This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I've been using YT music anyway, but I recently started using my Navidrome server by just yt-dlp'ing albums + tag with MusicBrainz picard and boom. A bunch of songs I can own until my server burns down.
I feel a little bad about pirating, but I'm a college student who hasn't even gotten a job yet... But I will be buying merch or music off bandcamp in the future when I know I have the budget for it!
Bandcamp is very nice!
Now I have a peoblem with this statement in a vacuum.
Zero: I am based in Germany. So not as many dystopian laws and decisions as in the USA
First: Yes, Spotify bad, Hooray Jellyfin, ripping CDs and owning the media you have. Also good for the artists.
Second: I had ads played to me. But it only happened on podcasts.
Third: I had talked to the Spotify support: https://imgur.com/a/Ulis7Oe
(TLDR: Podcast publishers (e.g. LTT with their WANshow or Dallas Taylor with 20 Thousand Hertz) can decide if they want to play ads. They happened to me inbetween episodes)
So yeah. Now it would be very interesting what this random person encountered where.
Why do people even use Spotify at this point?
Sharing and creating playlists with friends. Discovering new music. Endless playlists of high quality for all genres and moods. Family plan is cheap.
It's still been cheaper than the alternatives if you buy for multiple people, and has most of my native country's artists at this point. I'd like to switch, but I'm worried the other services don't offer enough finnish music, and just couple euros more is a lot of money when you are poor.
Of course you could say "don't pay for these if you're poor", but it's the only subscription I'm paying for, and I feel like abandoning every single thing that can still bring me joy is kinda asking for my depression peak so I'm back to trying to hang myself again.
Though the moment I hear adds or the price increases again, I'll obviously switch immediately
Convenience of instant access to gazillion songs, though i'm not sure if the average spotify user even listens to anything other than top-lists
I used to use Spotify but got sick of their recommendations. Vastly different genre playlists would still get top100 songs recommended. Sabrina Carpenter in all my playlists.
I moved to Pandora, their recommendation engine is way less biased. Fewer features in the app, tho
Back when I was on spotify I listened to premade playlists very rarely since I pretty much always knew what I wanted to listen to and because I'm very picky. The "This is [x] playlists were pretty good though
The Convenience aspect kind of goes away when you factor in alternatives like YouTube music, apple music or soundcloud
It's a bug, not a change of policy
Lol! 😹😹 I'm glad I never signed up for Spotify
I have heard this before from rando Reddit posts where it turns out they were listening to podcasts that just had the ads baked into the broadcast.
Nope. Had it happen to me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/25040771
TLDR: I know it because the ads were German but the podcast is in English.
TLDR: I know it because the ads were German but the podcast is in English.
That can still happen and happens to me too, despite using a no-ad FOSS player, so the ads are definitely from the podcast, not the player.
Dynamic ad insertion is absolutely a thing in podcasts. If you access/download the MP3 file on the server from a German IP address, a German ad will be put in at the specified ad break before you/your player downloads the file.
So a different language ad doesn't mean it's from Spotify.
(PS: By the way, using a VPN connected to a country where not many companies make podcast ads works basically like a podcast ad blocker. I route my podcast player through an Albania VPN and have like 80% less ads than before. The remainder is "classic" podcast ads that are inserted as a static part of the MP3 file, no way to get rid of those.)
TLDR: I know it because the ads were German but the podcast is in English.
That can still happen and happens to me too, despite using a no-ad FOSS player, so the ads are definitely from the podcast, not the player.
Dynamic ad insertion is absolutely a thing in podcasts. If you access/download the MP3 file on the server from a German IP address, a German ad will be put in at the specified ad break before you/your player downloads the file.
So a different language ad doesn't mean it's from Spotify.
(PS: By the way, using a VPN connected to a country where not many companies make podcast ads works basically like a podcast ad blocker. I route my podcast player through an Albania VPN and have like 80% less ads than before. The remainder is "classic" podcast ads that are inserted as a static part of the MP3 file, no way to get rid of those.)
They still serve personalized ads in the podcasts. They aren't baked in.
Love hearing about products and services as I'm listening to my podcast about genocides and warcrimes. Mustard gas really gets me in the mood Blue Apron.
Mmm.... Mustard... 🤤
The minute I have ads in my paid subscription it's a cancel
Exactly why I canceled Amazon Prime. 100% would recommend canceling. I don’t miss it.
And then they wonder why everyone is fixing the hulls of their ships and getting new sails.
Edit: whats family plan these days? 20€/month? My local record shop has new albums for 20€. I'd guess you can find a lot of good stuff on sale for 10€. So might as well buy an album or two per month. In a year you'd already have 12-24 albums. You can make a decent playlist out of those. Do that for a few years and you have a excellent music collection that lasts decades. Spotify is stupid and pointless if you really think about it.
1.: I divide the payment of Family across 3 members.
2.: I listen to so many songs individually, it would bankrupt me to buy every single song individually or the full album.
3.: I'll buy an album (2nd hand discogs (so good)/ebay, digitally on wherever or bandcamp). If I don't like the music as much or the buying process is annoying, I'll pirate the song.
So yeah. It depends.
I've been saying that for years. Now I have about 250 albums drm-free on Bandcamp. A good chunk of that money went to the people making the music, too.
I know there are people out there paying a subscription to Spotify who listen to the same dozen albums over and over, too.
Yup exactly. Since I still pirate, I haven't bought albums very actively, only here and there but I have about 120-130 albums in my shelf. I have a friend who uses spotify, he has connected it to Last.fm. I once checked and he's been scrobbling since 2016... he has 80 unique albums on the list there. Seems like a waste of money, but hey, at least its not my money.
Or self hosting their own Jellyfin
It's the same thing.
A music collection on your harddive is a joy for you personally for ever
A music collection on a VPS hosting a Jellyfin with accounts for your family and friends is a joy forever for all your family and friends (as long as you pay the hosting fees)
A music collection on your harddive is a joy for you personally for ever
As long as you take care of backups
Instead of paying monthly for a VPS you could get a mini PC from eBay for 100 dollars and host it yourself
I buy my music from the artists as directly as possible via Band Camp.
Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer.
I'm using Tidal, but i can't say i really like it. They seem to randomly decide what songs and artists are not available, and their search function is really bad.
That's not up to the streaming service but the record company.
Personally I switched from Tidal to Qobuz this year and I like it much better.
Just recently signed up for Qobuz. I'm planning on purchasing albums as I go along so at least I'm left with something the day I decide to quit.
Fun fact, there are tools to rip FLAC files of music you stream on qobuz so you can build up your music hoard
This is just the latest in a series of vibe-coding caused bugs, Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:
I don't know if this makes it better or worse.
Worse. It makes it worse.
If I didn't already cancel them, this would make me cancel them again.
It's telling of this era that it's impossible to initially know if this is corporate greed or vibe goonery.
So... intentional or unintentional enshittification, I guess. 😬
I would have to go and download an ad, and then upload it, and then select it from new additions in order to hear an ad on Plexamp.
But the subscription model is the framework for fuckery here.
It wasn’t long ago that subscribing to something, implied a consistent (usually periodical) delivery of actual goods or services that were in some way distinct from the previous periods good or services. Issue #33 is different from #32. March’s soup of the month is different than February’s.
And you could hold issue #33 in one hand and #32 in another hand and directly interact with two months worth of that subscription.
The tech bro idea of innovation is to get two revenue streams from each customer; keep us paying for the same thing over and over but never owning it, and sell our data to advertisers. The fact that they are also showing ads to subscribers is just dripping lemon juice in the paper cut because they can. They were already making money off that data.
