neil young

I bumped the Best Show thread for this too, but Scharpling is following Neil's lead and yanked The Best Show from Spotify.

Good for him. I saw a few small labels & tastemaker types who do curated playlists announce theyll stop doing so today too. I have zero expectation that any of this will affect any change at Spotify due to the amount that theyre invested in Rogan & his audience, but it's still nice to see people putting their money where their mouth is.

My small hope is just that the conversation around this could at least potentially remind people that Spotify is one service that you can choose to use or choose not to use, rather than thinking of it as synonymous with "music", which is how a lot of people seem to think of it ime.

I actually had a "best of" playlist going for latter day Neil Young tracks, sort of a Decade IV, V & VI. Even though the actual music is gone, the selections are still there, just greyed out.

Lefsetz shared emails from a bunch of people cancelling their accounts as well.

Meanwhile our very own Spotify thread still mostly consists of subscribers complaining about bugs and minor inconveniences to do with changes to the interface

ILM Best of 2021: Pandora edition

I really like Qobuz doesn't get a lot of attention but it sounds better and has some good editorial

Qobuz isn't available in Canada so I went with Tidal, which is so similar to Spotify interface-wise and is the same price but streams lossless that there really isn't much of an argument to not switch

how do the catalogs compare for Qobuz and Tidal w/ Spotify?

If you already pay for Amazon Prime, Amazon Music HD costs 8 bucks and sounds awesome (which makes up for the crappy UI).

I have Amazon Music and agree. mostly because there are small gaps between Amazon and Spotify, things one will have that the other won't.

the interface does suck ass though I agree.

Are Tidal and Qobuz as easy to embed as Spotify? When I'm writing an article online, I can embed the Spotify version of an album or a track right into the middle of the piece. Can I do that with these other streaming services?

https://embed.tidal.com/#/ should help

Barn and Rust Bucket sounded fine to me on free YouTube, as do most other things.

Likewise the version of Amazon Music incl. w Prime, haven't tried HD.

I feel like there can be some gaps in Qobuz, mostly with newer pop/hip hop stuff. though it's European (French I think) so sometimes there are things that aren't on Spotify that are on Qobuz.

Not sure about embedding, though my gut says it's maybe not possible or wouldn't' be as good as Spotify. It's more hi-rez music focused, I don't even think they have podcasts.

I had Tidal for a while on a 3-month deal at I liked it. I'm a little skeptical of their "MQA" encoding which feels bullshitty to me, Qobuz is just straight FLAC.

At the time, Qobuz was cheaper than Tidal hi-rez but I think Tidal lowered their prices since.

I'm part-way through a month's free-trial of Qobuz and I like the interface/liner notes/editorial. The catalogue seems to be just as deep as Spotify and their artists' payments are supposedly 8-10x higher? Though I know that's a variable thing and there are different figures from different sources.

I'm not convinced I can reliably tell the difference between 320k-OGG and 16/44.1k-FLAC but, if you've got the bandwidth for the latter, why not? Hi-res isn't a major consideration, it's mostly nonsense. Without a native Qobuz app on my Marantz, I'm limited to 16/44.1k ALAC AirPlay anyway, unless I use a third-party uPnP app like mConnect; over WiFi it flakes out above 24/48k, over wired 24/96k is the limit. But whatever - that's a lot of bandwidth for stuff my tweeters can't reproduce, I can't hear and which is -100dB down.

But the big disincentive to switch is it's not just me; my partner, ex and our daughters are on this plan. I'm not going to be able to convince them. That's a whole lot of playlists to leave behind (or somehow copy over?). And... I do like a few podcasts, just obviously not *that* one.

xp
Yeah I just do the Tidal hifi plan. I don't have anywhere near the right equipment for that master thing and it does have a snakeoil vibe

I have never embedded Tidal (or Spotify), but they do provide an Embed Code option in the Share menu.

how do the catalogs compare for Qobuz and Tidal w/ Spotify?

― they were written with a ouija board and a rhyming dictionary (Neanderthal)

Hard to say, as I haven't actually used Spotify regularly in years (I switched from YoutubeMusic, which sucks ass, shoutout to morrisp for posting the bitrate differences on some other thread). I'm happy to check out some artists if anyone wants

I don't know if I'm hearing YouTube Music or Youtube---does the former have a freebie? I just search artist & title on Chrome, top left of results incl. "YouTube," so I choose that one, whichever it is. Sounds good on Koss non-audiophile over-earphones, Win 10 Dell desktop at library.

That's a whole lot of playlists to leave behind (or somehow copy over?).

I am using SongShift to move my playlists now from Spotify to Apple Music and so far I'm pleased with the matching results. Drawback is I'm using the free version, which is very slow (there is a premium price that supposedly does it fast).

if you're leaving Spotify because of Rogan I don't think YouTube is the place to go, YouTube is what made him

how come qobuz is 17/mo on mobile but 12/mo on a laptop?

maybe the devices are operating with different IPs and that's triggering some financial machinations

lol I pay $14 a month for Qobuz

Just to further stick it to Spotify, Neil Young should release all his music on physical media. That'll show them!

if you're leaving Spotify because of Rogan I don't think YouTube is the place to go, YouTube is what made him

I thought the point was that Spotify is paying him tons of $$ to be exclusive to their service, not simply making his podcast available.

holy shit qobuz sounds good. i have decent speakers, but this is blowing me away. i feel high

if you're leaving Spotify because of Rogan I don't think YouTube is the place to go, YouTube is what made him

I thought the point was that Spotify is paying him tons of $$ to be exclusive to their service, not simply making his podcast available.

― Animals must have a name (morrisp), Friday, January 28, 2022 12:41 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

just seems like if you are bad about Rogan spreading vaccine disinformation so you go to...YouTube?

Yeah Qobuz is like cleaning your glasses

I'm sure there's plenty of disnfo on YT (and books full of hate/disinfo sold on Amazon, etc.), which may reasons to avoid those platforms if one chooses, but it's not the issue Young and others are having w/Spotify as I understand it (i.e., Spotify is actively funding Rogan)

yeah I wish I knew more about audio encoding because I suspect reducing it to bitrate comparisons isn't telling the full story

fucking LMAO at this headline on MSN : "Why Neil Young can afford to leave Spotify". same reason why I can afford to recycle my cans instead of trading them in for 10 cents a pound

No place is pure, but yeah Spotify seems to be the one actively funding him, making him that much more dangerous (not to derail, but I hope somebody's survivors sue him into the ground, though prob can't: your father made his own choice etc.--then again tobacco settlements, the Sandy Hook win vs. Alex Jones).

Apple Music promoting self as Home of Neil, SiriusXM reviving his channel: hope it helps him financially, and he doesn't become a cautionary biz tale re the unwisely principled.

Kind of torn btw backing Neil and hoping other artists do the same vs not wanting to get caught in a crossfire of losing access to music over politics. I'm kind of all in on streaming and haven't had a proper full blown CD or record collection for a while now, which is admittedly short-sighted of me.

Unless he leaves the Internet altogether, forever, which seems unlikely. think we'll be okay. Right now I'm listening to a new Bandcamp purchase, the Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band's 2021 release of Both Ways---The Great Lost 2017 Double-Album, and wondering what Neil would think. They just finished a suitably extended string band excursion around "Marquee Moon," and currently it's "Internet," based on "Heroin."

"Internet," based on "Heroin."

do you mean someone is singing "in-terr-ne-et" like Lou Reed?

Yes, and dark fiddle intro, and then Stampfel starts, "I/Don't Know/Just What I've Loaded," gets to the fast parts pretty quick, and then back, and then you know. Very appropriate for today.s discussion.

lol frogbs

I am using SongShift to move my playlists now from Spotify to Apple Music and so far I'm pleased with the matching results.

Ah, thanks for the tip!

I just moved an old 40-song playlist over without too much trouble (couldn't match "1,618" by Charlotte Adigéry... but it's right there, I played it last week! And then the playlist is frozen and you can't add or delete from it on the target platform).

But then I tried the 310-track ILX Classical 1900-09 list... 26 matches, 284 fails :( And I'm sure that's just a metadata thing, because Qobuz's C20th classical catalog seems pretty deep.

So, yeah, this would be a heck of a slog and then there's all the collaborative playlists...

Yeah, I haven't tried much classical yet. I imagine that's uniquely challenging.

The Buck 65 guy did a "deep dive" into Harvest on CBC radio today. Putting aside how much I hate that phrase, can you even do a deep dive into an album that famous? His deep dive amounted to playing every track, even the really famous hits...can we just call it, like, Album of the Day or something? Anyway, as I listened to "Alabama," and the line "Your Cadillac has got a wheel in the ditch/And a wheel on the track," it occurred to me that a) that's the origin of the phrase "Ditch Trilogy" (via Neil's liner notes for Decade), and b) Harvest itself has a wheel in the ditch ("Words," "Are You Ready for the Country," "Alabama," "Needle") and a wheel on the track (the rest). It's not really as polished as Neil seemed to think it was when he wrote those liner notes.

Neil Young always wins in the end

Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week.

— scott budman (@scottbudman) January 28, 2022

SiriusXM reviving his channel

lol. as variety notes:

SiriusXM hosts multiple conservative radio shows that espouse views similar to or more outspoken than Rogan’s — particularly on SiriusXM Patriot channel, which features Sean Hannity, Breitbart News, Andrew Wilkow and others

though it should also be noted that siriusxm operates under a radio license which gives it the right to play anything it wants, no permission or license needed from artists and songwriters. so nothing neil can legally do about that one. he could write more open letters though!

I haven’t followed the background of this too closely, but it seems to me like the public relations aspect of this is a big win; even if not Spotify doesn’t end up actually removing the Rogan episodes or canceling his podcast. In other words, why not more open letters? Neil has a big soapbox now, he can call out those other clowns as well. The more that folks are aware of specific misinformation sources out there, the better.

https://neilyoungarchives.com/news/1/article?id=Spotify-More-Songs-Less-Sound

ok lol at him bringing back the sound quality complaints into this "SPOTIFY plays the artist's music at 5% of the quality"

does anyone actually use amazon's music streaming, i feel like i never hear it get mentioned at all

I do, I mentioned it on one of these other threads.

also my housemates.

(to play the same dozen or so songs over and over on tipsy saturday evenings. no beef, just kind of lol c'mon guys, "land of confusion" again??)

gotta be honest here— i piggyback off of a friend's premium account (they offered). i thought it would be a wonderful way to check out a lot of new (to me) things and it has been. also i mean, idk how the streams/artist revenue get counted for premium users, but at this point i'm using it a lot so i'm kind of mad at myself for starting to rely on it more often. if it goes away, oh well. i'll adapt and make do like i did before this current arrangement.

funny (to me) sidebar: when spotify first started to gain recognition about a decade ago i used to joke that real fans bought the records, but listened on spotify to make sure that the bands saw as much money as possible. how mad the "low paying" aspect of it made me back then seems quaint now.

final thought—

unsurprisingly, i'm with neil across the board on this one. spotify sucks for a myriad of reasons and this joe shitforbrains situation is the breaking point. if me losing the ability to shuffle twelve hour lover's rock playlists means dickheads like this get muted, i'm all for it.

also it would be really funny if some memey type person pulled their stuff. like i wanna see rick astley take a fucking stand and title his open letter to spotify: "rick roll, part two. i'm rolling tf off this platform lol."

popcorn at the ready.