But I am grateful for independent journalism, which is now my main hope for the future.
Well guess who’s in control of eyeballs on those journalists?
Social media companies, who have clear incentives to deprioritize such content and have repeatedly shown they do.
Let’s reclaim music from the technocrats. They have not proven themselves worthy of our trust.
While I agree with the article, I have issue with this line. These are not technocrats, they are “leaders” willing to make companies and their products objectively worse in the name of short term profits. These aren’t ‘technical experts put in charge,’ they are greedy, spineless pigs.
I don’t think this is earth shattering news. These companies identify when the audience is barely paying attention (to content and ads) and spits out the cheap stuff. I watch fly fishing and fly tying videos on YouTube and often fall asleep with it on. Then I wake up to the third hour of a professional bass fishing tournament. It happens a lot
Many of my friends use it. I’m old school and just keep a collection of mp3s on multiple devices for backup.
It’s all but impossible to purchase an mp3 anymore. Anywhere you can theoretically buy music does everything it can to lock you in to their ecosystem and prevent you from accessing your music outside of it.
I believe that Bandcamp is doing a pretty good job with it. But you can always sail the seas
I have no issue sailing the seas, if I can’t buy it an own it, then I don’t see the problem in downloading it.
My mother hates Spotify and just wants to own her music and listen to like the 100 or so songs she likes, but absolutely cannot figure out how to buy them. She’s not really technical and wouldn’t pirate if she were.
Your mother is absolutely right and this old school way is not so old school, it’s not mainstream but not really old school. But yeah piracy is a bit hard to accommodate, so in this way there are two options, teach her how to use it OR download her music.
If you support your favorite creators by going to their show or buying stuff I don’t see the ethical problem of piracy. I’ve more than 1600 songs from a dozens of groups and I just love it, got the best quality (at least 16 bit 48Khz), can listen to the songs offline on my PC or with my iem (best kind of earbuds in my opinion).
The only downside is the size of the files, I have about 25gigs in my library, my phone and my pc have enough storage but if I’d like I could reduce this to around 5-6gigs by using “normal mp3 audio”
I live in Europe. Had Spotify for about 5 years, stopped paying and using 6 months ago. I usually buy from Bandcamp, mostly non mainstream music, and download in FLAC and store it on my server. I can stream through the app on my phone when I’m out.
For the ones I can’t find on Bandcamp, or albums from major labels, I tend to find it on Qobuz in MP3. Pricing trends to be similar everywhere.
My pirating nowadays is mainly for old music or establish artists.Edit: autocorrect
I scan understand that you prefer to pay for your music, personally I prefer support artists in other ways than buying from platform.
I don’t put my music on my server simply because i prefer to have music directly on local, it’s not that heavy so I prefer having my music directly on hand. Even with the possibility of self hosting it.
The artists I like don’t come around where I live, so I can’t support through live music. I’ve done it in the past when I lived in a large city. In the end we’re all trying our best. And we all have our use cases, there’s no right way to listen to music.
Yeah you’re right and live music is my opinion always the best 😃
Yeah, going from “Google Play Music” to “YouTube Music” was such a downgrade. Shit like Bluetooth had more issues with YTM, and they completely eliminated the ability to purchase music. It sucks and there are still no good alternatives on Android :-(
Used CDs (or local library). Ripping software. Super easy. Or just buy from Amazon and download your files to local.
People sell whole collections or discographies on ebay too, I’ve had good luck with that. CD, then rip them. I don’t give a flying fuck what law says if I own the media I’m going to rip it.
For music that I really like, for artists that I really appreciate, I do look for ways to support them, because buying used does not.
It’s not hard to download a YouTube video as an mp3, so all you’ve gotta do is rip it from one of the many places it’s posted up.
No idea why you would think it’s hard to buy MP3s. I’ve never had a problem buying any, just go to the big name FAANG companies’ music store webpages or Bandcamp for FLACs. No DRM on any that I bought.
Tidal
Me too, it’s just so much better
One of the best thing to do is to pirate almost all of your music and then reward the creators by going to their shows, buying them shirts or even CDs (you can also rip physical copy if piracy is not a thing)
Ideally just send them money, most of the are set up for donations.
Tshirts and CDs create waste unless you actually end up using them
I totally agree with your point of view, I was talking to buy stuff to use it. When sending money I usually just gives some money to the group at the end of the show by hand
“Nice show Ms Swift, there’s a tenner for you, maybe buy something nice with it”
When sending money I usually just gives some money to the group at the end of the show by hand
Lmao WHAT? You don’t seriously expect people to believe this…do you?
Ohh sorry if I make myself misunderstood but I really listen and go live to small to medium groups so I can definitely to this, but maybe you can’t, no problems online (or IRL) donations are the solution
Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.
Tidal has decided to sunset it’s app, which means it’s basically on maintenance mode now. Somewhat off putting.
Did they? Couldn’t find an announcement on the fly.
They laid off 10% of their workforce last year, and like 20% of the remaining work force late this year with cuts to engineering expected. It is not in a healthy place, seemingly, and they cover a very small slither of the market.
Edit: Couldn’t find the exact article I had read before but this one seems well formatted. https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/12/tidal-bets-future-artists-djs/
It doesn’t help that their parent company makes so little from them compared to a series of crypto ventures, but what can really compare to that.
Boy, that’s a bummer. Thanks for the information, I’ve missed that.
I jumped ship over to Quboz for this reason. I’ve been really happy with it
Never heard of them. They seem interesting, will definitely taka a look. Thanks for the hint!
I’m concerned with switching to a small alternative which then becomes untenable or shutters within a year and then having to piss around again.
They been around since 2007 though, so not my biggest concern right now
Its app on a specific platform? Or do you mean the entire service? Seems weird that they would sunset their only product.
They’ve been making deeeeeep cuts in order to make the company “more like a startup”, as per Jack Doresey’s comments.
Well that’s fucking dumb.
The chart showing how much money the CEO has made off selling the stock… wouldn’t he run out of shares? It appears executives have sold over a billion dollars in 2024.
Makes you wonder if they heard these investigations were ongoing and figured they’d sell shares before lawsuits came and any potential dips in the company worth.
If so… insider trading charges would be nice
If so… insider trading charges would be nice
Yes with fines that lead than the profits… Nowadays charges are just used to seal the deal, see plebs, I settled with dady government, everything is cool.
CEOs are often compensated with stock, AFAIK.
Insider trading is almost a joke now, and about to become way more of one under the next few years of the SEC.
For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.
What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
I’m just amazed they haven’t tried to use AI to write and record their shoddy muzak, cutting out the musician all together.
I just use ViMusic or RiMusic or one of those types of forks. I believe it uses YouTube and other sources. It is ad-free and has the usual stuff you’d expect like suggestions, playlists, genres etc. Occasionally the source platform will make a change that breaks it, an update comes out fixes it.
That and there are still (probably ancient at this point) desktop clients that scrape your Pandora and download local copies of all the tracks. That’s another good way to never listen to ads.
https://spotube.krtirtho.dev/ is another alternative, but it uses the Spotify api (you can hook up your account) and backends it by playing music from yt.
the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it’s a great watch if you understand german!
it’s called Dirty Little Secrets
EDIT: here’s episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call “ghost musicians”
Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations
So instead of the cents that artists get from streaming you propose they get nothing at all? You can buy from Bandcamp if the artists are on it and use ListenBrainz.
I’m very much in favor of people supporting artists, but I don’t feel like people should be obliged to do so. I don’t believe copyright is doing society any good, and I think everyone should be free to download/listen to whatever they please. If you make music and set it free in the world, let the world listen. If they like it, they might support you, and if they don’t that’s too bad. Feel free to disagree, but that’s my point of view. If I pay for music it’s mostly by going to concerts. I’ve also donated to artists, for instance to Cardiacs when their lead singer got ill. And Major Parkinson through their kickstarter campaigns.
Exactly, they aren’t losing anything and there’s hope a better system will come along.
Agreed on Bandcamp though. The very few artists who use it get my money through there.
Didnt bandcamp get bought by some big company a little while ago? Sp bandcamp just doesent have the library yet. I do like it though in its current form (until it gets enshittified)
Can I import my history from Last? I’ve had my lfm account for like… almost 20 years, and I really don’t want to have to start off blank…
yes, you can connect them and you can import from last.fm. I was in the same situation as you, first I had both simultaneously running for some time, because I needed to get comfortable with the idea of removing last.fm. I also have data since 2008 so I felt a bit insecure ‘risking’ that. But after a while I concluded there was really no need for me to keep last.fm so I removed it. Haven’t had any regrets. ListenBrainz isn’t perfect but, despite it’s small development team, it’s sgnificantly improving every year.
https://listenbrainz.org/settings/music-services/details/ Here you can “Connect to your Last.FM account to import your entire listening history and automatically add your new scrobbles to ListenBrainz.”
Thanks! I didn’t want to make an account just to find out if I could or not. I’ll poke at this soon :D
“Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians.”
Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection…
What’s the equivalent for the movie and TV streaming?
I was thinking about the Paramount Decrees and how the repelling lead to the creation of studio owned streaming servies which has exclusive acces to the studio’s library like Paramount+, Disney+, Discovery+, apple Tv+, Peacock etc.
From the article:
"…journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.
…
"Now she writes:
‘What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.’
In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels."
Once they get maket shared they start extracting…
To normal people this is called enshitification
This should theoretically at least be illegal, as they abuse the power of the platform to favor certain tracks unfairly.
Any action would require a government that pretends to care for the pedons.
Indeed. Regulation is deeply unpopular these days. At least with the oligarchs.
We got enough of their bootlickers in this thread lol
Spotify is AFAIK Swedish, so there you go.
PS:
I guess you mean peons.
Pedons is apparently types of soil: https://www.britannica.com/science/pedonSpotify is AFAIK Swedish
It was started in Sweden where its operations are still based, but it’s headquartered in Luxembourg and it chose to IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.
Luxembourg screams “tax efficiency” to me, so their list of pre-IPO investors must be quite the thing.
@Buffalox@lemmy.world
Hmm
All western regimes sold out us out, mate
Exploiting us is the MO as workers and customers
I disagree, I live in Scandinavia in one of the best democracies in the world.
EU is mostly OK IMO. Democracy can never be perfect, because it’s about compromises. But without the compromises you’ll have a real dystopia.
But here is just about as good as it gets at our current level of development.
So get real why don’t you?Well put. Cheers, gallons of glogg and a Merry Christmas to you.
Sweden has regressing with the rest of the west.
Sure they have it better than most of oecd but the corporate take over is underway, they botched the immigration policy which resulted with serious crime rates…
A tiny foil wearing person would think that this was done on purpose to undo Swedish strong socio economic policy
Time will tell but the trend for Sweden is not looking good same way as other countries…
Published in January 2025, seeing the URL, huh.
The article is an excerpt from the full report, which comes out next month.
Can someone explain why this is bad? It seems like normal behaviour of corporations.
Or has spotify previously committed to being a fair market?
The normal behavior of corporations IS bad. By definition.
IANAL but it seems akin to the antitrust case against Microsoft for bundling their own web browser in with Windows or movie studios also owning theaters and giving preferential treatment to their own films.
You seem to be saying that something normal and legal cannot be bad.
Unfair competition.
This is like a soup joint that’s trying to see how much they can piss in the broth before customers notice.
This is a completely disingenuous comparison.
yeah, it’s more like they piss directly into peoples mouthes, but it turns out a few people are into that and can’t get enough of it
According to the RIAA, Spotify is a leading contributer to music revenue going up over the past decade plus https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2022-Year-End-Music-Industry-Revenue-Report.pdf
Prior to spotify, people bought songs or albums, and were locked into their favorites or pirated music, which obviously contributed nothing to artist’s pockets.
Spotify is not the evil entity here, in my opinion. Record labels are.
Edit: Unsure how reliable of a source this is, but steaming reduced piracy levels by ~20% https://www.alliotts.com/articles/streaming-has-a-consumer-and-a-piracy-problem-the-answer-lies-in-the-music-industry/
I do think that we have become far removed from the old days, because music piracy was extremely prevelant before these services came out.
A couple of years ago we reached the tipping point where artist are paying more for Spotify to promote their music than Spotify is paying the artists. Spotify is more evil than even the record companies at this point.
Streaming only reduced piracy because it presented a more convenient option. This formula has already changed with their predatory behavior.
The reason artist create has little to do with money. It was never about that and those that think it make shitty music and are owned by corporations.
Technology has set us free from corporate control, but we have to shun commercial platforms. We will never be free running to the wide open arms of business ready to fleece us and lock up our culture behind their pay walls.
Enshitification is here for every corporate platform. There is no escape. The days are 0% interest aka free money are now long gone.
That would be a health hazard, so it’s not really comparable.
It seems more like a soup joint using cheaper ingredients in their dishes, which is just… normal? I don’t get what the big deal is.
It’s normal if you accept it. You do not have to accept it. There’s also a good chance that it’s illegal in Spotify’s case, if not in the US then likely in Europe.
Under what law?
Likely antitrust.
That said if you’ve gone down the path of reasoning that says things that aren’t illegal are okay, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I suppose you could argue that Spotify can abuse its position in the same way that Walmart bullies its suppliers and Microsoft freezes out competition, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here. Like I said, it sounds like they’re just preferring cheaper sources.
This is behavior is anti competitive under both US and EU and member states’ law.
Issue is the regulatory capture along with strong corporate lobbying on these issues.
If you are with it, that’s cool. But behavior has historical precedent and it requires the state to set boundaries on the extraction practices
Better check the TOS doesn’t include acceptance of various concentrations of piss…
Just because it’s normal doesn’t me it isn’t bad.
I’m just surprised that anyone didn’t assume this was happening. If most people are using playlists generated by Spotify, how are they not expecting Spotify to choose songs that are also in their interest? Furthermore, how would this be different from the practices of a radio station? Seems like manufactured outrage to me.
So basically Payola 2.0
An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre). How was that even possible?
LOL a couple obvious reasons are that Spotify listeners don’t get to vote for grammy awards - only a few thousand people do - and to be eligible for a grammy an album has to be released in the United States. The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality. Jimi Hendrix never won a grammy. Neither did Bob Marley or Diana Ross. There’s a lot already wrong with the grammys.
The fake musicians and possibly AI-generated songs are more interesting. If the music industry is trying to eliminate musicians it wouldn’t be to avoid paying them - they’ve already figured out lots of ways to do that - it would be to have complete control over the music.
I only listen to obscure Swedish jazz musician.
And Lenin said, “the best way to undermine society is through its music”
- Bob Duvall
It’s a fake quote from Lenin, but suitably apt.
The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality.
Do you know who Jon Batiste is?
The album won on quality. The sales spiked after the win.
I mean they paid Joe Rogan $100 million dollars so they have already wrecked their reputation.
Ngl, I canceled them and haven’t gone back since. Don’t really miss it much, I try to use the same cost as my subscription to buy music every month on CD when I can.
I have recently discovered Qobuz (French company). You can purchase digital music. They aren’t cheap, but they have selection and hi-res music (sometimes 24 bit).
But good on you for the CDs, too!
I heard they pay artists a lot more. Need to double check.
Try bandcamp too. Almost all goes to the artist and you get FLACs.
I’ve used them plenty but…
They recently got acquired by a turd company and if I remember correctly, already issued a round of layoffs.
Don’t recall the details. Check.
I just want to remind people that you may still have a used CD store in your city, also 2nd hand stores for CDs. They tend to be quite cheap these days.
I cancelled it the second I found out how easy it was to get it for free.
I still buy FLAC releases individually from artists I like, I just use Shittify for discovery. Fuck 'em.
Yeah, I switched to deezer then, haven’t had any trouble with it.
Wow, and they didn’t even get into the seperate streaming numbers.
