[mattdotc]

>Those who don’t have paid subscriptions probably aren’t that interested in music in the first place.

Or we run our own media streaming setup rather than pay Spotify $10/month. Spotify gives the illusion of supporting artists but the artists you listen to will never see a significant amount of money from your subscription fee.

I've downloaded thousands of albums over the years and have my own music library. Why should I pay Spotify for doing the same thing? This is literally how they seeded their library when they started out.

I have since mainly moved from torrenting to buying vinyl and using Bandcamp like others here have mentioned. I still see artists tour on occasion, but I'm not convinced that touring is sustainable for musicians, so I'd rather buy the album.

It's sad to me that so many have bought the lie that Spotify et al have pushed. They are no different from the music labels.

DIY 'til I die.

[vonseel]

Spotify is worth it alone for the discovery to me now, and I grew up with my weirdo foobar music player and etc.

I don't know what your impression of Spotify is, but it seems quite different than mine. When I think Spotify, I think Discover Weekly, awesome machine learning that finds artists similar to whatever I was listening to every time I listen to an album / artist all the way through, often finding me new favorites, well made apps that integrate nicely between my iPhone / Mac desktop app - I can easily resume something on a different player. This seems like it's getting smarter. I don't really use it the way I used to use Foobar / Winamp / iTunes - but I probably abuse it. I create playlists for whatever I'm listening to lately, and just access those. I don't want to scroll 2000 artists in my library.

Downsides I've experienced - not many: - quality not quite as good as Apple Music or Tidal ( and definitely not as good as FLAC, lol ). This isn't really a problem for me unless I A/B something. Sometimes the library is missing something. These songs are probably not available from competitors either. - Lyrics view? WTH guys seriously, this was good at first and now it only occasionally shows "Behind the music with Genius'... assuming this is licensing problems but if you can work out streaming rights, can't you work out lyric sheet rights? - That might actually be all of them.

Buying vinyl is cool but I'll never listen to it. Inconvenient. It's a cool souvenir.

I used to have a big FLAC library. Somewhere along the road, it was lost, along with many other digital heirlooms.

[skinnymuch]

Isn’t touring how they make most of their money? Hasn’t that always been the case?