I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers…
gotta give even more money to joe fuckhead - bet absolutely none of this will improve artist payouts…
fuck Spotify, I only listen to downloaded flac and mp3 music and YouTube
What an awful website. You either sell your soul or you throw away your money. No thanks, I will stick to the post title.
Cool I can’t pay any less than the zero I currently am subscribed at to not use their service
You guys are paying for Spotify?
I guess some people are, as long as it’s a good balance of convenience and price. Ages ago, Napster, Kazaa and DC++ were considered more convenient than buying music. I guess torrents are used for that these days.
There’s a P2P app from the same era as KaZaA, originally released the same year (2001), that’s still in active use today: Soulseek. It’s a great way to find obscure music, some of which isn’t on streaming services and is extremely difficult to obtain otherwise.
Usenet is good for less popular stuff too. Torrents die once the last seed is gone, but some Usenet providers have over 10 years retention, and you always get full speeds over an encrypted connection with no uploading required.
Edit: Support artists where possible, but sometimes there’s music that’s impossible to find, and that’s when these services come in handy.
Do I need an invite for usenet?
now I don’t want to be that person but I’d like to give artists some money somehow. Like I dislike AI as it rips people off - there is a (difficult) middle line to tread
The problem is there’s some 90s albums I can’t find anywhere - not on Discogs, not on eBay, not on Marketplace. The record labels are usually long gone. But they’re on Soulseek. I’m not sure what else to do to get them.
There’s also things like DJ sets/mixes that were never sold, only ever distributed online for free.
And that Judas priest CD in the cellar somewhere, sometimes you have paid the artist already so soulseek comes in handy.
Of course… I mean you don’t want them coming around your place to see you do you (Judas Priest that is)
Of course… not quite my point but yours is valid. I’d just like a more ethical alternative which I know is asking far too much in 2025
Bandcamp?
I buy merch or direct where I can. I generally pirate older stuff or stuff I would not pay for or cannot find anywhere. I got a rip of dogma and I wll buy the4k to encourage a sequel.
I work a desk job. I cant put pirated music on my work computer or ill get fired. Only real option is a pay service.
I don’t like to bring my personal stuff on my work computer, but I can use my phone for all that stuff instead. You could use a BT speaker to blast pirate metal in the office.
I thought about using my phone but I dont have unlimited data on my phone. I also dont have unlimited data at home so id run my phone and internet down faster. Phone is the real issue as its not much cell data at all per month.
An offline solution exists too, but then you would need to sync a few gigabytes of mp3 files on your phone. Not quite as convenient, but at least it wouldn’t use any mobile data. Actually, it’s still a whole lot nicer than dragging a CD player and a few discs with you. If you’re into retro, you totally can get CDs too…
Firefox & ublock and there are no publicities.
My 'ol android apk doesn’t work any more thoug… and can’t find a new one (Hint hint, blink blink)
I’ve been using a cracked yt music since the Spotify crackdown. I miss my playlists often :^(
must be hard paying 5 bucks for an exporter :^(
Can’t be fucked looking into how to grab my playlists. I’m sure I will eventually
Same with pi-hole.
We have the duo plan, for me and my wife. Kids don’t need one yet.
Their strategy has been for years to make the phone app very constrained if you’re not paying, so to have any decent experience that was kinda required.
I don’t no. But as they keep removing features from the free account, and here in the UK you at least need an account now to play anything people do
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What bubble?
the modded app chad bubble
Wrong assumption 👋
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Username checks out
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I never said it wasn’t a successful service. I’m only genuinely surprised that so many people pay for what I personally consider marginal improvements. Also thanks for being the usual internet jerk ready to snap at any comment he doesn’t like: now I have an idea of who may pay for that subscription.
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Damn, you got me! Now I have to rethink my whole plan to undermine Spotify’s revenues one comment a time!
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Let’s say it together: Enshittification
It’s been long underway for Spotify; raising prices is just the lastest step.
Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and ‘just works’ with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It’s French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you’re trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
They don’t have any other recommendations apart from those human made ones though? Couldn’t find what I wanted.
The UI is awful and their artist pages are normally blank for indy artists.
The migration is pretty seamless though, and they apparently pay their artists way better.
They have the human made ones, they have the “artist radio” function that plays songs similar to a band you like, they have a weekly top 30 based on stuff you’ve been listening to. The headline ‘albums of the week’ are based on what they like, which I don’t think is unfair - I’ve really enjoyed some of them.
I listen to a lot of metal and electronic, and I’ve always found the descriptions excellent - usually several paragraphs even for the most obscure of bands. Was well impressed that they had Lambrini Girls as one of their ‘albums of the week’, and their album at studio quality. Not that that’s essential for punk. Admittedly I don’t listen to a lot of indy, but they’ve always had what I’ve wanted to listen to.
My main complaint about the UX is that it’s nearly identical to Spotify, but I suppose there’s not much else you can do. Something particular about it that you dislike?
At my PC now, where the radio option doesn’t seem to exist at all!?!
Strange, it has the ‘autoplay more like this’ option on the web player (which does basically the same) but not the explicit ‘artist radio’ option. Huh.
Ah, I turned off auto play because it would randomly start playing other music instead of continuing my massive playlist…
“Go to Radio” on the app. Hmm…
Yeh, found it in the android app (on tracks, not artists). Not there on desktop though.
I can play the radio on the app to my desktop though… Guess that works. Not exactly great UX though.
Thanks for pointing out that it exists though!
Thanks for the long reply.
Did not know the radio function existed. On mobile at least I can’t find it on the artists page? I have to go into the … Menu on a track in a playlist?
I listen to a lot of instrumental stuff while working, so I may be going too indy? Someone like soundcriters should should have something on their page?
https://open.qobuz.com/artist/5003476
I dislike that you have to go to a playlists page to play it in shuffle, you can’t do it from the playlists menu.
Double clicking should play a track but doesn’t.
I also just switched to Qobuz. I like to listen to albums and playlists. The UI is more minimal than Spotify which I enjoy. I like the fact it’s not constantly trying to push new things like podcasts, concerts etc. on me. I just want to listen to music and pay the artists for it!
I’m on Tidal right now and currently considering the switch to Qobuz. There’s no official (or unofficial) Linux client which is kind of a bummer. Tidal at least has a half-decent unofficial one…
Yeah, I could just use the web player or strawberry but I just prefer having a dedicated app.
Yeah, the web client works just fine on Linux. A good native client would be better, of course, but I’d rather use the web one than a half-assed native one.
As much I despise Spotify, I’m trying out Qobuz and it’s just not really it.
No folder organisation for playlists or albums.
No Linux application.
No lyrics.
No support for smart speakers.
No information linking to artist tours and merch.
No dedicated classical music app.
Generally lacking when it comes to non western artists.
Prides itself on providing high quality music, yet still only has lower quality masters for some artists compared to Apple Music, Tidal, and even Spotify.
I want to love it, like the way it loves and respects the music industry, with it’s special magazine etc, but it’s just not it.
For those using spofity connect: tidal has “tidal connect” as well, which is identical and exactly as supported.
Qobuz unfortunately lacks this feature, to my knowledge.Correction: Qobuz has released “Qobuz connect”! I don’t know how widely supported it is vs. Tidal connect, though; iFi and Cambridge audio most notably seem to be missing, according to this list.I personally also prefer the tidal algo to Spotify and qobuz, but that is a matter of preference.
It’s quite easy to download Tidal content on any device w/o the app as well—for educational purposes, of course.
For some, Tidal may be a better alternative. I’ve been quite happy with it. Others may prefer Qobuz.
Qobuz released Qobuz connect back in May
Thank you for the correction! I have updated the comment.
Do they have an API? I use a lot of third party recommendation services, to avoid Spotifys and would love to make sure I can create playlists into it
Im 90% sure they have an API, I’ve seen github projects that mention using it
might be possible to just build a TUI for it then. I’ll look into it.
Qobuz catalog is extremely lacking IME.
I’m glad to hear this! I’ve just cancelled our Spotify this past week and my partner is looking for a new service (I only listen to the same albums on repeat so I’m going to survive).
Third one in a little over two years. They say it’s to keep up with inflation as if they’re a retail store operating on razor thin margins and people accept that. Meanwhile, they’re donating to fascist political parties and shafting artists by leveraging loopholes to pay out fewer royalties.
Man, music is one of those things where file sizes, quality and performance all conspire to make both offline media and self-hosting so viable. I never understood Spotify’s role.
I mean, you can like physical media and understand why Netflix was more convenient than digging through enormous TV DVD boxsets. But who the hell didn’t have a MP3 dump of hudreds of CDs by the time Spotify started being a thing?
That is fascinating to me as well:
Movies > Big filesizes > many public trackers and seeders
Music > smaller and easier to store/play > less public trackers, only slsk is really viable
Books > even smaller > there are some websites like anna and a lot of small ones
But then: Sheet music > even smaller files > almost impossible to pirate
It is fascinating to me that there isnt one clear spectum along filesize.
I guess it has to do with the target audience and demand.
There are a lot of reasons for this but mostly because music streaming has been so popular that it wiped out the market for music. Its also a huge pain in the ass to sort and organize music when nobody follows a standard when they rip music so it makes automating things a lot harder as well.
I have several thousand songs I’ve downloaded over the last 25 years but even with modern tools like MusicBrainz Picard or Lidarr, there’s no good way to organize your collection. You wind up with a bunch of singles or oddball songs from a compilation album, from a sampler, or you download an album and half of the songs come from the US version while the other half is from a UK version of the album and the uploader forgot to include a bonus track that comes on that version. Its just a huge mess that you dont see with movies and TV because apart from things like a “Director’s Cut” or “Extended Version,” you know what you’re getting when you download them.
Additionally, playback isnt easy either. Are you going to manually transfer hundreds of files to your phone? Stream from your home media server to your phone and use a bunch of bandwidth? You’re getting tired of 30% of your songs so are you going to go through your collection one by one and erase them?
There’s a huge convenience factor for services like Spotify. With movies and TV the convenience factor definitely favors the self-hosted side of things.
Re: Transferring, I bought a 1TB sd-card for my phone and use Syncthing to transfer music from desktop to phone.
Nowadays people say it’s advanced stuff for powerusers, but just a decade ago this was the way for everybody: download audio to your computer, sync some of it to mobile devices, listen on the go. Everybody did it, OSs had dedicated software that got activated as soon as you plugged the device in etc.
I hate the “convenience factor” or “non-technical user” arguments.
Since I already had a jellyfish server for TV/Films, I’ve been testing it for music recently. And the Finamp app is pretty great. I can create playlists and download them for offline listening.
That’s definitely a nice feature for sure but getting Jellyfin to even recognize the album/songs means they all need to be properly labeled and filed correctly and that some database somewhere needs to have that album’s metadata available which can be real hit or miss. SoulSeek seems to be decent for labeling and allows you to choose who you’re downloading from but its still a clunky mess at the end of the day.
I’m all for self hosting as much as possible but for me personally its just much more convenient to use a streaming service for music, and these days I find myself listening to podcasts the most which aren’t going to be available on the high seas (nor would I bother if they were because I’m not going to listen to them again).
Not trying to convince you in particular of anything, but for anyone who may be interested in switching to a different podcast app, I’d recommend trying Antennapod.
I’ll weigh in since I started hosting my own subsonic server.
I dropped lidar because, like you said, its full album based and doesn’t play well with partial collections. I dont want to collect music albums, I want to listen to music. I’ve not found a good solution for it yet, but I don’t even think I even need it. Once I get music, I tag the files with a desktop app which uses musicbrains for data and then drop the files on a SMB share. Navidrome picks them up and makes them available for streaming in 2 seconds.
Bandwidth is free and file storage space is cheap. Any convenience I gained from spotify is lost when music gets removed from it. Most recently it was king gizzard who removed half their library from spotify and I actually purchased some of their albums from bandcamp before. I own the mp3s already, but used spotify for convenience. Now I host them myself. Now I’m in control.
Obviously though, I’m the odd man out. Not everyone will be able to do this. But if I can, I will. And since I can, I do.
I wouldn’t have subbed to Spotify on my own. I’m inherited into my wife’s family plan. For me the biggest benefit is just discovering new music. I used to have a big MP3 library, but after a couple computer upgrades, they’ve kind of disappeared over the years. Having Spotify there has been really convenient for just listening toto old stuff I’ve lost as well. This said, if my FiL cancels, I probably wouldn’t sub for myself anyway.
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Yea it is a bit of a pain, but also I haven’t found a reliable setup like rrsuite for music.
Ideally it should allow for noticing a song on Spotify and transfer direct to the server
A big part of it that finally made me pay for spotify is it helping me to find new music. Its not perfect, but when the app actually works correctly it will queue up music similar to the song or playlist you searched and it can help you find new bands or other songs by the artists you like. When i was just listening to my downloaded music I’d get stuck in a rut of the same few albums or artists.
I really like Bandcamps suggestions and weekly newsletter for music suggestions, might be worth checking out. I always felt like Spotify was pushing me towards the mainstream, whereas Bandcamp almost does the opposite. Ultimately, I greatly prefer it.
I was like 9 when Spotify was incorporated
Your parents failed you by not having an MP3 dump of hundreds of CDs to give to you.
Dummy
I obviously do understand why people use Spotify.
But you are correct; my phone has 128GB internal storage, my hard drive music collection is smaller than that. There has been solutions for syncing (a curated list of) music to mobile devices for a long time. There are many - and frankly much better - ways to discover new music outside of Spotify. There are some really cool music only internet radio stations out there.
And I’m not even talking about self-hosting, which simply cannot be recommended to everyone.People defending Spotify always come back to convenience, and always dismiss the disdvantages of generated playlists, and downplay the suckness of AI content. And never acknowledge that alternatives exist, right down to NOT using a music streaming service.
Like a million songs come out every week. Can’t keep up when it’s mostly digital now, no cd to get. But you can rip Spotify!
You could just be young. By the time I was old enough to start pirating Spotify had already existed for years and it’s just significantly easier than getting into a tracker. My wife has yearly playlists she’s been making since she was a teen and doesn’t want to loose those.
“Youngins” dont understand that when Spotify came on the scene people had already stopped playing music on CDs and MP3s largely. It was when the ipod and iphones already existed and people were getting ripped off by apple for $1.29 per song that they wanted to listen to.
I vividly remember at the time trying to tell people to try Spotify instead of paying for literally every song they wanted to listen to, and people were skeeved by it because it sounded too good to be true
God this made me remember my parents getting me an iPod touch and a 50$ gift card. I listened to an owl city album for days on repeat lmao.
I actually know plenty who still hold onto them…
Friendly reminder that your “legally acquired” library of FLAC files never raises its subscription prices!
I will never part from locally stored music. I do, however, would love to have my collection run through a recommendation algorithm for discovering new music.
Would scrobbling to e.g. ListenBrainz (or last fm) be an option for you for discovery?
Yep. Hooray for self hosting!
I’m quite unhappy with spotify. I don’t care about the price, but it keeps repeating the same and same music again, and the percentage of crappy AI music is increasing. You can clearly hear it. Their client isn’t open source, and it’s just a wrapped website. It sucks.
There are ways you can use a Spotify account registered in another country and you basically pay about £2 a month. I’m mainly into 80s and 90s music and used Spotify to discover music, and once I come across a song I like I add the album name to a list (i.e. note it down) and find the CD from a second hand shop or failing which obtain the FLAC files some other way. This way I now have an offline library that has most of the songs that I love. Spotify will be there as long as I can just pay £2-ish but the moment they try the age verification or raise prices, its bye-bye for them.
They age verify in the UK already…
For most people though they won’t be hacking things to use Spotify. I agree £2 a month is OK but for me the issue is they charge a fortune yet pay artists a pittanceTrue. For me it hasn’t come up so far, possibly because my account is registered in a different country. It’s going to be a bit inconvenient but probably time to give them the finger and look elsewhere.
I ripped CDs to FLAC, put them on a Plex server, and use Plexamp on my computer and phone. Now I’ve got my own personal streaming service.
Not everyone will do that though… plenty of people I know have zero idea about that kind of stuff
Unfortunately true. It’s the uninformed (and who don’t care enough to get informed) that allow the violation of rights and privacy continue.
I have a 50TB library of movies and TV, Plex, the *arrs, a dedicated server, and even I dont bother with music because its a huge pain in the ass to deal with. I have a bunch of songs from before music streaming was popular and a few I’ve gotten from SoulSeek since then, but that’s about it. Ripping CDs, labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure is just too much work especially when you get into thousands and thousands of songs. There are software solutions to this but they don’t work very well because music is much harder to deal with when you can have 50 versions of the same song floating around out there.
Somewhere out there is a person with a single folder named “music”, with zero sub folders, containing thousands upon thousands of tracks with names like “1.mp3” and “1 (1).mp3” and they’re totally okay with it.
Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
IMO it makes more sense to rip and download music than movies. Music is small files that you listen to dozens or hundreds of times, whereas movies are large files that you might only watch once or twice.
labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure
You need to do the same thing for movies and TV shows though.
Lidarr will do this for you, mostly automated.
To rip CDs, I use abcde (“a better CD encoder”) on Linux. It automatically tags the tracks based on CDDB or Musicbrainz data.
There’s probably a basic app that’ll move it to the right directory structure, but I find Lidarr pretty easy to use. I copy the album across to my server, then in Lidarr I add the relevant album then click the button to manually import it, and point it to the right folder. Lidarr will automatically sort it into the right directory structure. I have it configured to use the structure that Plex wants - folders per artist, then folders per album inside those.
That’s assuming it has data on Musicbrainz. For MP3/FLAC files from albums that aren’t on Musicbrainz, it’s a bit trickier. I sometimes use kid3 (KDE audio tagger) as it can pull from other sources like Discogs and Amazon.
I think you do have a point about the replayability of music versus movies but at the same time I share my server with about two dozen friends and family so its good to have some variety in there along with having a good selection for when you get that random thought about a movie and want to watch it rather than spending 20 minutes finding and adding it to your server
Radarr and sonarr also handle the naming and organization but this all relies upon the files being properly named which can be a chore with music as you regularly see remixes, sample albums, compilation albums, singles, covers, extended play, radio play, censored, uncensored, etc not to mention the quantities of songs out there by artists of varying popularity, which is the root problem with music databases not always finding a match, matching incorrectly, or your downloaded album having songs from multiple different sources that the uploader lumped together. You very occasionally run into this with movies too but its typically because TMDB or whatever source not matching the studio on the release year when a release is delayed.
This probably isn’t much of an issue for you if you’re ripping your own music but that’s becoming more and more rare these days with the transisition away from physical media. I actually bought a blu-ray RW drive for my PC with the intention of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays but gave up because of the work involved (encoding in HandBrake) if you wanted anything but Remux quality.
I honestly wish the days of Napster came back, but I have had good luck with SoulSeek and have read that its possible to integrate with Lidarr but haven’t tried yet. Im sure things will get better in time as these streaming services try to squeeze their customers more and more.
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This is the way to go!
Also Daniel Ek is investing in AI war company:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html
And Trump!
So glad he didn’t get his grubby hands on Arsenal FC in the end.
My main beef with spotify is their attempt to privatize and monopolize podcasting.
Spotify offers audio hosting and a large userbase, but does not provide rss. A few people I like are trapped in this, and I have no way to listen to their shows apart from using spotify. They refuse to understand that this is an issue, just like youtubers are ok with lock-in.
Podcasting infrastructure is not monopolized yet, like video is. It is even bigger problem for me than underpayid artists.
So boycotting, and if you undersrand that, you should too.
The podcasters that you are referring to being “trapped in this” chose to be “trapped”. So don’t just be upset with Spotify over it.
I choose to blame platforms for vile intents rather than users for ignorance. I don’t see awareness of politics of technology as obligatory for all authors (even less for users), but creators of those platforms know damn well what they are doing.
Meh, their attempts at privatizing podcasting is why I’m mad at spotify, but same token there’s been a few podcasters that definitely go to the spotify platform for reasons, some in the monopolized format…
Since I don’t have a spotify, I don’t listen to those. I agree with above don’t just be upset with spotify, I blame the platform yes, but I also blame the people who got in bed with them.
Podcasting infrastructure is not monopolized yet, like video is. It is even bigger problem for me than underpayid artists.
It helps a lot that audio hosting is so much cheaper than video hosting
spotify pays me half a cent per stream, the profit margins for them must be fucking insane. and the music sounds like shit. I’d much rather people pirate it than support these leeches
if you want to support artists you like, buy the music, ideally on bandcamp. if you do have to steam it, Deezer at the very least won’t vandalize the audio
What do you think about Qobuz as a musician?
