Welcome to the era of only Spotify Plays matter - let’s take a look at the underbelly of streaming scams affecting independent artists.
I stopped using Spotify over a decade ago. Now I just use Pandora which is actually still pretty good. And occasionally I’ll use YouTube music if I want to check out a new band or something. But Spotify is pretty usless.
Eh, I switched back to running my own server like five years ago. Sure, technically I’m not giving individual artists their $0.0005 a stream, but nowadays I discover more music, attend more shows, and buy more merch.
During the couple of years I spent streaming, I discovered like Alvvays and Yumi Zouma. Nowadays, I discover new bands monthly if not weekly.
Like AI, streaming recommendation engines are mediocrity machines. All they can do is find you things that sound like the things you already listen to. Sometimes, if you’re adventurous, you find things you love that sound unlike anything else you listen to. If you find a great thing like that, it can change you. Unlike recommendation engine music, which will try to keep you the same forever.
What’s your discovery means now? How do you get exposed to things not currently in your wheelhouse? And once you find that thing, how do you integrate that into your library for listening on an often enough basis?
I find that I binge explore, grab 12 new artists like an old mix CD and see what sticks, but then feel like a hoarder when it sits unplayed in my library for a year.
Not who you asked, but I can tell you where I’m at with that. My primary listening is on an mp3 player, and I also use a home server for listening on speakers/tv. Switching to a separate device used only for music has made my listening far more deliberate. When I pick up the player, I’m making a point to listen to music, not just have it on in the background like I used to. It’s also a pain in the ass (comparitively) to make playlists on it (I purposely chose a scroll-wheel style and no touch screen) so I’m listening to a lot of full albums now, which I never really did before, exposing me to a lot more than I used to since I don’t just throw the song or two I like on a playlist and leave the rest.
There’s been an interesting side effect that I didn’t expect: Being more deliberate with my listening has sharpened my ear to music, I hear music in movies and shows in a way I never used to, I’m beginning to recognize voices and band styles by ear, I actually focus on music now instead of it just being part of the background. As such, I find a lot of new music these days by looking up songs from movies and tv. For example, the most recent:
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I completely devoured the Sinners soundtrack. (Ludwig Göransson is a fave and I’ve always been a fan of Buddy Guy)
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Watching Dope Thief, I realized I never skipped the intro. Got me hooked on Little Simz
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James Gunn has some great taste. Beyond season 1 of Peacemaker, Season 2 has already got me absolutely loving Foxy Shazam, and after the latest ep I’ve been getting into Hardcore Superstar.
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Strangely enough, Rick and Morty has some bangers in the later seasons, and got me listening to stuff I never would have like Kishi Bashi.
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Additionally, there’s the news. I’ve been listening to Bob Vylan and Kneecap, and only heard of them because they stood up to support Palestinians.
Not only has my listening become more deliberate, but my sourcing of new music has as well. No longer relying on an algorithm to do the work for me has allowed me to hone a new skill and learn how to find new music myself.
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can’t speak for OP but for me, surprisingly, youtube shorts. Once that damn thing gets your algo figured out for you suddenly you can start finding bands that are in your wheelhouse. Start by looking for shorts on your current favourite bands and eventually new stuff will start popping up that should be similar to your taste.
Honestly for all the crap that’s on youtube, shorts has been one of if not the best tool for me to find new music/bands. Once I find something I like then it’s off to SoulSeek/Nicotine+ to add it to my server.
As much as I know Spotify isn’t great for artists, I do find it to be the best streaming option for how I enjoy music. Next to Winamp of course.
It really whips the llamas ass.
Unfortunately, Spotify’s streaming quality is rather low, even if you pay for a monthly subscription.
I switched to Tidal when I bought a dedicated DAC and a pair of very highend headphones and have not regretted it - you can hear the difference on good gear.
I have great gear, I have FLACs, I have 180g records, and I have Spotify, and they all sound fine. Perhaps I come from a time when 192 mp3s were what you downloaded, but IMO if it’s a 320 mp3 or above it sounds the same. Only time I ever noticed and appreciated a difference was when sampling or mixing, and then higher quality can be appreciated, but if I’m just cranking tunes, Spotify, FLAC, or vinyl, really makes no difference, they all drown out the ringing in my ears just fine.
Looks like your ears’ hearing profile matches the psychoacoustic models underlying lossy compression algorithms very closely.
That’s the thing many people don’t understand - lossy audio compression works better for you the more your ears match the average human ear.
In my case, being an older fuck with slight hearing deficiencies, I don’t match this profile as closely. That’s why I require higher bitrates (or lossless compression such as FLAC) for music to sound high quality.
So yeah - listening experience isn’t just a matter of taste, it’s highly subjective and will vary from person to person. For people like me, the difference between low-res streaming and FLAC is very noticeable, and ironically not because my ears are better than yours, but because they’re worse. :)
I listen to punk music recorded on crappy gear, so I prefer not to hear it hi-fi.
Crappy punk music should be listened to from vinyl anyway.
Or cassette
Yeah. On second thought, that’s even better. A shitty 80s boombox covered with band stickers is the ultimate way to listen to punk music. Sitting on table along with a dirty ashtray and a couple of empty beer bottles.
I wish Winamp was on Android so I could use it on my phone, too. Especially if it had Milkdrop Visualizer.
I used to host my own Shoutcast. Full on DJ cosplay, like it was FM radio. 🤣
That’s what I did for my wedding - shoutcast with a requests plugin so the wedding party and guests could choose what songs to play.
Especially if it had Milkdrop Visualizer.
I wouldn’t be suprised if there’s a ProjectM port. It’s in Debian.
checks
Yup. Not on F-Droid, though.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.psperl.prjM&hl=en_US
https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm
projectM is an open-source project that reimplements the esteemed Winamp Milkdrop by Geiss in a more modern, cross-platform reusable library.
A long time ago, you could go to a special store and trade government paper for music disks and tape that you got to keep forever.
Same but I have a huge collection of digital media.
When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.
honestly, most of my CDs have been used once: Put in a PC and ripped (to 96kbps MP3s, of course!)
That bitrate seems low? I always thought 160-192kbps was the floor for a decent sounding rip, but it’s been over a decade since I’ve even had a CD so maybe things are different now
The Bitrate part was a joke, yes. 96k is low, although I just remembered a special mp3 codec from NERO that allowed for such low bitrate, at the same perceived sound quality as 128kbps.
But obviously, all my CDs have been ripped as either V2, V0 or 320kbps - I personally have not noticed any difference to FLAC files with either of those qualities, I guess my ears are not sensitive enough.
Yeah, that’s low. I don’t bother with anything below 320 kbps.
Where do you buy them from?
Qobuz. And sometimes bandcamp
Thanks
Dunno about the user you asked, but I’ve used Bandcamp for that.
Im gonna guess bandcamp?
Mostly Qobuz.
Oh, I thought that was only indie artists
Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart’s content.
Spotify was always for chumps.
Alright, I got an eighth. How do I trade it for music?
Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs
I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).
Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.
I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don’t know if it’s harder right now or not.
They want fuckin 40 bucks for a vinyl these days and they don’t even throw in a digital download for that price, and the radio is owned by like three companies unless you live near a college station.
The contracts that steal music from artists haven’t changed one iota. Unless you’ve got juice like Paul McCarty, Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, and even then it can be a fight that takes years.
I have a feeling it’s easier to put your music out there as an independant artists. There’s always someone taking a cut but the contacts are optional and there isn’t much gate keeping like before.
This 100%. Just because capitalism makes streaming unethical doesn’t mean we need to go back to old studio system of other capitalist bastards to serve as gatekeepers of art.
[glances at shelf in corner]
Can confirm.
What in the tech world isn’t broken? Besides older consoles and computers disconnected from the internet.
My Internet-connected Linux computers are pretty fucking rad.
My GOG games aren’t, my Steam library’s still chugging along after 11 years, my Linux installs haven’t failed or started spying on me and my offline, modular 3d printer still works.
It’s all about understanding what you’re using/buying and what’s the incentives for those on the other end. We shouldn’t have to think about that all the time, but on the bright side there are cool things happening outside of enshittification by publicly traded corpos.
Also VLC is free and is one of the best media players there is, and yt-dlp is so easy to acquire music with I’m surprised people thought spotify was a good long term idea for their music consumption.
Steam will do a rug pull one day. You purchase a license to their games, you do not own them.
What do you think will happen? Classic enshittification?
Wanting some kind of subscription to still play?
Helps that steam’s DRM is piss-easy to crack, and good indie devs give you DRM-free redeemable copies if you show a proof of purchase (Klei my beloved)
steam will go to shit soon as we lose gaben
Would that be coorporate suicide for steam?
Probably. Reasonable storefronts are the only thing keeping the warez at bay.
Fingers crossed he passes the reigns to someone with the same vision.
Quite a bit of what they do gets into open source.
This. I’ve been developing my exit strategy for years and am reluctant to buy too many games on steam. It’s going to hit most people like a freight train
I love seeing this. As someone who has kept his own library of music since 2004 and went through the peak of local libraries to it almost being dead after like 2012, this is a day I never saw coming! When it started declining, home hosting solutions were already sparse, but then some more threw in the towel as well. Right now, I use Navidrome as my server and Symfonium for the app and has been an incredible 2 years using it. If people start coming back, I feel like it will only drive more creativity and new features as it will be worked on more than it is.
Navidrome + ListenBrainz + Bandcamp (and a little Soulseek) = unshittification
I also use Symfonium, it is just awesome
Yeah! I’ve been using it since the first month, and it has been released and has come a long way in only 2 years. Funny enough, I used to use his other app, Yatse, way back in like 2010 for a while, and I also have nothing but high praise for it as well. It was a remote control app for Kodi, and the things he added to it were impressive. Who knew you needed tons of features in a remote control app!
I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8.
Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).
My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).
Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.
I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.
My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.
In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it, look up album/artist on Rutracker, filter out albums/songs I don’t want from the discography torrent add it to my qbittorrent if available, mount the NFS share on windows with my staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the correct folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.
This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don’t like the song and delete it later. It’s way too much.
The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can’t even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren’t worth it for me.
Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that’s frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves.
Feels like I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.
I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn’t worked for me to move off of it long-term. I’d love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.
I dont go into depth that much, but i do a lot of manual labor getting everything in place when I get new music. Maybe I never spent a good amount of time figuring it out, but preset id tags done automatically never worked out for me. I check them all and edit a few things on some, and then I run it through music Picard using someone’s script to only update genre tags and give up to 5 per track. After that, I add them in. My biggest complaint about Spotify was that I didn’t feel anything when it recommended me stuff, and it always felt off as to what I heard. Something about looking it up, finding what’s new, and wanting to hear it is why I keep coming back. Spotify, I didn’t learn anything about who came on unless I looked. Weirdly enough, I feel like I discovered way more myself than with the algorithm.
Wish I had your money experience tbqh, because Spotify algorithm is the only algorithm I use (that I’m aware of, anyway) and it’s the only one I find that doesn’t just suggest me random crap, but is almost dead on to what I want every time I’m building a new playlist, and while I had a fairly developed and diverse taste to start with, I have found hundreds of artists that I would consider myself a fan of through Spotify. It’s genuinely a lot to give up to never find any artists like that again and go back to a much more narrow cone of vision for music :(
Even though I talk a big game about quitting algos everywhere else on Lemmy, I also can’t say I was ever particularly impressed with recs of YT’s, Google’s, Tumblr’s or Insta’s or TikTok’s algos in comparison, hence why all those were very easy to delete/block/disable.
Worth noting though, your phrase “came on” makes me think you are talking about some sort of smart shuffle or auto-generated playlist feature, which I never used. My only interaction with the Spotify algorithm is scrolling to the bottom of a playlist I’m making and seeing the list of songs that are listed at the bottom as recommended, if I like it and there’s a place for it on the playlist, I will add it. The only flaw in this mode of interaction is after many many playlists, and the fact that I try not to repeat any songs between playlists, I find that what it tends to suggest is just songs I already have in my other playlists.
That’s typically the kind of videos I will never watch. The thumbnail is ridiculous (as per YouTube’s guidelines), the title is vague and clickbait. For those who did, what made you click?
PS: thanks OP for adding details
I refuse to use YouTube without sponsorblock and dearrow. I use Firefox on android with extensions and make a YouTube PWA because thumbnails in the official app are ridiculous.
Even good channels like Veritasium have completely irrelevant titles make me skip videos I would’ve watched
Fuck streaming. I’ve had my local mp3s for decades.
Damn, I’m jealous, I just started collecting.
I ripped 100s of CDs back at least 2004.
Ah, you hit me right where it hurts.
To be honest, I’m afraid to keep anything, otherwise, imagine, soon your answers on the Internet and political views will influence whether you live or not.
I’m especially afraid that when my computer breaks, I’ll have to risk buying new hardware with AI that will spy on me.
My suggestion is buy an old phone that still has a micro SD card. Get your music collection on that as well as your current phone. You then use the old phone with zero service as a music player.
You need ID to for adult sites like discord or twitter but you did a cover with Drake? We trust you…
Do you want to buy bread? Show me your ID! I don’t get it, why isn’t your ID on your body like other people? You’re an outlaw!!!
Why come you don’t have a tattoo?
I really want to get a https://www.crowdsupply.com/cool-tech-zone/tangara at some point.
Although I have an old ipod with a new battery and linux installed…so theres no real need.
Did he ever go over bandcamp? Most of the indie music that is local at least has something on there.
This is from the artist’s pov, and touches on specific scenarios, but generally speaking this and other things make every Spotify user’s experience worse.
And what I hate most is that they don’t even understand what I’m talking about. That they’re being duped, and that I have more freedom in choosing and discovering music than them.
So many people think solely in genres nowadays, not individual artists. And they don’t even care if more and more generic or AI generated stuff finds its way into their playlists. They “adapt”. After all, they only put stuff they like into their playlists, right? But unknowingly, gently, they keep getting pulled towards a trodden path and if this goes on long enough we’ll have like 10 genres to choose from and that’s it. No individual artists anymore, no experimentation, no challenging your listening habits etc.
edit: it seems my general anti-streaming-service-rant partly contradicts this video, or misses its topic by half a mile, but then again maybe not? Shit’s complex.
I just think we should all go back to physical media CDs for music and blu ray for films is what I am currently doing
physical media CDs for music
My understanding is that the streaming services basically ended the loudness war by imposing ReplayGain-style volume normalization. I’m not sure that I want to restart it.
That’s true, from a certain point of view. What they actually did was give everyone a common target. We still get everything compressed and limited into a flat line, just now we don’t have to adjust the volume on our stereo between songs.
We still get everything compressed
I don’t know if sound engineers are doing so, but the streaming services removed the volume benefit to doing so. If you use DRC, your music will be cut in volume. DRC will reduce audio quality both on CDs and streaming services, but before there at least was a volume edge to gain, and now that’s gone.
Last year I put my music collection on an SD card and slapped it into a hifiman walker mp3 player. I quickly discovered that having a device solely for music has made my listening much more deliberate, and I’ve listened to more music more often than I ever have because of it. I even plug it in my car instead of using bluetooth
