That's true, I looked at it from pure consumerish selfish point of view. I appreciate the idealistic view and caring about artists, but in the end I believe:
- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves
- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change
I mostly only use spotify for discovery, using either discovery weekly or starting a radio stream from a particular song. Is there another service that treats artists better that I can use instead for this purpose?
Wow. The ghost artists - that’s horrifying. Clearly Spotify would prefer to completely squeeze out everybody below the clout level of the top 10 artists, and replace the rest with stock music. I would bet anything they’ll cut out the middle-artist any day now and fill their playlists with AI sloptunes.
Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.
Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.
"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?
The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.
> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote
1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own
2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).
And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.
Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).
As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".
And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".
Performative outrage is performative.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.
> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform
Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.
So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).
Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
... 1000 plays in a year?
We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.
If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?
I stopped my Spotify subscription and gave Apple Music and Youtube Music a try for a few months. I'm now again a Spotify user, despite that Youtube Music is still included in my Youtube Premium.
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
A few of my favorite artists have dropped from Spotify (for great reasons that I agree with) and I want to switch to something else. I gave Apple Music a try but the interface is just unbelievably bad. Also I am a Linux user and the lack of a native app is brutal (and Cider, a 3rd party app, is a no-go for me). Tidal seems decent though and I'll probably give it another shot eventually.
The other thing is I actually do get a lot out of the suggestions and daylist of Spotify. I guess there are some 3rd party recommendation systems out there now (pulling in data from last.fm scrobbles) but I'm not aware of something that would be as easy and have such an integrated result.
Have you heard of Tidal? I swapped to them from Spotify back when Spotify did a big round of layoffs. Tidal had the music I was looking for (generally higher quality recordings) for the same monthly cost of Spotify.
Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for, and I will continue to pay for, because:
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own.
2. There are no advertisements in the paid service.
3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
They have an impressively large amount of music available. In addition, they price songs at $0.16 USD/song —- or cheaper if you deposit more money onto the platform and.
This isn’t piracy (money is flowing to artists) and you get to own at a fraction of the cost of iTune, Qobuz, or other platforms that charge around $0.99/song
At least in my case, I'm pretty sure I can afford to own all the music I listen to. I only listen to 5,000 minutes per year of mostly the same few hundred songs. I've spent 8 years x 12 months x 13 = $1248 on Spotify in my life so far, so even at $.99 per song (which is above average if I buy albums), I'm losing money
I do enjoy the Spotify Wrapped stuff, but after moving partially to selfhosting Navidrome for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases, I've been scrobbling everything (including Spotify) to Last.fm, which has a similar end-of-year round-up. It's pretty good, got mine a couple of days ago.
No ads in the traditional sense, sure, but they do push artists and albums for example with their stupid "pre-save" functionality, even if I don't have anything to do with them. I'd consider that an ad.
It's worth the effort to host your own media. There are privacy benefits, you own the audio files (presumably) and are no longer hostage to a platform that cares little (if at all) about artists.
Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000. In fact Instagram ads have led me to discover some fantastic small artists, so I'll happily give that out to whoever cares.
I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
Or if you follow any contemporary artists who will drop a new single on any given day (which is usually not available for purchase), I much prefer being able to just go into my streaming app and press a button to start listening as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
Apple Music and YouTube Music also let you upload your own files to a cloud locker and stream them from any device, so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself. Best option IMO
There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.
If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.
Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.
It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).
Well obviously you could just pirate it instead right? Like piracy or not, spending more money or listening to less music are not the only options. Hell you could not pirate it and just listen on youtube - that's another option.
The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.
I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible as is discovery and they suffer the same problem the others do with their supplied catalog being flooded in fake songs attached to real artists as “ft.).
Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.
That probably depends on how you listen to music. I still have a qobuz family subscription but barely use it. Mostly I listen to new albums on Bandcamp, and if I like them enough, I buy them.
I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.
One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.
For those who feel that self-hosting limits music discovery, a more traditional option is "radio" (traditional in the sense that you listen to a curated playlist made by someone else).
Radio Paradise [1] and Radio Swiss Pop/Jazz/Classic [2] are two great ad-free ways to discover new music. There are probably tons of others out there.
You can use ListenBrainz to discover new music based on your listening activity from your self-hosted library. I've started doing this recently with Navidrome and I'm happy with the results. This is the plugin I've been using: https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla....
There is also Troi[1], a tool provided by ListenBrainz to generate playlists and radios from your local music collection.
Regardless of pricing you can't substitute one with the other... Spotify is a streaming service with a massive library. Self hosting means you must BYO media... and, news flash, populating a library with relevant content that rivals Spotify or would satisfy your average user will almost certainly require illegally acquiring said content.
Youtube has much more music than Spotify, is better sorted by Albums (without holes, no skips) and you can easily rip it. It has all the better obscure artists, Spotify delisted.
There's also a recommendation engine via YouTube Music.
This is my bottleneck too. I'm all for paying artists, and the hustle of setting up self host doesn't bother me (maybe not for my wife though, who is way less tech-y than me and is in my spotify family plan.) But the benefit of tens of millions of music, a search away, is simply too much for me to give up. I do my annually retrospective in music, and Billie Eilish was my back-to-back favorite artist of the year. Without streaming service, I probably wouldn't have tried her music at the first place.
My media library is simply a directory on my Linux NAS, exported over NFS. No VPS, no Plex, no Jellyfin no Jellyfish, no Jelly donut, just NFS. If I want to listen to a song or play a movie, I just navigate to that directory and play it. Simplest system I could come up with.
I've used Spotify a little from time to time over the years, but I never got rid of my music files. I have MP3 files around that I encoded in the 90's.
There's a reason Spotify might force shuffle play on the free tier. It isn't solely to annoy you into upgrading. Royalties are 2x - 5x higher for interactive vs non-interactive streaming plays.
I've tried self-hosting with navidrome [0] / plex / jellyfin but the thing I miss most is music discovery via radios / discover weekly. I've tried replicating it a few times with embedding vectors + vector search but at best it finds songs in the (sub)-genre with the tempo / mood being pretty different.
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
I just did the same, but using a Pi + nvme drive at home. I did an initial setup with Mopidy/Iris, but just tested Plex, and it was such a better experience I am going to start paying for that instead.
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
I probably should mention this: If you're a Plex user, Hetzner blocks them so don't try to host it there unless you want to setup wireguard and a reverse proxy somewhere else. They received too many complaints from media companies mad about resellers of access to plex shares hosted on Hetzner so they block the whole ASN.
Usually either the Jellyfin/Navidrome app/web UI, or a native player app that talks to your NAS over the VPN.
For iOS I ended up building a small app for my own setup that streams files straight from the NAS (SFTP/FTP) over WireGuard/Tailscale so no media server in between. TestFlight if anyone wants to try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM
I use Manet as a music player an tailscale to have access to my home server. Before I tailscale set up, I’d just download what I wanted to my phone before leaving home.
I self-host on Jellyfin with Tailscale from my home server and it's been a great experience. It's fun and intentional.
I left Spotify during one of the many scandals they've had but I think this was in 2019ish based on where I was living and I just can't remember what it was. Possibly not paying the artists enough? This was pre-Rogan. Can't say their actions over the last few years have made me regret the decision.
I ran Navidrome and then Jellyfin alongside TIDAL and then Apple Music for a while, but the UX is just so much better with my own stuff and finding things to add is fun. I wish I'd spent all the money I spent on music streaming services over the past 15 years on buying music instead. Vinyl is more expensive now (I buy it anyway), but used CDs are dirt cheap and ripping them is fun.
Does anyone have a good solution for Jellyfin with tiered storage? I’d like to store my media as encrypted blobs in object storage and then materialize it on disk when I’m about to watch it (manually queued or e.g. next episode).
With regards to keeping the service behind a VPN, I have a few questions:
1. How do you deal with various devices (Roku, Smart TVs, ...), as most don't seem to have VPN apps for them?
2. How do you deal with airplay? My ipad can VPN to my home network and access jellyfin when I am away, but Airplay doesn't work, as the stream isn't available to the device I am streaming to.
My jellyfin (and navidrome) on my home server has me very happy with the basic set up. Both are internal only, as the only service I expose is wireguard. But I haven't solved the two issues above, which also keeps me from being able to share my jellyfin with my family.
Android TV can run Tailscale or Wireguard natively. AppleTV has a native Tailscale app, and I think you can also use Passeportout for Wireguard on AppleTV but I haven't used it. Alternatively if you're on the go a lot and want to use a streaming stick in your hotel you can use a travel router that supports VPNs like GL.inet.
Airplay and Chromecast are a different story. Maybe someone else here knows different, but while it's not literally impossible it doesn't really work because of mDNS. A layer2 VPN might, but not so much on Tailscale/Wireguard.
The article is surprisingly missing the most important part: a cost comparison. I understand and share the frustration with rising prices and ads creeping into paid plans, but for people who value optionality and broad access, streaming is still meaningfully cheaper than owning content.
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)
- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent
- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns
I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.
However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.
Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.
I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!
It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)
Some people do not mind buying art or paying artists for their work.
If we assume an artist gets 1¢ per stream of a song, and that album is 10 songs long, you need to listen to it 100x for the artist to get the same as just buying a $10 CD from Bandcamp.
I understand this example is missing the cuts given to other parties (label, etc) but it is still more to the artist than streaming unless you obsessively stream the same albums repeatedly.
Spotify is cheaper because your favorite local indie band makes far less from it.
Additionally, thrift stores have loads of CDs you can rip for extremely cheap.
For the most part, you aren't meaningfully paying for content when you use streaming services. This has the effect of making it not cost effective to produce good content you enjoy, while still costing you money to pay for the services, most of that money being funneled towards slop and execs. The ecosystem as a whole would benefit if you set aside the money you would ordinarily pay for streaming, and instead spent it on choice works you appreciate, while downloading whatever you like.
For movies specifically, you should consider paying substantially more than you would on streaming if you watch any substantial amount of movies. It is very hard to fund good movies with only streaming revenue.
TIL they somewhat resurrected Google Music and raised the limit (I think it was 20k on that). I used Google Music for years because it seemed like only Spotify and them figured out reliable caching on mobile, other services when I'd lose signal they'd give up trying to stream... even noticing recently apple music is not super reliable with that.
You know you can get Spotify for way cheaper by buying card codes and activating your service from that? Just buy a new card before your subscription expires and it adds the time onto your plan when you put in the card activation code.
Even from official retail channels like Best Buy and Amazon a 1 year Spotify activation code in the US is $99, so 8.25/mo. But you can get cards from gray markets like G2A and it's only like $26 a year.
I'm looking forward to trying jellyfin once DDR4 prices come down a little. I was slow rolling my server build as I added services, but the ECC ram sticks I was using jumped up to 150 USD from 50 USD. Hopefully the lesson I get out of this is just buy the damn chips already lol
6 EUR per month really ain't much but then 80 GB of SSD is really not much for a media library.
FWIW I both rip, losslessly and verifiably, my own CDs to FLAC (lossless but compressed), I run Plex (tried JellyFin and going to switch) and yet I still pay for Qobuz (I don't see why I'd pay for Spotify when lossless streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz do exist: additionally Qobuz allows to buy DRM-free song individually).
Now, and that is not a snark: I both rent dedicated servers since decades now and run Proxmox at home.
I thought "self-hosting" meant hosting on your very own hardware, at your place (e.g. from your home).
If hosting on a rented virtual server is "self-hosting", then I take it hosting on a rented dedicated server is self-hosting too? But then what's the difference between a company renting servers and deploying its apps there? That one is registered as, say, a LLC and that the other is an individual?
So "self-hosting" depends on whether you're an individual or a company?
Sounds like a weird definition of "self-hosting" to me.
I see that they suggest Jellyfin. I wonder if there is an end-to-end encrypted media server that can be self-hosted? E.g. if I was to host my photos on a VPS, I would use Ente instead of Immich because Ente is E2EE. Same for my media.
Never used Spotify, never will. I also, as a producer, pulled my music off that service a long time ago.
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
The problem seems to be, as a producer, if you don't publish your music there, people won't find it or listen to it, at least not in the viral way that other artists are able to find success.
Sure, there are plenty of people who get their kicks from record stores and soundcloud, but to properly make it, you need to be where the ears are.
I had a nice little app that I would run once and a while and it would take all my Weekly Playlist Spotify built, remove duplicates and make one playlist.
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I had that same setup and it was great, except Jellyfin. It is ok when it works; clunky but OK, however when something goes wrong with jellyfin, it is really goes bad. Sqlite corrupted, XML files corrupted, basically having to fresh reinstall. Now with Claude code, i just made my own. Works much better, faster, no such issues and more importantly; tailored to me, so not clunky to me even though it might be for others.
.. could have purchased a few 512GB microSD cards (assuming it is not iPhone, iPad). I have all my data offline. I can also use a uPnP on android to share it across all of my WiFi network be it TV or another persons phone.
It's not just Spotify, it's also Netflix & Co., so that adds up quickly!;) But I don't argue whether it's economical or not, my point is rather:
- Commercial subscription services are getting worse
- Self hosted solutions are becoming better
Jellyfin is a really nice piece of software & Navidrome looks really cool as well! And in some (not all!) aspects the open source alternatives are even better than their subscription equivalents.
The author is angry that his Spotify subscription becomes slightly more expensive, now running at EUR 12 per month instead of 11. So his solution is to instead rent a EUR 6.50 per month Hetzner server plus a storage space that starts at EUR 3.20 per month (next bigger tier is 10.90). Which means he is now paying at least EUR 9.70 per month for infrastructure, and he has invested a whole bunch of time, and he doesn't even have any actual music, because that would cost extra.
geekamongus|1 month ago
- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...
- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...
qwerpy|1 month ago
atmosx|1 month ago
wismwasm|1 month ago
- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves
- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change
class3shock|1 month ago
cdrnsf|1 month ago
xp84|1 month ago
Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.
tambourine_man|1 month ago
Its only use case seems to be algorithm playlist. It’s an atrocious music player any other way.
troupo|1 month ago
Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.
"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?
The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.
> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote
1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own
2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).
And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.
Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).
As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".
And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".
Performative outrage is performative.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.
> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform
Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.
So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).
Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.
thordenmark|1 month ago
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denismi|1 month ago
... 1000 plays in a year?
We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.
If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?
barbs|1 month ago
- the chief executive invests money into AI weaponry https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-12/spotify-boycott-danie...
sedatk|1 month ago
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
My Apple Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2mvmybjr225
My Youtube Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m5ms6fxsrs27
temp0826|1 month ago
The other thing is I actually do get a lot out of the suggestions and daylist of Spotify. I guess there are some 3rd party recommendation systems out there now (pulling in data from last.fm scrobbles) but I'm not aware of something that would be as easy and have such an integrated result.
unknown|1 month ago
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DerArzt|1 month ago
hutattedonmyarm|1 month ago
acureau|1 month ago
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own. 2. There are no advertisements in the paid service. 3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
D9LuTa4gT0UnN|1 month ago
They have an impressively large amount of music available. In addition, they price songs at $0.16 USD/song —- or cheaper if you deposit more money onto the platform and.
This isn’t piracy (money is flowing to artists) and you get to own at a fraction of the cost of iTune, Qobuz, or other platforms that charge around $0.99/song
63|1 month ago
akpa1|1 month ago
atmosx|1 month ago
barbazoo|1 month ago
Bridged7756|1 month ago
WD-42|1 month ago
I wanted a nice native client for Linux instead of using the web app so I wrote one in Rust. Shameless plug: https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
xp84|1 month ago
cdrnsf|1 month ago
hbn|1 month ago
I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
Or if you follow any contemporary artists who will drop a new single on any given day (which is usually not available for purchase), I much prefer being able to just go into my streaming app and press a button to start listening as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
Apple Music and YouTube Music also let you upload your own files to a cloud locker and stream them from any device, so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself. Best option IMO
aeturnum|1 month ago
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
[1] Qobuz has the highest per-stream pay rate in the industry by like 40%. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/discover
[2] Tidal is the widely-available service with the second-highest pay rate. https://tidal.com/
Freak_NL|1 month ago
If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.
Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.
It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).
nonethewiser|1 month ago
The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.
dawnerd|1 month ago
Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.
Yodel0914|1 month ago
I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.
One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.
drnick1|1 month ago
Certainly not. As to how, I don't believe I need to provide instructions.
The main issue with streaming is that you own nothing, and also get snooped on.
If you really want to "stream" NewPipe is as good as any streaming service.
dogcow|1 month ago
Radio Paradise [1] and Radio Swiss Pop/Jazz/Classic [2] are two great ad-free ways to discover new music. There are probably tons of others out there.
[1] https://www.radioparadise.com/ [2] https://www.radioswisspop.ch/en
sedatk|1 month ago
[1] https://somafm.com
[2] https://scenesat.com/
chhs|1 month ago
There is also Troi[1], a tool provided by ListenBrainz to generate playlists and radios from your local music collection.
[1] https://troi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
bcye|1 month ago
whitguy|1 month ago
rurban|1 month ago
There's also a recommendation engine via YouTube Music.
asukachikaru|1 month ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|1 month ago
dpoloncsak|1 month ago
dazzawazza|1 month ago
I primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.
ryandrake|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
Still doing the modern version of mix tapes.
Haven't lost anything, and is with a smile I observe kids today being responsible for the revival of portable tape and CD players.
encom|1 month ago
sigil|1 month ago
Frotag|1 month ago
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
[0] - https://www.navidrome.org/
[1] - https://musicbrainz.org/
[2] - https://github.com/LAION-AI/CLAP
[3] - https://github.com/SonyCSLParis/music2latent
[4] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.06405
hyphmngo|1 month ago
have a service running here if you're into electronic music and want to poke around https://cosine.club/
urbandw311er|1 month ago
josh-sematic|1 month ago
sp1nningaway|1 month ago
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
joecool1029|1 month ago
mrweasel|1 month ago
andreas_42|1 month ago
For iOS I ended up building a small app for my own setup that streams files straight from the NAS (SFTP/FTP) over WireGuard/Tailscale so no media server in between. TestFlight if anyone wants to try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM
cletusw|1 month ago
aidenn0|1 month ago
I haven't tried it, but there is a program called Finamp that is specifically for music streaming from Jellyfin and supports both iOS and Android.
encom|1 month ago
Yodel0914|1 month ago
footy|1 month ago
I left Spotify during one of the many scandals they've had but I think this was in 2019ish based on where I was living and I just can't remember what it was. Possibly not paying the artists enough? This was pre-Rogan. Can't say their actions over the last few years have made me regret the decision.
I ran Navidrome and then Jellyfin alongside TIDAL and then Apple Music for a while, but the UX is just so much better with my own stuff and finding things to add is fun. I wish I'd spent all the money I spent on music streaming services over the past 15 years on buying music instead. Vinyl is more expensive now (I buy it anyway), but used CDs are dirt cheap and ripping them is fun.
chatmasta|1 month ago
darknavi|1 month ago
l72|1 month ago
1. How do you deal with various devices (Roku, Smart TVs, ...), as most don't seem to have VPN apps for them?
2. How do you deal with airplay? My ipad can VPN to my home network and access jellyfin when I am away, but Airplay doesn't work, as the stream isn't available to the device I am streaming to.
My jellyfin (and navidrome) on my home server has me very happy with the basic set up. Both are internal only, as the only service I expose is wireguard. But I haven't solved the two issues above, which also keeps me from being able to share my jellyfin with my family.
gh02t|1 month ago
Airplay and Chromecast are a different story. Maybe someone else here knows different, but while it's not literally impossible it doesn't really work because of mDNS. A layer2 VPN might, but not so much on Tailscale/Wireguard.
tomashertus|1 month ago
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
wismwasm|1 month ago
- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)
- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent
- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns
I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.
However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.
Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.
I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!
It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)
galleywest200|1 month ago
If we assume an artist gets 1¢ per stream of a song, and that album is 10 songs long, you need to listen to it 100x for the artist to get the same as just buying a $10 CD from Bandcamp.
I understand this example is missing the cuts given to other parties (label, etc) but it is still more to the artist than streaming unless you obsessively stream the same albums repeatedly.
Spotify is cheaper because your favorite local indie band makes far less from it.
Additionally, thrift stores have loads of CDs you can rip for extremely cheap.
f33d5173|1 month ago
For movies specifically, you should consider paying substantially more than you would on streaming if you watch any substantial amount of movies. It is very hard to fund good movies with only streaming revenue.
modernerd|1 month ago
It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
It's not as independent but if you're already paying for YouTube Premium it seems reasonable if you don't want to host your own media server.
joecool1029|1 month ago
TIL they somewhat resurrected Google Music and raised the limit (I think it was 20k on that). I used Google Music for years because it seemed like only Spotify and them figured out reliable caching on mobile, other services when I'd lose signal they'd give up trying to stream... even noticing recently apple music is not super reliable with that.
pests|1 month ago
You can play uploaded songs in the background, ad-free and offline—even if you are not currently a YouTube Music Premium subscriber.
Did not expect that.
SirMaster|1 month ago
Even from official retail channels like Best Buy and Amazon a 1 year Spotify activation code in the US is $99, so 8.25/mo. But you can get cards from gray markets like G2A and it's only like $26 a year.
didip|1 month ago
mahmoudhossam|1 month ago
Edit: and of course bandcamp exists but I wouldn't call their collection extensive.
Yodel0914|1 month ago
aidenn0|1 month ago
gainda|1 month ago
r14c|1 month ago
TacticalCoder|1 month ago
FWIW I both rip, losslessly and verifiably, my own CDs to FLAC (lossless but compressed), I run Plex (tried JellyFin and going to switch) and yet I still pay for Qobuz (I don't see why I'd pay for Spotify when lossless streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz do exist: additionally Qobuz allows to buy DRM-free song individually).
Now, and that is not a snark: I both rent dedicated servers since decades now and run Proxmox at home.
I thought "self-hosting" meant hosting on your very own hardware, at your place (e.g. from your home).
If hosting on a rented virtual server is "self-hosting", then I take it hosting on a rented dedicated server is self-hosting too? But then what's the difference between a company renting servers and deploying its apps there? That one is registered as, say, a LLC and that the other is an individual?
So "self-hosting" depends on whether you're an individual or a company?
Sounds like a weird definition of "self-hosting" to me.
dangus|1 month ago
It’s a co-op of artists.
Streamers eventually own the song outright if they listen to it enough.
https://resonate.coop/
palata|1 month ago
jaredcwhite|1 month ago
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
etskinner|1 month ago
Sure, there are plenty of people who get their kicks from record stores and soundcloud, but to properly make it, you need to be where the ears are.
wiredpancake|1 month ago
[deleted]
thedangler|1 month ago
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I do not like them now.
spiritplumber|1 month ago
anonzzzies|1 month ago
distantsounds|1 month ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|1 month ago
wiredpancake|1 month ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
faust201|1 month ago
.. could have purchased a few 512GB microSD cards (assuming it is not iPhone, iPad). I have all my data offline. I can also use a uPnP on android to share it across all of my WiFi network be it TV or another persons phone.
pewpewp|1 month ago
insatiablo|1 month ago
wismwasm|1 month ago
- Commercial subscription services are getting worse
- Self hosted solutions are becoming better
Jellyfin is a really nice piece of software & Navidrome looks really cool as well! And in some (not all!) aspects the open source alternatives are even better than their subscription equivalents.
urbandw311er|1 month ago
€11 - €6.49 = €4.51 profit per month
khana|1 month ago
[deleted]
this_user|1 month ago
The author is angry that his Spotify subscription becomes slightly more expensive, now running at EUR 12 per month instead of 11. So his solution is to instead rent a EUR 6.50 per month Hetzner server plus a storage space that starts at EUR 3.20 per month (next bigger tier is 10.90). Which means he is now paying at least EUR 9.70 per month for infrastructure, and he has invested a whole bunch of time, and he doesn't even have any actual music, because that would cost extra.
wismwasm|1 month ago
- Subscription services getting worse
- Open source / self hosted solutions becoming better
Self hosting is also a learning experience / hobby.
And I'm still subscribed to other streaming services! However I get more and more annoyed of getting worse overall products for higher prices.
add-sub-mul-div|1 month ago