shit.
deleted by creator
I downloaded Spotify once and deleted it within a few days. F-them.
When I requested the data they have of me thanks to GDPR, I learnt they shared my information to other apps and websites. I deleted the app as soon as I got the info.
From the shitty artist compensation, to the AI content, to their exclusive deals with Joe Rogan you need another reason to stop using Spotify???
Android user from India. Only other alternatives available here are Amazon Prime and Apple Music.
Navidrome
Navidrome rules. Made the switch from Spotify some time ago, using the FOSS Tempo app on Android and Feishin on desktop, it’s been a lovely experience so far.
Symfonium is paid on android but it’s also the best. Works with navidrome, jellyfine, NFS, samba, etc…
I used Spotify premium apk for near a decade. They shut down the modded apks so I stopped using them. Not a terrible service honestly, given I didn’t pay them a dime.
Modded apks still going strong… 🤫
spotify already has a propaganda arm of trump, aka JOE ROEGAN podcasts.
No shit ur still using today? A few months ago mine got shut down. Downloaded 2x other newer APK files and (I had been using mine for years) and both new ones were the same. Maybe I’ll have to try again!
Yeah it only went down for a day or two for me, bit the patches from different Devs worked to fix it Now I think they all work and many different versions.
and they are trying to move to videos to, which i assume would be giving podcast/video to the viewers to draw in more subscribers for ROEGAN.
Yes because people are driven by money a lot sadly.
Is Spotify cheaper than the alternatives?
It’s hard to compare, because Spotify has a lot of features that aren’t available on alternatives.
If you’re just looking for music availability and audio quality, then the cost of Spotify is pretty middle-of-the-road as long as you’re a westerner with mostly western musical tastes. But when you start getting into other qualities like social features, recommendation algos, API and third-party app integrations, multi-device controls/playback, etc… a lot of those things just aren’t offered by competitors. Those features may not matter to you, but they should probably be considered when comparing platforms.
Spotify also has a lot of promotional pricing that they offer. I think students get a pretty substantial discount. They also offer family plans, so the cost can be split significantly that way, as well.
Im thinking about the artists here because thats what the article is about. Spotify is still the biggest music platform so leaving it, even if the conditions are shit, means leaving money on the table.
Don’t forget their donation to Trump’s campaign!
Is there another music streaming service around, so I can leave? I use it damn near everyday and the accessibility is what I crave.
Have you tried Deezer?
I was just complaining about selfhosting but this, this makes me choose violence
Isn’t Deezer owned by some Russian oligarch? If so, I worry about jumping from the proverbial fry pan into the fire.
Yep, in the link posted
I use a Revanced YouTube Music app that doesn’t play any ads, and it functions almost exactly like Spotify.
I feel like this might not work as a mobile solution but will look into it
There’s a Revanced community on Lemmy, and they have a discord with all kinds of resources and tutorials to help get it all set up.
Revanced is a project that works exclusively with YT content as far as I can tell, right? This is an interesting project, i will try to follow along.
I use this too on android. Works great for streaming, but you can’t download tracks to listen offline afaik.
I use YouTube music because I all ready pay for premium, but YouTube and Google are getting worse everyday though.
Back almost a decade ago I was using Google Fi and it had access to YT Music when that existed. It was easy to use, but the content was limited and I found it very hard to find new music.
Have you tried Qobuz? It’s french.
I use Qobuz and I like it.
I jumped on Qobuz from a lemmy thread. Really happy with it. The artist selection is pretty broad and the Playlist are decent. But honestly, I haven’t disliked anyone from the recommended home page which says a lot. I was on yt music before and it would always loop the same five artists no matter what radio station I started. It was really weird.
Thank you for the rec. I will check it out, looks like theres even a mobile app.
currently i’m doing bandcamp and tidal for my two most least evil options
Tidal pays the highest per play amount to artists, and Apple Music also pays high (second highest for mainstream artists after tidal last I checked), and they have a massive library -but obviously they’re an evil megacorp so use your best judgement.
I personally use Apple Music but then I’m fully ensconced in the Apple ecosystem, so it works for me.
Tidal pays the highest per play amount to artists, and Apple Music also pays high (second highest for mainstream artists after tidal last I checked)
I think this info may be outdated. I’ve been seeing a lot of people recommending Qobuz. It looks like they may be paying the most per stream now, and they also allow you to buy tracks and supposedly have the best sound quality streams(?).
How is Tidal evil? I’ve never heard anyone complain about anything but the old mqa standard they have since dropped.
Apple is the one I was calling evil.
Apple music surprisingly. Good price, good bitrate, and aptx support on android.
I have become frustrated with Apple musics library management as the only Apple products I use are iPhones anyway
Honestly thata the issue I ran into. Napster and tidal were both in the running for a minute, both were more expensive, tidal is ran by Jay z and Napster is owned by a tech bro. Honestly, I’m more inclined to go back to cd.
Its such a massive PitA to self-host things. Dont get me wrong I love the idea of it, it works in theory, and then you get an update for one of the multiple services you have to run to make it work ex-prem, or your isp does some funky stuff and drops out. There is such a massive time sink into self hosting that its not a reliable answer for 90% of people.
That’s kinda the opposite of what I have found, once I get something to work it usually just works. Although I’m in IT so I’m pretty used to keeping ‘in production’ servers going. It absolutely is more work, because you aren’t paying somebody else to do it, so you really need to decide if that’s worth it to you. For many people the trade off in control and privacy aren’t worth the extra work and paying somebody else to use their computers instead is far more convenient.
Ive worked in IT before. If things ran as smoothly as you claim, I dont think you would have much of a job. I have had a pi-hole brick itself during an update, routers crash, home PCs just stop working.
You and I have the necessary skills to accomplish what needs to be done, just the basics of reverse proxy or ssh tunnels are damn near magic to most people. Hell, could you imagine walking your tech-illiterate neighbor through the process of it all and then expect them to keep it up without contacting you all time. I can not, which, is one of the reasons why I dont work IT anymore.
For real though, I believe that self-hosting is the only future for most of what are talking about here. I thought it was the most logical next step after everyone had libraries of music and movies at home in the 90s. I had assumed most people would want to keep those and would digitize.
The process to make that happen, and the hardware, are just not accessible to others outside our field. I would like to see a closer to all-in-one-solution become available. A system one could purchase with software ready to go all where you have to do is load it with content. Hell, call it a Spoopify Box or something equally ridiculous and you could VC angel funding in a week in SF.
Be the change you wish to see in the world, I guess. But I don’t see a commercial product like that taking off, simply because the MPAA and RIAA will fight it. They will use the media to convince the public that it is a piracy tool. I also don’t think it’s fair to demand FOSS volunteers to cater to tech illiterates. These projects are a labor of love, not a product. Self hosting means you are taking the responsibility of hosting something, and that comes with pros and cons. I think expecting a black box solution to remain stable and secure in the long run is a hard sell for me, it doesn’t line up with my personal and professional experience.
I feel like this opinion is more damaging to the cause than most people realize. Accessibility and usability are just so important, I would never demand that the opensource community do this task as it should be a cost to consumers just not like the SASS model we are currently dealing with.
I think I would like the world to be different, I just dont know how to get there yet.
No doubt that the black box solution is out of reach as of yet, but as technology moves forward the changes become less and less of a delta and it could be possible in the future. I would like to look at this solution like we look at video game consoles, or Roku even.
I use a combination of Bandcamp, Qobuz and Jellyfin atm. It gives me the combination of using their apps or my own self hosted. The chances of everything going down at the same time is pretty slim I figured.
I also have all my purchased music stored in a Nextcloud instance so in a pinch I can play the local flac/mp3 files from my computer.
In your estimate how many hours a month do you need to upkeep all of those services? What about your power bill? Im nitpicking because I am interested in doing something similar. Ive played with these services before but as a hobby PoC thing and not serious usage. Nextcloud I had some issues with dockerized containers, Jellyfin was nice but had its own cons. Plex has been great but I dont want to pay to access my own content on mobile.
I pay flat power bill so I don’t really know about the electricity costs. I also live a cold place so for most of the year I need to heat my apartment anyway so I don’t really know.
Apart from patching the Ubuntu VMs that run Nextcloud, Jellyfin and my Nginx proxy I haven’t had any upkeep on the services themselves after I got them setup, and even then I have automatic security updates on so I only really need to log in and run a feature update and reboot every few months.
Whenever I buy a new album I download it and put the files in their own folder in Nextcloud and everything syncs in a few minutes. I have set up an external folder in Nextcloud for my music that is readable by Jellyfin so everything just works for now, but I’ve only had this setup for a few months to be fair.
Bandcamp and Qobuz are just apps for me and I download all the music I buy in the apps on my phone and it’s virtually no upkeep for those. The only annoying thing is that I can’t buy music in the Qobuz app, only on the web site. I assume this is because they refuse to pay the Google tax.
You might have to look into a Wireguard/VPN setup as well if you need that for remoting into home hosting, but I can’t really help with that. I got a kinda special deal in regards of hosting.
Your setup sounds like a dream, kinda jealous of your hosting solution, gotta admit. Thanks for all the great info, youre a great person!
Yep, I’ve started buying all my media again, even music. Don’t want my copy of a movie to get censored, don’t want my music to get delisted.
The only exception is games. Damn you, steam, for being so awesome in every way except ownership.
Gonna cry when gaben kicks it, they go public, and become ea 2.0. Its gonna be hell for gamers.
All we can do is fight when the time comes. Hopefully his successor has the same values as him.
I’m absolutely there on movies, even running my own jellyfin, but I listen to such a wide variety that I don’t even know where to start getting some of them in physical.
You don’t necessarily need to buy physical to own. Most of my music comes from Bandcamp in the form of FLAC and mp3, but I have CDs and vinyl as well.
Oh heck, I didn’t even know about bandcamp
Bandcamp is where it’s at! If you are ever dissatisfied with the music industry’s proliferation of stupid and samey music, Bandcamp will surely have something for you.
I switched to Tidal a couple years ago and I’m happy enough with it. It’s cheaper than the comparable membership tier I was paying for with Spotify. The higher fidelity streaming is nice and supposedly it pays artists the most over any other steaming service. Their recommendation algorithm doesn’t index so heavily on your favorite tracks like Spotify’s does, so I’m discovering new music a lot more.
The UX isn’t quite as smooth as Spotify’s. I can’t cast from the browser app and it doesn’t remember what I’m listening to between devices. When I first switched there were a lot more bugs but I haven’t noticed as many over the last year.
After Tidal inevitably succumbs to corporate rot, I’ll be switching to owning my own collection and self-hosting. But until then, I’m happy with Tidal.
Tidal is owned by Square (the mobile payment app/company), and I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) owns that. So, probably safe to say it’s already pretty corporate.
Yes, but it’s a million times better than Spotify, Google, and Apple.
That guy sucks.
Why?
This is just the first article I found
https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/jack-dorsey-layoffs-streaming-music-app-tidal-block-leaked-email/
Honestly I respect the way he called musk on his bluff and forced him to pay 40+ Billion for Twitter, but this article cements him as an asshole in my book. Whenever you see a CEO saying “we need to function like a startup” what they really mean is “I have no fucking clue how to run this business, so I’m going to go back to the one thing that worked for me”, not realizing that it was mostly luck not startup culture that cemented their early success.
Talking in CEO speak seems pretty mild compared to being on the board of an AI military company. I know there is no perfect billionaire so I’m not going to advocate for Dorsey. But if that is the worse thing about Tidal, I think I’ll still support it.
Sure! I was just trying to answer the question. I’d point out that his current attitude is exactly how enshitification starts, so the writing may be on the wall for Tidal. After all, it was started as a passion project by a group of actual musicians and then sold, so the soul of it is likely gone too.
Spotify used to be the good guys, too.
As someone who was briefly interested in his podcast/video blogs, it becomes highly apparent that his approach to everything - even something as personal as music - is completely backwards and wholly centered on poor metrics around perceived efficiency as opposed to anything remotely logical. His ideas are fully derivative of the latest trends in the worst way while missing the point on how to implement them in any kind of reasonable way. He’s just another member of the modern-category Silicon Valley CEO: hoodwink everyone, hop on bandwagons, get yours first for the least amount of cost, market yourself as an enigma, who cares about the actual product, when in doubt do lay-offs.
Isnt Tidal responsible for the problems of high quality music formats like .ogg? Making it hard to find and download from them.
Do you have money? If so, buy music you like from the artists. Bandcamp is pretty good (though they sold out, and might enshittify).
I’ve been buying music for years and have a big library now
Is there anywhere that guarantees access to purchases forever? Ive purchased music in the past from other providers that went under and lost access to it all.
Aside from actually downloading the audio files and stripping any DRM off them? No one will offer truly perpetual access, because that means maintaining infrastructure forever, which simply isn’t going to happen.
Understand the argument of perpetuity but thats certainly not what I would ask for. CDs and physical media have a life expectancy too but at least I can make copies of those.
You can always rip cds and records you buy to a nas with a raid setup and an external drive you put in cold storage…media forever then
Yea, Ive got a Jbod sitting around somewhere. Just being pedantic but thats not forever either, there is no physical media that so far will last into infinity. I really thought that was where we would be by now considering how popular VHS, DVD and Vinyl and CDs were.
Forever as in, multiple lifetimes…
Yes, sadly physical media advancements are dead. I always thought it would be fun to see what comes after cd, if the internet hadn’t come.
If only we could go back to reel to reels, such a great sounding format that really lasted (have some from 1950 that sound good as new) but the machines take care, and people dont listen to music at home anymore. And making tapes uses a lot of plastic that im not crazy about. But I love them anyway.
Bandcamp gives you drm free copies of the music. I think you can do flac, mp3, or ogg. They do recommend downloading your copy after buying it because in rare cases something can be removed
I’ve bought some CDs directly and then ripped the music myself, too.
Bandcamp is also cool because you can find some really weird niche artists giving their music away for free.
I have sooo much great weird music I got for free or 50 cents per album.
I left Spotify when they tried to force tiktok ui update out of nowhere and I wasn’t even paying for it
I’ve still got my old mp3 collection. but haven’t added to it in years, been using YouTube premium for a decade now since it’s the easiest option for my family. Individual sub is not worth it but family is. Tried Spotify but hated it.
I think it’s time to get my jellyfin running
I use YouTube music premium because it also means no ads on YouTube.
Same, the features and ease of use make it worth it. I can’t handle being at friends places watching YouTube with ads it’s horrid.
Kind reminder that no streaming platform is very good on the ethical front. There are no ethical alternatives because the root of the problem is the legal strangle hold labels and record companies keep on artists and commercial music distribution.
Whatever happened to magnatune? Are they still around?
Not actively, they stopped trying to make money long ago. Since 2018 you can’t buy anything from them and artists are leaving. No new releases since then, of course.
I suppose that is to be expected. They were really not noticed, and spotify more or less put every other option out of business.
Tidal puts artists first, and pretty awesome.
Can’t promise that’s how they are forever, but that’s how they are today.
The ethical alternative is listening to mp3s straight from your own hard-drive, just like we did in the '50s.
Fuck yeah, down with streaming I wanna own my shit again
then do that. If you don’t have enough space, get an external hard drive. If you want convenience, you can attach the hard drive to a raspberry pi and access the music from anywhere. You’ll probably never get as convenient as spotify, but hey, you gotta decide what your values are and if that means being a streaming-vegan then that’s the sacrifice you gotta make.
I feel like there is a step missing here. Do you mean physically take the raspberry pi and HD with you (I mean, you could but it’s not terribly elegant) or are you talking about just setting it up to stream the music.
If your referring to streaming, is there a program you can recommend to easily stream it outside of you home network? I.e. access anywhere.
Leave it at your home network.
The simplest solution IMO is to access it via an SSH or SFTP connection. I have these connections bookmarked in my file browser, so I can open them up just like any folder on my hard drive.
Some people use jellyfin as a client which has a kind of netflix-like interface. I haven’t researched to find out if there’s anything with a more spotify-like interface.
I’ve used jellyfin for years but never tried to remotely access it. From what I’ve read you pretty much have to use something like Tailscale. It’s something I will probably give a shot at some point.
I have never used SSH or SFTP. I will have to look into that. I automatically assumed that to access my files remotely I would need to pay for a static IP address. I’m assuming this is not the case? I’ll have to read up on it.
Thanks for the info. Time for me to dust off the raspberry pi 4 and play around with it a bit.
Instead of paying for a static IP address, you can pay for a domain name and have a script on your home network update the domain name to point to your current IP address once a day. It’s a pretty common practice.
Dude, I remember my grandpa telling me about ripping CDs back then. The computers they used were the size of entire rooms and could only rip at .5x
I can stream from Jellyfin
I have found a bunch of my new favorite songs this year on Jellyfin. Some of them are pretty old too, lol.
It worked pretty well doing it the old human-based way, where I got a bunch of albums because I liked the band or even just a particular song. Listening through those or just playing the whole pile on shuffle led me to find plenty of gems that I stuck in my playlist.
Yes!
+1 here
Either buy the albums from the musicians or pirate that shit and just pay to see them in concert. Fuck all these companies.
Yeah… Give some love to Ticketmaster…
Don’t get me started…just…don’t.
Sneak in and slip the roadie a 10 spot?
Paying for music - in a world where the artist gets almost nothing and it’s all wasted on middle-men- is unethical. Music is art and even without the industry there would still be making music for free. Pirate your favorite and donate the money to a local good cause
There’s not much middleman if you buy an album from small bands like Pokolgép directly.
Buy on Bandcamp.
Til thry decide to tevoke ownership.
Pirate it, and send $10 to the band.
Pirate it, and send $10 to the band.
Most members of The Band are dead now though.
In that case, send nothing, since they only ones still profiting are the greedy Labels keeping the music from becoming public IP anyway
Then pirate, or send 10$ to their heirs.
RIP Rick Danko
And my personal hero, Levon Helm. Rest in peace.
RIP Garth Hudson
Don’t forget Richard Manuel. What a tragedy, such a talent. RIP.
[…] send $10 to the band.
What method would you recommend for one to do this in general?
Beats me, email them, and ask how to send the money. Venmo probably.
I pirate things to see if I like them, and if I like them, I buy the CD and a t-shirt or something from the musician’s website.
Where do you buy CDs? The vending machine in the old folk’s home lobby?
My tech store has a few, and there’s also jpc.de
There’s this magical thing called going outside, and in this outside place there are things called shops that sell things. Maybe you could try going there if you ever try to touch grass?
To add to the below suggestions, Bandcamp sells them new for a variety of artists, McKays’s and other second-hand stores sell them used (the one near me has an entire upper floor for just CDs), and many musicians sell them on their own websites. If you buy directly from the musician, you’ll sometimes get a signed or limited edition version at no extra cost.
https://amoeba.com/ https://tradepostentertainment.com/ https://vintagestock.com/
Just to name a few. There are also probably physical stores in your town.
Why is nobody mentioning funkwhale in this thread?
No monitization
You should have left when Rogan was let onto the platform.
After that you should have left when fake music was discovered. Seriously, they have lots of fake music.
I’ve had it with these streaming platforms. I now rely solely on RED for downloading and finding new music (their top 10 page is very solid). To stream I use navidrome.
What’s red? Got a link?
Invite only torrent tracker. It’s not enforced but it’s proper etiquette to not share the direct link. If you search for redacted music tracker on Google I’m sure you’ll find the URL.
Some info can be found here: https://interviewfor.red/
Why does someone with $9 billion need to invest more money into anything at this phase?
Investment generally is a good thing. You wouldn’t want someone with that much money to simply hoard it. Otherwise nobody else benefits of it. Critical thing is, what you invest in…
