Continuing with Spotify?

I think the Spotify fallout warrants its own thread

― west elm girls (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, January 29, 2022 2:53 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Neil out, Joni out

obviously this pleases me greatly, but it's going to take a contemporary megastar to change minds.

Grimes' mother:

Feeling enormous pride that the artists who got this #Spotifydeleted train going are Canadian.@Neilyoung & @jonimitchell

There are sure to be more, and bigger. But it’s Canadians who led.

— Sandy Garossino (@Garossino) January 29, 2022

I no longer control it or I would in support of Neil https://t.co/hrD132gi8T

— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) January 29, 2022

nagl Barry

I recently heard a rumor about me and Spotify. I don’t know where it started, but it didn’t start with me or anyone who represents me.

— Barry Manilow (@barrymanilow) January 28, 2022

it's going to take a contemporary megastar to change minds.

Well, Neil was a step forward after 270 doctors and scientists...

Lol. Cardiacs quit a couple of days before Neil but I am not sure that anyone noticed.

Well, Neil was a step forward after 270 doctors and scientists...

― deep luminous trombone (Eazy), Friday, January 28, 2022 9:23 PM

yeah, which should have been the slam dunk from the get-go. and yet here we still are.

(insert generic angry outrage rant that basically sums up to)

man. this whole thing really sticks in my craw.

ugh, past my bedtime and i'm grouchy. sorry for the unnecessary attitude.

Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week.

— scott budman (@scottbudman) January 28, 2022

I know it’s just anecdotal, but I know several people IRL who are canceling their Spotify subscriptions this week (and I have few enough IRL “contacts” that that number feels significant to me).

They paved Paradise, put up a Rogan Pod

No idea who this guy is but seeing lots of similar grim takes. And unlike Lloyd Cole, Bret's not afraid to play the 'wrong side of history' card

These artists have a right to remove content in protest. But make no mistake, their intent is to force Spotify to censor Joe Rogan so that you and I can no longer choose for ourselves whether to listen.

They’re on the wrong side of history. Truth persuades. It doesn’t coerce.

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) January 29, 2022

Joni jumping in gives me hope that more will follow.

Worth noting here, I think, that The Best Show and Kreative Kontrol have left:

pic.twitter.com/79BJTQe0b1

— The Best Show (@bestshow4life) January 27, 2022

I hope you get the connection... pic.twitter.com/XzT3NsCPc5

— Kreative Kontrol (@VishKreative) January 27, 2022

I suspect a lot of the young popular artists who could potentially make an impact here don't care about vaccines or public health and probably an alarming number of them totally agree with Rogan. OTOH artists have their own issues with Spotify and if a significant number of people drop it it may prompt a few more to leave, or they might at least perceive themselves as having new leverage.

If you’re impressed that Spotify lost $4bn this week, just wait until you see how much they lost in the three weeks prior to that. Shares peaked at €312 last year, they’re less than half that now. The model just isn’t as profitable as investors want it to be (see also: Netflix dropping 45% of its share value in a few months).

^^^

the spotify market drop this week may get a tiny further bump downward from the news but is in line with market trends. artists dropping one at a time isn't going to occasion more than a "we're listening" statement from the company; it would take an organized action to make this more than a PR hiccup for them. Five, ten, fifteen big artists individually pulling their catalogs won't make them say "ok, we'll eat the hundred million we gave Rogan." an organized effort of fifty or more artists might -- Future of Music Coalition is as close as we have to that and I'm not sure they want to spearhead something that might be framed as partisan

it would take an organized action to make this more than a PR hiccup for them

see also: literally every other consumer protest

TIL, Neil and Joni are both polio survivors

I do want to ditch Spotify. I'm in the middle of a 3-month trial of Apple Music but I hate their UI and search functions. I'll give Qobuz a shot with their free month. One frustrating thing is having to pay some third party to migrate playlists, and the migration options seem to have frustrating limits. I just discovered the 1500-track Anthology of Dub playlist this past week, and the Spotify ---> Qobuz migration tool has a limit of 1000 tracks per playlist.

I don’t have any specialty loyalty to Spotify but I have become pretty dependent on streaming. The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

i'm continuing with spotify

“Speciality loyalty” = morning brain

My spotify and hulu subscriptions are intertwined, so if I ditch spotify for another platform I lose (free) hulu. As soon as it becomes clear where the greatest number of people are migrating to, I'll follow. But for now I'm stuck.

and the Spotify ---> Qobuz migration tool has a limit of 1000 tracks per playlist.

split the 1500 tracks into two playlists of 750, migrate them both, then drag and drop the second playlist into the first playlist, right?

As I said on the other thread, between collaborative playlists, and the family plan, I'm not sure how I could readily disentangle myself from using this platform. If I had a single-user subscription, I may just hop over to Qobuz or Apple (mixed results with the free version of SongShift last night, migrating playlists over to my Qobuz trial, but not insurmountable).

xp - merging playlists: may or may not be possible once they're migrated; last night's brief experience gave me a fixed imported playlist that I could neither add to nor delete from.

oh, weird? i shouldn't talk - i've never heard of Qobuz until this morning - but i just figured any playlist could be edited, if you made it in the first place! kinda weird.

i really hate my opinion on spotify and the alternatives, so much that for once i'll stfu

is it easy to import spotify playlists to another plataform?

Xp - yeah, was odd. 37 of 40 tracks matched by SongShift, figured I could add the ones it couldn’t find manually on Qobuz but no: that imported playlist was read-only. The attempt to do the same with one of the ILX c20 classical playlists was hopeless - barely a 10% match.

If I pay actual money to some service to migrate my Bacharach list (738 tracks) and the Dub list and wind up with a 10% match rate, I will be hot under the collar.

The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

Rogan signed with Spotify in May 2020, and Apple launched podcast subscriptions over a year later. So AFIK they wouldn’t have been in the running when Rogan made his deal (in fact, it was deals like his which got Apple serious about building out exclusive podcasts of their own)… which may not alter your overall rationale

Do people have to be paid subscribers to hear Rogan on Spotify? I figured it was just to get people to the platform. Apple surely would have made a deal with Rogan to keep people using their platform exclusively, but probably didn’t need to as much as Spotify did.

Right, I don’t think that was part of their business plan at the time. Maybe they would’ve signed him in a different scenario, who knows (in which case Young would presumably be pulling his music from Apple)

Idk, I found a Steve Bannon podcast on Apple. Is it still okay to switch to Apple? Maybe I’ll go to YouTube where absolutely no white supremacists or QAnon nuts exist?

It's his reach and influence that makes the difference, the size of his audience.

I mean, Spotify pulled a bunch of archived episodes - with Gavin McInnes and others - so there was pressure from the beginning not to spoil the platform with his show. The issue then becomes whether giving disinformation on Covid is a deal-breaker for an episode of his that Spotify chooses to host.

I dislike Spotify for a few reasons, but yes switching to Apple or Amazon for political reasons (or even the sole reason of disseminating Covid misinformation) does not make a lot of sense. Some people earlier were suggesting that the fact Spotify directly pays Rogan, rather than simply making money off ads a la YouTube, is worse but idk if I find that super convincing.

That said afaict, Qobuz and Tidal don't have the "we murder workers" problem that Apple and Amazon do nor the "paying Joe Rogan $$$" problem, so it's a little disingenuous to frame this as just "Spotify or Apple? what's the diff"

Maybe so. I’ve never heard of Qobuz until about an hour ago. Admittedly I’ve never tried Tidal.

It was initially challenging to get past the "Tidal? lol" reaction, I'll admit

The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

otm. also, to the extent that this list of top 100 podcasts on apple podcast is accurate, the current #10 podcast in the united states (on apple podcast) is the Joe Rogan Experience Review, a podcast where some enormous fucking loser spends 45 minutes dissecting the latest joe rogan podcast

#15 is the ben shapiro show.

ben shapiro is worse than joe rogan (but not as popular). he is a hitler youth

the matt walsh show at #35, what a wonderful person he is

i survey the landscape of american podcasts and i want them all to disintegrate my own brain

let me check google/youtube real quick, see if there is any joe rogan-esque content on there

I moved to Tidal from Spotify about 3 months ago after being on Spotify since it originally launched and for the most part I've been content with it. There are a few things that I miss from Spotify, but nothing that would compel me to go back.

The increased emphasis on podcasts combined with the Helsing.ai thing are what pushed me to pull the plug. I'm also trying to shift more of my spending/listening to Bandcamp, but I'm too hooked on streaming at this point to abandon it completely.

I mean, Tidal is now majority-owned by a gross tech bro, if you're looking for a "political" reason to avoid that too

gross how?

Dorsey? I'm half joking (though he's not my type of fellow). He hasn't paid Rogan $100m, that's for sure. If I were a heavy Spotify user, and not invested in Amazon or Apple, I'd prob switch to Tidal - the UI is v similar

The arguments that other platforms also feature reprehensible content are valid but imho the Spotify/Rogan issue is different because of the extent to which Spotify has made Rogan the face of their brand. Rogans show is one of the most popular media properties out there and Spotify's play for him was explicitly about identifying themselves w/him in a bid to lure his audience, which imho puts it in another category than just "I can find people saying worse stuff on other platforms too". Ben Shapiro is a monster & is platformed by Apple Podcasts, but at least they are not repeatedly giving him big public bearhugs the way Spotify does w/Rogan, giving him the PR boost that his views are something Spotify considers normal & mainstream.

That’s a good way of putting it.

Our individual personal actions have a moral meaning regardless of how many other people “care”, like what are we even talking about here, “whats a boycott?”

idk ive made the same point on this thread plenty, i refuse to throw up my hands and cede my moral agency to the owner class but ymmv

people have confused “no ethical consumption under capitalism” with “do whatever, it’s cool.”

i guess? it’s hard for me to be satisfied with individual actions having a moral dimension, like sure but who does it help??? or does it just make me look “good”??? on top of which everyone draws a fucking line somewhere arbitrarily, just seems like another way ppl try to appear perfect in order be shitty to other ppl on the internet, enjoy tho

sorry, i’m clearly on my own trip, and y’all are on yours. we can all agree spotify is bad and the ceo of spotify is in fact a scumbag who has aligned himself with ai battletech which is fucked as hell

it’s hard for me to be satisfied with individual actions having a moral dimension

not trying to be shitty ivy, in fact i know youre way too smart & thoughtful to actually believe this.

I once took an afternoon of the only life i’ll ever have on this beautiful earth and spent it on this board defending the Velvet Underground album Squeeze, trust me appearing perfect has never been a major consideration

xxp - who does it help is a good question. That’s the heart of “no ethical consumption” - buying the good things doesn’t give you moral or ethical credit.
Signing up for Tidal or Qobuz instead of Spotify won’t get you into heaven anymore.

Even if we as individuals can’t fix or destroy capitalism via purchase we should cancel Spotify because Daniel Ek is a piece of shit and because of major label self-dealing, not because it might destroy Spotify. If it eventually does, bonus, but fuck ‘em anyway.

Been interesting seeing a few friends switch to Spotify this week, which I hadn’t heard about since Block acquired them, other than that the sound quality’s great.

Whoops, switch to Tidal this week, I meant.

I used to have Tidal which is decent but then they removed Plex support and doubled the monthly fee if you used DJ app integration, so now it's Apple Music. It's...just OK. Most of my listening is through Plex anyway, I just use the streaming services for the stuff I can't bother to download, and requests when DJing.

Spotify doesn't integrate with DJ apps. And the UI is super annoying, it pushes podcasts way too much, there's no way to turn them off which is completely idiotic - that should be the simplest feature ever to implement.

Apple has djay integration right? Does it cost any extra? How peaceful are their AI investments?

genuine questions. i have a spotify family plan i'd like to wean us all off of. i don't suppose anyone knows how strict Apple is about family plan members sharing an address?

crap, no Lyrion support. Tidal in the lead.

tidal was good when i had it. my problem with all of these services is that the UI always stinks

Jack Dorsey is probably a worse human being than Daniel Ek.

i don't suppose anyone knows how strict Apple is about family plan members sharing an address?

not strict at all.

Qobuz has a terrible search function but it is otherwise pretty good.

I'll probably try that one first. I don't even know who owns it! lol. Rates to artists apparently better than Tidal too?

What does Dorsey do now?

Playing Toxie?

I liked Qobuz but had problems with buffering which I never had anywhere else.
Also, it's godawful for telling you what new albums are coming out unless you just want the biggest most mainstream in the genre. So I quit using it at the beginning of this year.

Huh, I've never had issues with Qobuz buffering, I either listen at work or with downloaded files on the app, or through Sonos at home.

And I still have never learned about a new release through a streaming service unless I manually look it up and see it, it's always hearing about it elsewhere and searching for it.

Release Radar used to be good at telling me what albums of artists I followed had something new out.

release radar very hit and miss for me, I'm mainly manual too.

Are new singles reliably on there? Is there an account mirroring Rap Caviar?

I'll trial the thing soon. I'm guessing going for max bitrate can result in some buffering. I'm probably going to have it set to basic Spotify type quality mostly tbh. I'm not taking this mild moral stand to waste a ton more bits

oh, quboz lets you buy things. it says 'cd quality' but doesn't say which codec it's using. mp3? flac?

I don't think they'd get away with calling it cd quality if it was mp3

On Qobuz, the CD quality files are available in FLAC, a lossless compression format which reduces the size of the files without altering their original quality.

https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/audio-quality?utm_source=chatgpt.com

I should be a prime candidate for migrating away from Spotify considering I have never used its algorithm engine and use a different app for podcasts. I used to listen to some of Spotify's own genre playlists, but I lost interest when they became customized to my listener profile. Mostly, I just use Spotify to listen to music I already know about and to create my own playlists. But it's worked pretty well for me so far, so I am reluctant to move.

SongShift or similar apps are good if you’re concerned about having to recreate playlists. Moved from Spotify to Tidal about 3 years and have no regrets.

kinda looking forward to a bit of a clean slate tbh. Like deleting podcast episodes I'll never listen to. I've also never used Spotify for podcasts and look forward to never seeing that crud in a music app again.

Co-sign that. The Joe Rog@n bullshit was the straw which broke the camel’s back but was already creaking with constant podcast promotions.

Had to delete my podcast from Spotify because it has music in it and they keep deleting episodes because that's not allowed.

SongShift or similar apps are good if you’re concerned about having to recreate playlists. Moved from Spotify to Tidal about 3 years and have no regrets.

I used soundiiz, for which I paid 4$ to subscribe for one month just to be able to transfer all my playlists from spotify to another service and it mostly worked pretty well (a couple of mistakes here and there (mostly taking the wrong version of a specific track) but nothing that was that difficult to deal with). I still use the free version to transfer the music league playlist from spotify to what I currently use.

I'm on youtube music now, which I wouldn't really recommend, but we share a family plan with my sister-in-law and it works well enough for just listening to music.

I used soundiiz

there's a link in the Qobuz app to transfer your stuff from another service... and it's a 1-month trial of this. Nice that it shows you its hit rate on playlists and all (% found)

problems with buffering

It is definitely slower than Spotify to get started playing a song, like a couple of seconds when choosing something new. Downloads are slower too. This is on the lowest quality (320kbps MP3). Weirdly the tippy top highest res streaming seems to get going in the same amount of time. Other than that, not bad on Android and Windows (and on Lyrion probably smoother than Spotify fwiw).

I was getting songs stop playing through playback no matter the quality settings and all sorts of problems and we have fast internet and a good spec laptop which was less than a year old at the time but have no such problems on spotify

The speed with which Spotify starts a song has always struck me as something of an engineering miracle. Someone told me years ago that it did it partly by playing a lower bitrate version for the first second or so but don't know if that's still the case

That was totally what made Spotify stand out from the crowd originally. No one had ever achieved that kind of near-instantaneity. I'm sure there are a lot of ingredients that make it work. Pre-loading like a second or two of everything clickable, possibly at a low bit rate, is what I've always assumed

weirdly qobuz doesn't support sonos, but sonos does support qobuz, so I have to use the sonos app. qobuz has a list as long as your arm of the services they do support, weird that it doesn't include one of the biggest players on the market.

xp Canada was so far behind with the launch of services, i honestly never even thought about this. Now I'm half ass complaining that starting a new album takes as long as the old standard pause between CD tracks.. lol

I don't want to comment a lot on catalog holes because it's going to vary by country you're in. Japanese selection from here is not on Spotify's level but that's no big surprise. Most shocking omission is the albums of my countrywoman Carly Rae Jepsen!! I found an article noting this but no explanation. Apparently Americans can access "Kiss" lol.

Sonos... don't use it but i think it's there. I went on the website to the My Account bit to add Last.fm integration (works). The only other thing in that section was the Sonos integration option.

Apple has djay integration right? Does it cost any extra?

Main downside vs Tidal is no stems separation, and no offline caching/downloading.

hold on the Tidal DJ thing gives you stems? that's pretty cool....... to play with at home lol

I might mess with that at some point. Unfortunately the add-on doesn't apply to the family plan so I would need to pay them a whole nother $20 on top.

Tidal family is what I'm moved onto since Qobuz simply did not work on my parents' main players, a couple of Chromecast Audios. Seems they are pretty much forgotten devices at this point... and I'm not ready to pay hundreds to swap them over to Wiim Mini (same form factor) or something. Tidal gets along with them fine. I'll do a short Qobuz/Tidal comparison soon for the curious. My access to Emotion Side B is restored thank fuck.

Arranged roughly by significance to me:

Qobuz
/ "Qobuz Connect" works about as nicely as Spotify's: finding devices, control one from another, etc. Not the widest device compatibility (reason I had to try Tidal instead)
- really is pretty crap at recommending stuff. Maybe the editorial selections are nice (they push a "magazine"). I've seen it said someplace.
+ can browse by label
- bit slow starting new selections (any resolution)
+ good last.fm integration, at the account level
- no playlist folders
+ playlists can be arranged any order
+ relatively uncluttered
+ includes Soundiiz trial for easy library import (Qobuz must be the endpoint)

Tidal
+ Recommendations seem fine (messed around with Radios based on artists and songs and results seemed relevant, lot better than Qobuz)
/ Seems to factor stuff you've saved into recommendations, judging from what I'm getting suggested so far, which isn't bad, especially for helping get you some decent recs early in your use (Spotify robots only care about what you've actually played).
+ quick start of new selections (the Spotify equivalent quality seems as snappy as Spotify)
/ "Tidal Connect" only seems to apply to casting and certain hardware (including Chromecast Audio lucky for me). Can't control other apps with phone (for example I can cast to the TV using my phone but can't control the TV app with the phone)
/ last.fm integration only at the player level, and not supported on Android (have to use another app that keeps an eye on what's being played)
+ playlist folders
- only a few playlist ordering options
+ relatively uncluttered
- on your own with library importing (Soundiiz best of few options I messed with... 500 tracks at a time is free)
+ videos are neat. The TV app is geared towards them and... I might actually start throwing on some of these playlists?

I like both apps' approach to big Now Playing/play queue screens. Spotify's triple vertical pane thing was getting to me.

Sucks how nothing touches Spotify for user/artist/label-created playlists. I'll still use a free account to browse (and export) sometimes.

Confusing thing with Qobuz: i heard about and loved the idea of CD booklet scans available... but I can't find any. Googling it mentioned some button I can never see. Maybe not available in Canada.

Good luck out there

Cancelled spotify today.

hell yeah

Confusing thing with Qobuz: i heard about and loved the idea of CD booklet scans available... but I can't find any. Googling it mentioned some button I can never see. Maybe not available in Canada.

It depends on the label and genre. Classical tends to have booklets, especially from more recent releases. Most if not all rock and pop have no booklets.

Until people pointed out the slight delay in tracks starting to play, it never even occurred to me to think about it. If you're not djing via wifi, it doesn't seem like a big deal.

queueing up you're fine, it's just when you switch it up suddenly it can take 2 seconds.

yeah I'd kinda never felt so spoilt

1. Form a nonprofit streaming service
2. Find donors / patrons of the arts to help get started.
3. Use initial funding to poach people directly from Spotify, entice them by the mission and/or actually paying them higher salaries
4. Announce mission to public and be 100% transparent about costs and how much is going to artists and release periodic updates. Blow every other streaming service out of the water as far percentage of $$$ going to artists.
5. As the service gains momentum due to people wanting to support artists, poach even more people from Spotify. People like to feel good about what their job is doing for the world.
6. Blow every other streaming service out of the water.

Should be easy enough, right? (sarcasm font)

There is this, though it hasn't been launched yet: https://www.instagram.com/subvertworld
But they are billing themselves as a Bandcamp successor rather than Spotify.

barf

https://www.404media.co/spotify-uk-age-check-verification-yoti/