Welcome to the era of only Spotify Plays matter - let’s take a look at the underbelly of streaming scams affecting independent artists.
Sorry, I can’t hear it over the sound of all these downloaded MP3s I still keep around
A long time ago, you could go to a special store and trade government paper for music disks and tape that you got to keep forever.
Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart’s content.
Spotify was always for chumps.
Alright, I got an eighth. How do I trade it for music?
Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs
This one time at band camp…
I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).
Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.
I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don’t know if it’s harder right now or not.
The contracts that steal music from artists haven’t changed one iota. Unless you’ve got juice like Paul McCarty, Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, and even then it can be a fight that takes years.
I have a feeling it’s easier to put your music out there as an independant artists. There’s always someone taking a cut but the contacts are optional and there isn’t much gate keeping like before.
It’s like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone’s who’s “about it” is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you’ll probably never hear of.
There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people’s media consumption.
For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.In some ways it’s a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).
They want fuckin 40 bucks for a vinyl these days and they don’t even throw in a digital download for that price, and the radio is owned by like three companies unless you live near a college station.
Same but I have a huge collection of digital media.
I find it funny that I have those examples in my “huge library of physical media.”
When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.
I’m starting (a little late) to build my music library this way too. I self host jellyfin , for which there are some nice music players. But, I still have my Spotify account currently while I gradually build my personal library. I’ll admit tho, I will miss the algorithm and artist suggestions
It was kind of easy for me, as I already used Plex for video, but Plexamp has been such an amazing experience for rediscovering my own music. The radios, sonic matching and DJ algorithms are fantastic. I’m sure there’s other similar solutions, but it’s really worth investing in, imho. There’s currently a lot to be desired with the library management, but the player experience is worth the downsides for me.
Where do you buy them from?
Qobuz. And sometimes bandcamp
I mostly buy from Bandcamp. Do you have the special Qibuz subscription to get discounts on purchases, and is it worth it ?
Nah. I don’t bother with that. I can’t listen to unlimited amounts of music anyway, and buying fewer albums I care more about makes me listen to them more instead, I’d say. I already have a massive music catalog going back to the early 2000s when I bought CDs, pirated a lot and just kept all of it on my NAS.
Thanks
Im gonna guess bandcamp?
Mostly Qobuz.
Oh, I thought that was only indie artists
Dunno about the user you asked, but I’ve used Bandcamp for that.
[glances at shelf in corner]
Can confirm.
Nah bro, device storage is cheap nowadays. CD readers/burners to USB are also cheap. Just buy music and put it on your device of choice.
You can also just buy digital downloads from sites like Bandcamp and Quobuz, and even iTunes if you click past the Apple Music streaming part.
Why would you not stream that to yourself? No need to buy additional hardware to get in the way.
I mean most phones have +64gb of memory, no? With that space I can have hundreds of songs that I can listen at any time without having internet connection or not. Why would I stream it to my self (which requires internet connection) if I can just have it in my phone or computer?
You do have it on your computer: your server.
So when I listen to music locally, I just open clementine and it knows all the music on my server, and plays from the network share.
When I go out, I stream to my phone from the same server. How often is your phone NOT on the internet? I mean its a phone right?
Here I am about 5,000 miles away from my server, and I still stream to myself, to the laptop I am working on. Should I load up my phone, laptop, tablet, and steamdeck prior to leaving the house, or just know I can stream anything from my 6TB collection (seems big, but I only do FLACS) at any time?
If you DO feel you need to have some offline, it still makes sense to have a server. Just use syncthing or any decent music program to bring over what you want before you leave the internet.
Well it sounds cool. Definetly trying it out once I have my own server (with everything that is involved).
Hey some good people are here on Lemmy under selfhosted. I am sure there are more.
A server can be nearly anything, a $50 used computer can work, the cost of hard drives can run a bit more. Its a neat little hobby and doesnt have to be expensive. OpenMediaVault (as the OS) is free and get you started as a NAS out of the box.
In any case, lots of people are happy to help and there are tutorial videos as well.
Because there is no need to send music over the internet when you can just save it locally and have it everywhere and always with you.
To be clear: I am talking about running my own sever/stream.
I almost always have it with me because the internet is nearly everywhere. On a plane, in my car, at work, at the place I am typing this to you which is thousands of miles away from my server. When I am at home it still is playing from my NAS on my local network.
How am I supposed to cart around 5 TB of music with me? I don’t want to have to copy a tiny bit to my laptop, tablet, phone, and steamdeck. If I absolutely know I am going to be out of internet range I can have it copied temporarily to a device with downloads, or syncthing. Even doing that at least I can be nearly anywhere in the world to do the download.
Its not like this is hard, or expensive.
Optical drives are no longer in production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BafMgVvHTI
Eh, I switched back to running my own server like five years ago. Sure, technically I’m not giving individual artists their $0.0005 a stream, but nowadays I discover more music, attend more shows, and buy more merch.
During the couple of years I spent streaming, I discovered like Alvvays and Yumi Zouma. Nowadays, I discover new bands monthly if not weekly.
Like AI, streaming recommendation engines are mediocrity machines. All they can do is find you things that sound like the things you already listen to. Sometimes, if you’re adventurous, you find things you love that sound unlike anything else you listen to. If you find a great thing like that, it can change you. Unlike recommendation engine music, which will try to keep you the same forever.
What’s your discovery means now? How do you get exposed to things not currently in your wheelhouse? And once you find that thing, how do you integrate that into your library for listening on an often enough basis?
I find that I binge explore, grab 12 new artists like an old mix CD and see what sticks, but then feel like a hoarder when it sits unplayed in my library for a year.
I use https://www.albumoftheyear.org/ and I subscribe to pitchfork and the rolling stone in my RSS feed.
I also Shazam when I’m out and hear something I like.
Wait, Shazam started working again?
Did it not at some point?
I might be confusing it with SoundHound which seemed like it had become abandoned.
Not who you asked, but I can tell you where I’m at with that. My primary listening is on an mp3 player, and I also use a home server for listening on speakers/tv. Switching to a separate device used only for music has made my listening far more deliberate. When I pick up the player, I’m making a point to listen to music, not just have it on in the background like I used to. It’s also a pain in the ass (comparitively) to make playlists on it (I purposely chose a scroll-wheel style and no touch screen) so I’m listening to a lot of full albums now, which I never really did before, exposing me to a lot more than I used to since I don’t just throw the song or two I like on a playlist and leave the rest.
There’s been an interesting side effect that I didn’t expect: Being more deliberate with my listening has sharpened my ear to music, I hear music in movies and shows in a way I never used to, I’m beginning to recognize voices and band styles by ear, I actually focus on music now instead of it just being part of the background. As such, I find a lot of new music these days by looking up songs from movies and tv. For example, the most recent:
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I completely devoured the Sinners soundtrack. (Ludwig Göransson is a fave and I’ve always been a fan of Buddy Guy)
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Watching Dope Thief, I realized I never skipped the intro. Got me hooked on Little Simz
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James Gunn has some great taste. Beyond season 1 of Peacemaker, Season 2 has already got me absolutely loving Foxy Shazam, and after the latest ep I’ve been getting into Hardcore Superstar.
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Strangely enough, Rick and Morty has some bangers in the later seasons, and got me listening to stuff I never would have like Kishi Bashi.
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Additionally, there’s the news. I’ve been listening to Bob Vylan and Kneecap, and only heard of them because they stood up to support Palestinians.
Not only has my listening become more deliberate, but my sourcing of new music has as well. No longer relying on an algorithm to do the work for me has allowed me to hone a new skill and learn how to find new music myself.
I’ve found a lot of the same as you, listening to albums changed me for the better.
Just recently I bought the Horizon Forbidden West sound track on Qobuz at a sale, paid less than 1 Euro per hour. Its weird, I don’t pay attention to the music while playing the game, but listening to the soundtrack almost take me into that world.
I’m realizing how much I missed growing up by just listening to compilation albums and burning popular songs and listening to the same songs over and over. Albums can tell stories, and it’s interesting listening to how the songs flow together.
I’ve been listening to a lot of soundtracks from Skyrim to Outer Wilds, and anything by Hans Zimmer, Ludwig Goransson, and Ramin Djwadi.
Totally agree! On the other hand I have this whole universe of albums to learn to appreciate now! I’m also getting away from traditional social media, the 24-hour news cycle, porn etc and I find that just sitting down and listen to music and let my mind wander to be an amazing experience. Would recommend to literally anyone
I wish you the best! The only social I have left is Lemmy (do most of my scrolling on RSS now so there’s no comments) and as of 3 weeks ago have officially cut out all big tech (grapheneos on phone, linux on PC and laptops, no Google/Amazon etc). It’s been a long 2 year journey but I feel like I accomplished something I can be proud of.
I’ve since finished a novel for the first time in years, started another, and listened to more diverse music than I ever have.
I still keep up with news (france24, fairly unbiased) but only because I feel like it’s my responsibility to stay as informed as I’m capable of, especially now with fascism on the rise again.
Keep it up!
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can’t speak for OP but for me, surprisingly, youtube shorts. Once that damn thing gets your algo figured out for you suddenly you can start finding bands that are in your wheelhouse. Start by looking for shorts on your current favourite bands and eventually new stuff will start popping up that should be similar to your taste.
Honestly for all the crap that’s on youtube, shorts has been one of if not the best tool for me to find new music/bands. Once I find something I like then it’s off to SoulSeek/Nicotine+ to add it to my server.
What in the tech world isn’t broken? Besides older consoles and computers disconnected from the internet.
My GOG games aren’t, my Steam library’s still chugging along after 11 years, my Linux installs haven’t failed or started spying on me and my offline, modular 3d printer still works.
It’s all about understanding what you’re using/buying and what’s the incentives for those on the other end. We shouldn’t have to think about that all the time, but on the bright side there are cool things happening outside of enshittification by publicly traded corpos.
Also VLC is free and is one of the best media players there is, and yt-dlp is so easy to acquire music with I’m surprised people thought spotify was a good long term idea for their music consumption.
steam will go to shit soon as we lose gaben
Fingers crossed he passes the reigns to someone with the same vision.
Would that be coorporate suicide for steam?
Probably. Reasonable storefronts are the only thing keeping the warez at bay.
Yes, but some private equity schmuks will get a pay day so it’s fine.
since when has that stoped anything
see Sears and Craftsman
Quite a bit of what they do gets into open source.
This. I’ve been developing my exit strategy for years and am reluctant to buy too many games on steam. It’s going to hit most people like a freight train
Steam will do a rug pull one day. You purchase a license to their games, you do not own them.
Helps that steam’s DRM is piss-easy to crack, and good indie devs give you DRM-free redeemable copies if you show a proof of purchase (Klei my beloved)
That mindset allows them to keep doing it
How do you go about getting drm free copies, email them? I love this dev already.
When you buy one of their games on steam (In my case, Don’t Starve), they come with a “CD Key” included which you can plug into their website to download your DRM-free copy. Alternatively if you buy it from GOG you just have a DRM-free copy out the gate.
What do you think will happen? Classic enshittification?
Wanting some kind of subscription to still play?
I’d assume something along those lines but who knows how the enshittification will continue to develop. Having crap TOS always leads to companies taking advantage of it eventually to make more money
My Internet-connected Linux computers are pretty fucking rad.
Just use nicotine(the soulseek client), and you will have 0 problems. If you want to support the artist, purchase their stuff on platforms made for that, get the .flac
I love seeing this. As someone who has kept his own library of music since 2004 and went through the peak of local libraries to it almost being dead after like 2012, this is a day I never saw coming! When it started declining, home hosting solutions were already sparse, but then some more threw in the towel as well. Right now, I use Navidrome as my server and Symfonium for the app and has been an incredible 2 years using it. If people start coming back, I feel like it will only drive more creativity and new features as it will be worked on more than it is.
I also use Symfonium, it is just awesome
Yeah! I’ve been using it since the first month, and it has been released and has come a long way in only 2 years. Funny enough, I used to use his other app, Yatse, way back in like 2010 for a while, and I also have nothing but high praise for it as well. It was a remote control app for Kodi, and the things he added to it were impressive. Who knew you needed tons of features in a remote control app!
Navidrome + ListenBrainz + Bandcamp (and a little Soulseek) = unshittification
I stopped using Spotify over a decade ago. Now I just use Pandora which is actually still pretty good. And occasionally I’ll use YouTube music if I want to check out a new band or something. But Spotify is pretty usless.
Pandora is unavailable in Europe, does anyone knows solid alternatives ?
The Pirate Bay is my favorite alternative. You should try it out. The library is enormous, and the monthly subscription charge is negligible. It even works on all major platforms!
ProtonVPN.
VPN for streaming on the go ? Too much hassle 😓
Really? You just turn it in and let it run… It’ll drain your battery a bit faster but theres almost no effort on your part.
I know it’s unpopular, but I have YT premium and use YT music since it’s included. It’s expensive for a streaming service, but it’s also the only streaming subscription I have.
I won’t get yt premium out of sheet principle but with the whole side loading crap going with android I might have to.
My server says streaming is working great. My radio station list says streaming is working great. SomaFM is working great, and the archive fills the rest.
As much as I know Spotify isn’t great for artists, I do find it to be the best streaming option for how I enjoy music. Next to Winamp of course.
It really whips the llamas ass.
You are goddamn right it does.
Unfortunately, Spotify’s streaming quality is rather low, even if you pay for a monthly subscription.
I switched to Tidal when I bought a dedicated DAC and a pair of very highend headphones and have not regretted it - you can hear the difference on good gear.
Yeah but Spotify does now offer 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC as their highest now, which is fine for most any system. And they have 30+ million more songs. Using both is probably the best option in many ways, but for my tastes Spotify hasn’t been beat. I can find things on Spotify I can get on other platforms and that’s important to me.
That came in the news literally after I wrote my previous comment. FLAC is great of course, because it’s lossless.
If you google Tidal vs Spotify song count, though, you’ll find sources which say Tidal has more songs than Spotify. I’ve found everything I want on Tidal as well.
I have great gear, I have FLACs, I have 180g records, and I have Spotify, and they all sound fine. Perhaps I come from a time when 192 mp3s were what you downloaded, but IMO if it’s a 320 mp3 or above it sounds the same. Only time I ever noticed and appreciated a difference was when sampling or mixing, and then higher quality can be appreciated, but if I’m just cranking tunes, Spotify, FLAC, or vinyl, really makes no difference, they all drown out the ringing in my ears just fine.
Looks like your ears’ hearing profile matches the psychoacoustic models underlying lossy compression algorithms very closely.
That’s the thing many people don’t understand - lossy audio compression works better for you the more your ears match the average human ear.
In my case, being an older fuck with slight hearing deficiencies, I don’t match this profile as closely. That’s why I require higher bitrates (or lossless compression such as FLAC) for music to sound high quality.
So yeah - listening experience isn’t just a matter of taste, it’s highly subjective and will vary from person to person. For people like me, the difference between low-res streaming and FLAC is very noticeable, and ironically not because my ears are better than yours, but because they’re worse. :)
Same. In my younger days, I couldn’t really tell much difference between mp3 and CD. Now? I can absolutely tell.
Yea, 320mp3 sounds close but if the music has a lot of very low or very high frequency music, mp3 seems to clip it off, even 320.
Opus seems to handle the extreme ranges better though. But if you have an MP3, and convert it, it’s no better. Converting lossy to lossy is a no win outcome.
Yep, converting lossy to a lossless format won’t magically bring back what was lost during the lossy compression.
Changing from Spotify to Tidal absolutely makes sense if you’re sensible to these differences, because Spotify’s best possible quality basically equals Tidal’s worst (320 kbps lossless). Well, and Tidal’s max quality is 24bit 192 kHz FLAC.
But boy, I wish I had these Hifiman headphones when my ears were still young and I could still enjoy the full frequency range of music.
I listen to punk music recorded on crappy gear, so I prefer not to hear it hi-fi.
Crappy punk music should be listened to from vinyl anyway.
Or cassette
Yeah. On second thought, that’s even better. A shitty 80s boombox covered with band stickers is the ultimate way to listen to punk music. Sitting on table along with a dirty ashtray and a couple of empty beer bottles.
I found my people
A dirty cassette that you found on the floor of a Pontiac Fiero.
I wish Winamp was on Android so I could use it on my phone, too. Especially if it had Milkdrop Visualizer.
I used to host my own Shoutcast. Full on DJ cosplay, like it was FM radio. 🤣
Especially if it had Milkdrop Visualizer.
I wouldn’t be suprised if there’s a ProjectM port. It’s in Debian.
checks
Yup. Not on F-Droid, though.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.psperl.prjM&hl=en_US
https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm
projectM is an open-source project that reimplements the esteemed Winamp Milkdrop by Geiss in a more modern, cross-platform reusable library.
That’s what I did for my wedding - shoutcast with a requests plugin so the wedding party and guests could choose what songs to play.
Fuck streaming. I’ve had my local mp3s for decades.
Same. I’ve got most of my downloads on my phone with VLC to play them
If you can get Poweramp player I highly recommend.
Great custom options like: crossfade control, replay gain… so many options.
Damn, I’m jealous, I just started collecting.
I ripped 100s of CDs back at least 2004.
Ah, you hit me right where it hurts.
To be honest, I’m afraid to keep anything, otherwise, imagine, soon your answers on the Internet and political views will influence whether you live or not.
I’m especially afraid that when my computer breaks, I’ll have to risk buying new hardware with AI that will spy on me.
My suggestion is buy an old phone that still has a micro SD card. Get your music collection on that as well as your current phone. You then use the old phone with zero service as a music player.
That’s typically the kind of videos I will never watch. The thumbnail is ridiculous (as per YouTube’s guidelines), the title is vague and clickbait. For those who did, what made you click?
PS: thanks OP for adding details
I clicked on it because I knew a lot of things with Spotify are broken and I am interested in it. I have a lot of friends on there and I like having good arguments against it. Also I just like this channel and my mood did very much fit the “we’re fucked” part of the title 😅
You need ID to for adult sites like discord or twitter but you did a cover with Drake? We trust you…
Do you want to buy bread? Show me your ID! I don’t get it, why isn’t your ID on your body like other people? You’re an outlaw!!!
Why come you don’t have a tattoo?
Speaking of tattoos – https://lemmy.world/post/35708965
I think it’ll be fun. :3
I really want to get a https://www.crowdsupply.com/cool-tech-zone/tangara at some point.
Although I have an old ipod with a new battery and linux installed…so theres no real need.
Did he ever go over bandcamp? Most of the indie music that is local at least has something on there.
I just think we should all go back to physical media CDs for music and blu ray for films is what I am currently doing
physical media CDs for music
My understanding is that the streaming services basically ended the loudness war by imposing ReplayGain-style volume normalization. I’m not sure that I want to restart it.
That’s true, from a certain point of view. What they actually did was give everyone a common target. We still get everything compressed and limited into a flat line, just now we don’t have to adjust the volume on our stereo between songs.
We still get everything compressed
I don’t know if sound engineers are doing so, but the streaming services removed the volume benefit to doing so. If you use DRC, your music will be cut in volume. DRC will reduce audio quality both on CDs and streaming services, but before there at least was a volume edge to gain, and now that’s gone.
Last year I put my music collection on an SD card and slapped it into a hifiman walker mp3 player. I quickly discovered that having a device solely for music has made my listening much more deliberate, and I’ve listened to more music more often than I ever have because of it. I even plug it in my car instead of using bluetooth
