A “subscriber consent to renew on price increase” law would go a long way
I suppose I’m a “content creator”. I write music.
I WISH all my recording gear was free. Fucking hell. The amount of money I’ve wasted in the last 30 years… sheesh.
innovate its product features
What. It’s meant to stream music. Tf do you mean?
The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that’s the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.
the playlist saved for offline playback that will still try to connect to the internet for like 30 seconds when you open it while actually offline. the Discover Weekly playlist that will serve you the song that you’ve marked as “not interested” over and over and over and
The UI that gets progressively worse with each update, ruining what was perfectly fine before. The attempts to create the audio focused equivalent of TikTok.
The way shuffle constantly shuts itself off even when set within the settings to be the default. The shitty Smart Shuffle that adds in songs that break up my playlists terribly. The way it plays the same song again the first time you enable shuffle and hit next.
If anything, they’ve taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they’re making record profits, and jacking up the price
This is why they have record profits. They attack at both ends. Strip features, increase prices.
Spotify actually doesn’t make that much profit, if any.
But the record labels are major shareholders and definitely influence the pricing structure. Spotify is essentially a marketing frontend for the record industry.
I am literally looking at their financial report for 2024 Q1 and it shows a profit.
They’re reporting 1.00 billion in gross profit as of Q1 2024 so yeah, they make money. It’s kind of impossible to compare much though since they’re the only freestanding music competitor that’s popular.
The closest comparison I can make is using Apples reported figures of making around $9.2 billion in revenue for its 93 million user base.
Meanwhile Spotify is making around 2.63 billion in revenue for its near 3x subscriber base estimated around 240 million. So I wouldn’t say they’re not making money, but maybe you can see why they think they can squeeze a lot more. Best to just unsubscribe honestly, they’ll keep doing this
So they’re leaving a lot of money on the table and getting criticized for their greed? I’m not sure how that’s a coherent position.
AI generated music based off your likes and listening. It lines up with his statements. There was no innovation here. The same as every “disruptor” technology that just cheapified everything and one it was ubiquitous attempt to remove the core of the business.
They did add audiobooks.
Though the interface for audiobooks sucks, so I hope they improve it.
The last thing I ever wanted from Spotify was audiobooks or podcasts. We’ve had excellent apps available for several years already, we don’t need half assed bloat added to (very poorly) replicate the same features
The part is what drives me mad. Podcasts and audiobooks are not that hard to do properly. You could very easily separate them into distinct apps or at least a special tab that acts like a proper player. Instead audiobooks are basically albums.
There’s a shuffle button.
On an audiobook.
It’s the dumb goal of tech bros to create an “everything app” that does everything you want.
Without podcasts I am not sure I’d still use Spotify
Why not use a free/cheap pocketing app designed for it specifically? All the podcast apps I’ve tried are far better than spotify. UI-wise at least.
Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
You can influence things with your wallet.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
On paper. But in practice…
On February 27, 2016, Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele from the band The American Dollar launched a $5 million class-action lawsuit that claimed Tidal had to compensate the band for any of the royalty payments accrued from the streaming of the band’s 116 copyrighted songs. The suit also accused Tidal of using faulty numbers to payout artists while also having undercut these same individuals by 35%. A response from Tidal stated that they were indeed fully up to date on all royalties for the group and had removed said intellectual property from their servers.
Hollywood accounting and pirate profiteering undercut what artists would normally be paid.
You can influence things with your wallet.
You can influence how you feel about your consumer habits, but capitalists are still going to capitalize.
If you can, and they have it on there, buy your favorite albums on Bandcamp, then they are yours forever
I thought that Bandcamp was shutdown?
I dont think so? As far as I can tell, my account still works and I bought an album there the other day.
It looks like the company has been sold around a few times in the last few years and i think its gotten worse, but I honestly cant tell lol
I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.
iTunes Match is $25/year if you have an iPhone.
Oh so only $100+ a year*
How does $25 become $100+
you need to buy a very expensive phone to “enjoy” the sale
Plexamp is better than any other music app I’ve tried.
Finamp for anyone using Jellyfin https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
AOL profited for over a decade on people who signed up for the service and simply lost track of it, paying month after month for something they’d forgotten they even had.
Crazy that these services can just raise premiums whenever they please without even reaffirming that the customer still wants the service. I guarantee that if you needed to re-verify your account on a price increase, firms with big client pools would never raise their rates again.
Remember: Stealing from big, evil corporations is morally correct.
deleted by creator
Then let them die.
and? what do you recommend?
Supporting artists directly via bandcamp and other options.
If you can’t support artists directly, and would have to buy physical media which supports the record label and not the artist…pirate.
Bandcamp is great but in the POV of a third worlder, bandcamp is never going to reach our audience. People barely make ends or spend much on other subs so paying separate artists not something people here would prefer. Maybe ideal for supporting one or two artists you love.
Sadly, physical media is dead here. Vinyl is still alive in some places but not here.
I don’t support spotify but right now its the best here if you pay premium ofc. if there’s a better alternative that’s not geolocked, has good recommendation algo and pays artists better than spotify, i will be always happy to switch.
For anyone out there, I recommend giving Tidal a shot and for podcasts, I recommend a FOSS app called AntennaPod. This is the combo I use myself, I’ve been using Tidal for a bit over two years now and just recently switched to AntennaPod.
Just another CEO denigrating the work of those who make him rich.
So now that Tidal has moved its Hi-Fi tier price down to match Apple’s wtf is Spotify doing? Charging more than the competition, paying artists less, and not even offering lossless?
Spotify is less vulnerable to customer churn compared to TV/movie streaming services, as users are less likely to switch music streaming providers due to the hassle of rebuilding playlists and losing personalized recommendations.
There are services for transferring playlists
yes but often there are some mixups… which is a PITA for those of us with ~10K+ songs
Spotify has over 200mill paying subscribers and over 600mill total I believe. They an afford the peel off unfortunately.
From what I can tell Tidal won’t even publish their subscribers so it must be pretty small.
Anyone have an alternative with the same content, offline play, and integration into Android Auto? I would love to switch if something meets my needs.
If it’s worth anything, Tidal has had great offline support so far. I’m missing a handful of tracks, but the offline support might be enough to move to Tidal. It’s either generally better quality, better offline, better shuffling, and a dollar less per month, or a console/tv app and a few more albums.
I left when I saw how much of our money they gave to Joe Rogan to punch down on trans people. Already paying for YouTube pro for years and finally took advantage of their music app. It’s been great. My car and every Google screen in the house have native support. The only disadvantage is everything from tinder to open source crap I run at home only integrate with Spotify.
Already paying for YouTube pro
lost me in the second half
deleted by creator
IIRC this means the family plan costs more than 3 individual plans did like 3 years ago. If not more than it saves you like $.50 in comparison. I would try and look it up but Google search has also turned to shit so I don’t feel like dealing with it.
The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.
I switched to TIDAL, for this, for the disgustingly low amount of revenue passed along to artists by Spotify (the entire value of their business), and for the fact that they continue to partner with Rogan after all the disinformation he peddles.
Not a huge proponent of streaming services in general, but some are objectively better than others. Spotify is atrocious. Tidal is a lot better.
they continue to partner with Rogan
They don’t anymore.
Though I am far more concerned with Spotify’s attempts to destroy what is otherwise a last bastion of internet freedom with their exclusive podcasts.
They do, but not as an exclusive. This year Spotify signed a deal with him worth 250M.
But also yeah, I can appreciate that sentiment.
Ah, last I heard the deal had just expired. Now they’re paying him even more money than before? And for what reason?
At least it sounds like that Spotify exclusive bullshit is dead?
