Is this Russian propaganda
From the shitty artist compensation, to the AI content, to their exclusive deals with Joe Rogan you need another reason to stop using Spotify???
and they are trying to move to videos to, which i assume would be giving podcast/video to the viewers to draw in more subscribers for ROEGAN.
Navidrome
Navidrome rules. Made the switch from Spotify some time ago, using the FOSS Tempo app on Android and Feishin on desktop, it’s been a lovely experience so far.
Symfonium is paid on android but it’s also the best. Works with navidrome, jellyfine, NFS, samba, etc…
I used Spotify premium apk for near a decade. They shut down the modded apks so I stopped using them. Not a terrible service honestly, given I didn’t pay them a dime.
Modded apks still going strong… 🤫
No shit ur still using today? A few months ago mine got shut down. Downloaded 2x other newer APK files and (I had been using mine for years) and both new ones were the same. Maybe I’ll have to try again!
Yeah it only went down for a day or two for me, bit the patches from different Devs worked to fix it Now I think they all work and many different versions.
spotify already has a propaganda arm of trump, aka JOE ROEGAN podcasts.
Don’t forget their donation to Trump’s campaign!
Android user from India. Only other alternatives available here are Amazon Prime and Apple Music.
Yes because people are driven by money a lot sadly.
Is Spotify cheaper than the alternatives?
Im thinking about the artists here because thats what the article is about. Spotify is still the biggest music platform so leaving it, even if the conditions are shit, means leaving money on the table.
It’s hard to compare, because Spotify has a lot of features that aren’t available on alternatives.
If you’re just looking for music availability and audio quality, then the cost of Spotify is pretty middle-of-the-road as long as you’re a westerner with mostly western musical tastes. But when you start getting into other qualities like social features, recommendation algos, API and third-party app integrations, multi-device controls/playback, etc… a lot of those things just aren’t offered by competitors. Those features may not matter to you, but they should probably be considered when comparing platforms.
Spotify also has a lot of promotional pricing that they offer. I think students get a pretty substantial discount. They also offer family plans, so the cost can be split significantly that way, as well.
Is there another music streaming service around, so I can leave? I use it damn near everyday and the accessibility is what I crave.
Apple music surprisingly. Good price, good bitrate, and aptx support on android.
I have become frustrated with Apple musics library management as the only Apple products I use are iPhones anyway
Have you tried Deezer?
https://lemmy.ml/post/33837544
Or Tidal, or Qobuz
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/06/tidal-qobuz-busted-vinyl-high-res-audio/
I was just complaining about selfhosting but this, this makes me choose violence
Isn’t Deezer owned by some Russian oligarch? If so, I worry about jumping from the proverbial frypan into the fire.
Yep, in the link posted
Do you have money? If so, buy music you like from the artists. Bandcamp is pretty good (though they sold out, and might enshittify).
I’ve been buying music for years and have a big library now
Is there anywhere that guarantees access to purchases forever? Ive purchased music in the past from other providers that went under and lost access to it all.
Aside from actually downloading the audio files and stripping any DRM off them? No one will offer truly perpetual access, because that means maintaining infrastructure forever, which simply isn’t going to happen.
Understand the argument of perpetuity but thats certainly not what I would ask for. CDs and physical media have a life expectancy too but at least I can make copies of those.
You can always rip cds and records you buy to a nas with a raid setup and an external drive you put in cold storage…media forever then
Yea, Ive got a Jbod sitting around somewhere. Just being pedantic but thats not forever either, there is no physical media that so far will last into infinity. I really thought that was where we would be by now considering how popular VHS, DVD and Vinyl and CDs were.
Forever as in, multiple lifetimes…
Yes, sadly physical media advancements are dead. I always thought it would be fun to see what comes after cd, if the internet hadn’t come.
If only we could go back to reel to reels, such a great sounding format that really lasted (have some from 1950 that sound good as new) but the machines take care, and people dont listen to music at home anymore. And making tapes uses a lot of plastic that im not crazy about. But I love them anyway.
Bandcamp gives you drm free copies of the music. I think you can do flac, mp3, or ogg. They do recommend downloading your copy after buying it because in rare cases something can be removed
I’ve bought some CDs directly and then ripped the music myself, too.
Bandcamp is also cool because you can find some really weird niche artists giving their music away for free.
I have sooo much great weird music I got for free or 50 cents per album.
currently i’m doing bandcamp and tidal for my two most least evil options
I use YouTube music because I all ready pay for premium, but YouTube and Google are getting worse everyday though.
Honestly thata the issue I ran into. Napster and tidal were both in the running for a minute, both were more expensive, tidal is ran by Jay z and Napster is owned by a tech bro. Honestly, I’m more inclined to go back to cd.
Yep, I’ve started buying all my media again, even music. Don’t want my copy of a movie to get censored, don’t want my music to get delisted.
The only exception is games. Damn you, steam, for being so awesome in every way except ownership.
Gonna cry when gaben kicks it, they go public, and become ea 2.0. Its gonna be hell for gamers.
All we can do is fight when the time comes. Hopefully his successor has the same values as him.
I’m absolutely there on movies, even running my own jellyfin, but I listen to such a wide variety that I don’t even know where to start getting some of them in physical.
You don’t necessarily need to buy physical to own. Most of my music comes from Bandcamp in the form of FLAC and mp3, but I have CDs and vinyl as well.
Oh heck, I didn’t even know about bandcamp
Bandcamp is where it’s at! If you are ever dissatisfied with the music industry’s proliferation of stupid and samey music, Bandcamp will surely have something for you.
Its such a massive PitA to self-host things. Dont get me wrong I love the idea of it, it works in theory, and then you get an update for one of the multiple services you have to run to make it work ex-prem, or your isp does some funky stuff and drops out. There is such a massive time sink into self hosting that its not a reliable answer for 90% of people.
That’s kinda the opposite of what I have found, once I get something to work it usually just works. Although I’m in IT so I’m pretty used to keeping ‘in production’ servers going. It absolutely is more work, because you aren’t paying somebody else to do it, so you really need to decide if that’s worth it to you. For many people the trade off in control and privacy aren’t worth the extra work and paying somebody else to use their computers instead is far more convenient.
Ive worked in IT before. If things ran as smoothly as you claim, I dont think you would have much of a job. I have had a pi-hole brick itself during an update, routers crash, home PCs just stop working.
You and I have the necessary skills to accomplish what needs to be done, just the basics of reverse proxy or ssh tunnels are damn near magic to most people. Hell, could you imagine walking your tech-illiterate neighbor through the process of it all and then expect them to keep it up without contacting you all time. I can not, which, is one of the reasons why I dont work IT anymore.
For real though, I believe that self-hosting is the only future for most of what are talking about here. I thought it was the most logical next step after everyone had libraries of music and movies at home in the 90s. I had assumed most people would want to keep those and would digitize.
The process to make that happen, and the hardware, are just not accessible to others outside our field. I would like to see a closer to all-in-one-solution become available. A system one could purchase with software ready to go all where you have to do is load it with content. Hell, call it a Spoopify Box or something equally ridiculous and you could VC angel funding in a week in SF.
Be the change you wish to see in the world, I guess. But I don’t see a commercial product like that taking off, simply because the MPAA and RIAA will fight it. They will use the media to convince the public that it is a piracy tool. I also don’t think it’s fair to demand FOSS volunteers to cater to tech illiterates. These projects are a labor of love, not a product. Self hosting means you are taking the responsibility of hosting something, and that comes with pros and cons. I think expecting a black box solution to remain stable and secure in the long run is a hard sell for me, it doesn’t line up with my personal and professional experience.
I feel like this opinion is more damaging to the cause than most people realize. Accessibility and usability are just so important, I would never demand that the opensource community do this task as it should be a cost to consumers just not like the SASS model we are currently dealing with.
I think I would like the world to be different, I just dont know how to get there yet.
No doubt that the black box solution is out of reach as of yet, but as technology moves forward the changes become less and less of a delta and it could be possible in the future. I would like to look at this solution like we look at video game consoles, or Roku even.
I use a combination of Bandcamp, Qobuz and Jellyfin atm. It gives me the combination of using their apps or my own self hosted. The chances of everything going down at the same time is pretty slim I figured.
I also have all my purchased music stored in a Nextcloud instance so in a pinch I can play the local flac/mp3 files from my computer.
In your estimate how many hours a month do you need to upkeep all of those services? What about your power bill? Im nitpicking because I am interested in doing something similar. Ive played with these services before but as a hobby PoC thing and not serious usage. Nextcloud I had some issues with dockerized containers, Jellyfin was nice but had its own cons. Plex has been great but I dont want to pay to access my own content on mobile.
I pay flat power bill so I don’t really know about the electricity costs. I also live a cold place so for most of the year I need to heat my apartment anyway so I don’t really know.
Apart from patching the Ubuntu VMs that run Nextcloud, Jellyfin and my Nginx proxy I haven’t had any upkeep on the services themselves after I got them setup, and even then I have automatic security updates on so I only really need to log in and run a feature update and reboot every few months.
Whenever I buy a new album I download it and put the files in their own folder in Nextcloud and everything syncs in a few minutes. I have set up an external folder in Nextcloud for my music that is readable by Jellyfin so everything just works for now, but I’ve only had this setup for a few months to be fair.
Bandcamp and Qobuz are just apps for me and I download all the music I buy in the apps on my phone and it’s virtually no upkeep for those. The only annoying thing is that I can’t buy music in the Qobuz app, only on the web site. I assume this is because they refuse to pay the Google tax.
You might have to look into a Wireguard/VPN setup as well if you need that for remoting into home hosting, but I can’t really help with that. I got a kinda special deal in regards of hosting.
I switched to Tidal a couple years ago and I’m happy enough with it. It’s cheaper than the comparable membership tier I was paying for with Spotify. The higher fidelity streaming is nice and supposedly it pays artists the most over any other steaming service. Their recommendation algorithm doesn’t index so heavily on your favorite tracks like Spotify’s does, so I’m discovering new music a lot more.
The UX isn’t quite as smooth as Spotify’s. I can’t cast from the browser app and it doesn’t remember what I’m listening to between devices. When I first switched there were a lot more bugs but I haven’t noticed as many over the last year.
After Tidal inevitably succumbs to corporate rot, I’ll be switching to owning my own collection and self-hosting. But until then, I’m happy with Tidal.
Tidal is owned by Square (the mobile payment app/company), and I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) owns that. So, probably safe to say it’s already pretty corporate.
Yes, but it’s a million times better than Spotify, Google, and Apple.
That guy sucks.
Why?
This is just the first article I found
https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/jack-dorsey-layoffs-streaming-music-app-tidal-block-leaked-email/
Honestly I respect the way he called musk on his bluff and forced him to pay 40+ Billion for Twitter, but this article cements him as an asshole in my book. Whenever you see a CEO saying “we need to function like a startup” what they really mean is “I have no fucking clue how to run this business, so I’m going to go back to the one thing that worked for me”, not realizing that it was mostly luck not startup culture that cemented their early success.
Talking in CEO speak seems pretty mild compared to being on the board of an AI military company. I know there is no perfect billionaire so I’m not going to advocate for Dorsey. But if that is the worse thing about Tidal, I think I’ll still support it.
Sure! I was just trying to answer the question. I’d point out that his current attitude is exactly how enshitification starts, so the writing may be on the wall for Tidal. After all, it was started as a passion project by a group of actual musicians and then sold, so the soul of it is likely gone too.
Spotify used to be the good guys, too.
Isnt Tidal responsible for the problems of high quality music formats like .ogg? Making it hard to find and download from them.
I use a Revanced YouTube Music app that doesn’t play any ads, and it functions almost exactly like Spotify.
I feel like this might not work as a mobile solution but will look into it
I use this too on android. Works great for streaming, but you can’t download tracks to listen offline afaik.
There’s a Revanced community on Lemmy, and they have a discord with all kinds of resources and tutorials to help get it all set up.
Tidal pays the highest per play amount to artists, and Apple Music also pays high (second highest for mainstream artists after tidal last I checked), and they have a massive library -but obviously they’re an evil megacorp so use your best judgement.
I personally use Apple Music but then I’m fully ensconced in the Apple ecosystem, so it works for me.
How is Tidal evil? I’ve never heard anyone complain about anything but the old mqa standard they have since dropped.
Apple is the one I was calling evil.
Have you tried Qobuz? It’s french.
Thank you for the rec. I will check it out, looks like theres even a mobile app.
I use Qobuz and I like it.
I jumped on Qobuz from a lemmy thread. Really happy with it. The artist selection is pretty broad and the Playlist are decent. But honestly, I haven’t disliked anyone from the recommended home page which says a lot. I was on yt music before and it would always loop the same five artists no matter what radio station I started. It was really weird.
https://infosec.pub/comment/17208208
It feels weird defending Spotify as I have always disliked them and preferred YTM
Ukrainians are actually reporting the drones to be vastly overpriced compared to similar Ukrainian drones.
Otherwise there is quite a few indications of corruption and it wouldn’t be surprising if Helsing will become the next Wirecard, as Germany once again follows the fever dream of some billions-worth start-up without following up on what it actually can and cannot do.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t they expensive simply because of startup model and having to pay off R&D? Meaning they should normalize over time.
Why should Ukranians pay for that though?
Although i strongly doubt, that they would have R&D justifying 4x the price of Ukrainian competitors, when people in the field say that the capabilities are similar.
i just YTM as well. mostly because it’s the less shitty option out there. sucks that there are no good options.
hope this comment summons people with actually good suggestions for my to check.
I will never use YouTube music. Specifically because back when it was Google play music, they allowed you to upload your own library… Then arbitrarily decided to delete everything after a couple years.
For real! After shutting down GPM, YTM felt like an absolute insult. Everything about it was just worse.
Deezer and Qobuz
Except deezer is run by Russian Oligarchs. So qobuz.
CEO of Deezer is a Russian agent
there are no good options
Tidal is great. A little more expensive, but it’s owned by artists, and puts the most back in the pockets of artists. The audio quality is also fan-fucking-tastic.
[Helsing, based in Germany, says it was founded to “help protect our democratic values and open societies” and puts “ethics at the core of defense technology development.”]
Show me your democratic values, open societies and the ethics at the core of your murderous defense development … then I’ll show you mine.
Yes, Spotify is not an ethical company. However, I would argue that Europe achieving defense independence from the US military industrial complex is a good thing. Germany is just two doors down from Russia.
Poland is next door and technically is also in Europe.
technically?
I’m just teasing. Poles will know what I mean.
I happen to be one and I don’t know what you mean.
No true Poleman.
He knows, he’s just pretending not to know because he doesn’t like the joke. Poland was always on the outskirts of Europe and in many aspects it’s closer to Russia than EU. Many people in Western Europe simply forget that Poland is part of EU and think about it more like about Ukraine. This used to be even more obvious and Poles had inferiority complex but now that they finally had caught up a little bit while the West deteriorated they suddenly feel real good about themselves and pretend not to remember what it was like 10 years ago.
Thanks Peter. Great joke very cool.
Theres no joke here?
However, I would argue that Europe achieving defense independence from the US military industrial complex is a good thing.
I would argue that spotify ceo doesn’t give a shit about europe achieving defense independence (the company donated money to trump). I would also argue that europe pretty much already spend in war as much russia does and that wasting public money in war is not a good thing.
They didn’t leave already when they gave millions to bag of human shit Joe Rogan?
bag of human shit Joe Rogan
This is libelous. He’s a bag of cockroach shit.
That’s sure as fuck when I left!
Same
Spotdl is a command line program that is easy to use, you just need to feed it the playlist link and it will download all the songs off YouTube.
You can then self host with azuracast or airsonic. Azuracast is what I use but it makes it into a radio station more or less, sonic I think is more of a spotify clone. There are a few other options.
The subscription fee can then be used to support your favorite small time artists through other means, without the middle man.
Seriously, just torrent your music, downloading songs off YouTube sounds like an awful idea, automated or not.
From my understanding, it’s a bit of a bother downloading less popular music through torrents. You need a private tracker I think. For big names though, definitely the way to go.
That’s fair!
Give soulseek a try, finding less known artists is a bit of a pain but i have had good luck finding everything i had looked for with a bit of digging.
Soulseek is still a thing? Rad. I’ll have to keep that in mind.
P2P will never die!!! (Hopefully)
Yt downloads are just copy and paste a link, and the quality doesn’t really matter for anything I own, no audiofile gear.
I could never get on board with spending money to stream music. There are a TON of radio stations, free streaming services, small independent artist collectives, and more hours of live free music than I could probably listen to in a lifetime.
I am the weirdo though, I get it. I VASTLY prefer live music over studio work.
I’ve never cared much for listening to live music, even if I play myself. Well, at least not for those big ass concerts you pay €200 for. I once heard a guy playing in a church near me and it was intimate and amazing; that’s how music should be… anyway, sidetracked, my point is that I love streaming so much and I listen to music when I cook, when I focus at work, when I need to get pumped, when I need to relate. The idea of streaming is amazing - although having everything in one place all at once does remove some of the magic. I don’t really have a point other than that I hope for more ethical streaming services…
For work I am right there with you. I have been streaming SomaFM for as long as its been around. Several of the channels on there are perfect for working: beat moves forward, no lyrics, great flow.
I do have my own server and about 8 TB of music, 90 percent of which is free and non commercial anyways, lol.
Some people just use music as a tool. I think you are more likely to say you see it as human expression. Live music is far better when you want to feel something in my opinion.
Hmm, I would say quit if the defense company will be US but its German. Do not be naive, we need european defense. See what is doing ruSSia. We cannot defense it with stars and rainbows.
German the country who always side with genocides and apartheids
I highly recommend that read. Seems like Helsing’s shooting star success is tied to having good contacts with the German defense ministry and Ursula von der Leyen, which both are indicators of corruption.
Ukrainian soldiers report the drones to be vastly overpriced for what they are and drones costing less than a quarter of the Helsing drones to have similar capabilities.
This sounds like another Wirecard scandal in the making, where the desperation of Germany to create some billion Euro startup is exploited by corrupt politicans and company owners. Given the context it also wouldn’t be surprising if intelligence is involved.
Ukrainians seem to be better of with domestically produced drones.
Bandcamp waves their share on Bandcamp Fridays
August 1th
September 5th
October 3rd
December 5th
Forgive me if it’s obvious, but what does “waves their share” mean?
They won’t take their percentage on the sales, and leave them to the artist
“Waives” instead of “waves”
Bandcamp is owned by union busters. Fuck bandcamp.
I agree, fuck Bandcamp, so I only buy on Bandcamp Fridays.
So… What are you using as an alternative?
Direct purchase, like the old days and fuck corporate greed so torrents.
How many artists still offer direct purchases?
I wish this was simpler. I never see direct purchases on band websites unless I’m buying physical goods.
Gotta start asking for it. If the bands you enjoy know that people would buy physical or digital copies from the artist again they would begin making them. It only benefits the entertainers.
Like Bandcamp or not, i can’t ever find the bands i’m looking for.
Are there any alternatives that aren’t associated with a tech giant?
Have to sail the high seas, and send money directly to people like Butch Vig.
Try Deezer. It’s owned by a publication traded French company. I’ve been enjoying them for the past year.
It’s owned by a Russian oligarch bastard
Founder of that company is a Russian oligarch under sanctions by Ukraine. Man also was part of a big business group chat focused on “changing the narritive” about the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza.
Theres a link posted in this thread about deezer and how its own by a russian oligarch and donates to the Right in the US at least
I’ve been using tidal for a couple years and enjoy it
Tidal is owned by Block Inc which is owned by Jack Dorsey
Serious question. Is Dorsey more ethical than the Spotify CEO? Is he still paying artists more for their music?
damnit!
Yes…self host on a nas ;)
Agreed, looks like I have my solution!
Are there self hostable alternatives to their discovery algorithm?
Their discovery algorithm will soon degenerate into mostly showing you cheap AI music. I think we better go back to looking for new music ourselves, talk to people, search online, look up people talking about the music you already know and like to find clues about other related music they mention beside it.
And if you want to do all this with a UX somewhat reminiscent of Spotify, try Hype Machine (hypem.com)
Cool site, didnt know about it
And listen to the radio. Find shows that play music that you like, created by people who love and know music.
Kind reminder that no streaming platform is very good on the ethical front. There are no ethical alternatives because the root of the problem is the legal strangle hold labels and record companies keep on artists and commercial music distribution.
The ethical alternative is listening to mp3s straight from your own hard-drive, just like we did in the '50s.
Fuck yeah, down with streaming I wanna own my shit again
then do that. If you don’t have enough space, get an external hard drive. If you want convenience, you can attach the hard drive to a raspberry pi and access the music from anywhere. You’ll probably never get as convenient as spotify, but hey, you gotta decide what your values are and if that means being a streaming-vegan then that’s the sacrifice you gotta make.
I feel like there is a step missing here. Do you mean physically take the raspberry pi and HD with you (I mean, you could but it’s not terribly elegant) or are you talking about just setting it up to stream the music.
If your referring to streaming, is there a program you can recommend to easily stream it outside of you home network? I.e. access anywhere.
Leave it at your home network.
The simplest solution IMO is to access it via an SSH or SFTP connection. I have these connections bookmarked in my file browser, so I can open them up just like any folder on my hard drive.
Some people use jellyfin as a client which has a kind of netflix-like interface. I haven’t researched to find out if there’s anything with a more spotify-like interface.
I’ve used jellyfin for years but never tried to remotely access it. From what I’ve read you pretty much have to use something like Tailscale. It’s something I will probably give a shot at some point.
I have never used SSH or SFTP. I will have to look into that. I automatically assumed that to access my files remotely I would need to pay for a static IP address. I’m assuming this is not the case? I’ll have to read up on it.
Thanks for the info. Time for me to dust off the raspberry pi 4 and play around with it a bit.
Instead of paying for a static IP address, you can pay for a domain name and have a script on your home network update the domain name to point to your current IP address once a day. It’s a pretty common practice.
I can stream from Jellyfin
I have found a bunch of my new favorite songs this year on Jellyfin. Some of them are pretty old too, lol.
It worked pretty well doing it the old human-based way, where I got a bunch of albums because I liked the band or even just a particular song. Listening through those or just playing the whole pile on shuffle led me to find plenty of gems that I stuck in my playlist.
Yes!
+1 here
Tidal puts artists first, and pretty awesome.
Can’t promise that’s how they are forever, but that’s how they are today.
Zionist supporters :/
Whatever happened to magnatune? Are they still around?
Not actively, they stopped trying to make money long ago. Since 2018 you can’t buy anything from them and artists are leaving.
Why is nobody mentioning funkwhale in this thread?
You should have left when Rogan was let onto the platform.
After that you should have left when fake music was discovered. Seriously, they have lots of fake music.
Would love to see a bandcamp revisit. Not as popular as Spotify but at least sales go to artists now. edit: wasn’t aware about the union busting. kinda sucks there are no good alternatives.
Back To the 70s mail order physical media
You and TotalCourage007 could always try the other option available… 🏴☠️
Man its been so long since I pirated I don’t even know where to start these days
If you’re looking for music, https://nicotine-plus.org/
