Technology

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah I'm done with spotify.

Back when it was a fiver, I could get the appeal and had a subscription myself.

At 11 bucks it comes at the price of a CD per month, every month. I didn't buy that much music annually, ever. So right now we are entering a territory where streaming is exceeding the price of my regular music consumption patterns. I'll go back to buying physical media and torrenting whatever old stuff is no longer available and can't be found on ebay.

Fuck 'em with a cactus.

"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...

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.

"but if we pirate things the singers won't get anything!"

yeah, fuck the music companies and fuck the movie companies. The moral thing to do is to pirate everything you want to watch, read and listen to.

the actors, writers and singers and everyone working behind the scenes are already getting next to nothing for their hard work compared to what the executives at all those corporations are getting for just sitting on their asses.

....sorry I blacked out, what were we talking about?

You should never pirate anything! that would be bad!

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".

More money for the executives and less for everyone else. People need to start standing up to this shit.

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

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.

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.

And 99.99999 percent of musicians lament being humiliated and poor.

Stop releasing your music on Spotify. They depend on you for their reputation as having all the music and will give you nothing in return except ever-broadening inequality and ever-narrowing artistic culture. People have mocked boomers for claiming that music is dying but that's exactly what is happening.

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.

Really, really long sigh

TIDAL.

Spotify can die in a fire for all I care. Sail the high seas and if you like an artist buy physical releases/merch/tickets.

Doesn’t make me feel guilty using Soulseek. Artists get next to nothing but I’m refusing to give any money to Spotify. If there was a better way to buy and own music digitally from popular artists I would

I feel so bad for artists. They deserve to get paid for their hard work. Unfortunately, it’s been so hard for me to convince friends to move away from these predatory streaming platforms. A lot of people don’t want to lose having an unlimited catalogue at their fingertips.

Maybe I’m going to sound like a boomer here, but I don’t get why people need an unlimited catalogue at all. What’s wrong with paying artists directly to get their vinyls and CDs (or digital album)? What happened to curating your music library? What happened to the days where you’d buy CDs and listen to them over and over again, front to back? What happened to the days where playlists were manually curated for yourself, or even better, for your friends? Some of my fondest memories are music related, of my best friends painstakingly selecting a playlist of songs for me and burning them onto a CD for me to enjoy. What happened to the days where we didn’t need a constant stream of music pushed to us by an impersonal AI? What happened to developing your own unique and interesting personal taste?

I get that these streaming platforms are convenient, but it feels to me that we’re losing the ability to actively listen to music, to truly appreciate it, to understand the labor of love that it was for the artists, all for the sake of convenience. I don’t want music to be convenient, music is a fucking gift. I don’t want to be pushed AI generated recs, or AI generated music.

I’m rambling, lost my train of thought, and probably sound like a Luddite, but I have such strong feelings related to music and just hate these streaming platforms so much. I refuse to use them.

tldr please please please support your favorite artists by buying from them directly