Spotify being nice? Absolutely not. There certainly is a hidden agenda behind this.
Probably ads. It’s always ads.
is spotify being desperate, or there is an ulterior motive?
YouTube Music allows this, maybe they’re losing ad money to them on the people that weren’t going to get premium anyway.
I dropped my Spotify account after last price hike.
me too. I pirate instead now.
Spotify is trash anyways.
Wait, free users of Spotify could not pick which track they listen to???
Well, on PC or tablet you always could, but on mobile it was always album random shuffle… and if you created an album of less than N songs, in mobile they added related tracks in the reproduction (radio-spotify like) so it remained not possible to control what you listen…
EDIT: I updated the verb tenses to the fact that now you can in the mobile app chose the song to play
This is why I never even gave Spotify a chance. It didn’t make sense to me.
No, you could tap shuffle on an album-by-album basis, or on a Playlist with like 10+ tracks or something.
Winamp with a cool custom skin and downloaded mp3s was better than Spotify imo.
I know it’s cool to shit on spotify and streaming services on Lemmy, but personally I disagree. I loved Winamp and had tens of thousands of songs back in the day, downloaded on my zippy 56k dial up connection. But being able to search for and play virtually any song available instantly and share collaborative playlists, no matter where you are, is so much better.
Why would I decide what I like to listen to when am algorithm can do it for me?
I fully jumped on the Spotify bandwagon hoping the algorithm would decide what i listen to, I’d become stuck in a rut and hadn’t really listened to anything new for a good 15 years.
Well… After letting it figure my music tastes out, every single automatically generated playlist on there starts off with crap I just immediately skip before devolving into the same 5-10 songs I listened to pre-Spotify. So i guess it knows my taste well? But it has turned out to be useless for this too!
cool, my “music” folder filled with mp3s could always do that
Too late, already got sick of their shit and went back to downloading everything myself. I have to have two media player apps on my phone to account for podcasts and music but it’s still better than using spotify. Probably a better way to do that too but haven’t been bothered enough to look into it.
I still let spotify to discover me things from time to time… but regularly I download/obtain those that I like, I never abandoned my offline library, I am old enough to know that nothing online perdures…
I’m so confused. Couldn’t you always pick what track you wanted to play?
Currently, for free users, only PC or tablet allows to control what you listen (caveat occasional ads) but mobile constraints to a shuffle reproduction of albums, and if you dare to do a short album they spice it with additional related tracks, so you are never in control of what is likely to play…
EDIT: well, apparently I can do that also on my mobile app, I remember in the past some glitched occasions bit it seems is real now…
Nope. At some point spotify forced FREE users to shuffle play playlists. You couldn’t pick which specific song you’ll hear first. And with ads, obviously.
Damn, when I joined way back when, you could pick the track you wanted you just couldn’t skip and had to hear ads. Being able to pick a track is the whole reason I moved away from Pandora.
I’ve recently moved away from Spotify and to Pandora, ironically.
Pandora premium let’s you play whichever track you want, they are not longer exclusively stations, but their station algorithm is the reason I decided on them over other spotify alternatives
pandora was the shit like 10-15 years ago.
me too …
I like tidal a lot. They pay their artists the highest percentage last i checked, and they have sound quality as their main selling point. The station algorithm is a little bunk though.
I am slowly rebuilding my mp3 library after switching to streaming 15 years ago when it was the hot new thing. Hopefully i can ditch them all together soon.
Right now, it’s Qobuz that pays the most, and they also sport lossless audio formats as well. Tidal’s still a good pick, as far as music streamers go, though.
Neat, are they available in the US and as affordable as tidal?
I think it depends on whether you used the web interface or mobile app. Mobile app was more restrictive.
I love product updates as part of my technology feed…
I miss old technology feeds in the classic internet days. That actually posted and listed out cool stuff with technology
RSS is still going strong. I’m in the process of shifting my screen time from lemmy to RSS. Just articles, no comments. Makes me realize how addicted I’ve been to comment drama, I say as I post a comment.
You guys use spotify ?
Mostly for random song discovery considering my previously liked songs, I regularly download/obtain those songs I like for offline reproduction and preservation… online stuff has short lifes
It’s probably the most popular music streaming service at the moment.
Sure, for the morally bankrupt
Who is any better? Literally all are paying pennies to the artist per stream.
Tidal doesn’t host far-right mouthpieces, offers much higher quality streams, and pays the artists far, far more per play.
Edit: Here’s a chart from 2022:
If they had a better regional(Taiwan) music view, I would switch to them.
The chart is neat.
But I could care less about (US) politics while listening to music.
Tidal, Deezer and qobuz pay better and don’t fund Slow Joe
Are we talking about theBiden administration?
Tidal pays more than 3x what Spotify pays. Qobuz pays like 5-6x.
Although better, still very little in comparison to bandcamp
Sure, that’s true, though if you allow streams on Bandcamp, those pay $0, so in terms of “try before you buy”, any streaming service is better. It’s only if you actually sell an album on band camp (or AmpWall, a smaller indie service that does a lot of the same stuff) that you’d get paid, as an artist.
I say this as a musician who has put out several albums both independently and with a label.
Some people buy albums
Buying albums is great because you can host them on your own Plex server and use Plexamp.
(or something like Jellyfin, but IMO Plexamp is still the best app available for streaming your own music collection)
-Sent from my iPhone built with slave labor and suicide nets at foxconn factories
Samsung doesn’t build in China. How do you know he’s not using a Galaxy, or something similar?
hell no
Sailing the high seas ,is the way ,yep
No, it’s not. Even more so if you like your artists.
Buy their merch rather than feeding the beast
Even if that was ok, I’m sure people who pirate buy a ton of merch from all the artists they pirate, that’s why all those artists get a ton of money.
I’m sure that small to medium artists don’t get fleeced by Spotify and get a ton of money from a service that almost everyone in the west is using. /s
Some more things I’m sure of include that Spotify exists for the artists and won’t sneakily replace them with Suno-generated shit at first opportunity or fuck with people’s legacy of holy playlists or make the interface more cumbersome to alter users’ habits, or increase the price until the frogs start jumping out. It’s allowed to exists through the graces of biggest publishing conglomerates whose C-suite and shareholders get the lion’s share. Fuck fucking Spotify.
I’m sure they are on Spotify (which is shitty anyway) and other streaming services by choice. And if you are against streaming services, feel free to buy their albums.
Plexamp.
Yeah. Just started my self hosting journey a few months ago, looking to replace Spotify at some point. I got a NAS with Jellyfin set up, my next step is replacing Google photos with Immich probably.
I do appreciate Spotify will be adding lossless music soon, but they have so many other issues.
YouTube, but yes it’s insanely popular and an excellent value.
Is this the onion? They add the basic feature of a media player where you can listen the title you clicked and not random stuff? If I understood correctly, this is not a feature, it’s just a restriction being removed
The mobile application has always had this restriction for free users (as far as I know), but the desktop application has not.
I don’t think it was always that way but it has been for years now.
Easier to let users play music for free when you don’t pay the artists I guess
None of you were. Y’all were stealing it for years.
Lol, I’m a vinyl nerd, I’ve probably given more money to the music industry than to anything else except food
Rent?
Touché. Gotta admit I didn’t think it through properly, there’s probably a bunch of other things as well. Point is I think I’ve provided the music industry with more money than it strictly deserves.
Especially with the price of concerts these days. Jesus.
Talk about projection
Call me a hardcore Spotify fan boy: I paid for Spotify for 15 years, I loved it, I even applied to worked for them. The product was great and unmatched so as I didn’t care about the problems, so many problems. things were getting progressively more problematic but in the end, King Gizzard convinced me to quit. I don’t regret it a single minute. Fuck Spotify.
I had an account day 1 when Spotify launched in my country. It was such a big deal to me, a person who spent their teens and 20s hoarding music. One service and it was most of the music I wanted. I could sideload my own music and shuffle it all together.
I miss that little app store on the desktop client. You could join shared radio stations and vote on the next track while people wrote to each other in a chat.
wow the music app finally lets users select music! I’m sad that this is actually something to look forward to.
Be happy it was free and ads could probably be blocked.
Would you appreciate it more if they blocked the view of the library like the videostreamers like Netflix or D+ do?Idk I haven’t used the free tier of Spotify in a decade. I think add supported listening is enough and all features should be available to the free user except offline listening.
And I think that’s sufficient enough for free.
Though non-random playback is a nice addition :)