hello all, i did a little search but didn’t see a recent thread on this. me and some friends had been gaming the spotify family plan pricing, but that plan is falling apart (‘head of household’ is switching to apple music). so i’m left wondering should i switch to another service. i’m also generally pissed at spotify exercising monopoly power while paying artists in exposure, and the joe rogan transphobia something something.
thoughts i am thinking:
spotify’s music discovery algorithm pretty much sucks and their big playlists suck. just pushes already popular stuff ime.
spotify often doesn’t have indie artists and lesser known stuff i would like to see. i would like to use a platform that’s better for artists, and easy to use as an artist myself. (e.g. uploading music, creating playlists for public consumption)
use cases: i use spotify via iOS app, waze integration (driving), bluetooth speakers round the house, roku, and web player (at my computer) pretty often. playing in background is important (why can’t normal youtube do this)
i listen to podcasts in the shower sometimes
i’m on youtube constantly pretty much and already use it to send ppl music
i would like to have high quality audio (v0/320 ish if possible)
i have a bunch of historical playlists on spotify (e.g. “spring/summer 2019”) that i would want to recreate
i’m looking at options:
just reupping to spotify - but see title
youtube music - i think this one has way more indie artists and is generally good on music selection. how’s the quality and convenience?
apple music - idk anything about apple music but if it’s anything like app store i bet it’s a walled garden type approach, which is wack imo
other (tidal??)
so uh, what’s yalls experience with spotify/streaming alternatives? or if you’ve seen any good comparisons/analysis lmk
the thing about musicbee is that it can do three important things:
convert files to whatever bitrate MP3 you want, so since my phone doesn’t have a billion gigs of space for FLACs i can just convert them to 256 kbps MP3s
it can sync just certain playlists to my phone, meaning that i can maintain different mood playlists and just sync whichever one i want when i feel that mood. so that way i can have a billion albums but only have a million on my phone
New music can be sent to the inbox to be processed, so i can choose what mood playlists it should go on instead of having to search it out after adding it. also i can re-tag stuff if necessary
okay anyway that’s all i just really like my system, no real opinion about streaming services
My buddy who is in a band that has stuff streaming on spotify recently told me that if someone buys one of their albums at a show for $5 and then turns around and immediately gives it away to 2000 people for free, he would still have made more money than if all those people had streamed his music on spotify.
I’m running one of those head of household spotify scams with people but I really want to get rid of it and just spend the $17/month on like bandcamp albums or something.
If you can follow the head of household to Apple Music and use iOS I think it’s a better product than YouTube Music. YouTube Music is straddling Google Play’s old structure and the tenuous copyright dodging of proper YouTube. The UI does a bad job of mixing these. If it’s free with ad-free YouTube it’s a fine service but very half-baked in the Google way.
For artists, Apple pays around twice as much as Spotify and over four times as much as YouTube. (It’s still not enough, but it may matter to you on the margins.) I can’t speak to ease of publishing personally but I know some very small acts with music on the service. I also like their search by lyric and lyric timestamping features. I don’t know the particulars but they also rolled out a lossless codec in the past year.
Spotify’s advantage is the same as Twitter’s or Facebook’s etc. — more users.
Youtube Music was so bad I actually switched to spotify, having been a google music user before it got rolled into youtube. goog music was good from a listening perspective, too bad they killed it and replaced it with a dumpster fire.
Buy music on bandcamp and optionally keep using spotify out of convenience because the alternatives are somehow worse.
oh, keep in mind that apple and spotify both have egregious/scammy payment schemes where all the money gets funneled into the wallets of the most popular artists even if you only listen to indie/non-mainstream stuff, so which pays more is an irrelevant concern, that money will still go straight to taylor swift no matter what.
altho, hold up, Deezer has both last.fm ios integration and waze integration. and (i think) a roku app? and gets really good reviews from basically everyone who uses it. i’ve never even heard of it but i’m curious now.
Yeah, this is what I do. Bandcamp for digital/some physical or whatever other place for physical if not on Bandcamp, and then spotify for convenience and such. I know Spotify sucks for paying artists, but so does just pirating things, so I just pay artists when I can otherwise.
and hell, up until her rerelease stuff, it wasn’t even going to her, because on top of the shitty scamminess of spotify/apple/etc, the music industry is still the same scam it’s always been. Not that she needs the money, obviously, but yeah.
Good thread and relevant to my spotify dissatisfaction. I think Spotify has singlehandedly killed my album-listening behaviour and converted me to hits playlists. I want a service that returns me to albums which was previously, for me, having an ipod and a long commute.
