Spotify’s 2nd price hike in a year raises prices in July by up to $3
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I looked at Spotify as a place to switch to until I discovered that:
- They started hiring cheap Swedish artists to replicate other artists in certain genres so they could effectively pay less.
- They locked in the big labels with deals that screwed indie artist labels ability to negotiate better terms.
- They heavily use playlists that lets them decide who gets played, thus letting them ultimately decide who gets royalty payments (and it is usually those labels with an investment stake in the company).
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They didn't roll this out to all users (yet). It's currently being A/B tested with only a subset of the users getting the change. So far I've only seen hard negative feedback to this change. App Stores are now seeing lots of 1 star reviews. The twitch subreddit is negative on this, their own feedback channels is full of negative feedback. Lot's of people mentioned that they cancelled Nitro or streamer subscriptions and uninstalled the app.
Maybe the feedback from the pilot is enough to kill it.
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I'm fine with podcasts and audio books being available through Spotify. I am not fine with Spotify trying to be the original source of podcasts and exclusive deals.
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We went to YouTube music because the YouTube premium family plan ($25cdn) is pretty reasonably priced once you count that we got to stop giving money to Spotify to fund Rogan. And YouTube without ads (and with content downloads) is a truly enormous step up.
Like others have said, YouTube music is fine. It's not as polished, but it does the job. I like its song radio feature better than I liked Spotify's equivalent. But I miss everyone on the same Wi-Fi network getting to control the playlist.
Like others have said, YouTube music is fine. It's not as polished, but it does the job. I like its song radio feature better than I liked Spotify's equivalent. But I miss everyone on the same Wi-Fi network getting to control the playlist.
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Would you recommend Tidal or Apple, if you could only choose one?
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That's good to know! I feel like last time I checked they were missing a couple of more obscure artists I liked, but I'll have to check again.
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I think its been a year or two since I last looked, I'll have to check again
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I've got one of the old original "free" ad-infested Spotify accounts I never use, and once had Apple Music, but will probably stay at Tidal HiFi, since I'm very picky about hearing what the musicians are actually doing. The sound quality, and perhaps also the masterings at Tidal are a lot better than any other alternative - I really regret buying all the Apple Music acc files I never play because they are so much more boring to listen to than the versions at Tidal. They really were a waste of money.
The main problem with Tidal perhaps is connected to your impression: their search functions sucks big time, especially for anything non-mainstream pop. For classical (in a wide sense) music I mostly have to search for recordings via Apple or plain Google, and then use those hits in Tidal to get what I wanted. For my musical taste Apple Music still has a better catalog, but when done right, Tidal after all seems to have more than it looks like at first glance - they just are good at hiding it.
Perhaps your experience was due to their search function?
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BlueEyedDevil
Smack-Fu Master, in training
I use Pocast Addict on Android and it works really well. One of the things I really appreciate is it allows you to import RSS feeds from premium podcasts.
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I have used Spotify for a long time; I like the experience and the app, I don't mind them hosting podcasters I disagree with, I appreciate that they have an app on anything and everything, but the price hikes to fund things I barely use (podcasts) is having me thinking about going elsewhere for my music streaming. Just feature the podcasts as a paid upgrade, don't make all of us people who only listen to music pay extra.
I've been thinking of moving to Youtube Music to get rid of ads and this may be making that decision for me.
I've been thinking of moving to Youtube Music to get rid of ads and this may be making that decision for me.
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Regarding discovering music: Doesn't streaming radio (of real radio stations) and using YT to listen to music (with uBlock Origin) accomplish this? I've discovered a few bands in a similar genre to QotSA/EoDM from YT recommendations, and I get all the latest club bangers from listening to Sunshine Live at work.
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Spotify is increasing prices to try and be profitable. Maybe being the middle man between artists and listeners should be a profitable enterprise. Why should listeners pay a Spotify tax? Why should artists get less revenue per track?
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My two streaming music services are (paid) Apple Music and (free) Pandora. I spent too much time making my "instrumentals only" profile on Pandora to abandon it and the ads aren't too intrusive. When I find something new in Pandora, I can dive deeper in Apple Music. On the whole, I find Apple Music's radio stations to be a bit limited, but they do make it easier to check out different genres and discover new music that way, too.
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As a Spotify family premium subscriber, my family and I couldn't care less about anything unrelated to streaming music on the platform.
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For me, Spotify's algorithms for identifying new music from lists has been terrible. I have better luck through free YouTube in finding new music I like, and then finding it in Spotify.
I quit Spotify about a year ago, but my wife became very accustomed to having music for the 2+ hours driving to and from school each day and started up with Duo again.
We can purchase or find any music we want now, but with Spotify built into our car (and no other music streaming service), I'm challenged to find a dead simple way to have that same searchable functionality available in the car.
I quit Spotify about a year ago, but my wife became very accustomed to having music for the 2+ hours driving to and from school each day and started up with Duo again.
We can purchase or find any music we want now, but with Spotify built into our car (and no other music streaming service), I'm challenged to find a dead simple way to have that same searchable functionality available in the car.
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That's insane. I had no idea Spotify worked this way where it wants to phone home as much as possible. That's obnoxious and I'd guess also drains your phone battery like crazy on cellular.
I am an Apple person, but was a latecomer to streaming and had become partial to Beats Music before Apple bought it. I had libraries built in both Spotify and Beats and then just let my Beats library merge into my uploaded cloud library when Apple took it over. Never used Spotify again. The initial merge had its issues, they sorted themselves out over time. To this day, I still have tracks in my Apple cloud library that are from janky CD rips I did decades ago before MP3s were a thing. They still play fine and have retained all the album art and metadata I manually entered when converting them into iTunes Match.
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I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I actually like the podcasts in Spotify. What I don't like is them constantly recommending new ones to me and not letting me curate the ones that I'm not interested in. I have several regular ones I listen too, and then occasionally branch out to listen to one-off episodes friends or colleagues have suggested. I was ok with the small hike last year, but this one is tempting me to dump it. It sucks too, I've been using it since 2012 and have quite a few playlists built
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I'm a big fan of Pocket Casts as well--have used it for years and I love their Apple Watch integration. When I'm out on walks with the dog, I typically have a podcast or music on and usually don't bother bringing my phone.
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Since share price is what drives C suite bonuses, from their point of view shareholders are the core users.
Music listeners paying subs are just part of the product.
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The local thrift store has several hundred CDs in stock all the time for $1 each, and often has 50-CD binders full of CDs for $10 or even less. I just buy those, rip to my hard drive, and don't have to deal with rising subscription rates.
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I can understand how current customers are getting annoyed over their recent actions.
Spotify lost me years ago over their awful customer service. Somehow they "merged" my account with someone else's (from a different country) who then wiped out all my playlists. Customer service couldn't/didn't do anything to help me. Seems like they're continuing to ignore the customer.
Spotify lost me years ago over their awful customer service. Somehow they "merged" my account with someone else's (from a different country) who then wiped out all my playlists. Customer service couldn't/didn't do anything to help me. Seems like they're continuing to ignore the customer.
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The benefit for me is that my wife and I tend to buy TONS of new music every month on average, and my wife started getting really annoyed at our iTunes bills after a while. We switched to a family Beats Music plan and never looked back. She and I are both musicians and it was a no-brainer. We went ahead and let it ride when it switched to Apple Music. I have no problem paying Apple for this service because I know they tend to pay their artists more than Spotify does (at least last I checked).
Apple's pricing and marketing for Apple Music tells me it's not a profit play but rather a mindshare play. It wouldn't really be modern day Apple if they didn't have an ultra-competitive music related product on the market. At the risk of sounding like someone on their marketing/PR team, "It's in their DNA".
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I never tried Tidal, but I've never heard anything particularly negative about it as a service (other than MQA may verge a bit into the snake oil area of audiophile tech).
I tried (and stuck with) Apple Music, and my biggest test was importing my favourite songs playlist. At the time, the playlist was about 48 hours long—mostly reasonably popular North American music from the 60s to the 90s, but also including recordings from around the world from the 30s to today—and I lost two songs: one from the soundtrack of the German movie Bandits and "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next" by Manic Street Preachers. The latter is specifically a Canadian licencing problem for that one album, as I know its available in many other regions. Lossless music is a nice plus for me, but isn't of value to everyone. I find its suggestion algorithm to be perfectly cromulent. It tells me about new stuff from artists I like. It makes suggestions of stuff similar to what I listen to, drilled down enough to highlight genres as specific as "Third-wave ska," for example. It will tell me the top 25 current songs in Sapporo or São Paulo, Marseille or Montréal, if I want to know.
Missing Spotify Connect was a bit of an issue. Primarily because the Apple Music desktop apps and mobile apps seem to fight more than they work together. Spotify always knows which device is playing music, and I could control playback from any device. I could start on my desktop, cast to my soundbar or speaker array, and then control it with my phone. Apple Music is equally graceful if I start on a tablet and switch to my phone, but I find the desktop app frequently just gives errors about music being played elsewhere in that case. Or if I start casting from the desktop, the mobile apps don't see it. The upshot is that I mostly use the mobile devices to manage playback, even if I'm actively using a computer at the time.
It's probably also worth saying—because people might not expect it—that the Apple Music Android app is just as good as the iOS app.
But yeah, I can't really speak to Tidal, so maybe someone else can discuss its upsides and downsides.
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The thing is, Spotify was profitable back in 2019 before it decided to start burning money. Its net income continues to rise but they just can't stop spending.
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Welcome to the enshitification roller coaster though it just goes straight to hell.
I think I'll just stick to buying mp3/mpa files every now and then.
I think I'll just stick to buying mp3/mpa files every now and then.
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sigh
While I wish there were a traditional, yet non-profit, music streaming platform, it looks like there are a couple interesting alternatives, if anyone is fed up with Spotify and other traditional platforms:
- https://resonate.coop/ - Looks like you have to pay a few cents for each song you listen to, doubling each time, up to $1, and then you own the song and can listen for free forever. And as the TLD indicates, it's a cooperative, so it's entirely owned by the people who develop and use it.
- https://sonstream.com - Pay artists directly ($0.03 per song play). No subscription fee, so days/months where you listen to nothing, you also pay nothing. If you listen to music occasionally, that's probably pretty affordable (500 songs would be about $15). But that could also be over $140 a month if you listen to music for 8 hours a day, every day.
Not sure how big either of these platforms' libraries are, but I'm sure they're much smaller than Spotify or YouTube Music or Apple Music or Tidal.
While I wish there were a traditional, yet non-profit, music streaming platform, it looks like there are a couple interesting alternatives, if anyone is fed up with Spotify and other traditional platforms:
- https://resonate.coop/ - Looks like you have to pay a few cents for each song you listen to, doubling each time, up to $1, and then you own the song and can listen for free forever. And as the TLD indicates, it's a cooperative, so it's entirely owned by the people who develop and use it.
- https://sonstream.com - Pay artists directly ($0.03 per song play). No subscription fee, so days/months where you listen to nothing, you also pay nothing. If you listen to music occasionally, that's probably pretty affordable (500 songs would be about $15). But that could also be over $140 a month if you listen to music for 8 hours a day, every day.
Not sure how big either of these platforms' libraries are, but I'm sure they're much smaller than Spotify or YouTube Music or Apple Music or Tidal.
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What’s nice about the Apple Music, Classical, Podcast, Books, Games, TV apps is being able to pick just one. They aren’t all mushed together. Podcasts are supported by their fans, books are bought by the readers/listeners, etc. If you love music you should also be supporting the artists the same way on Patreon or buying anything good you discover on a streaming service.
(Although, an Apple Music subscription does include Classical and lossless.)
Spotify, Amazon and all the other subscription businesses etc should not be pissing off their core subscribers by demanding extra money to fund things that are irrelevant or offensive. It’s also incredibly insulting they have shoveled in ads then demanded extra money to avoid them.
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And as we've seen folks tend to complain and keep paying. I'll throw myself on that pile (not with Spotify but other streamers).
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Huh. I couldn't disagree more. I want my podcasts and my music in the same place. Making them exclusive and stuff, though, I don't like. And I really don't need audiobooks; they're not going to be as good of a deal as Audible anyways.
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Spotify should be a platform for creators to upload their audio content, nothing more. I don't need exclusivities, they don't need to pay creators to stay here, they don't need to finance voice actors to try to compete with Audible, just be a hub for everything audio-related and everyone will be happier, it's cheaper for Spotify and easier for consumers and creators. I love being able to make playlists with my music on the same platform I listen to podcast, but if the price increases, I'll just use my existing YouTube Music or Amazon Music subscription and a separated podcast app, I don't care, convenience is way more important than having 10 functionalities I don't care about. The price is still fine right now, but it's a slippery slope.
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How can they not be profitable? They're not actually producing their "product" and they supposedly pay the actual music makers pennies. Where does all the money go? Is Taylor Swift getting it all 
?
?
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As others posted earlier, the majority of the money goes to the record labels, who then dole out pennies to the artists. If Spotify could pay out what the record labels pay out to the artists directly without the labels interfering and demanding a cut, they'd do that instead.How can they not be profitable? They're not actually producing their "product" and they supposedly pay the actual music makers pennies. Where does all the money go? Is Taylor Swift getting it all
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Really? I've found Spotify's recommendations to consistently be the best of any similar service I've used. I feel like whenever I've used YT I can't follow its logic on what it think is related, and its recommendations are often very generic. Spotify consistently gives me the weird, hyper-niche music that I'm looking for.
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So Spotify is doing this. I thought I was going crazy. I keep all of my music downloaded, but I still get hiccups when my connection is bad, and it's been driving me nuts. I have the music downloaded for a reason!
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On iOS devices, try Overcast. It does playlists, overnight downloads or direct streaming. But my favorite features are the removing silence/pauses and speeding up of podcasts while also improving voice quality. It allows me to listen to more podcasts in less time.
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It's a good method for some people, but I can't stand the ads and don't want the DJ chatter. I'm also too much of a goody-two-shoes to use an ad blocker on the ad-supported tier of a service.
With Amazon Music Unlimited I never hear an ad or chatter, ever, just music. Unlike radio if I can tell I don't like a song I can skip to the next one instantly.
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AFAIK it’s always been like this. Learned it a long time ago when a friend downloaded the entire Spotify library and went on holiday, leaving data roaming on, just to discover that despite having everything downloaded Spotify created a massive bill for data transfers.
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