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.
Yall are noting not even the reason why I went to Apple Music: no ability to actually consistently sync an offline library across devices, your own files.
The “repeat” option that activates itself is probably the most frustrating bug. I can’t recall the last time I legitimately wanted to listen to a song on repeat but it enable itself very often.
If I could simply remove the feature I would.
That’s never happened to me
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You do you I guess. If you scroll down far enough on the android app home screen it will start displaying recommended content in the typical short-form layout. I believe you can also click on a small rectangle on some playlists and it will do a similar thing.
I use Tidal and get annoyed because the shuffle clearly has a recency bias to it, and it keeps trying to recommend show tunes to me in my Daily Discovery, and the suggested albums for me has become considerably worse since the last update, but everything i hear about what Spotify has been doing has made me glad i switched over a couple years ago.
How good is tidal? Is its catalogue as good as Spotify?
I’ve recently switched from Spotify to Tidal and I’m happy with it…
Yeah, get a trial and see though.
Tidal does have higher bitrate songs, also atmos and sony’s 360 audio and when done right the spacial audio sounds nice. Amazon music is decent too and it comes with prime.
The cache part pisses me off. I’m fucking paying you to stream me music. Not the same fucking shit over and over and over again.
I really don’t get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It’s not a hard thing to implement.
True random shuffle would be a terrible idea. No one wants the same track showing up multiple times in a row, which would not be uncommon in true random shuffle.
I think the idea is that the play order for the entire playlist is shuffled on each loop, so you play all songs in one order, then it shuffles, and you play all songs again but in a different order.
^this - why is it so hard to implement sigh
I disagree that that’s what it means, IMO “shuffle” explicitly means each track exactly once. Pedantry aside, what I meant was a truly randomized order when you shuffle a playlist. It’s a major critique of Spotify among users and has been for a very long time.
You can make a truly random shuffle that doesn’t do that in like five pibes of code. This is the most pointless objection to random shuffle that I’ve ever seen.
Lines of code. Lines. Not pibes.
In unrelated news, I hate autocorrect. Pibes is not a fucking word.
I mean, not really. This is actually a non-trivial topic, and true random is a really bad label for what someone actually wants out of a shuffling algorithm.
See the following engineering blog post on the subject: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/
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
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.
This is why they have record profits. They attack at both ends. Strip features, increase prices.
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.
Nah, what’s worse is that it’s only 15(!) hours per month!
Which for most people would give you a week of audiobooks to listen to in your commute to work.
Sure, but it also only counts book time. If you listen 2x it’s only 7.5 hours.
Yup this is what irks me most. I don’t think of audio books and music in the same context. Why the fuck are they mashing them together? Wrapped includes podcasts…
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.
Their podcast and audiobook integration has been so sloppy.
They haven’t ever been profitable with just streaming music.
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
I’m an album man so while I have beyond that many tracks it’s more seemless for me.
I predict in a few months, they will put their API behind a paid tier.
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Data takeouts are non-optional under the GDPR, so I would be very surprised if that happens.
Would you happen to have one to recommend to switch from Spotify to apple music? I’m thinking about moving but my playlists are keeping me from leaving.
I used TuneMyMusic when I switched to Amazon Music a few months ago. It worked really well. It costs $4 or $5 to subscribe for a month but it’s a huge time saver.
I moved all my music using the SongShift app on iOS which was super convenient. At least when I bought it, it was a 1 time cost of like $5, not sure about now. But it matches songs and lets you see which ones don’t line up and then copies the playlist over exactly the same.
And as long as people keep subscribing to them, they’ll March right along collecting that sweet money.
And they don’t offer music videos like Apple does
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.
Nvm I think my app bugged out
Remember: Stealing from big, evil corporations is morally correct.
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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.
IIRC labels own bits of Spotify, so they get their money that way. They don’t care if their music on the app actually makes a profit.
You see, the music labels know that stealing from Spotify is morally correct.
The average person: Spotify sucks and is making me hate them even more
Shareholders seeing layoffs followed by AI replacements for those workers and then repeated price hikes: 🤑
The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer. It’s very obvious that it only improves, at best, the next quarter’s returns for the investor. Once that husk of a company stops “line going up,” the money goes elsewhere and we repeat.
If the line can’t go up through creation it’ll go up through destruction.
It worked differently before speech was considered money. Or I like to tell myself that.
It worked differently before because the information network was orders of magnitude slower and data was expensive as Pope shit.
Nowadays, the information is almost instant and everything is interconnected and data storage is cheap so we got big data with people paid solely to boil that down to algorithms that squeeze money as much as possible from customers.
Just look at all the streaming services that makes you pay more if you don’t want ads and they resell your data. Triple dipping baby
This is for sure a big part of it also. Greed greed and greed being the main draw lol
Everyone that works for a company is poorer, every company is scraping by and making cuts, but executives are making more and more money
The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer
So you don’t think your life is better than someone from the 16th century?
I’m so tired of this nonsense argument, is capitalism your God to which you give credit for every human accomplishment? How did capitalism help to raise the Russian serfs to the status of a world superpower? It didn’t… How did capitalism help Russia get to space before the United States? How did capitalism help human life improve before the 16th century?
I wonder what you even think capitalism is. I wonder if you comprehend that technological advancement, markets, money, and trade aren’t synonymous with it.
You love democracy but when it comes to matters of economic decisions you are bootlicking the petite dictators that control every aspect of your economic life. You are employed by people whose means of acquiring wealth is to skim off the top of what you’re producing and steal it from you but you are too busy making eye contact while you suck them off that you don’t see their hand in your pocket.
The world is burning and there’s plastic in your balls because of capitalism, you are such a good submissive little peasant.
Spotify Premium in practice has new benefits!
More specifically: Lyrics that they took away from regular users some time ago.
They fucked it up for premium users too, though, since they’ve done that. Half the songs that I knew to have lyrics either no longer have them, or they constantly “fail to load.”
Seriously, damn, that’s feels like such a basic thing
I remember I used to have an add-on (at least I think it was an add-on; didn’t Spotify officially support those at some point?) that synced the lyrics of a song to the timestamp. It used user submissions to figure out the timestamps and edit the lyrics. It was pretty cool.
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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.
Indie internet is better, hi Lemmy
They’re still scraping us unfortunately
Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
You can influence things with your wallet.
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
It has been purchased by EPIC and a large portion of the staff was layed off. But it is still up and you can still buy music there.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/16/23919551/bandcamp-layoffs-epic-songtradr
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.
I just switched to Tidal, any recent issues?
Not loving the delay in Android Auto but the quality difference is truly night and day.
Any good way to transfer playlists?
Tidal now has built-in transfer of playlists, at least from Spotify.
I used TuneMyMusic when I moved from Apple to Tidal.
Now this isn’t without its own stupid system.
So to transfer all your music and not just a limited amount you have to sign up to pay for it. Now I’m fine paying a one off fee for this service as it was seamless, what in against it the only options being an annual fee or a recurring payment.
It cost me like £3, maybe less in being lazy. But I had to sign up, do the transfer then immediately cancel. I understand some people might be bougie and use multiple services, but not having a one time fee irked me.
If you go this route, as it is easy as tidal will send you there, please do what I did and send them a complaint afterwards about the ludicrous system and that they should add a one time fee to make it even easier. Heck I would have paid £5 for this as I have so many playlists and liked albums and songs etc.
I mentioned it on here previously and someone alluded to free services but I can’t confirm.
I used Soundiiz and it works pretty good. Gives you an overview after the import so you can see what’s missing or wrong.
There were apps out there to help with this when I switched from Spotify to Tidal. I can’t remember the name anymore though. It just sucks up all your saved songs and playlists, matches them in the other service then adds them. Almost everything I had moved over without a problem. I do miss the social aspect of Spotify, being able to share links with friends. No one I know has tidal except the people on my family plan. There are services that will turn your song link into a linktree like page with links for Spotify, tidal, YouTube music, deezer, etc., but that’s clunky.
Sharing a track from Tidal will take you to a page that links to the song on multiple platforms. Try this: https://tidal.com/track/68705949?u
That doesn’t help for whole playlists, but it at least helps with sharing with friends
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Honestly €56 million in profit seems small for an operation as massive as Spotify that has so throughly saturated the market. That does not make it excusable at all. I’m just surprised to see that number.
I’m sure there’s tons they’ve made that their accountants have managed to classify as something other than “profit,” so they don’t have to pay taxes on it
First reasonable response I’ve gotten lol
Most shitty companies do it with stock buybacks
Who cares what the “company” does when, as CEO, you rake almost $400 MILLION a year
https://mywage.ca/salary/celebrity-salary/daniel-ek
PS: and this is while receiving “no salary” (which they sell as if they were running a charity and meager $1.4 million in “other” compensation
I mean I understand there are a lot of caveats to that statement. Like I said, just kind of a surprising number. A company as massive as Spotify can have its revenue shift 10 of millions easily within a year, which means with a little nudge they could easily become unprofitable.
It would be like, I don’t know, realizing after you’ve paid all of your bills and groceries everything you have $300 at the end of the month. Not a lot of wiggle room. This isn’t sympathy and the stakes aren’t the same lol, I’m just saying their margins are not as high as I would have suspected.
A cursory search shows me competing figures - 7000+ and 15000+ employees. Both are very, very large numbers. Id have guessed they make hundreds of millions a year, not mid-8 figures. That’s probably what their payroll runs for 3-6mo.
Edit: for perspective, they have over 200mill paying subscribers. If ~800,000 left they’d be break even. That’s like .4% of their MAU’s.
It would be like, I don’t know, realizing after you’ve paid all of your bills and groceries everything you have $300 at the end of the month. Not a lot of wiggle room
Well that depends… if I have only $300 at the end of the month but I have already paid every bill and allocated $1,000,000 for entertainment, another $1,000,000 for personal expenses, another $1,000,000 for pet services, etc etc etc… the $300 left mean nothing… why do I need “wiggle room” when I can not just wiggle but literally run in every direction until I get tired and still not hit any limits?
The relatively small profit margin is a PR strategy… one that is working well on you giving you the false impression the company is “tight” when in reality, they are milking every bit of it before you get to that figure.
It’s not good PR because it makes me think they’re poorly structured and poorly allocating their money lol
if it makes you not buy into their subscription, then it’s poor PR… if it makes you think they are not greedy fucks, then it’s good PR
None of this impacts whether or not I pay them. It makes me think they are wasteful and greedy. Those are not mutually exclusive
Profit is AFTER they pay their CEO and other suit’s
Yes I am aware.
They are usually losing money
https://www.statista.com/chart/26773/profitability-development-of-spotify/
But is that net or gross?
If it’s profit it’s net by definition. Gross can’t be profit. You’re thinking of revenue. Gross is total revenue before any costs deducted.
You may need to realign your usage of phrases. Their 2024 Q1 financial statement has a line for “gross profit” and “net income/(loss) attributable to the owners of the parent.”
I’m going off the number from the article that your dude linked. The guy said “€58 million in profit.” Totally possible he’s wrong though.
I’m just saying there is a difference between “gross profit” and “net profit” because their official financial statement differentiates between it.
I dunno, my QuickBooks shows me gross and net profit. Gross profit is your income after you remove cost of goods sols (COGS). Net profit is what the org nets after everything else like payroll and other expenses.
Yeah you right. Don’t bake and lemmy, folks
That’s insane… 1000 plays per track?
A “subscriber consent to renew on price increase” law would go a long way
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Looking at you, amazon prime free trial auto renew
So what is their excuses for older musicians that paid for expensive studio time before the day of home studios? Cause they still pay them like shit too
The only reason I keep Spotify anymore is that I’ve got a family plan with something like six accounts. I gave those to random acquaintances back in the Facebook days - people who are really into music.
If I cancel Spotify, there are five people out there who are suddenly and without warning going to find themselves without music.
I really don’t even remember who they are, but I feel like continuing the subscription is my community service
Pretty sure you can see their email address. This should give you the opportunity to message them stating you’ll be canceling the subscription. They’ll still be able to subscribe on their own.
I would suggest anyone bothered by this to look into xManager.
Kind of love and hate that their website doesn’t explicitly say what it does. Like, if you can’t figure it out, you probably shouldn’t do it, even their GitHub is a bit dodgy on what the software is for, you can figure it out, but it’s never explicitly stated what it’s specifically meant for. “We help you install old versions of the app who must not be named” kinda bullshit.
I think it’s intentional to avoid eyes on taking it down.
This is the way.
I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.
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.
And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that’s somehow legal.
Does the CVV number on credit cards not change when they’re renewed in the USA? Or can companies still somehow charge cards without an up-to-date CVV?
They sometimes have an agreement to update the card after expiry
Gyms exist solely because of people like that.
Plexamp is better than any other music app I’ve tried.
Finamp for anyone using Jellyfin https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
Plexamp I’ve only gave subsonic a try. But I’ll look into Plexamp.
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
Round #451 of telling people to stop using Spotify and consider one of the many, better alternatives.
I mean they do have one good thing going for them: you can separate the art from the more controversial artists, because you know for sure the artist isn’t getting a damn thing from spotify
You should list some.
Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz, Apple Music
Deezer user checking in. After Spotify’s Rogan deal I tried Pandora, Apple Music, and Deezer and the latter was the only one I could live with. I’ve been using it for three years and never plan to go back.
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I purchase the family plan of YouTube Music. In addition to the music, it comes with ad free YouTube videos. I watch a lot of yt so it’s a no brainer for me. Never used any other streaming service so I can’t compare.
What are some alternatives? I’ve heard Tidal is one of the better ones. I’m not necessarily opposed to piracy/ripping my CD collection + self-hosted streaming, but if I can pay someone else for the convenience I’d rather do that.
Do any services have a comparable family plan too?
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.
AntennaPod is great, I used it for years. I eventually switched to self hosting AudioBookShelf which does audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts. One main reason was because podcasts more and more yank the old episodes and put them behind a patreon. AudioBookShelf downloads the episodes to your server so you always have them. About 5 months after starting using it another one of my podcasts pulled that stunt and I was super happy to have all of the old episodes still.
I’ll have to keep that in mind, thanks for that. I honestly had no considered some BS like that happening.
