Spotify paid users hit 236M, but losing money, amid Apple battle::Spotify reported a mix of good news and bad in its latest quarterly earnings report. The good news was that…
I must be the only person on Lemmy who actually likes Spotify. You youngings don’t remember the time before spotify where the best option was Apple’s shit-of-a-service that charges flat 2$ per song (no matter where you are in the world lol) or spending evenings in p2p music sharing channels and music forums organizing your playlists.
Spotify has objectively changes music for the better and I’d be very sad if it goes away because all alternatives are significantly worse still.
This is me as well. I haven’t downloaded music since I got Spotify. I just wish the movie industry had similar options. No I will not sign up for 15 different streaming platforms. There are much easier ways to solve that problem.
The problem (or at least mine) is not the concept of music streaming subscriptions but with Spotify in particular because the alternatives are in fact better in multiple ways.
Most alternatives offer lossless audio for the same price for example. On top of that, Spotify reportedly pays artist second to worst, only surpassing Amazon Music (and is still not profitable).
Besides that (although that’s opinion), their app hasn’t improved in a very long time either. Instead of building solid library management (which they had at dome point but removed) they add an overt focus on playlists and algorithm based recommendations and they make it annoyingly difficult to add titles that aren’t on the service to your library. Also, the app still does not offer a light mode.
And, since you‘ve mentioned Apple‘s shit service: They did a 180 and are currently offering what is in my opinion the best package for people who are serious about listening to music: Great organized app that still offers great algorithms and hand curated playlists and recommendations if you want to use them, however they’re not the focus, your library is. Great audio quality with most of the music being lossless and lots even hires lossless. By now they have even (almost) caught up with apps on non Apple devices: Android, PlayStation, XBox, Roku, webOS, Samsung TV, web an probably a few more. Since the last update they’ve even finally added the last feature most other services had that they didn’t: collaborative playlists.
Spotify has a few pluses, still, like even better support for more devices (better windows client, native linux client, androidTV client) and the Spotify device control feature is rather cool. However, I‘d argue the alternatives are definitely not (all) worse. I haven’t even mentioned deezer, which also has a very decent app and YouTube music, which is amazing but comes free with YouTube Premium and the ability to add any YouTube video to your playlists if what you‘re looking for isn’t in its library.
While I don’t wish for Spotify to go bankrupt and disappear, I‘d still recommend taking a look at the market once in a while. Switching services is relatively easy and the competition isn’t sleeping.
I have youtube music and tidal too (I pay for all because I do love my music) as well as tried every other service and Spotify is still the best daily driver by far because it does everything well enough and innovates just enough to be interesting but stable. Everything else is lacking some piece of a puzzle like no lyrics, small library, lacking core features.
Other than that Youtube music is severely under rated because of music videos but the rest don’t really have anything special about them tbh
What core features is Apple Music missing for you? The library isn’t smaller than spotify‘s (and has actually usually been a lot larger) and the lyrics feature is excellent. It even has a rather good library of official music videos.
Also, what’s your reason of having tidal, spotify and YouTube music? In my experience they do not differ so much as to warrant paying for more than one…
Cross platform being main feature missing from Apple music also a modern discovery mechanism and no way to control output device like on spotify. No group listens or social features. It’s not even close tbh.
I have tidal for some audio quality for my house speaker setup. Yt music for mtv chill nights and Spotify for everything else :)
I love the daily mix playlists.
I quit using Spotify after the Joe Rogan antivax nonsense. They refused to take any action.
Is Apple innocent? No, but afaik they’re not paying Joe Rogan $100 million to platform people like Elon Musk and Alex Jones.
I got caught in a crazy loop of Spotify resetting my password once a week. They offered no help except telling me my 40 char generated password was “not secure enough”. So, I cancelled and deleted the account; fuck em.
Back to the high seas I guess.
Deezer ain’t bad. https://www.deezer.com
How do you high seas music ?
I vane from limewire days. Then I used YouTube then moved to Spotify.
I only listen to music with my phone or on my desktop. On my phone I have a pirated Spotify premium app, and on desktop I just stream from YouTube with adblock. Don’t have any recommendations if you’re looking to download though.
Do you need a rooted phone for that app.?
Negative. Just download the launcher, then you can pick the version of Spotify you want to use. Then it’ll download the apk. Basically like how YouTube vanced used to work. It’s been pretty perfect for my use case.
Noice. Will check it out
Soulseek.
YoutubeDL or spotdl for actually acquiring music. you tube for some discovery, but really have not found a good one for discovery. Spotify was good for that, but getting locked out of my account on a weekly basis(even free tier) is a hard NO for me. Spotify is a bait and switch scam now; they advertise/tout you can use your account on multiple devices, but that is definitely not true.
Makes sense
they advertise/tout you can use your account on multiple devices, but that is definitely not true.
The system they have for account sharing is a little strange, at least with the family plan, where instead of having everyone on one account (like what netflix does/did) you instead have to link different accounts to the one that pays for the subscription.
I acquire the MP3 of the song I want from where ever I can find it. Be that buying it, YouTube converter or elsewhere. Then copy it to the SD card on my phone to listen to. No ads, no data connection needed. I even bother to set the album covers and tags up so it is all searchable in the Oto app I use on my phone.
Which is great when you already have established bands and albums you want to listen to. Not so great for discovering new music and genres which is where Spotify really shines for me.
I used to use YouTube converter. However I got Spotify and it was beyond easy. Also google shut down google music.
Converting vs Spotify is a no brainier though. Costs like $30 a year
I actually had this happen for a while. For some reason it stopped. I still have no idea why. I use vpn and alias emails so one or a combination of both is the problem. After some time, maybe I got my trust level up.
I’ve been happy with Qobuz and it’s cheap.
They will also be terminating another 5-10% of their EU userbase this month for not accepting their latest price hikes. These will mostly be the low-volume users who were too lazy to cancel.
Wait for the special offers before signing up for a plan again, folks. And explore the alternatives in the mean time… you might just discover that you don’t need them.
I like apple better tbh. Some things I like more about Spotify but overall Apple keeps playlists fresher for me. Spotify plays the same stuff over and over.
