I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.
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didn't they sue someone for doing this on his own? I guess they want to be the only ones doing it.
Spotify was my penultimate subscription. Still have to bring my AWS Lightsail instances back in house. :(
Yeah, enshitification indeed. Was quite happy 4 years ago. Worth $10/mo. to get what I want and some new stuff occasionally thrown in. Suggested music tracked my tastes, easy UI, all that.
Then they upped it $1. Fine. Then I started getting all sort of bullshit when my playlist ran out. "Fuck was that?!"
Now that I cancelled the paid version, the ads are killing me. Look, I'm a GenXer, accustomed to ads for free TV and radio. I'm fine with that revenue model. But fuck me, just like modern radio, the ads became so thick as to be distracting. And of course I can't use it in the deep woods where my internet is sketchy.
I download all my playlists. FOSS I can use to upload and play that on my phone? Guess I'm back to pirating.
I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify's weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!
They pay artists better and it's been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn't easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.
Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you're into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn't pay as much as direct support.
This reads as an ad but I'm genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.
As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.
Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I'd love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.
Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.
I have now used Deezer for a bit over half a year after Spotify.
The song selection is pretty equal. The playlists can even automatically be imported/exported with TuneMyMusic.
I think Deezer's best feature is the song radio which finds songs of similar genre, and it really does find songs and artists I have favorited after hearing them. I always found that feature in Spotify to work pretty poorly.
However, if you don't have an exact song in mind, finding music by theme is terrible in Deezer. There are few set categories, but the amount of user-created playlists is very small, compared to Spotify.
I'd recommend giving it a try, but I wouldn't say its better or worse than Spotify. Just different.
I've been using Deezer for almost a year now.
Things I like:
- Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
- Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.
Things I (we) don't like:
- As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows ("hits" in other word).
- My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don't have servers.
I've been using Deezer since Tidal dropped Plex support. So far the library seems to be the same as Spotify, at least I wasn't missing too many songs when transferring my Spotify playlists in.
I like the built-in song identifier and radio station support. The song quizes are a little gimmicky, but kinda fun. I probably haven't used it enough for recommendations to get me down, but so far nothing crazy has popped up there.
I'm not sure if it's just my phone, but every couple days when I first launch the app, I need to close and reopen it to get it to load, my desktop app constantly throws up a banner saying the app is offline, but it doesn't actually effect functionality, so it's just annoying more than anything.
Thats some pretty bad stuff: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3wLm5nlYrHkbd29ilMRq89?si=e6f3299113e34bb9&nd=1&dlsi=50e31b2329204ddd
its all the same song as the article states.
Everyone always gave me shit for sticking with Pandora. It can basically do all the shit that Spotify can these days albeit a little different. You can even make your own playlists and listen offline if you have premium. It has a more limited library but it's barely noticeable except maybe once or twice a year I can't find a song I wanna listen to. It's simpler and cheaper than Spotify with most of the same features. My favorite part is that I can literally pick any song I want and it will just continue playing after it's over with similar songs. I've discovered so much music I would have never tried if it hadn't shown up. And so far it hasn't been overrun by AI slop like Spotify. Sure they pay artists less compared to competitors but at least they aren't just straight up trying to replace them.
I'm not saying Pandora is objectively better. I'm just saying Spotify is falling into the world of enshittification and there are many alternatives out there. You could even just buy music and support artists directly like we used to.
I still prefer Pandora, it’s great for music discovery and it pays artists more than Spotify. I also feel like its recommendations are better or maybe I’ve just had better luck with them.
I’ve Definitely found new artists and albums after listening on Pandora that I went off and purchased CDs or albums thanks to it.
Apple Music’s recommendations were fairly good as well, and they also pay more than Spotify, but not tons and I abhor how it integrates music I don’t own with my actual library.
I need to try Tidal, but I also just don’t get the “you’ll stream everything and own nothing” idea. I just like “radio” services for discovering new stuff.
Problem is Pandora is US only. They stopped streaming to the rest of the world years ago.