Can’t even seek through songs.

  • gmtom@lemmy.worldEnglish
    673·
    2 years ago

    What a shame it would be if this drove more people into using those awful cracked versions of the Spotify apk that give you most of the premium features without a premium account. Truly the godless heathens over at xManager (https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager) must be rejoicing over this.

    • NightAuthor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      102·
      2 years ago

      Generally I agree, but spotify has just recently started to reach the point of profitability. And with high interest rates and reduced venture capital, its now or never for them. I, as a paying customer, haven’t felt this enshittification. But if they make that turn, then I’ll quickly resort to self-hosting digital music purchases, Lidarr, and Plex.

  • acceptable_pumpkin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7216·
    2 years ago

    I have the family premium plan and honestly love it. I haven’t downloaded an mp3 in years because Spotify is so convenient. As far as subscription services go, this one is top tier for me.

    Now when we look at movie streaming… well that’s what the music streaming could have been like. What an absolute mess.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      341·
      2 years ago

      Now if only they’d pay the musicians worth a shit. Maybe they should strike next.

      Full disclosure I am on Spotify family plan and I love it because

      It would be nice if companies didn’t slash features and would offer music for free with features beyond that of broadcast radio.

      It would be nice if we didn’t have the mechanisms demanding infinite growth from companies because sometimes that’s just not possible or even necessary.

      Imagine if Spotify could just be like ok, yeah we’re good no need to make major changes, everyone is happy, life is good thanks. Versus: oh shit we need to boost the quarterly numbers who can we fuck over to get there? I know, customers and musicians both! Yay!

        • gmtom@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Yeah I work at a label we pay our artists about 30% of what we make off them, but that isn’t actually that bad considering the amount of overhead there is at a record label and the amount of services we provide for them. Just advertising alone makes up about 1/3 of a big label and we will spend more on advertising, distributing and actually allowing them to make music than we actually pay them, so in terms of end value it’s probably closer to 60 or 70%

      • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        2 years ago

        In this case, it’s a good thing that Spotify is an European and not an US company. Less incentive for enshittification. At the same time, the main reason they fuck over musicians so much is not so much Spotify but because of record labels and ads themselves. The record labels are the ones with the financial power, holding the copyrights. It’s not that Spotify doesn’t pay labels, they do, then in turn the labels keep most of the money and fuck over the artists. At the same time, the record labels came last to the streaming game. Blinded on the madness that was the Napster and peak P2P era, a war they lost, they didn’t want to even sell digital copies. Many awards and labels didn’t considered digital sales, legitimate sales. An many rogue artists sold or gave their digital albums for free to protest this. So they were always behind the curve. When Apple forced the labels to sit at the table for iTunes, they had no bargain leverage and were forced to accept shit terms in exchange for the hope that streaming would stop piracy. As a result, the tech giants got to keep most of the revenue bag and that’s been the status quo ever since.

        On the other hand, adverts don’t pay. We tend to forget this because the likes of Google and Facebook are so massive. But the only reason they make any money is because of how massive they’re. Adverts are a shit form of payment. Too expensive and no one wants to advertise with you, too cheap and you can’t cover even the platform maintenance, it’s a delicate balance. The result is you need millions of eyes to make any significant amount of money from an advert. There’s a reason cable and open air TV has devolved into 15 minutes of advertisement per every 20 minutes of entertainment.

        Spotify pays a fraction of a cent for every play. It takes 150 plays of a song to make a dollar from advertisement, and most of that dollar is gonna stay with the record label. This is significantly worse for indie and small up and coming artists. They simply can’t make a living out of Spotify unless they are already big and have a massive following. This hurts the whole industry as it becomes harder and harder to nurture new talent.

        The up side is that, although they are getting shafted by Spotify and the labels, a subscription play is worth more than a free play. Up to ten times more than a free user play. So your subscription does help pay artists more. The down side is that less than 25% of Spotify users pay for a subscription.

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
      63·
      2 years ago

      I’ve never paid for any streaming music plan and I love it. I never have to pay to listen to music because I already have MP3s of all the good music

      • acceptable_pumpkin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        To each their own. For me, I really like the Discover Weekly/Daily features to discover new music and I can’t see how I would ever “already have MP3s of all the good music” since that’s an ever changing set. Heck, I still have a ton of old mp3s I used to rip and/or download, but I haven’t listened to them in a while.

        I would gladly pay for a similar AYCE movie subscription, but I refuse to sign up for a ton of different services and play the “which service is that movie on again?” game. Instead it’s a very different approach for me.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      2 years ago

      because Spotify is so convenient.

      I used to think the same, but these days it seems like most songs from my favorites/liked list are no longer on Spotify, as I hear the same 10 or 20 songs over and over again when I have it on random play, and when I manually try to go through my list it’ll skip over songs and not let me select them.

      I guess the competition with the other music delivery companies is coming down to certain companies have exclusives for certain songs and artists.

  • iamgoingberserkk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    427·
    2 years ago

    I’ve been using Spotify for almost 2-3 years. The only thing I can say is the app gets DEGRADED EVERY YEAR!!! They do their best to bring more and more bugs with each update. I’m done with Spotify shit, also they removed a lot of regional songs from my country. The only reason I pay for Spotify is because I can download/rip their music and store it on my Plex Server.

        • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          So many services pushing price hikes, increasing ads, diminishing features and libraries. No wonder people are seeking other options.

      • Meltrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        Literally the opposite. Pirating takes time, effort, resources, and I lose access to “everything” - I only get what I take the time to download and store.

        If a product I pay for provides a great service, I’ll keep using it. It’s worth the money for excellent user experience and convenience. It’s when they keep upping the price while reducing the features or content that bothers me, and that’s when I’d rather spend the time pirating than paying them for a worse product.

          • Meltrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            I do. Still need to configure those too. Don’t get me wrong it’s not that bad, but there was a world 5 or so years ago where the streaming platforms were just easier for the cost. Not anymore.

      • Rouxibeau@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        2 years ago

        I pay for a service. They jack the price. They remove features. They add restrictions. They punish paying users.

        The result is that I stop all of the above and do what’s best for me. Fuck them. They did this to themselves.

  • Usernameblankface@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    2 years ago

    Putting all the best features behind a paywall, opening up ad space as well as sponsored song spots… Where have I seen this before?

  • small44@lemmy.worldBannedEnglish
    30·
    2 years ago

    The free version is completely useless on smartphone. I hope the limitations won’t come to the desktop version

  • loftkey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    315·
    2 years ago

    Spotify is garbage, last time I used it it was missing basic features like sleep timer, play count, song rating, and history. I buy my music and use poweramp instead.

    • tiita@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Love power amp… I’m on Spotify thou… so I don’t get to use it too much

      I would love for power amp to be able to connect to the main online storage services thou… that’s where most of my music I own is nowadays

  • Infernal_pizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    2 years ago

    I thought this was always how the free version was? Which bit of that is new? I remember only being able to shuffle play until I got premium

    • TurboWafflz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Yeah I’m also very confused here. Maybe it’s different depending on the country? I’m in the US and I’m pretty sure the mobile version has always been like this

  • Jikal@lemmy.worldEnglish
    191·
    2 years ago

    They just need to add commercials for Premium that have horns or police sirens and they’ll be all set

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    2 years ago

    And Netflix and other streaming services, despite supposedly saving us from cable, re-invented cable.

    But the good news is, maybe it’s time to get the good old iPods/DAPs back into the mainstream again. You can have a big SD card with all the music and podcasts you could ever want without tying yourself to a specific service.

    • Wilmo Bones@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      I own quite a lot of mp3s legally. Host them on a 50 dollar raspberry pi with something called Navidrome which uses a protocol called subsonic.

      I can stream my own music from my home to my phone etc or anywhere. Otherwise yeah just having them locally is the other best option.

    • foxfell@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      For some strange reason it’s not working well, getting paused, playing silence or messing with song names rarely.

      • Joe Cool@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        The only thing Spotube does with the Spotify API is fetch your lists and recommendations. Everything else it streams off Youtube (Music). Sometimes this is a bit wonky.