[endofreach]

what‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs & managing their own library. m a y b e some devs would. but those thinking about it, wouldn‘t be stopped like that. i am thinking about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time & motivation to crawl down yet another rabbit hole of diy.

[ezst]

I will never START paying for Spotify. I like my music and so I like to know my music, I have no problem curating my collection, chasing rare works for artists I really like. I enjoy the process, I enjoy the result, I enjoy that I own it. I really don't see why I would rather spend hundreds a year for the privilege of owning nothing at all in the end, while being prescribed what I shall listen to, when and where.

[lukan]

My old mp3 collection is too big for my mobile phone and I did not set up a private streaming solution yet. So out of convenience, I also used spotify. Stream anywhere anything is nice.

And I did enjoy finding new artists through the algorithm there .. but I do made up my mind about letting go of the concenience and owning all my music again. It is a big effort, though and I don't enjoy it so much like you.

[brailsafe]

Seems like a reasonable hobby, people love doing this, but idk that not doing something you already wouldn't be inclined to do carries much weight.

Almost like how people who haven't moved out of their hometown cite all sorts of reasons or apparent faults of the place they haven't moved to, like it's too expensive; it's too rainy; it's too busy; it's not sunny enough; but really, they weren't in the business of leaving anyway, because they're comfortable or don't know how to make friends, or they stubbornly try to love a place they actually hate, or they have family there and a support structure, or they have no ambition, or they actually just like the place. Either way, the moving goalposts and random critiques don't matter, it's not the hypothetical destination's burden to court someone who won't make that leap anyway, but there may be a select few fence sitters who are just waiting for a push.

I don't think Spotify's main objective is to persuade hobbyist music collectors to stop, but rather it's to persuade people who want to access music anywhere to pay for the service, which may or may not be someone forced to ditch their vinyl collection or Zune. Voting with your wallet only matters if the service you actually might pay for or are paying for stops being a compelling product.

[rjh29]

I'm old enough to have an mp3 collection, so I haven't needed spotify. They don't have 20% of the tracks in my playlist and their integration of local audio has been steadily eroded to be almost unusable now (i.e. it's completely separate, doesn't show up in regular search, playlists etc.). They also push audiobooks and sponsored results in my face even on the Premium subscription, and their UI sucks.

If you already have a collection and are reasonably content in what you listen to, topping it up with a few albums a year is not that hard.

Or just use youtube music!

[asveikau]

Even if you have an mp3 collection, the streaming apps are good for discovery, recommendations, and generating playlists.

There are probably good local solutions for the last one especially, but a convenient UI that's already on all your devices helps.

[snowmobile]

Many people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for subscription services.

[ulrashida]

Exactly this. Increasing prices with worsening service and feature bloat combined with questionable ethics made it an easy decision to cancel.

[kilroy123]

I know people who recently canceled, but I think it has more to do with them raising the price.

[parpfish]

This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit.

Spotify will never be able to pay out enough if people don’t think this music is worth paying for.

They want access to every new album but refuse to pay how much a single new CD would have cost back in the day

[cdrnsf]

I run a Navidrome server I stream my own music from. I tag everything with Mp3tag and have a shell script to organize and upload the tagged files. Not all of the music I listen to regularly is on Spotify and their treatment of artists is abominable.

[subdavis]

How much piracy do you do?

[whywhywhywhy]

>what‘s in it for spotify?

Their relationship with the labels

[troupo]

You have to first find spotify in the court docs: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.65...

    ATLANTIC RECORDING CORPORATION;
    ATLANTIC MUSIC GROUP LLC; BAD
    BOY RECORDS LLC; ELEKTRA
    ENTERTAINMENT LLC; ELEKTRA
    ENTERTAINMENT GROUP INC.; FUELED
    BY RAMEN LLC; WARNER MUSIC
    INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LIMITED;
    WARNER RECORDS INC.; WARNER
    RECORDS LLC; SONY MUSIC
    ENTERTAINMENT; ARISTA MUSIC;
    ARISTA RECORDS, LLC; ZOMBA
    RECORDING LLC; UMG RECORDINGS,
    INC.; CAPITOL RECORDS, LLC; and
    SPOTIFY USA INC.,

       Plaintiffs,

ANd then you could read the decision https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.65...:

    Factual Background - III

    The Record Company Plaintiffs’ business model relies
    in significant part on the licensing of their catalogs of sound recordings
    to legitimate streaming services like Spotify.

IMO Spotify couldn't care less. The actual owners of music care.

[themafia]

Cozy secondary relationships with music labels. Payola goes one way and industry demands go the other.

Since "owners" take such a big chunk (50%) of paid royalties for streaming there is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers. Controlling the number of "spins" an song or album of theirs gets is still a huge concern of the labels.

[troupo]

> here is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers.

Spotify has exactly zero music "directly by artists and performers". Even indie artists have to go through distributors and labels. Because without "owners" that own 60-80% of all world music, and that Spotify pays 70% of revenue to there would be no Spotify (or any music streaming service).

[crazygringo]

> what‘s in it for spotify?

Honestly, Spotify itself probably couldn't care less, for the obvious reasons you say.

But the music labels sure do. Their contracts with Spotify surely require it to implement appropriate DRM, stop all attempted piracy, etc. If Spotify wants to be on good negotiating terms with labels, they have absolutely no choice but to take as much legal action as possible.

[jrflowers]

I put Rockbox on a non-techie friend’s new mp3 player just the other day. Some folks absolutely went back to buying/pirating music after the whole Spotify playing ads for ICE thing. It’s apparently fun curating a collection like in the olden days, and sites like fmhy have gotten pretty popular recently.

[protocolture]

Spotify cancelled my subscription. I started off with a Spotify partner subscription with my wife, which grandfathered into some other thing, like a family subscription, and then whatever I had got cancelled. Meanwhile I found a new local radio station has started playing 60% of what I like, some new (to me) joint venture thats a web first marketing company and they bought a bunch of radio stations to add local radio advertising to their list of services. Between spotify with ads, radio with ads, I am listening to radio, while planning out how to most easily go back to just having my favourites on my phone or maybe even an mp3 player.

[sdoering]

IF I were still a Spotify user - this would be the nail in the coffin. Not that the founder wouldn't give me enough reason. But they lost me due to other reasons.

I am still paying for streaming, though. Still. Not sure if it is really worth it - and once I have my local mp3 collection available for myself - not sure, if I need a paid streaming service. I am getting too old and I return more and more to the songs I grew up with. And to be honest - if I would be missing anything, I could easily yt-dlp it, store it on my server and have it available ti myself via self hosted streaming.

I am loosing more and more interest in streaming. For video and music.

[Retr0id]

I think the main use-case for the metadata-enriched 300TB archive is training AI models like suno. Anyone torrenting music for personal consumption had higher quality sources available already.

[johnnyanmac]

NVidia seems to agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677628

Their response to litigation?

> NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models.

It's barely veiled these days how little they care for art.

[integralid]

> i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs

I'd love to self host my music, but curating my collection is a lot of work. I made several attempts, but looking for music I like was too much work for me. If getting "illegal" music becomes easier I'll definitely eventually do this.

[s1artibartfast]

I would go back in an instant. I think a lot of people would if it is convenient. Furthermore, all someone has to do is make a Spotify clone to interact with the archive and you have consumed their entire business.

Even if you didnt want a DIY solution, I bet you would accept a free clone, along with every other customer

[endofreach]

i dont think its much harder. but we got used to a different convenience standard regarding the consumption (of our music/library).

[queenkjuul]

Lol i say it to my friends all the time, "if music were as easy to pirate as 20 years ago I'd already be back"

Credit where it's due, Spotify made it a lot harder to find pirated music in good quality

[direwolf20]

Aren't there illegal tools for downloading music from Spotify?

[have_faith]

I cancelled my Spotify the other day in favour of listening to my own archive. I’m admittedly an outlier though.

[CryptoBanker]

Perhaps worried about downloads being used for training music models

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Can’t have competitors when they inevitably move in that direction themselves.