[HN Gopher] Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client
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Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client
Author : keepamovin
Score : 761 points
Date : 2024-01-20 10:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bayindirh wrote:
| Nifty.
|
| Please be aware that this is not a "spotify client" per se. It
| gets the data from Spotify, and plays the audio from YouTube.
|
| It's an interesting invention, and worthy of the first page, if
| you ask me.
| anotheryou wrote:
| oh ok...
|
| I'd have tried it, but I pay for good audio quality so I won't
| :)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Is there a difference in audio quality between Spotify and
| YouTube?
| anotheryou wrote:
| yes, I think so. And youtube is mixed quality, especially
| for older uploads.
|
| Newer youtubes are "opus (251)", which I think is 128kbps
| 48KHz Opus (WebM standard).
|
| - Spotify at least used to be ogg vorbis and claims to be
| "320kbit/s [mp3] equivalent"
|
| I think the 128kps Opus is still considered quite lossy1
| and 320kpbit/s mp3s I know I can hear the difference to wav
| on _some_ tracks in a blind test, but generally don 't find
| them better or worse.
|
| 1 from some google test:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/odPogeR.png
|
| via https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/
| bayindirh wrote:
| Lossless still beats MP3@320CBR audibly, but you need a
| pipeline which can render that difference.
|
| I'll not rewrite details here, one can search my comment
| history if more details are required.
| anotheryou wrote:
| Yes, at least for my setup it makes a difference, but for
| me not in quality.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| Some of the best recordings I've heard (NPR) are only on
| YouTube. This leads me to believe recording quality is
| orders of magnitude more important than encoding, as long
| as a decent bitrate and encoding scheme were used.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The quality ceiling for any recording you have is the
| quality ceiling of the weakest link in your audio
| pipeline.
|
| This means, to be able to get a good sound from any
| system, you have to feed it a good signal, and that path
| starts with recording.
|
| Current audio codecs are great from a psychoacoustic
| point of view. A good encoder can create an enjoyable
| file at modest bitrates (192kbps for MP3, and 128kbps for
| AAC IIRC), and retain most of the details.
|
| The audible residue when you subtract a MP3 from a FLAC
| is not details per se, but instrument separation and
| perceived size of the sound stage. People generally call
| this snake oil, but I have the same amplifier for the
| last 30 years, and I can say how different qualities of
| audio render through the same pipeline. A good recording
| stored losslessly can bring the concert to your home, up
| to a point. MP3 re-encodings of the same record will
| sound flatter and smaller.
|
| Lastly, it's not possible to completely contain the sound
| of a symphony orchestra in a stereo recording. That's not
| happening. So there's always a limit.
|
| If you have the time, there's a nice ABX test:
| http://abx.digitalfeed.net/
| _joel wrote:
| > Lastly, it's not possible to completely contain the
| sound of a symphony orchestra in a stereo recording
|
| Thank god we have more than 2 ears.
| empiricus wrote:
| Thank god they recorded the concert using binaural mics
| on an identical copy of your head :)
| bayindirh wrote:
| The problem is not the number of ears we have, but the
| amount of air moved by the instruments themselves and how
| they interact with each other.
|
| A symphony orchestra is miced per group normally (2 for
| violins, 2 for trumpets, etc.), but if you're around 60
| people, you can mic every instrument individually.
|
| To reproduce the sound 1 to 1, you need to mic every
| instrument individually, and playback them with speakers
| matching the frequency response and air pressure . So you
| need speakers equal to the number and characteristics of
| instruments themselves. On top of that you need to record
| them ideal microphones and store them loslessly in the
| process.
|
| Otherwise, you can't create the sound by recording 100
| people with 20 microphones, and downmixing them to two
| channels. It's not possible. I played in double bass in
| an orchestra, listened countless orchestras, listened the
| recordings of our own concerts. The gap is enormous.
| kjqgqkejbfefn wrote:
| What's your take on audio systems that deliver
| vibrations. I have a nuraphone and a subpac. Great for
| listening to trap music or iranian experimental.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I genuinely have no opinion. I like to use a vintage
| amplifier with a couple of beefy bookshelf speakers. I
| run a couple of Heco Celan GT302s with an AKAI AM-2850.
|
| It's a very well balanced system for my needs and room
| size. That's a pretty nifty setup for me.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| A reduction in soundstage/width is likely due to using
| "joint stereo" or "intensity stereo" encoder modes, which
| do things such as mid-side (M-S) conversion (which isn't
| itself the culprit) in order to give more bits to M
| (which results in better quality for sounds with high L-R
| correlation, like vocals) and fewer bits to S (which
| results in less quality for sounds with low L-R
| correlation, like a drum kit stereo miked).
|
| If using plain old "stereo" mode instead, this problem
| doesn't occur, but you need a higher overall bitrate for
| correlated sounds to come through at the same quality, so
| it's rarely used at modest bitrates and instead tends to
| be reserved for only the highest bitrates.
|
| Thus, comparing mp3@192 with mp3@320 often actually means
| comparing mp3@192joint with mp3@320stereo and therefore
| the listener will find very little if any improvement in
| the quality of mono-miked center-panned sounds (vocals,
| etc.) but a decent improvement in the quality of wide
| sounds (cymbals, reverb, string sections, etc.) since the
| 320 will have only a few more bits for "mid" but way more
| bits for "side" so to speak, relative to the 192.
| NavinF wrote:
| Interesting, how can I check if a file was encoded with
| joint stereo? I've never seen those keywords in ffprobe
| output
|
| Is this only an issue for mp3 or do other codecs also use
| fewer bits for the difference between channels?
| bayindirh wrote:
| "file" command outputs the encoding used, alongside
| details.
|
| Usage: "file test.mp3"
|
| Rsult: test.mp3: Audio file with ID3 version 2.3.0,
| contains: MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1, 320 kbps, 48 kHz,
| JntStereo
| bayindirh wrote:
| Thanks for the technical details, I didn't know how
| intensity/joint modes work, however I never use them.
|
| The tests I have done is all encoded by myself. I have
| purchased 24bit WAV of Radiohead's OK Computer
| Remastered. I encoded it to FLAC, and 320CBR Stereo with
| LAME. I still can feel the difference on soundstage, and
| can create a audible residue file by subtracting MP3 from
| FLAC version.
|
| I agree that current iteration of encoders create very
| good audio, however given that your audio system can
| render high resolution audio, the difference is still
| audible.
| jorvi wrote:
| Lossless is for archival only. This has been common
| knowledge for years in the audiophile community at this
| point.
|
| For active listening, the gain going from 320 MP3 / 256
| AAC to lossless is beyond minuscule. What you are hearing
| is far more likely to be placebo.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Not every human is created equal when it comes to ear and
| sound processing. I have met people with sub 20Hz
| hearing, and people with ears so sharp, they were able to
| pick a single wrong note from a single instrument while
| watching a recording of a symphony orchestra (I played
| together with them).
|
| MP3@320kbps CBR and AAC@256kbps are pretty good for
| normal listening, but if you have the hardware to render,
| lossless formats creates a richer soundstage. I have an
| amplifier which can render it, and I'm listening music
| with it for 30 years now, so I can hear the difference.
|
| At the end of the day, if your audio pipeline can render
| the differential residue between MP3@320kbps and FLAC,
| you can hear it.
|
| Now, you can say that "are you attentive enough to
| perceive such difference", I'm not listening that
| intently 75% of the time, but it pays off when I put some
| time aside to listen to my favorite album for the sake of
| listening it.
| qingcharles wrote:
| In one of my previous lives I built an encoding platform
| for all the major record labels. Part of this involved
| listening to hundreds of tracks to try and optimize the
| encoder settings. It's not necessarily the quality of the
| original recording, but simply the type of audio. For
| instance, the absolute hardest, IMO, were "unplugged"
| albums, e.g. solo singer, acoustic guitar. Lossy
| compression would shit itself on those.
| Thorrez wrote:
| I don't think that imgur link is a good example. The only
| opus 128 there is heavily optimized for low latency (5ms
| frame size). If you remove that optimization, and instead
| optimize for quality, opus does better than mp3 at the
| same bitrate.
|
| https://www.opus-codec.org/static/comparison/quality.svg
| anotheryou wrote:
| too bad that diagram stops at 128, as I want to compare
| to 320 mp3
|
| no question opus is the more efficient codec
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Even disregarding which codec Youtube uses, there's also
| the question of what codec was uploaded(unless it's an
| official upload), which in many cases was probably a
| lossy codec in the first place. So often you're listening
| to some lossy codec, reencoded to another lossy codec.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Even disregarding which codec Youtube uses, there's
| also the question of what codec was uploaded(unless it's
| an official upload)
|
| Hm? What codec was uploaded if it's an official upload?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Presumably a lossless one.
|
| As opposed to some mp3 ripped off a scratched CD in some
| guy's drawer.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Aaah Napster. You changed my life.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Presumably a lossless one.
|
| Why?
|
| For example, there are many songs on YouTube listed as
| "Provided to YouTube by CDBaby". (Here's one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxHpQ668gzA )
|
| CDBaby only provides one format, which is mp3. They'll
| accept uploads in any of four formats, of which one is
| also mp3.
|
| So you'd need to answer two questions:
|
| 1. Is the file that CDBaby distributes to YouTube the
| same file they distribute to everyone else, or is it the
| same file they receive from the artist? (Note: if the
| answer is #1, that is likely to save CDBaby a bundle on
| storage!)
|
| 2. What did the artist upload to CDBaby?
|
| And then you'd also need to answer analogous questions
| for the other major providers of official music on
| YouTube; there are tons and tons of them. CDBaby appears
| to be unusual in that, in addition to providing your
| music officially to YouTube, it will also sell it to
| consumers. Most of these services don't appear to offer
| anything but official distribution to major websites.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| He says as he plays his music over Bluetooth... :)
| anotheryou wrote:
| me? I got good wired speakers
| nunez wrote:
| Okay, THAT is Hacker News worthy.
| denysvitali wrote:
| To be fair it would be more HN worthy if they managed to
| reverse engineer the DRM of Spotify to create a custom client
| without the Spotify library (which only works for Premium
| users)
| yellow_lead wrote:
| There are bypass methods here for almost all platforms: htt
| ps://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/14rszaw/v3_the_ulti..
| .
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the
| README, we only get to see a take down notice from Github.
| Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure what.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the
| README, we only get to see a take down notice from
| Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure
| what.
|
| Circumventing DRM, no matter how trivial, is a violation
| of the DMCA.
| linuxandrew wrote:
| Then just host it elsewhere. Spotify isn't an American
| company and not everyone who uses Spotify lives in
| America.
| JadeNB wrote:
| The implicit question of:
|
| > Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the
| README, we only get to see a take down notice from
| Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure
| what.
|
| was what violation would cause Github specifically to
| take it down, not whether it could ever find a host. The
| parent brought up Github, not I.
| mrd3v0 wrote:
| Good thing DRM is not as protected in many countries and
| the anti-DRM movement include some hosters.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Your sibling comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39073132 mentioned a
| similar thing. The reference to Github and what could
| cause a takedown there was the parent's, not mine.
| nsteel wrote:
| One of their terms of use is regarding using their API
| data alongside competitor services. This project
| fundamentally breaks that. I think it's on borrowed time.
| dartharva wrote:
| There do exist cracked Spotify "mod" apks in the high seas
| that do it. They are perhaps too illegal to get featured on
| HN.
| hackernewds wrote:
| anything related to free for paid content is HN worthy /s
| hackernewds wrote:
| Watch Spotify revoke their public API key or reduce access to
| the public API because of this
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is something between the app developer and Spotify. I'm
| neither.
|
| BTW, If you need an API key for public API access, you may
| need to enroll yourself to use that API. I don't ship public
| API keys with my apps.
| smashah wrote:
| Let's stop developer (victim) blaming for soulless billion
| dollar companies restricting API access.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Billion dollar company that still isn't profitable.
| dventimihasura wrote:
| It seems to me like there are people who have profited
| from it.
|
| https://www.dailystar.co.uk/sport/football/arsenal-home-
| dani...
| notyourwork wrote:
| Spotify is profitable as of recent quarters.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| now the focus shifts to unrelenting growth at any cost,
| yay
| smashah wrote:
| That's not the fault, nor responsibility, of developers
| and API access.
|
| API access (interop) is a digital human right. If
| companies can't be profitable without restricting that
| then that's a deficiency upon them and their gormless VCs
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > API access (interop) is a digital human right
|
| I'm with it on this idea, but comparing it to a "human
| right" will not lead to the desired response in non-tech
| people, who will write off the idea as taking the
| Internet too seriously if phrased that way. A human right
| carries a much heavier, more fundamental connotation than
| just a right on its own
|
| Even if you consider it a human right, might be better to
| brand it differently to get wider traction
| danShumway wrote:
| The entire VC model in this area of tech is to be
| unprofitable to undercut traditional mediums so that
| other companies can't compete with them, and then to
| raise prices once better systems have been driven out
| because with investor funding Spotify can last for a
| longer time than its competitors within an unprofitable
| market.
|
| And during that process, Spotify wants to be treated as
| if they are profitable. They don't want consumers to be
| looking at them like they're a fly-by-night business
| whose entire existence depends on raising prices in the
| future once consumers have no alternatives to switch to.
| They don't want podcasting partners to be looking at
| every business deal as a temporary arrangement that will
| only last until Spotify feels comfortable trying to pull
| the rug out beneath them. If we're going to start acting
| like businesses are charity cases when indie developers
| do anything they dislike, then we should stop acting like
| these "charities" are sustainable businesses at all.
|
| Spotify doesn't run ads saying, "hey, we can't make money
| and we're hoping that goodwill and investor greed is
| enough to keep this engine running for one more year
| until its safe to start charging you what we actually
| need to survive."
|
| It's reasonable for developers and consumers to treat
| businesses with substantial market control as if they are
| businesses and not charities. That treatment is
| consistent with how Spotify advertises and portrays
| itself and with the decisions that the company makes
| about the market. It's not an accident that Spotify is in
| this position, it's a conscious choice in service of
| pursuing a long-term strategy of market domination. It's
| also not a healthy choice for the market overall, so
| Spotify choosing to put itself into this position is not
| a moral obligation for consumers or developers to treat
| them with some kind of special consideration. If
| anything, we should be more harsh to companies who try to
| decrease competition by creating an artificially
| unstainable market and starving out sustainable
| businesses and funding models.
|
| For all intents and purposes Spotify is a billion dollar
| company making moves to lock down open ecosystems like
| podcasting that are consistent with a billion dollar
| company. If it's also a poorly managed billion dollar
| company that's lying to consumers about the actual cost
| of delivering music, then that's their problem -- it's
| not something we need to feel guilty about.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| > The entire VC model in this area of tech is to be
| unprofitable to undercut traditional mediums so that
| other companies can't compete with them, and then to
| raise prices once better systems have been driven out
|
| Sometimes but not always. The best example is Uber/Lyft:
| taxis sucked before ride shares, they continued to suck
| after being "disrupted" by ride shares. Both in terms of
| price and quality of the service.
|
| Briefly, Uber and Lyft were less expensive than
| traditional cabs, but now I'm back to spending the same
| $40 to go to the airport that I did a decade ago. The
| difference being that the cabbie can't have their machine
| magically "stop accepting cards" once you arrive.
|
| Though to be fair, the taxi industry had been terrible
| for decades, and are the exception
| danShumway wrote:
| Agreed. "We'd have APIs if y'all didn't use them" is a
| really bad take.
|
| Part of the reason why API access is desirable is because
| it forms an effective safeguard against some forms of
| company abuse. To argue that we can only have API access if
| nobody uses it for adversarial interoperability or to build
| 3rd-party clients or to bypass systems -- we might as well
| argue against API access entirely if that's going to be our
| position. The point of API access is to be able to use it.
| tills13 wrote:
| Not really suggesting Spotify pays their artists well but
| surely YouTube is worse, right?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Supposedly "between $0.001 and $0.003" from [0], but then
| this site[1] claims:
|
| > Plays on YouTube Music will gain on average $0.008.
|
| Although neither have sources. I imagine YouTube Premium
| plays match or beat Spotify on average.
|
| Of course, for anything, if you block ads AND refuse to pay
| for the premium subscription, the artist makes $0 from your
| listening. Hopefully you can support them off-platform via
| merch or even purchasing their albums (e.g. iTunes which
| provides DRM-free versions), but then you're still not paying
| for the platform if you continue to use one with an ad
| blocker.
|
| 0: https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/
|
| 1: https://routenote.com/blog/how-much-music-streaming-
| services... Although this doesn't take into account
| jpalawaga wrote:
| is that true? presumably youtube still has to pay the
| artist for reproducing/streaming the song, even if you
| didn't watch an ad. I'm suspicious that the licensing
| agreement YouTube says "we'll pay you for the right to
| stream your music, unless if they use an ad blocker, then
| too bad."
| lxgr wrote:
| In the countries where Youtube has an agreement of that
| form with music rights holding agencies like Germany's
| (in)famous GEMA I'd assume that to be the case.
|
| For monetized videos, where Youtube directly pays the
| channel owner, I've heard a few times now that they
| really don't pay anything when neither ads are
| successfully displayed or the viewer has Premium.
| NJRBailey wrote:
| My colleague has his music on both Spotify and YouTube
| Music, and he has said in the past that one YouTube listen
| is worth 2x as much as one Spotify listen.
| sanroot99 wrote:
| What music does he produce?, Can you share his profile
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've put that in the title now, along with the project
| name. (Submitted title was "Open source Spotify client that
| doesn't require Premium nor uses Electron")
| jackjeff wrote:
| I see.
|
| What I really want is a converter from Spotify abomination to
| standard podcasts which I can read from any podcast client.
|
| Last I checked the podcasts are DRM encumbered. So you'd have
| to spin up a client pretending to be chrome and use the
| Wivedine extension to decrypt every mp3 frame. No hacking
| required. But Life is too short. So instead I refuse to listen
| to fake podcasts on Spotify.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Me too. Spotify may have successfully killed the "open
| medium" promise of the words "podcast" and "podcasting" as
| part of their embrace/extend/extinguish strategy, but there
| are many great podcasting clients that continue to support
| opencasting, and very few shows exclusive to closed audio
| platforms like Spotify.
| Spivak wrote:
| Huh? Does Spotify have any exclusive podcasts worth
| bothering with? Because I haven't seen the death of open
| podcasts since every podcast is still on Apple Podcasts.
| input_sh wrote:
| Spotify pretty much backtracked on paying huge sums for
| exclusivity about a year ago, and the list of Spotify-
| exclusive podcasts has definitely gotten a whole lot
| smaller since then.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I've seen a few German productions. There is a worthwhile
| podcast about the wirecard debacle produced by a big
| German news outlet that was exclusive to Spotify.
| prmoustache wrote:
| On the other hand, why would you choose to use spotify API for
| a start? Spotify doesn't have nearly the quantity of available
| music that Youtube has.
|
| So many times when I try to find some music on my partner's
| spotify account it is just not there, and I give up and we
| listen to it via newpipe or freetube.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Huh my experience is the total opposite. I try to download my
| Spotify playlists from YouTube Music because its easier but
| half the stuff isn't there or incorrect versions etc.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| That was my experience when I used to use last.fm for radio
| as well.
|
| Connecting via YouTube offered significantly more music than
| via Spotify, albeit some big artists restricted it.
| Larrikin wrote:
| I would find it pointless to make music playlist on Youtube.
| Stuff gets taken down too easily, skits are prevalent, and
| theres so many accounts that just rip off music from other
| people. If it can't be on Spotify, I'm better off finding it
| on Soundcloud.
| stemlord wrote:
| It should be Discogs. Discogs is by far the largest
| publicly-accessible music database on the web.
| erk__ wrote:
| This was the trick used by bots on Discord that played music
| (before they pretty much all got disallowed)
|
| It would simply get the title from the Spotify API and then
| look it up on YouTube to play.
|
| At some point I actually had set up a rather awful hack where I
| had a Discord bot that could play webradio and then pointed it
| towards my own Mopidy server which used the Spotify plugin to
| have a webpage such that multiple people could add songs and
| such. It was a great hack though I did not use it for long.
| stemlord wrote:
| I don't understand why people are using Spotify to get data
| instead of Discogs?
| erk__ wrote:
| This was just so people could give the bot a Spotify link.
| Reubend wrote:
| While it's nice to have an open source client, please think twice
| about bypassing the premium subscription/ads to listen for free.
|
| Musician deserve to be paid for their work, and it's not fair to
| them to bypass all of the mechanisms to do that. Spotify doesn't
| pay musicians well, but there are still indie artists making a
| living from it nonetheless.
|
| I hear a lot of people these days complaining about ads, and
| that's totally fair. But when it comes time to pay for content,
| those people rarely are willing to pony up. You can see this
| happening with journalism, music, apps, etc.
|
| Similarly, most people hate subscriptions, but you can always buy
| music directly if you don't want to subscribe! A lot of smaller
| artists provide ways to purchase their music that give them a
| large percentage of the proceeds, and you can get the music DRM-
| free if that's something you care about.
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's not bypassing anything. It gets the playlist data from
| Spotify, and streams the song from YouTube, arguably still
| providing income for the musicians.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| YouTube pays less per stream to the rights holders than
| Spotify, however.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I don't know the numbers. What I was trying to point out
| that there's no nefariousness going on.
| jsnell wrote:
| No, you weren't just pointing that out. You claimed that
| it is "arguably still providing income for the
| musicians". How is it arguably providing income for tyhe
| artists given the app is obviously not playing ads?
| bayindirh wrote:
| First of all, the tool's description doesn't say anything
| about ads. Second, I'm neither the developer, nor user of
| the app.
|
| Third, I didn't say definitely, but arguably. I might be
| wrong, but I'm not endorsing anything here.
|
| Lastly, I'm an ex-musician, too and prefer to pay for
| premium and buy proper albums when I can.
|
| So pointing fingers doesn't do any favor to anyone.
|
| Have a nice day.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| I don't know where you get your info but Spotify just
| effectively demonetized the majority of music on their
| platform. They've decided they have the right to just stop
| paying small time artists so they can funnel more money
| upwards to the record labels.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Sources please?
| erinnh wrote:
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/01/11/spotify-
| stream-m...
| gallexme wrote:
| 1000 annual listens? That's likely less than 1$/mo
| revenue the artists get no? Even small time musicians I
| know have about 1000 listens a month
|
| Seems to me just like yt monetization partner program
| which required like 50EUR revenue for payout and 1000
| subs+approval for even enabling monetization (some time
| ago unsure if it's still limited for new accounts )
|
| Unless I'm missing something it mainly just trims out
| mass produced content
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| It is similar but different to what YouTube did (which
| also sucked).
|
| How many musicians do you know of that only ever released
| one song? This isn't about the streaming revenue for one
| song (though that is how Spotify tries to frame it).
| There are 1000s of artist who might have even been fairly
| successful at one point who have dozens or more songs in
| their back catalog that don't have over 1000 streams per
| year. Add up the lost revenue from all of those together
| and it isn't about just a couple bucks anymore.
|
| Further, even approaching the argument from how much it
| means per song is granting Spotify a pass that this is in
| any way fair to artists. Why should the top 1% of artists
| take even more money while the struggling musician now
| gets nothing?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Agreed in general.
|
| "and it isn't about just a couple bucks anymore."
|
| And I want to add, that for quite some musicians, a
| couple of bucks can make the difference between being
| able to (partly) pay the rent, or not.
|
| And those are usually the ones making interesting music.
| So I rather would like the trend reversed, less for the
| superstars, more for the unkown artists. But this is
| unlikely to change with these services.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| > Even small time musicians I know have about 1000
| listens a month
|
| On every single one of their tracks?
|
| Let's say they have 20 tracks on Spotify.
|
| 1000 plays/month across 20 tracks gives 50
| plays/track/month.
|
| 50 plays/month gives 600 plays/year, less than the
| threshold.
|
| ARTIST GETS NOTHING FROM SPOTIFY.
|
| Fuck Spotify.
| letier wrote:
| This is quite interesting. I'd be interested in more
| information on this.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| If you mean the changes declared in
| https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-
| royalty-..., then I find it hard to reconcile the
| description given there with your editorialization.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| > Starting in early 2024, tracks must have reached at
| least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to
| generate recorded royalties.
|
| This will take my Spotify income from pitiful to non-
| existent.
|
| Fuck Spotify.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| As soon as this change was announced, I cancelled my
| Spotify subscription. I know it won't mean much of
| anything to the overall number but at least in my case,
| they saved less than $10 in royalties at a cost of $132
| in subscription fees.
| swozey wrote:
| I tested getting off spotify last year, but the other
| apps were so bare bones and featureless. I tried most of
| the popular ones, Quboz, Tidal, Spotify, Apple music,
| youtube music, amazon music.. i think 1-2 others.
| Thankfully there's an app called soundiiz that for like
| $2-3 will sync all of your music app playlists/favs/etc
| to one another.
|
| _ALL_ of them had absolutely useless /bad Android
| Auto/Carplay apps. I know at least half of them (quboz
| tidal for sure) didn't have a way to search in the car
| app. Quboz or Tidal didn't even display your subscribed
| albums/playlists. I forget exactly but I think I could
| only play their recommended stuff. Exacts are off here
| but I remember specifically sitting in my car with both
| of those apps wondering why I couldn't figure how to play
| my fav playlist or search for an artist.
|
| Then the social stuff. I share collab playlists with a
| few friends. Apples adding these feautures IIRC. Surely
| not important to most people but they really make the
| other apps just feel barebones. I like gamification,
| rewinds, badges, etc.
|
| The Carplay thing is the killer for me, though.
| hedora wrote:
| I haven't had many issues with Tidal's CarPlay support.
| I've only used it in rental cars (so cars that shipped
| mid to post pandemic) though.
|
| It definitely shows subscribed albums, etc. The one
| exception was that, on an older Toyota, it only showed
| the first dozen or so albums in my collection one time
| out of the dozen I drove the rental. Parking the car then
| coming back a few hours later fixed it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Spotify pays ~$0.004/stream.
|
| 1,000 streams is $4.00. That's a coffee.
|
| _Lots_ of services for creators have minimum payouts.
| Google AdSense won 't pay you until you reach _$100_.
| Patreon has a $10 minimum payout using PayPal. A
| threshold of just $4 is actually very much on the low
| side.
|
| I genuinely don't understand how this is something to get
| upset over. It's comparable to what an artist used to
| make in royalties from a single CD sold. What's more
| surprising to me is that Spotify previously didn't have a
| minimum at all.
| jwagenet wrote:
| Yea, I don't get it either. This makes sense as a spam
| reduction move. If an emerging artist wants to make
| money, you would probably be more successful performing
| live until you boost your numbers significantly.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| You're looking at it wrong. That $4 per song! What artist
| only releases one song ever?
|
| Spotify and other streaming platforms pay royalties to an
| artist's distributor and that aggregate of royalties from
| all platforms gets paid out to the artist when they reach
| the distributor's threshold. Spotify is making that money
| no longer exist at all for indie artists.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Ah sorry, I hadn't picked up on that -- thanks. But it
| still doesn't change the overall point at all.
|
| So if you've got 2 albums of 10 tracks each, then you
| need 1,000 listens of each album to reach a minimum
| payout of $80, which you've got an entire _year_ to
| accumulate. So Spotify isn 't on the low side -- it's
| comparable with AdSense's minimum payout of $100.
|
| But honestly, compared to the effort involved in
| producing an album, that's... nothing. $80 is not the
| difference between making or breaking your music career.
| It's under $7 a month. A slightly more expensive coffee.
|
| I just don't understand how that can be upsetting. If
| your streams on Spotify are that low, then you're doing
| it as a hobby anyways, for the love of it. Which is
| wonderful. But it isn't your source of income.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| You are correct. This isn't really about income. It is
| the principle of the thing. Spotify is redistributing
| subscriber fees and ad revenue from the struggling artist
| to the record labels and superstars.
|
| As I said in another comment, I've cancelled my account
| so in my case it is costing them more than they are
| saving. I'm also no longer sending fans to Spotify and
| this year not all of the music I release will make its
| way to Spotify.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _redistributing subscriber fees and ad revenue from the
| struggling artist to the record labels and superstars._
|
| That seems a little harsh. They're also redistributing it
| to anyone with just 1,000 streams a song, right? And many
| (most? nearly all?) of those less-popular artists aren't
| even signed with a record label, correct?
|
| It seems like more of an anti-spam measure than anything
| else. And possibly about reducing overhead fees
| associated with the skinniest part of the long tail.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| Taking the news directly from Spotify? Try this for
| another perspective:
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/01/11/spotify-
| stream-m...
| jwagenet wrote:
| I listen to a lot of music under 1000 streams, artists
| with 10s to 100s of monthly listens. Based on the junk
| that makes it to my discover weekly or release radar,
| some big percent of that <1000 listen cohort is spam
| that's ai generated or has erroneously added real artists
| as collaborators to get well positioned. I have a lot of
| respect for actual musicians trying to make money, but I
| am honestly ok with Spotify setting a threshold for
| payouts to divert that cash to real artists.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| If it streams from YouTube then it's not really a Spotify
| client, is it?
| bayindirh wrote:
| It's aptly named SpoTube, to be frank.
|
| It describes itself as follows:
|
| An open source, cross-platform Spotify client compatible
| across multiple platforms utilizing Spotify's data API and
| YouTube (or Piped.video or JioSaavn) as an audio source,
| eliminating the need for Spotify Premium
| svantana wrote:
| A very large fraction of music on youtube is also monetized
| by ads (for free users).
| IanCal wrote:
| So it shows the ads from YouTube?
| vdaea wrote:
| People here all day defending p2p piracy but when you are
| taking the bandwidth from a multibillion, multinational
| corporation then you're the devil himself :'( :'( :'( :'(
| __warlord__ wrote:
| I think the "hacker" part of "hacker news" doesn't mean much
| anymore.
| extheat wrote:
| The Hacker in hacker news was never meant to imply black
| hat/malicious types of hacking. There's quite a difference
| between say, tearing something apart, reverse engineering
| it, breaking into something that _you_ own, versus trying
| to tear into something you don't own without a really good
| reason. At the end of the day it's about judgement and
| taste, there isn't so much a hardline but there is a line
| on what we consider acceptable and unacceptable areas of
| exploitation. Beyond the piracy point, I think few could
| find this exploitative, it seems like a cool open source
| project that could genuinely offer better and customizable
| user experience.
| elashri wrote:
| What in this project is about piracy? It does not give
| you free access you cannot have without it.
| mlrtime wrote:
| The article is still link here, so I say the hacker part is
| very much alive.
|
| That the comments aren't 100% all aligned is great, I come
| here for vigorous respectful debate. It helps me reflect on
| my position on topics.
|
| What's the problem?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| "bandwidth from a multibillion, multinational corporation"
| that started out as a frontend for the pirate bay. They were
| probably friends, as both are from Sweden.
| portaouflop wrote:
| So they started out pirating music and then decided they
| want to get rich from stolen culture while giving nothing
| back. That is taking the whole pirate meme a bit too
| literally.
| jug wrote:
| Their Beta yeah, but the vast majority of their wealth is
| built on venture capital where they give many things
| back. It's a very popular service that musicians want to
| be on. Neither popularity nor musicians would happen if
| they didn't give anything back.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Just because something is popular, backed by venture
| capital, or widely used does not guarantee that it is
| fair or positive for the culture.
| gsich wrote:
| "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"
| user_7832 wrote:
| Well people tend to forget this is _Hacker_ News. Finding
| creative workarounds is part of the fun.
| drcongo wrote:
| Claiming that the same people who complain about ads are also
| those who won't pay for services is just wrong.
| drewdevault wrote:
| Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and
| the distribution system, not to this. If everyone who uses this
| software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long
| run it would make _pennies_ for the artists at best. You 're
| better off listening to music however you please and buying
| albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; a lifetime of
| spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like
| than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp.
|
| Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365
| days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from
| Spotify.
| pinkgolem wrote:
| >Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365
| days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from
| Spotify.
|
| i mean, that sounds fair?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Especially considering that Spotify claims over 500 million
| users. The traditional bottleneck in the music industry and
| the entertainment industry has been distribution.
|
| Of course, 500 million users does not mean that 500 million
| potential fans will be exposed to your work.
| drewdevault wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. If an artist makes up 1% of your
| listening, that goes down to a dollar, and if you factor in
| more realistic listening habits that goes down further.
| Consider that this is paid to the rights holder, not the
| artist, as well -- the artist usually gets even less. Buy
| one album on Bandcamp for $10 and the rights holder gets
| $8.50 (on Bandcamp this is usually the artist directly).
|
| Fact of the matter is that in terms of getting artists
| paid, Spotify's business model and distribution model is
| inferior to other solutions and the economic cost of
| circumventing the ads is little to none, and in fact if you
| take advantage of Spotify's distribution model for
| convenience and buy elsewhere for economics then you are
| performing a net social good.
| gnramires wrote:
| People are saying about 70% of Spotify revenue goes to
| rights holders, whereas you're saying about 85% of
| Bandcamp's revenue goes to rights holders. It really
| doesn't seem like that much of a difference?
|
| Maybe what you're saying is, you end up spending _much
| more_ buying merchandise and labuns directly than you
| would spend on Spotify. (I 'm not sure this would be true
| for everyone though)
|
| Maybe then the solution could be to have a way to just
| pay more to Spotify (conditional on keeping the revenue
| split intact).
|
| Something I don't like about Spotify though, is that I
| don't get to have _any_ kind of say on how the revenue is
| split. I 'd personally prefer if there was an egalitarian
| bias in payment, and the artists with less revenue would
| get a greater share of my subscription. But there's no
| way I can control that, that's the most frustrating to me
| personally, and I'd gladly switch to a system that pays
| more (since I currently have the means to).
|
| In fact, I've proposed FunkWhale, the federated
| (libre-)music streaming platform, should get a
| subscription service like that, and that I should have
| some control over the revenue distribution (maybe there
| would be a minimum revenue split, and the rest I can
| 'choose my own algorithm', for example one that heavily
| favors less popular musicians). I agree that meanwhile
| the best I can do to support them would be paying them
| directly, and I've found a few have Liberapay (or
| Patreon) accounts as well.
| drewdevault wrote:
| > People are saying about 70% of Spotify revenue goes to
| rights holders, whereas you're saying about 85% of
| Bandcamp's revenue goes to rights holders. It really
| doesn't seem like that much of a difference?
|
| 85% of a bigger number is significantly more than 70% of
| a much smaller number.
| pinkgolem wrote:
| The number I spend on music before Spotify was well below
| 120 per year. I would even attribute increased spending
| on festivals/concerts/merch on Spotify
| hcks wrote:
| You don't understand, there is a parallel universe where
| people don't pay for Spotify and totally spend 500 bucks
| per year on merch for each artist they listen to
| 9dev wrote:
| That doesn't paint the full picture, though. Artists get
| something from Spotify in return - exposure to listeners
| (even those that wouldn't traditionally listen to an artist
| or never discover them otherwise), global and immediate
| distribution, marketing, and simple payment handling.
|
| Today, artists don't need most of the services traditional
| record labels provide, which treated them _way_ worse over
| the last half century. And that's a good thing.
|
| Not to say I think it's fair how little streaming services
| pay to musicians, but this is more nuanced than just Spotify
| exploiting artists.
| viraptor wrote:
| > If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify
| direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies
| for the artists at best.
|
| I'm not sure that "they get paid so little that we may as
| well stop paying them anything" is an argument you really
| want to make here? Yes, Spotify pay is crap. Not paying
| anything is crap too. Two wrongs don't make a right.
| drewdevault wrote:
| I'm not making that argument. I made an argument that you
| have better options in which the artist is paid _more_.
| viraptor wrote:
| You said "Direct your passion for getting musicians paid
| to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this." but
| that's not the problem this specific software can solve.
| However the authors of this software can work on adding
| reporting the plays back to Spotify. (And I believe they
| should)
| drewdevault wrote:
| This software is not trying to solve the problem of
| getting artists paid, and the suggestion that people
| should listen to Spotify ads and all is not really going
| to solve that problem, either.
| jsnell wrote:
| Taking the music without compensation and pretending that
| you're totally going to buy some music or merch from some
| other artist doesn't actually lead to artists being
| compensated. While in the plan where you buy music and
| only listen to the music you bought you don't need this
| app at all.
| drewdevault wrote:
| I've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp over the past
| several years, attended many live shows, bought
| merchandise, etc. Suggesting that one is "pretending" to
| do these things when making this argument is a hell of a
| strawman. I feel like pretending that you're supporting
| your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a
| bit more of an appropriate comparison.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > attended many live shows, bought merchandise, etc.
|
| I don't understand what does attending live shows have to
| do with how you listen to their music. Ppl who do listen
| on spotify also do that.
| drewdevault wrote:
| Live shows are generally the largest source of revenue
| for musicians.
| apwell23 wrote:
| So what? You think only ppl listening on bandcamp go to
| live shows? How is it relevant to the current topic.
| hedora wrote:
| If the purpose of Spotify is to pay artists, then it's
| objectively a failure.
|
| If you want pay musicians for their music, then you'd be
| better off buying albums on bandcamp or attending
| concerts. Paying Spotify is marginally better than just
| lighting your money on fire.
|
| If the purpose of Spotify is to allow you to listen to
| music with minimal effort and cost, _and don 't care if
| the bands get paid_ then it does a middling job among
| paid services. It's probably more convenient than piracy,
| but I don't know what the state of modern music piracy is
| (I could imagine a gray-area Internet group that does a
| better job with metadata and recommendation algorithms
| than the paid sites do, and that links to a popcorn time
| style torrent thing.)
| jsnell wrote:
| I meant the generic "you" of an user of this app. I'm
| sure you specifically don't actually use this app, and
| just listen to the music you bought.
|
| But the main selling point of this app, i.e. the actual
| submission, is to get the music for free and no ads. The
| target market of it is not going to be paying a cent,
| because the entire reason the app exists and was
| submitted is to avoid paying much smaller amounts for
| music than what you're paying.
| drewdevault wrote:
| This is perhaps true (but I'm not sure it is), but
| consider the context of this thread: we're specifically
| making arguments to an audience of people who _care_
| about artists being paid.
| andrepd wrote:
| There's also the artist's point of view in this thread,
| multiple people saying they made many times more money
| from Bandcamp than steaming services.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > multiple people saying they made many times more money
| from Bandcamp than steaming services.
|
| While it might be true that they get more money on
| bandcamp. They get exposure through streaming websites
| like youtube, spotify that brings ppl to bandcamp.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| You're supporting the artists you listen to more
| uniformly (via spotify) though.
|
| If you and I listen to 1000 artists over the course of a
| year, and you spend $1000/year on album purchases (let's
| say $10 each) while I subscribe to spotify, I pay $90 a
| year while supporting all of the artists I listen to,
| loosely based on how much I listen to them, while you
| much more significantly support up to 100 of the artists
| you listened to.
|
| I think what you're doing is better, don't get me wrong,
| but I can only afford $90 a year anyway.
|
| In your case though, you could support _all_ the artists
| you listen to by paying for a spotify /itunes/whatever
| subscription and using that as your primary listening
| service, while _also_ purchasing their music via
| bandcamp. You probably won 't feel the additional
| subscription price.
|
| And I think most people who can afford $1000/year for
| music are _not_ going to be using YouSpot, so I 'm not
| sure why you're pointing out that people can leech off of
| spotify and then support the artists directly, when the
| above person said "please also support the artists"
|
| > You're better off listening to music however you please
| and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists;
|
| Yes, but most people can't afford this. It's good that
| YouSpot is available for people who can't even afford
| spotify (no one upthread said otherwise), and many people
| aren't going to be able to pay bandcamp $1000 per year to
| support maybe 10-50% of the artists they listen to. So
| please save your thesis for somewhere it's relevant.
|
| For the average person who can _maybe_ comfortably afford
| $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more
| viable way to support the musicians they listen to than
| buying 4-9 albums
| etaweb wrote:
| You say that it is better to pay 90$ for 1000$ worth of
| goods than to pay nothing. This is a false dilemma, there
| is a third choice that is paying only what you can
| afford. Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make
| anyone less of a robber.
|
| A lot of people here would rather blame those who steal
| better than they do, than question the industry that
| allows artists work to be sold off.
|
| Furthermore, I would say that most people using Spotify
| and alike services do it only for convenience, but
| certainly not to "support the artists".
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the
| categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're
| talking about legally listening to music you have access
| to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how
| to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the
| part of the consumers anyway).
|
| If you have the means and inclination to pay more I
| strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues
| with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way
| for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the
| artists they like legally, while still being able to
| listen to them.
|
| So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford
| $90/year should only have access to the albums they can
| afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support
| the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just
| further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular
| working class people.
|
| Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few
| albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever
| they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I
| fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just
| paying spotify and listening there.
|
| edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your
| idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like
| we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist
| perspective, but your idea that poor people should have
| reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any
| anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of.
|
| Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the
| distribution channels which exploit the working class
| (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the
| connection that this is a condition of late-stage
| capitalism?
|
| If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the
| wonderful Cory Doctorow
| hedora wrote:
| Also, if, once a year, every spotify listener picked one
| band they liked at random, and paid them the amount of an
| annual Spotify subscription ($132), there'd be a hell of
| a lot more money in artist's pockets than there is
| currently.
|
| There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million
| monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average
| per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes
| $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we
| split the money across the 20% currently making any money
| at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the
| "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would
| fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does.
|
| Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their
| users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K
| below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently
| 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what
| would be a median income for one person. If a tiny
| fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to
| appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs
| for artists.
|
| Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my
| numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad
| supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too
| low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify
| subscription which is more than the assumed $90.
|
| Maybe divide everything I said by two?
|
| Link to subscriber numbers:
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I think you're missing a few relevant things:
|
| An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99
| (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd
| assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S.
| where prices are lower across the board.
|
| But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler
| content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the
| correct idea is to divide the potential money people can
| spend by the number of artists. There should be some
| connection with what people are actually choosing to
| listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic
| publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage
| people to do even more of this).
|
| Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund
| one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose
| to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally
| listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at
| random from their list of such artists? How do they then
| get that list to pick from? How do they discover new
| music to potentially listen to more of in the first place
|
| Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks
| on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions.
|
| Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the
| bandwidth, and the development costs.
|
| If you want to be fair, I think people should be
| encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their
| budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of
| spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar
| should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and
| pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of
| random artists whenever the mood strikes them.
|
| If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot,
| kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and
| then purchase music from their preferred artists up to
| the amount comfortable for them.
|
| Using YouSpot is the closest _actual_ thing to
| 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a
| resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for
| subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to
| that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream),
| if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs
| and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then
| we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I
| disagree with) that consuming something that can be
| 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is
| theft.
|
| But I think any of the above are reasonable options for
| people who want to maximize the support of creators of
| the things they consume while staying within their means
| hedora wrote:
| I mostly listen to long-tail artists, so if I were to
| pick one at random, it would probably be in the 80-99.9th
| percentile group. (Assuming 80% of Spotify's catalog is
| spam -- that could be, but I don't use Spotify, and have
| never encountered spam any of their competitors).
|
| This would pull some revenue away from the > 99.9th
| percentile artists, but that's OK with me.
|
| I'm more worried that, even if we count jobs that are way
| below minimum wage, Spotify is only supporting 15K bands
| worldwide. That rounds to zero when compared to their
| listener base and their revenue.
|
| Anyway, I pay more than just a streaming subscription
| annually, but I went with an estimate of what's going
| into just Spotify for my calculations. I'm not convinced
| there'd be much societal impact (in terms of artists not
| being paid) if they disappeared tomorrow.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Then you're probably the rare exception who would likely
| benefit independent artists more by just randomly picking
| a few every year.
|
| If everyone just pirated and picked a few musicians to
| support directly every year, the overwhelming majority of
| people would pick from the 16,000 in the 99.8th
| percentile on spotify, and the majority of the hundreds
| of thousands of artists in the 80th - 99.8th percentiles
| would see no income whatsoever from digital distribution.
| etaweb wrote:
| > These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the
| categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're
| talking about legally listening to music you have access
| to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how
| to engage with the suggestion that this is theft.
|
| It being legal doesn't do much about its unfairness.
|
| > For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford
| $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more
| viable way to support the musicians they listen to than
| buying 4-9 albums
|
| The option that you describe as the best for people who
| can't put more than 90$ a year on music (which is
| perfectly fine), is going through a subscription service,
| because even if a lesser amount of that money goes
| directly to artists, more of them get to see a bit of it.
|
| I disagree with that, because you don't know for sure
| where your money is going, as all of this distribution
| system around streaming services is pretty opaque. As far
| as I know, the money from subscriptions on Spotify is not
| equally distributed among the artists that a user listens
| to. Bigger artists tend to get more per play than smaller
| ones.
|
| The other option would be to spend that same amount on
| buying albums each year on a service like Bandcamp, which
| is known to distribute the money in a more direct and
| transparent way, and where artists actually have more
| control over what and how they want to sell.
|
| It definitely means making a choice about what to buy,
| but it is still better than letting an obscure algorithm
| make that choice for you.
|
| We should also consider that we can favor artists who are
| in need over those who are already earning large amounts.
| This is the opposite of what streaming services seems to
| be doing.
|
| > your idea that poor people should have reduced access
| to the arts
|
| This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize
| those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they
| blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly
| paid, when the subscription model being proposed as the
| best solution is actually far from it and could also be
| considered as theft when you put out the numbers of how
| much artists are asking for their work.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize
| those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they
| blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly
| paid,
|
| Oh well if this is truly the point you wanted to make,
| then we're in agreement.
|
| Earlier I was responding to:
|
| > > jsnell: In the plan where you buy music and only
| listen to the music you bought you don't need [YouSpot]
| at all.
|
| > drewdevault: I feel like pretending that you're
| supporting your favorite artists by listening them on
| Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison [to
| not supporting the artists]
|
| I wasn't saying either of these things are better, simply
| pointing out that paying for spotify is going to support
| a broad selection of artists a little bit, while paying
| through bandcamp is going to support a narrow selection
| of artists a lot, and that both are desirable:
|
| > You're supporting the artists you listen to more
| uniformly (via spotify) though ... you could support all
| the artists you listen to by paying for a
| spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as
| your primary listening service, while _also_ purchasing
| their music via bandcamp.
|
| Aka _both_ is better than _just_ buying the music of a
| few artists through bandcamp while listening to everyone
| through piracy or YouSpot. That doesn 't mean I disagree
| with anyone choosing to go the piracy + focused bandcamp
| patronage route.
|
| You jumped in with:
|
| > Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone
| less of a robber.
|
| Which I took to mean "no actually, just paying Spotify is
| theft".
|
| If the 80% of people with a limited entertainment budget
| pick their top 5 artists to support every year, the
| virtuosos of music are going to benefit, while the
| "B-tier" and "C-tier" artists who people still like to
| listen to are going to suffer a lot more.
|
| Paying for Spotify, or more aptly, Tidal (which seemingly
| pays artists the most) is probably the most realistic way
| that's accessible to a lot of people, to support the
| artists they listen to in a way that tracks their actual
| listening preferences. Yes, buy music in _addition_ to
| that if you can, but if everyone chooses a few artists to
| support directly, it 's still going to result in many
| musicians getting unfairly compensated despite lots of
| people enjoying their music, so I disagree with the idea
| that it's better to spend $90 on bandcamp in a year vs.
| $90 on spotify in a year, if it _is_ a choice of one or
| the other.
|
| Better in some ways sure, because you're
| disintermediating the streaming platforms, but worse in
| equitable distribution, which will disproportionately
| impact artists who are liked by many but "top-10"ed by
| few
| blibble wrote:
| I spend quite a lot on bandcamp and amazon's mp3 store
| (couple of hundred bucks a year maybe?)
|
| I am very very happy to pay for DRM free music
|
| however this getting increasingly difficult as companies
| don't even seem to want to provide it for sale at all
|
| under no circumstances am I going to pay a monthly
| subscription for a digital product that can be delivered
| as a one off download
| hedora wrote:
| I know people that still buy CDs.
|
| I've been meaning to dump my Tidal artist list to a
| spreadsheet or something, and figure out how to pay a few
| dozen artists directly this year.
|
| One possibility is to buy their albums and copy them to
| my NAS. Paying for DRM-free downloads seems easier /
| better, but I'd want to make sure the artists' cut is
| higher than with streaming.
|
| For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these
| days. I don't want to figure out their terrible GUI, but
| presumably there's some tool that'll copy the songs out
| of it and into a filesystem.
| blibble wrote:
| I would buy CDs and rip them up until about 5 years ago
| at which point the stuff I liked vanished
|
| > For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free
| these days.
|
| I'll try this!
| portaouflop wrote:
| If you care about the artist here pay them directly either
| through bandcamp, by going to the physical shows and buying
| merch, ordering physical copies of their music at the
| label, patreon, or whatever form of direct support they
| have set up.
|
| Spotify is just leeching of the culture and as drew pointed
| out you will be 10000 times more effective if you use one
| of those options.
|
| Spotify is more or less just a signal booster nowadays -
| because you have to be on there since everyone uses it.
|
| I for one would never put my music on Spotify, even if I
| get what like 20$ out of it, what a horrible company and
| service.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > If you care about the artist here pay them directly
| either through bandcamp
|
| Not everyone is on bandcamp. Seems like some sort of
| north american website.
| portaouflop wrote:
| I listed four other concrete options and closed with "or
| whatever other direct support method they have set up" --
| I assure you that every artist that wants to make money
| will have set up _something_ besides Spotify since it's
| practically impossible to make money through them.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > I assure you that every artist that wants to make money
| will have set up _something_ besides Spotify since it's
| practically impossible to make money through them.
|
| you are wrong in your assurances( eg: i am listening to
| this on spotify at the moment Odeon Yillari Album by
| Nesrin Sipahi ) and your "other options" have nothing to
| do with how you listen to their music. Ppl listening on
| spotify _also_ go to concerts they are not mutually
| exclusive.
| morelisp wrote:
| Are you saying Nesrin Sipahi, who received a personal
| award from the president, has nothing but Spotify?
| apwell23 wrote:
| No idea who that artist is. It something spotify
| recommended and I am into it.
|
| I didn't find that artist on bandcamp or any other non-
| streaming platforms. only on spotify, youtube, apple
| music. Are they not equivalent, didn't realize you were
| making a point specifically about spotify.
|
| And yes I will surely go to that artist concert if they
| are in my area. Me listening to on spotify has nothing to
| do with it. If anything I would've never found that music
| if it wasn't for spotify.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Nesrin Sipahi is a far cry from a small indie artist that
| relies on support by their fan base.
|
| And there are many options to buy her music as physical
| copies directly from her labels.
|
| Of course it's fine to use Spotify to listen to music and
| find new artists - I'm saying the worst way to pay
| artists that rely on their fan base for income.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > Nesrin Sipahi is a far cry from a small indie artist
| that relies on support by their fan base.
|
| Who said this though?
|
| This is what you originally said.
|
| > If you care about the artist here pay them directly
| either through bandcamp
|
| I responded to this
|
| > I assure you that every artist that wants to make money
| will have set up _something_
|
| Why did you bring 'far cry from a small indie artist '
| into the picture all of sudden when you said 'every' in
| original comment.
|
| Your original comment was about 'small indie artist' only
| ? You should've said 'small indie artist will always set
| up something' if you meant that. agree that might be true
| for small artists.
| hedora wrote:
| The argument is that this artist is only available on
| streaming, and that that's where most of their revenue
| came from?
|
| https://www.amazon.com/CDs-Vinyl-Nesrin-
| Sipahi/s?rh=n%3A5174...
|
| They're selling CDs, Vinyl and MP3s on Amazon, but their
| SoundCloud only has 29 followers.
|
| Maybe they screwed up when they went all-in on indie
| digital distribution back in... 1978?
|
| https://turkishvinyl.com/record/57/
| portaouflop wrote:
| Of course a celebrated artist with a 50+ year career that
| is a national icon won't be reliant on digital
| distribution...
|
| I think that would be obvious to anyone that wants to
| have a conversation in good faith.
| apwell23 wrote:
| I read you comment, looked at what spotify was playing on
| my speakers and posted that comment because you said
| 'every'. I really have no idea who that artist was or
| even what language that is.
|
| Your comment wouldn't have been worthy of a response if
| you had said 'small artists'. Because thats well known
| problem with all streaming platforms and not just music.
|
| Now looks like you are not even saying 'small artists' .
| It only applies arists who are not 'well known' ? No idea
| what you are even trying to say. Maybe use some precision
| ?
| portaouflop wrote:
| I would suggest you educate yourself a little bit about
| the culture you consume. The artist you chose is
| extremely well known and about 85 years old so I can't
| take your example serious.
|
| Of course I can't give an extremely precise category of
| artist that is better paid directly than through Spotify
| - but everyone reading that argument in good faith knows
| what is meant.
|
| You just choose to read it in the most unfavourable way
| imaginable.
| morelisp wrote:
| Please connect to reality.
| portaouflop wrote:
| If that implies connecting to Spotify, no thanks. If your
| reality is based on catering to VC funded tech companies
| I pity you.
| morelisp wrote:
| Read harder.
| marcomourao wrote:
| Bandcamp is widely used all over the world. My band made
| 6 times more money from Bandcamp than from all the
| streaming sites combined. People from all over Europe,
| USA, Canada and Australia bought our music.
| apwell23 wrote:
| >Bandcamp is widely used in all over the world.
|
| Not really.
| marcomourao wrote:
| My opinion is based on the stats Bandcamp provides me.
| Care to elaborate on why you proclaim otherwise?
| apwell23 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066807
|
| curious how do ppl discover your band on bandcamp?
| marcomourao wrote:
| Through Bandcamp itself, social media, music blogs...
| apwell23 wrote:
| does bandcamp give you this info?
| marcomourao wrote:
| Yes. The free version gives you basic stats, the pro
| version gives you detailed stats.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Europe, US, Canada and Australia is your whole world?
| Local metal guys I know is on Spotify and not on
| Bandcamp. I wonder what you think of that. I'm in Asia
| btw, largest continent of the world.
| marcomourao wrote:
| > Europe, US, Canada and Australia is your whole world?
|
| Of course not.
|
| > I'm in Asia btw, largest continent of the world.
|
| Those were only a few examples from the top of my head.
| We also had sales in S. Korea and Japan.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| So, instead of interfacing with the actual argument
| (which is that Spotify pays almost nothing and if you
| really want to support an artist you actually pay them
| directly), you decide to zero in that one singular
| platform of many is not available where you think it
| should be?
|
| If you didn't want to support artists you can just say so
| and cut out the gymnastics.
| apwell23 wrote:
| i support artists in a lot of ways. spotify introduced me
| to many new artists and told me about their concerts in
| my area
|
| > If you didn't want to support artists you can just say
| so and cut out the gymnastics.
|
| classic projection
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And what is spotify?
|
| Seriously, I would rather visit Bandcamp a 100 times than
| use Spotify, even though the website player of Bandcamp
| sucks and I need a user script to regulate the volume of
| it.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify
| and the distribution system
|
| Spotify pay 70% of their revenue back to the rights holders,
| leaving 30% for operating costs and profits. What percentages
| would you recommend, and what are you basing it on?
| drewdevault wrote:
| I would not recommend a different revenue split, I would
| recommend a different business model. And I did!
| gitaarik wrote:
| If you would pay $0.01 per song on Spotify. Then if you
| listen to an artist's album of 10 songs for a 100 times, so
| 1000 song plays of $0.01, that is $10. Spotify takes 30%
| cut, then the artist gets $7 and Spotify gets $3. Now if
| 10,000 people listen to the album a 100 times, the artist
| gets $70,000 and Spotify $30.000.
|
| What the artist needs to do for this is come up with the
| songs, work them out, practice them with a band, record,
| produce, mix, artwork, release, promo.
|
| For Spotify to release the album on their platform, they
| just need to sign a deal with the artist and add the album
| to their library. And this process is obviously largely (if
| not fully) automated. Of course they have some
| infrastructure and costs for this, but I think they're much
| better off than the artists.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify
| and the distribution system, not to this.
|
| How exactly do you do this ? What a dishonest comment to
| support stealing.
| drewdevault wrote:
| >How exactly do you do this
|
| By reading the rest of my comment.
|
| >What a dishonest comment to support stealing.
|
| Copying is not theft.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > By reading the rest of my comment.
|
| I did. You made a silly assumption that all artists put
| their music up on bandcamp. No one even knows what
| bandcamp is my area.
| drewdevault wrote:
| Bandcamp is available in more markets than Spotify. Not
| sure how that's relevant to my argument, though.
| apwell23 wrote:
| Here is an example of an artist not on bandcamp . This is
| what i am listening currently on spotify( I have no idea
| who this is)
|
| Odeon Yillari Album by Nesrin Sipahi
| westhanover wrote:
| So mail her a check? Do we have to think of everything
| for you?
| lxgr wrote:
| How do I find an artist's mailing address? And what is a
| check?
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I'm the only one buying stuffs on Bandcamp in my family.
| Casual listeners see no reason to be on Bandcamp when
| they can listen it on YouTube or Spotify.
|
| For the parent comment, it's better to support artists on
| whichever platform they want to be in, because parent
| comment feels like he has an axe to grind on Spotify.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Why would artists _not_ put their music up on one of the
| most well-known platforms that allow people to
| significantly support them by purchasing a copy of their
| music.
|
| I legitimately don't get it.
|
| I don't necessarily believe that Spotify is necessarily
| worse as a way to make money from their music (I think
| ad-supported and subscription "bundling" services such as
| Youtube and Spotify probably result in more money going
| to artists than all the options for purchasing artists'
| music piecemeal, like Bandcamp), but artists should
| definitely make their music available somewhere for fans
| to purchase regardless
|
| Substitute Bandcamp with Google/Apple music or whatever,
| the point remains, one can use Spotube and choose to
| support artists buy paying for their music.
|
| I don't think most people are actually doing this
| though..
| apwell23 wrote:
| > I legitimately don't get it.
|
| Because its not " one of the most well-known platforms"
| outside english speaking countries. I assure you no one
| in Sri Lanka or India know what bandcamp is.
|
| This kind of western arrogance is kind of infuriating to
| ppl from other parts of the world. Like american tourist
| demanding that ppl speak to them in english in turkey.
| sdoering wrote:
| Copying is robbing the artist of their revenue. So you
| are actually proposing a solution to make life worse for
| artists.
|
| What a dishonesty.
| drewdevault wrote:
| Copying _is not theft_ , it is materially different.
|
| Moreover, I have proposed ways of engaging with music
| which makes substantially _more_ money for artists. I am
| not the one being dishonest here.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an
| artist you like than buying a single album from them on
| Bandcamp.
|
| This is false. And I mean, dramatically.
|
| > Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365
| days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from
| Spotify.
|
| It's roughly 200$.
|
| Number of songs per hour: 60 minutes / 3 minutes per song =
| 20 songs
|
| Total listening hours per year: 8 hours/day * 365 days =
| 2,920 hours
|
| Total streams per year: 20 songs/hour * 2,920 hours = 58,400
| streams
|
| Total earnings: 58,400 streams * $0.004 (average pay rate) =
| $233.60
|
| How high do you think that number should be, to be
| non-"whopping"?
|
| I am seriously confused about what or who anti-streamers
| think they are zealoting for, what alternative fantasy they
| are defending.
|
| As someone who has worked in the music industry (i.e. the
| people actually making a living through music) I witnessed
| Spotify/YT and the likes as an absolute force of creation of
| a new class of musicians, that would never have existed
| before.
| drewdevault wrote:
| You and I did the same back-of-the-napkin math and arrived
| at slightly different numbers; I used a 5 minute average
| song duration and $0.003 average payout. See my other
| comments for elaboration on why the Bandcamp model is
| ultimately better for the artist.
|
| I don't deny that Spotify has improved the situation for
| many artists, but rather that it hasn't done enough and
| other approaches _do it better_ , and I believe this is
| factually true.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Yes, Bandcamp leaves a bigger percentage to the musician
| - from nothing/less. For a variety of reasons, Bandcamp
| is not actually being used and thus not doing for artists
| what Spotify has. You can start a personal crusade to
| combat that, but as long as you do not actually make it
| work (and I think there is good reasons rooted in what
| Spotify does well over Bandcamp and the service the
| former provides that the later won't), _this_ is what is
| actually factually true.
|
| Let's just skip the part, where we imply it's somehow
| okay to circumvent fair use, because nobody is making
| money off of streaming anyway or any such nonsense.
| Streaming as intended is fine for now. People can just
| use Spotify, or any of the alternatives, as they are
| intended and that's fine and on the whole better than
| anything we had before.
| drewdevault wrote:
| I didn't actually make that argument, though. I said that
| a user who circumvents ads on Spotify and buys albums
| from Bandcamp is more profitable for the artist than
| someone who just listens to Spotify ads, and I believe
| that this is factually true. A quick review of Google
| will turn up endless testimonies from artists who make
| more money from Bandcamp, usually by an order of
| magnitude or more. Spotify may be better than anything we
| had before (I don't believe this is true, but assume it
| for the moment), it is _not_ better than anything that
| came after.
|
| For the record, I am steelmanning a position in which
| abject piracy is a social negative, which I do not
| actually believe, but if we take that at face value my
| arguments still hold.
| blowski wrote:
| 1. If you _really_ like an album, buy it on Bandcamp,
| because it gives more money to the artist.
|
| 2. If you just listen to the occasional song, listen to
| them on Spotify. Artist gets _some_ money, but nowhere
| near as much as #1.
|
| 3. If you don't care about the artist getting anything at
| all, then use workarounds like this tool, or download on
| torrents.
|
| Most people used to do #3, and are now doing #2. #1 is
| just not going to happen, because there's too much
| friction.
| rglullis wrote:
| 0. If you _really_ want to support an artist, just ask
| what is the best way to just send them some hard cash
| every month? Patreon, ko-fi... even straight wire
| transfer (isn 't FedNow already working?).
|
| Why do we keep insisting on having middlemen?
| hhh wrote:
| I don't believe most people care about a lot of the
| artists they listen to enough to seek them out and send
| money this way.
|
| Not that I believe it's good or bad either way, it's just
| cumbersome. People want easy solutions. A few of my long
| distance friends are artists, and it makes them happy to
| see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl on
| Bandcamp above the regular price, and send nice notes
| with it.
|
| I can do this for more people more easily thru Bandcamp
| than figuring it all out myself.
| rglullis wrote:
| > most people (don't) care about a lot of the artists
| they listen
|
| Fair enough. Then don't pay anything?
|
| > it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new
| cassette or vinyl
|
| On the other hand, I do not want to buy merch, I don't
| care about physical media and I flat out refuse to buy
| something with DRM and/or through exploitative middlemen.
| ufocia wrote:
| Interesting to know. What are the comparative figures for
| youtube and TikTok videos?
| switch007 wrote:
| What's the median payout? i.e. is it skewed by some very
| high earning artists?
| hedora wrote:
| $0.
|
| 13,400 bands (not artists) got paid over $50K by spotify
| in 2020:
|
| https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-many-artists-
| are-...
|
| There are 8 million artists on spotify, and over 80% had
| under fifty monthly listeners:
|
| https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-
| artists-on...
|
| Put another way, 0.16% made over $50K. That's median
| income in the US. If you assume the money gets split
| across 5 band members, that's median income in Indonesia.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| This will also roughly be true for Bandcamp (albeit for
| each commercially failed band there's at least 3 friends
| and a mom, who will buy something off of the store and at
| a show, once when given the chance but I hope no one is
| cynical enough to argue about that being a lot better
| than $0).
|
| The fact that every creative endeavour or sport is a mix
| of a few pros and a lot of amateurs (in the sense that
| they do not make a living) is not an issue.
|
| The value of Spotify and the like to most artists is
| enabling them to publish to everyone for basically free,
| no matter how fringe or bad, and to do it all the time. I
| think that's wonderful.
| hedora wrote:
| They don't break down the distribution of how many
| artists got paid at all, but it looks like they're
| probably close to the estimated 15K bands that got non-
| trivial payments from Spotify this year:
|
| https://bandcamp.com/about
|
| > _In the past year alone, they've spent $194 million on
| 14.2 million digital albums, 10.4 million tracks, 1.75
| million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 350,000 cassettes,
| and 50,000 t-shirts._
|
| Note that $194M is less than 10% of Spotify's revenue.
|
| I'd love to see a breakdown by percentile income per
| band, but one thing's clear: If I buy something there,
| then more of my money goes to the artist I'm trying to
| support than they get from me streaming their album.
| hedora wrote:
| This computation is assuming streaming fraud though. If
| they see an account doing that, they'll flag it.
|
| Assume the album has 10 songs, is one hour long and costs
| $20. Ten songs means they get $0.04 each time you listen to
| it. So, you need to listen to the album 500 times for the
| artist to be paid for the album. I mostly listen in the
| car; call it under 2 hours a day, but lets assume 4 hours a
| day of listening to Spotify.
|
| A Spotify subscription is $11 a month. I can fit 4 non-
| fraud plays of the album into each day, so that's 4 * 30 =
| 120 streams. It'd take 4 months of listening to nothing but
| this one album for the artist to break even, and it'd cost
| me $44.
|
| Bandcamp + bittorrent would give the artists about twice as
| much money on average. Buying merch also pays artists more,
| assuming the cost of the item plus shipping is under half
| what they charge.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| That creation of a new class of musicians is not due to
| their ads model though, but due to offering a platform for
| discovery and distribution.
| code_runner wrote:
| The lion's share of Spotify subscription data goes straight
| to the labels. The labels are the ones not paying artists.
|
| It's crazy to expect all the music in the world on demand for
| $12 a month or whatever. Spotify can probably do better in
| some ways but I don't see how any of this justifies not
| giving the artists the pennies your mentioning.
| blowski wrote:
| I'm sceptical that Drew DeVault has a sock puppet account on
| HN, created 3 months ago, in addition to @ddevault. Forgive
| me if I'm wrong, but I don't like non-satirical
| impersonation.
| jasode wrote:
| _> You're better off listening to music however you please
| and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; _
|
| Often, the _" listening to music however you please"_ will
| contradict _" buying albums on Bandcamp to support the
| artists"_ ... because the particular artists the listener
| wants to listen to are on a big label and thus, _their albums
| are not on Bandcamp_.
|
| The _" buy on Bandcamp"_ advice only works if one likes to
| listen to the type of artists (typically indie) that happen
| to release on Bandcamp.
|
| On the other hand, if music listeners want the mainstream
| stuff (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Rolling Stones, etc)...
| they're only on the big tech music streamers like Spotify,
| Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc.
| apwell23 wrote:
| it also sidesteps the whole discovery issue. I would love
| to know how that person is discovering music that they buy
| on bandcamp.
| hedora wrote:
| Any of the locally-run radio stations in the SF Bay Area
| are good choices:
|
| https://radio-locator.com/cgi-
| bin/locate?select=city&city=mo...
|
| Here are some that I have found new music on (no
| particular order):
|
| KZSC, KFJC, KZSU, KSJS, KCSM, KKUP, KSJO, KBCZ, KDFC,
| KPOO, KALX
|
| There's also SomaFM.
|
| It looks like Pirate Cat Radio finally sold out to The
| Man, and got a broadcast license for their transmitter.
| Need to check them out again:
|
| https://kpcr.org/about/
|
| Apparently, there are now a handful of high school radio
| stations around here too. Does that mean the cool kids
| have kids in high school now? I must be getting old.
|
| Also, music podcasts are a thing. I like Dark Compass for
| metal.
| FirebornX wrote:
| I think the "buy on Bandcamp" advise extends to any other
| of a large number of marketplaces you can purchase popular
| artist albums from.
|
| I personally want to own music that I like and not just
| lose it if I decide to cut my subscriptions. I use Bandcamp
| for smaller acts and Qobuz for everything I can't find on
| Bandcamp.
| pg5 wrote:
| I don't get how this is justification for individuals to pay
| artists zero with thus bypass. Indie musicians who grow to
| have 10-100k+ monthly streams are making a nice chunk of
| money from it.
| specialist wrote:
| This Spotify client could autolink to artists on Bandcamp.
|
| Radio playlists often have artist links. Sometimes they work.
| For example:
|
| http://www.kser.org/content/live-playlist
| ajross wrote:
| > Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365
| days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from
| Spotify.
|
| Is that not reasonable? I mean, obviously this number
| represents a market price point: the system has reached an
| equilibrium where the "aggregate value" of being able to
| listen to music full time is $100/year (plus or minus all the
| confounding factors like who bears it and how it's
| distributed, etc...).
|
| Is $100/year wrong? That is, after all, right about the price
| of the subscription you're likely paying already. So... it
| sounds right to me? What's the mechanism you are imagining
| where customers paying for subscriptions of that order
| somehow produce payments to the artists that are
| significantly higher?
|
| I think a lot of the disconnect here is that the idea of
| "music revenue" is different in today's world than it was in
| the days of the 70's rock star. People used to pay a lot more
| for music! But they don't anymore, and all the parties take a
| hit, not just Spotify/Apple/et. al.
| tiku wrote:
| But do you need to get paid for each time someone listens to a
| copy? The artist isn't doing work for me when I listen to a
| song. Spotify should pay artists when their songs are added,
| not when listened.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| It's not your job to decide what Spotify's business model is.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| You know... I have very little empathy for Spotify. Their
| whole company is built on pirated music
| pelasaco wrote:
| and is your job to say what people should do or not?
| westhanover wrote:
| Obviously you have had your feelings hurt. If you don't
| work for Spotify, it is by definition not your job.
| kossTKR wrote:
| Deserve to be paid by whom though, Spotify already pays
| nothing?
|
| A song with 10000000 (10 million) streams , a pretty big hit
| and only reserved for big artists will give you 500 dollars
| before cuts, taxes etc.
|
| So not even the biggest artists will make anything substantial.
| apwell23 wrote:
| why are they publishing music on spotify then?
|
| I've discovered many artists on spotify and have paid for
| their live concerts.
|
| Curious, how do you discover music ?
| kossTKR wrote:
| I also use Spotify and like you have discovered a bunch of
| stuff.
|
| Spotify is just the state of things, the monopoly. Like
| lots of other current status quos bad for on everyone but
| investors, old money, the richest but there's no real
| alternatives.
|
| Though i know at least some smaller artists have moved off
| the platform, but people live in the biggest apps now so
| it's hard.
|
| Soundcloud somehow never really translated and bandcamp
| just went bad after it was sold to investors.
|
| I wonder if the scene is ripe for new platforms that's
| better for artists.
| superultra wrote:
| There's a lot of misinformation on this post.
|
| A 10 million stream song will gross about $30-40k. After cuts
| for an artist, depending on the structure, they might get
| anywhere from most of that to $5-10k.
|
| Not that Spotify is an equitable payment system but let's be
| honest about the numbers.
| pxoe wrote:
| signing up for a free service (or even just using it without an
| account with youtube music), and playing music for free, is the
| easiest way to support a creator, at no cost to you.
|
| the bar is so low - support creators with ad money for free,
| and some people still can't clear it, or refuse to clear it.
| the complaining is not fair, it's annoying. if you can't pay,
| or wouldn't pay otherwise, and still opposed to things like
| ads, that enable you to get something for free - you didn't
| deserve to get it in the first place. get over it and pay up or
| shut up. or rather, put your principles to work and refuse to
| engage with ad-supported content at all. instead of being like
| "well...i still want it. so let me get it completely for free.
| even though i could get it for free, but that's not enough for
| me." the complaints at their core are just 'i got it for free
| and i'm still not satisfied'. the annoying kind of entitlement
| that wants something so badly, it doesn't even dare to just
| refuse itself the thing it wants.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I feel that your comment is poorly articulated and ignores
| the primary reasons that many people use adblockers (malware
| protection). However, your point is very valid and I 100%
| agree. Compensate with your time or compensate with your
| money. I personally still have a large collection of compact
| discs. The sound quality difference is amazing, though people
| listening to music produced in the last decade might be less
| affected as that most of that music was engineered to be
| played over highly compressed lossy streaming and a half cm
| mono speaker that cannot reproduce anything below 100 or
| above 16000 hz as found on a smartphone.
| pxoe wrote:
| in context of music/video streaming (maybe even youtube and
| spotify specifically), if there's no malware in video and
| audio itself of ads that would be getting blocked, that
| isn't really "blocking malware". juuust a little
| disingenuous there.
|
| even with ads blocked "for malware protection", malware
| could end up being promoted within content, or just
| encountered somewhere, and there's more actual malware
| protection (some is built in to OS). so...it's not about
| "blocking malware" with blocking ads altogether, is it.
| especially when a bunch of ads are non-interactive and not
| even about software but stuff like food and other things.
| it's more about not seeing ads at all.
|
| and sometimes, ad blocking just isn't an "anti-malware"
| solution in itself. like, if you wouldn't be able to
| navigate app catalogues and kinda sus out what could be
| malware or just steer away from untrustworthy apps
| altogether, ad block isn't gonna help you much there.
| "native" ads (promotional content) throw an even bigger
| wrench into that.
| gumballindie wrote:
| HN has sadly become a bit of a #warezcentral. People demanding
| free stuff, either to train their ai models or for personal
| consumption.
| pelasaco wrote:
| What is more hacker than bypassing rules and paid services?
| What was phreaking all about?
| gumballindie wrote:
| Stealing content is not the type of rule breaking that
| phreaking was about.
| pelasaco wrote:
| you were probably not there or in any warez bbc...
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| phreaking was literally theft lol
| pelasaco wrote:
| > phreaking was literally theft lol
|
| Right? People get so attached to their political views
| that they dont even notice it.
|
| Kevin Poulsen, just wanted to win the Porsche for the
| poor...
| quesera wrote:
| "Theft of services", yes -- but the marginal cost/loss to
| the provider was effectively zero.
|
| In this way, phreaking was exactly like media piracy.
|
| But all of the above are entirely unrelated to the
| meaning of "Hacker" in HN.
| jug wrote:
| I think there's a difference between hacking for fun and
| feeling entitled to and arguing with weak arguments how you
| should be able to play music for free.
|
| This entire thread has absolutely nothing to do with e.g.
| telling how Spotify can be hacked and everything to do with
| script kiddies at best wanting to download a binary from
| GitHub to listen to music for free.
|
| But sure, maybe HN is that sad distribution mechanism now
| and, what's more, we're calling this hacker culture!
| pelasaco wrote:
| > I think there's a difference between hacking for fun
| and feeling entitled to and arguing with weak arguments
| how you should be able to play music for free.
|
| I don't think people want only to play music for free. I
| don't. But for sure this new definition of "what hacking
| is" is for sure annoying.
| gumballindie wrote:
| This. Period.
| pelasaco wrote:
| Please nobody needs such disclaimers. If people are not willing
| to pay for it, they won't pay it. If they are, they will do.
| westhanover wrote:
| Okay, I've thought twice and I don't care. Is it okay if I use
| this now?
| andrepd wrote:
| If you want to support musicians buy their music on bandcamp or
| go to their gigs and buy their merch. Don't think you're going
| to Spotify and doing them a favour by giving them 0.0005$ per
| play.
|
| Spotify is part of the problem, not the solution.
| superultra wrote:
| I work in the music industry and am intimately familiar with
| streaming earnings. While you are technically correct, I would
| much rather someone use this tool and buy a ticket to a show or
| an LP that stream over Spotify. In fact, the ad supported tier
| of Spotify is one of the lesser equitable ways to pay artists.
|
| Your intent is good but gatekeeping people to use an
| inequitable system is not the solution.
| Reubend wrote:
| > I would much rather someone use this tool and buy a ticket
| to a show or an LP that stream over Spotify.
|
| Sure! But at the end of the day, most of the people doing
| this will listen to hundreds of artists who they _don 't_
| purchase tickets from, or buy their music directly.
|
| The fact that royalty payment are so low is sad. But if you
| use this tool, you're lowering them even further to $0.00
| plagiarist wrote:
| Paying Spotify does not pay musicians. It pays Taylor Swift and
| Joe Rogan. The musicians I am listening to are receiving
| fractions of a penny per song.
| methou wrote:
| Which would benefit them more? Buying CD or listening on
| Spotify?
|
| I'm have a list of artist I want to pay back to:
|
| - the Monty Python - Tom Lehrer - Arrogant Worms - "Weird Al"
| Yankovic - the Dead South
|
| their work helped through different hard times.
|
| With latest update Spotify's Home is one scroll away from
| instagram story like short videos with a timer bar on it,
| trying to rush me with a decision on what to listen.
|
| OP is the answer to my new routine on consuming music, after
| which I'll need more direct ways to support the musicians than
| using using some Silicon Valley cooked poison.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| And not just that, bypassing restrictions put in place by
| Spotify, and where they make money from removing such
| restriction is a great way to get their attention and either
| receive a C&D or them adding further restrictions to break this
| bypass, making it a cat and mouse game.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| if you think musicians should be paid for their work then you
| shouldn't be using music streaming at all
| scosman wrote:
| " It is still recommended to support the creators by
| watching/liking/subscribing to the artists' YouTube channels or
| liking their tracks on Spotify (or purchasing a Spotify Premium
| subscription too)"
|
| Likes/subscribes are not support. Artists deserve to make a
| living.
|
| I'm supremely frustrated by the current state of TV shows (need
| 8 subscriptions and still have shows I can't watch). Music on
| the other hand is wonderful. Many services to choose from, all
| including basically all music. Different price points for
| ads/quality level. We should be delighted to pay $10 a month
| for unlimited music (or free ad supported) and not ruin a good
| thing.
| gr__or wrote:
| It should probably be said that the cuts artists get from the
| streamers are seen as insufficient and that platforms where
| you give more directly to artists, like BandCamp, are a
| better way to support artists you like.
| scosman wrote:
| Also: choose a platform that pays artists more. Apple and
| tidal pay out much more per stream than YouTube/spotify.
|
| But any form of paying is much much much better than
| piracy.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I liked the good ol' days when you could buy an LP/CD
| album and know that you'll have access to the music
| without depending on subscription services keeping them
| available.
|
| I'm particularly annoyed by Spotify only keeping
| 'Remastered' versions of tracks that sound
| smooth/full/pleasing to new-time listeners but shave a
| lot of character off the original.
| scosman wrote:
| You still can buy albums if you want. New, used, digital.
| Lots of options.
| Ringz wrote:
| The ,,remaster plague" is extremely annoying. But that's
| because artists re-record their music in order to have to
| give the record label less money.
| slily wrote:
| If you only listen to music that is on streaming services,
| then of course you would think that they have "basically all
| music", since everything else is forgotten. I pirated music
| before Spotify was available, which exposed me to a wide
| variety of international artists, and I still periodically
| look up some of my favorites on streaming services, only to
| find that they are still absent. So I continue to pirate and
| buy albums from time to time.
|
| Buying used records or borrowing them from the library does
| not earn artists money either, but no one bitches about that.
| As far as I'm concerned, downloading rips is the digital
| equivalent.
| swozey wrote:
| Spotify has been missing almost every hip hop b-side I've
| ever looked for. Like, the eps and lps that got these
| artists careers started aren't there. I had no idea how
| many b-sides some of them have until I started looking them
| up on soundcloud etc too.
| scosman wrote:
| Buying physical media you have the right to resell that one
| physical copy. Libraries pay extra fees for lending. In
| both cases only 1 person can use that copy at a given time,
| and the artist is paid for each copy. Downloading rips
| where thousands of people get an album in parallel without
| paying is in no way remotely equivalent.
|
| The occasional bootleg of an impossible to licence
| recording is something most music lovers do. But make your
| default consumption route a paying one. The services are
| absolutely amazing for what they cost.
|
| Yeah, some music hasn't made it to streaming. Usually for
| sad reasons. Those artists need legitimate support even
| more. Buy em.
|
| But please don't equate pirating to library lending.
| hackernewds wrote:
| I would rather support the artists on YouTube premium. But I
| have no easy way to port my music from Spotify to YouTube
| premium
| madsbuch wrote:
| > But when it comes time to pay for content, those people
| rarely are willing to pony up. You can see this happening with
| journalism, music, apps, etc.
|
| I think this sentiment is wrong. Personally, I pay for content
| and services that I find value adding (Kagi, Fastmail, etc.)
|
| That said: I am never going to pay for YouTube. The issue is
| that the entire platform and _all of its content is catered to
| ad-revenue_.
|
| I could be convinced to pay for a video service like YouTube
| where everything into its core and legacy has been based around
| user payments.
|
| Likewise I am never going to pay for news services that has
| adjusted their entire offering and content towards ad-revenue.
|
| But until I discover such a platform I am going to keep on my
| ad-blocker.
| hedora wrote:
| I actually don't mind ads. They're fine. The classified
| section of newspapers used to fund journalism in the US.
| Someone's got to pay Clark Kent, after all.
|
| What I do mind is algorithmic targeting. On the ad serving
| front, it funds an entire industry that does nothing but
| violate people's basic human right to privacy. On the
| personalized recommendation front, it provides a strong
| incentive for publishers to produce click-bait.
|
| There's one commercially viable corner of the internet that
| hasn't been ruined by this: Podcasts.
|
| Spotify is trying to ruin that too. Screw them.
|
| Also, if you're looking for a decent music service, consider
| something privacy preserving like Apple Music, or (better)
| something that uses metadata-based targeting, like Tidal.
|
| I find most of my music by following hyperlinks in album /
| band reviews that were written by actual humans. There's a
| button for that in Tidal. I've heard Amazon Music has such a
| button as well. I've also found listening to high-quality
| (local) radio stations with good DJ's is a goldmine, as are
| music podcasts.
|
| I've also found that non-tailored recommendations (people who
| like album X like album Y, grouping of opening acts with
| bands, and, when done right, old-fashioned display ads) also
| provide a decent signal, since they're typically curated or
| use the things I just mentioned as signal (instead of using
| your cookware preferences, or sexual orientation, or
| whatever).
|
| In addition to being the ethical alternative, it turns out
| that having bands and critics list things that influenced an
| album or were influenced by an album is a much better way to
| explore the space of modern music than via payola with a
| dollop of high-dimensional clustering.
|
| So, in addition to the ad blocker, I'm not paying for
| anything that tries to spoon-feed me payola or clickbait.
| chefandy wrote:
| > Personally, I pay for content and services that I find
| value adding
|
| While it would be a convenient reality, the people on HN are
| not even close to representative of the general population,
| and you can't generalize their tendencies. How many Kagi and
| Fastmail users are there compared to Google and Microsoft?
| Look at Google Play reviews for apps that front paid
| services: even for astonishingly cheap ones, a considerable
| percentage essentially say "not free: uninstalled! Those
| conniving bastards!"
|
| And if you're willing to pay for services instead of using
| ad-supported platforms, you must pay all of your music and
| other content, then? You don't even have to stomach the DRM
| from Apple Music, Amazon, e-reader platforms, et al with
| music shops, book stores, movie theaters, Bandcamp, Patreon,
| Substack -- there are so many services through which you can
| exercise your principles and pay for content directly.
|
| It's pretty common for the tech crowd to wag their finger at
| people who feel entitled to free commercial software and
| services (e.g. Kagi, Fastmail,) yet do the same exact thing
| with arts and entertainment. Getting access to content on ad-
| supported services isn't _your right_. There are
| alternatives.
|
| I'm not saying you must uninstall your ad blocker-- there are
| many unavoidable and essential things-- e.g., things for
| work-- that contain ads even when they really shouldn't. But
| you can't just assume that since you pay for some stuff, then
| everybody else is paying for some stuff, and since the
| distributors are real jerks, you have ethical carte blanche
| to take people's work without any payment. Creators don't
| have a choice to use these systems because people won't pay
| (directly) for things.
| madsbuch wrote:
| I am quite sure I do not have the ethical card in any of
| these discussions. I also pay way less than the combined
| sum of the value I receive from the internet.
|
| But there is a marketplace. And the content of YouTube is
| not worth the price of YouTubes premium offerings because
| they embed ads. Ie. I pay to remove YouTube's ads, but not
| video sponsorships.
|
| That would be like paying for Kagi and still only be
| presented SEO-optimized worthless content - I pay for Kagi
| because I feel like they can filter away that content much
| better than Google.
|
| I am saying that a product you pay for is not the same as
| an ad-supported product. It is not just about stripping the
| product of ads after the user has paid.
|
| So everybody not willing to pay for a Gmail offering
| without ads, I completely understand them.
| chefandy wrote:
| > I am quite sure I do not have the ethical card in any
| of these discussions.
|
| Realizing that you're doing something unethical is
| philosophically better than denying the obvious. However,
| as a commercial artist, I'm not really interested in any
| gussied-up justification beyond that statement.
| madsbuch wrote:
| as a commercial artist you should not tinker in ethics
| but try to sell and make some. money staying within the
| law.
|
| tbh,i hate moralization over what I decide to consume. If
| I should consume less travel for the sake of the
| environment, make it more expensive by taxing it.
|
| if you want to earn more money as a commercial artist,
| don't morally trip me into something I am not legally
| obligated to (watching ads), but deliver a product that
| is more valuable.
| chefandy wrote:
| I actually make plenty of money as a very technical
| commercial artist coming from a dev background, but
| thanks for your condescending and presumptuous concern.
| Believe it or not, I actually care enough about people
| _who aren't even me_ to point out when people are doing
| something materially unfair just because they can. If you
| hate people commenting on your admittedly unethical
| behavior, you might consider not publicly discussing it.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Your opinion represents everything that stops progress:
| The idea that we can use moral instead of sane
| legislation.
|
| I never said I was morally wrong. I merely said that I
| did not have a moral upper hand. I think I am morally
| indifferent.
|
| > you must pay all of your music and other content, then
|
| I do in fact pay for my music. I do in fact have news
| paper subscriptions. I don't think you got my point: I
| don't both want to pay for my cake on _not_ eat it.
|
| If I pay for content, it should not have sponsorships.
|
| But then again, I did not grow up with paying for
| satellite TV while also being fed ads 20% of the time
| watching shows riddled with product placement. In Denmark
| we have proper public service offerings (that people
| _pay_ for). In Denmark indie artists regularly receive
| grants to work on their art.
|
| On the point of supporting artists, by virtue of being a
| European, I probably have the moral upper hand.
| chefandy wrote:
| Where did I say these ideas shouldn't be legislated?
|
| You can't be "morally indifferent" if you're engaging in
| activities that aren't morally neutral. You're just being
| indifferent to the fact that your actions aren't moral.
| This isn't complicated.
|
| Your paying something to someone else doesn't absolve you
| from not paying someone.
|
| People generally see themselves as good people, and they
| use who they are, and other things they do to justify
| wrongdoing. This is a great example of that.
| chefandy wrote:
| PS: I also specifically noted that I wasn't suggesting
| getting rid of your ad blocker. I think the ad-driven
| surveillance capitalism model is a scourge on humanity,
| and I hope, for your sake, that you never have to see
| another ad, or be tracked by some creepy spy network ever
| again. But you, like many other people in tech,
| conveniently ignore the practically limitless sources of
| entertainment you can pay for directly and use your
| distaste of ad-driven platforms to _not pay artists at
| all._ And then, people usually talk about it like is some
| kind of activism rather than pure entitlement. Is
| especially great when people cite how poorly those
| platforms pay artists to justify not paying artists at
| all. lol
| madsbuch wrote:
| I live in a country where more than 80% of my salary goes
| to redistribution. That redistribution also finances
| artists through grants, education.
|
| I do not believe in your rather narrow sighted way of
| thinking about how one pays for the artists - that is has
| to be private, directly for the service, and on
| commercial terms.
|
| Especially since "me and many people in tech" has
| probably supported artists way more than you ever will by
| watching a Sneakers ad.
| chefandy wrote:
| I don't think those payments should be private either,
| but they are. You can't stop paying people because you
| think they should be publicly paid, if they're not going
| to be publicly paid instead. And unless the content you
| consume is all made by artists that live under that
| system, what your system does is irrelevant. As
| convenient as it would be for our circumstances or
| identities to relieve us from our duty to deal fairly
| with other people, it doesn't. In fact, it's the first
| defense we reflexively cite when justifying something we
| do wrong.
|
| The fact that you're using your residence in a country
| with more humane economic policy as justification for
| treating people with the exact opposite principles
| exemplifies that.
|
| Stop the mental gymnastics. You feel entitled to people's
| art, and your self-image of being a good person with the
| right political ideals absolves you from what you
| consider to be a minor indiscretion in simply taking it.
| You're wrong.
| Reubend wrote:
| > Personally, I pay for content and services that I find
| value adding... That said: I am never going to pay for
| YouTube... I am going to keep on my ad-blocker.
|
| So let me get this straight: you proudly claim that you pay
| for services which provide you value. But you don't think its
| hypocritical that you use YouTube with an ad-blocker and
| avoid paying for the subscription?
|
| If you keep going back and using it, then it IS providing you
| with value. You might argue that the value is very small, but
| it's also not a big inconvenience to watch a few ads. You're
| still consuming content without contributing anything back.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I get mixed feelings when reading this comment while
| remembering the many people gushing about how they formed
| lifelong friendships through what.cd.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Musician deserve to be paid for their work
|
| Nobody prevents them from doing live performances, you know?
| Reubend wrote:
| Live performances are great! But the average person listen to
| hundreds of different artists through Spotify, and they most
| certainly don't go to the live performances of all those
| artists.
|
| I'm not advocating for Spotify in particular. If you can
| support the musicians more directly, that's even better! But
| it's not fair to pay nothing, block ads, and then keep
| consuming content without giving anything back.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > But it's not fair to pay nothing,
|
| When you listen to the radio you pay for nothing. I don't
| really see where is the injustice here.
| larodi wrote:
| I would actually pay extra for proper open-source, minimal
| win32 client for spotify which runs every damn winbox. This
| electron apps Spotify been trying to get right for so many
| years is such a waste of information and cpu cycles sometimes.
| Can't believe a company which manages such enormous amount of
| data is so bad at UI
| bitcharmer wrote:
| There are platforms other than windows. Electron is one of
| the simpler ways to get software released on multiple
| operating systems without having to support different builds
| and architectures.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Personally I recommend you check if your favoured artist is on
| Bandcamp and buy their music DRM free. The artist will get 85%
| or 90%, Bandcamp will take 15% or 10% (based on sales volume).
|
| As a hypothetical, if you found them selling an album for $5
| and you bought it to download on Bandcamp, they'd earn $4.50,
| which is about the same as streaming their songs about 400
| times on Tidal, 1,000 times on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon
| Music or Deezer, or 4,000 times on YouTube, Pandora or
| SoundCloud
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| There is negligent connection between my buying a Spotify
| subscription and the artists I listen to getting paid because
| of the scheme they devised to support big fish only. So I try
| to support musicians directly and treat Spotify as a discovery
| tool (rather lousy I'd say).
| vvillena wrote:
| > Musician deserve to be paid for their work
|
| I agree. Does Spotify use my money to pay the people I listen
| to on a given month? They do not. They lump all the revenue
| together and use it to pay for content in a set of deals with
| music distribution companies, and some individual
| artists/podcasters. Which means the percentages are skewed in
| favor of the big names and labels.
|
| A fair subscription music service should be transparent, and
| even be able to provide detailed information about how much you
| are paying to the artists you listen to. E.g. if I don't listen
| to Coldplay, none of my money should go to Coldplay. If the
| streaming service wants to, they can use part of their cut to
| pay Coldplay a bit of extra money.
| jzb wrote:
| "buy music directly if you don't want to subscribe! A lot of
| smaller artists provide ways to purchase their music that give
| them a large percentage of the proceeds, and you can get the
| music DRM-free if that's something you care about."
|
| Amen. If you have the money and really like a band or artist,
| find a way to put some money _directly in their hands_ if at
| all possible.
|
| One: They're going to see a lot more money this way and be able
| to make _more_ music in the long run.
|
| Two: Music can and does disappear from Spotify and other
| services due to rights and licensing issues.
|
| Three: It's not super-common but sometimes the originals are
| replaced with remasters or something that isn't quite right to
| my ears. Robyn Hitchcock's first album ("Black Snake Diamond
| Role") is on Spotify, last I looked. But it was remastered for
| digital or whatever and they couldn't find all the original
| masters - meaning that one of the songs that used to have
| saxophone doesn't. It sounds _entirely_ wrong now.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Producers and record labels do provide a service with
| distribution which artists share their commissions for. The
| idea that the record labels don't deserve their cuts is
| confusing, do they also not have employees and artists?
|
| Jack Harlow might be one example, but you see the dearth of
| D2C music and platforms like TIDAL that the marketing and
| distribution network does matter, and helps good artists take
| off. Whether you believe mainstream music is "good" or not,
| is up to your preference
| jzb wrote:
| I didn't say anything about not paying labels. My point was
| you should buy music rather than counting on it to trickle
| down from Spotify.
|
| Note that many of the artists I've been buying from aren't
| on major labels, though.
| znpy wrote:
| > Musician deserve to be paid for their work
|
| If anybody actually cares even one tiny bit about a specific
| musician they should go to live events, buy the original
| merchandise and/or buy the CDs.
|
| Paying Spotify and similar services is the least efficient way
| to get money into artists' pockets.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| You can and should buy music you like on Bandcamp (or even
| directly from artists when they offer it), after you've thrown
| then a fraction of a cent via streaming.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| For something that puts "not using electron" so prominently I
| didn't expect it using flutter. I admit I don't really have much
| experience with it, I thought it was like react-native (but
| better?), still far from truly native apps.
|
| Im here to being told I'm wrong. I would love to, specially since
| we can transpile clojure to dart
| kevincox wrote:
| Flutter is pretty native as far as resource usage goes. The
| language does use a VM and GC but it's performant enough. There
| isn't native look and feel though. (They can emulate it a bit,
| but it isn't perfect)
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Flutter doesn't use a VM for release builds anymore. (Still
| GCed obviously).
| devjab wrote:
| I'm sort of surprised it's considered a good thing. Some of my
| favourite programs use electron, like visual studio code. I
| haven't used Spotify though, so maybe that is one of the many
| electron apps that suck?
|
| I was very unimpressed by flutter when we PoC it at work, but
| that was years ago, so maybe it's gotten better since.
| piva00 wrote:
| Spotify's desktop app has been pretty snappy for me, and it's
| been like that for many years across different machines.
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Spotify Desktop also doesn't exactly use Electron, but 1
| layer below: CEF
| diggan wrote:
| Also, they've used CEF since before Electron was even a
| thing (before Atom even).
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Yes, and they are doing it better than Steam Client i
| think.
| amomchilov wrote:
| VSCode couldn't support multiple windows until just recently,
| entirely because of a limitation from the early days of
| Electron.
|
| When "multiple windows" is a feature to be announced (as if
| weren't trivial on any native stack), you know it's a sad
| state is affairs.
| diggan wrote:
| > VSCode couldn't support multiple windows until just
| recently, entirely because of a limitation from the early
| days of Electron.
|
| That sounds like Microsoft deflecting blame. You've been
| able to do multiple windows for a very long time in
| Electron, I remember being able to do so in 2019 at the
| very least, and the book "Electron in Action"
| (https://www.manning.com/books/electron-in-action) even
| have a chapter dedicated to it, a book which was released
| in 2018.
| tredre3 wrote:
| VSCode always could have multiple windows. You can open
| multiple projects and they all share the same
| process(es), so clearly Electron supports multiple
| windows.
|
| What it couldn't do, though, was to have a single
| workspace span multiple windows (ie "detach" tabs).
|
| Whether or not this was caused by an electron limitation
| or a design flaw in VSCode, I can't say. Though I find it
| hard to believe that it would have been impossible to
| implement had they really wanted to.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Don't understand all the fuss about VSCode. I'm sticking
| with neovim.
| rubymamis wrote:
| Yep. This app uses 230mb of RAM on my machine compared to
| Spotify that uses 208mb. But it's definitely more performant
| than my hideously slow Electron Spotify client. I'm really done
| with Electron. I hope this shaming of Electron apps continue
| because I can't stand this degradation of software. The only
| Electron app of recent that had good performance is Notion
| Calendar (used to be Cron). Although, Notion itself is
| painfully slow. This is why I'm building a Notion alternative
| in Qt C++ and QML[1].
|
| [1] https://www.get-plume.com/
|
| EDIT: Is the app down? It doesn't load the "Browse" content for
| me.
| icy wrote:
| Plume looks so sick. Looking forward to it. A Vim-like modal
| editing mode would be so cool, I think.
| rubymamis wrote:
| Thanks! I heard many requests for this, so I'll consider
| it, but if I do get to that it will be at a later stage.
| subtra3t wrote:
| Weird, it takes up ~150MB while having a 500+ song playlist
| loaded.
| prg318 wrote:
| To respond to your edit, yes - it seems like the app is down
| - nothing seems to load at all on the Browse tab or anywhere
| else...
| olah_1 wrote:
| Plume looks nice! How does the sync work? Local first rocks,
| but I do want some redundancy as well. Are there plans for
| multiplayer or sharing?
| rubymamis wrote:
| Thanks! One of the next features we'll on work will be
| support for arbitrary folders (basically all notes will be
| plaintext inside folders, currently they are all plaintexts
| but inside a local database), so you could sync your notes
| with any cloud provider (e.g., Dropbox). We'll also provide
| our own built-in sync option. There are plans for sharing
| notes, but not quite for real-time collaboration, if that's
| what you mean by "multiplayer". There are plans for
| collaboration in the future, but not real-time - I just
| don't think real-time collaboration is good for text-based
| formats.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Coming from AppKit/UIKit I tried to learn Qt and it was just
| awful. I hated how tightly coupled with C++ it was.
| Everything was based around subclassing and overriding
| methods, there was no way to just have a dumb UIView and set
| its frame and add a bunch of subviews to it. There was also
| no clean way to expose a C ABI to use a scripting language
| (with an FFI) to configure the UI easily
|
| All of the Qt apps I know about (Ripcord, Dolphin) are fast
| but the aesthetics of the UI was just terrible. So I gave up
| on learning Qt. But this thing you made, Plume, actually
| looks good. If there isn't a monstrosity of hacks and
| boilerplate underneath this UI I might give Qt another shot.
| Otherwise I think I might just build my own thing from
| scratch on top of OpenGL or something....
| rubymamis wrote:
| I feel ya! I thought the same, until I discovered the world
| of combining Qt C++ and QML. QML is extremely easy to learn
| (I studied all the basics in one day using this Udemy
| course[1] (not affiliated, just love his work). BTW, he has
| many free awesome YouTube videos for Qt C++. Creating an
| aesthetically pleasing app in any framework takes a lot of
| effort (it's mostly about being focused on what necessary
| and then creating a lot of white space around it, haha).
| It's so easy to create beautiful, fluid UI with QML. I've
| created a short video that demonstrate what I'm working on
| currently[2] - a Kanban view inside my block editor (kinda
| buggy now, still WIP). Hopefully, this does inspire you
| that it's possible.
|
| And it's actually pretty easy to write the C++ code. I
| don't really use custom sub-classing much. I use Qt's
| QtObject which allows me to create C++ object that work
| beautifully with QML. Bryan's course doesn't delve deeper
| as that, I had to do a lot of searching to figure it out. I
| hope to open source some of Plume's components to inspire
| others to do the same. Another point regarding aesthetics,
| it really takes effort, but Qt can be extended using
| community libraries. For example, if you want your app to
| look native on macOS and Windows with a sexy frameless
| border with a transparent window, then you could use the
| awesome qwindowkit[3]. Another example, I wanted to
| position the window buttons on macOS (the traffic light
| buttons) differently, but couldn't figure it out, and
| obviously this can't be done using Qt alone, so I looked at
| Electron's source code and saw how they do it there in
| Objective-C and incorporated it in my app (ChatGPT-4 wasn't
| very helpful at that). Now I really want to have these
| buttons' fill color transparent like Things 3 does, so I'm
| looking at how to achieve that haha. I already got some
| ideas. If you need any further help, let me know![4][5].
|
| EDIT: A cool feature of combining Qt C++ with QML is that
| you get the performance of a compiled language like C++
| with the reactivity, ease-of-use, fluid and easy animations
| (and more) of QML. You can see on Plume's website that it's
| 4x faster than the fastest comparable native app on macOS.
|
| [1] https://www.udemy.com/course/qml-for-beginners/
|
| [2]
| https://www.loom.com/share/b40009316f6b420b9ece15a1f99e987c
|
| [3] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit
|
| [4] https://twitter.com/mamistvalove
|
| [5] ruby AT mamistvalove DOT gmail
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Thanks for the candid reply. Man... this sounds like too
| much for me. Oh well. Guess I'll use AppKit for now and
| if I wanna add Windows/Linux I'll bring in Qt. Definitely
| will come back to this comment if/when that happens.
| rubymamis wrote:
| No problem mate, let me know if you need any help. Good
| luck with AppKit!
| jwells89 wrote:
| I know what you mean. Would _love_ to just have AppKit
| /UIKit with some platform integrations (e.g. correct widget
| themes) on other platforms. Closest that exists to that is
| GNUStep, but it's stuck on an old version of Objective-C
| (no Swift) and targets something like OS X 10.6 with API
| compatibility.
|
| Outside of the that the next closest I've tinkered with is
| GTK, but since version 3 it kinda gave up on looking right
| running under anything but GTK/Qt-based desktops. It's easy
| to make idiomatic bindings for which is nice though.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Yea, GNUstep isn't bad.
|
| It uses an old version of ObjC? Are you sure that's
| correct? ObjC is open source right? There is no reason to
| be using an old version.
|
| Yeah the frameworks are kinda old but the new frameworks
| (since ~2014) don't really bring anything new to the
| table. And Swift is overrated anyway.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Not entirely sure about Obj-C version.
|
| Disagree regarding frameworks, though. The newer
| snapshot-based APIs for NSTableView, NSOutlineView, and
| NSCollectionView (added in 2020 as part of macOS 11) are
| a massive improvement over the old index-based ones for
| example, and there's been numerous polish and quality of
| life improvements scattered throughout.
|
| Also disagree about Swift if only for the large number of
| things it comes with out of the box that'd require a
| third party dependency with Objective-C, but so many more
| errors being caught at compile time, no need to maintain
| header files, and no awkward split between C and Obj-C
| for basic types are nice too. I still enjoy Obj-C for
| some types of projects but as project complexity
| increases so too does my preference towards Swift.
| chaxor wrote:
| Yeah, electron is _so over_.
|
| Now tbe modern tech stack is to build a bash+python app in an
| env, add a touch of R, some js, and bundle it into docker
| container, then make that docker container into wasm with
| container2wasm, and give that out as the executable.
|
| It's wonderful honestly. You can get just about anything
| working with stitching together stuff, and then serve your
| 10GB executable to anyone :).
|
| So MuCh BeTtEr ThIs MoDeRn WaY!
| dv35z wrote:
| Serious question: What's the feasibility of local web apps
| in containers, which appear to the user to be a "regular"
| app. E.g. Django + SQLite, running in a Docker container,
| and run by a Mac app shortcut. How would you recommend
| setting up and running that stack? Better ideas?
| denysvitali wrote:
| Flutter, from experience, works really well on Android.
| Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the web (see for
| example [1]).
|
| I think that if these performance issues were to be solved,
| Flutter would see a bigger adoption. In any case IMHO Flutter
| >>>>> Electron
|
| [1]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/56257
| jwells89 wrote:
| Last I knew it had significant performance issues on iOS
| (framerate drops/stutters), which dampens its cross platform
| appeal somewhat and is part of why I've heard of apps using
| Flutter for the Android port of their app, but nowhere else.
| stolsvik wrote:
| How old is that info? We're using it, and it is buttery
| smooth on both phone platforms.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Not that old. Only when Impeller was enabled by default
| last year did Flutter become usable on ios.
| lxgr wrote:
| Flutter on the web is absurd: At least when I last checked,
| it's been rendering UI widgets into an HTML canvas by
| default, using its own low-level drawing library.
|
| That sounds about as good of an idea as the old Java desktop
| GUI framework that used to (poorly) imitate native UI
| elements of Windows and macOS: Everything always looked three
| major versions behind and felt extremely janky.
| denysvitali wrote:
| I wouldn't care less if it worked in a performant way - in
| the end Flutter apps are using their own design (Material 2
| / 3) - so rendering them in a Canvas is OK-ish.
|
| The problem is that, on the web, the performance is
| extremely poor, so Flutter is still not worth being used
| there (IMHO).
| Alifatisk wrote:
| I tried Flutter on my previous project, it's good, like really
| good. Dart has its weird parts but other than that, I enjoy it
| a lot.
| lxgr wrote:
| I've heard many good things about it from Android developers.
| As an iOS user, I despise it. Apps written in it feel
| extremely janky. How is it even possible to bring down an
| iPhone 15 Pro to what seems like less than 10 fps in simple
| UI element scrolling?
| aydarkh wrote:
| I think it's skill issue
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Sounds like bad implementation, Flutter especially now with
| the Impeller engine is very smooth on Android / iOS. I
| don't know about the web though.
| lxgr wrote:
| It happens for me even with Google Pay on iOS. I'd hope
| that at least Google would know how to use it correctly.
| tristenharr wrote:
| I was surprised when I learned Flutter actually runs as native
| code without needing a JavaScript bridge like so many others.
|
| Although similar to something like React Native - Flutter does
| paint the screen. Personally I see it as a potential Electron
| replacement in the future.
|
| From what I've seen Impeller is also a big help on iOS. Screen
| jank was pretty bad for us when Flutter was using Skia as a
| rendering engine, although when I last messed with Flutter (~6
| months ago) Impeller felt almost production ready but iirc
| there were still a couple small things, not sure if they are
| better now.
|
| Personally I've become a big fan of Flutter, especially for
| back-office/utility type apps. We would follow all the Material
| Design 3 guidelines and when it comes to time spent, if you
| need to develop the same app on more than 1 platform, it's
| worth consideration.
|
| I've found some people will say: "But it's hard to get it to
| look like a native app in Flutter" but for me I've always seen
| that as more of a skill issue. You are literally painting the
| screen, you can get whatever pixel perfect design you want, if
| it can be Figma'd it can also be Fluttered and to be fair there
| are Cupertino widgets and you absolutely can get the best of
| both/many worlds if you want. Just like how on the web you can
| do a transform based on device width to switch between the
| mobile or web view, if you desire you can have different
| widgets show up for different platforms and give everybody a
| native feel. I personally still think that's easier than
| writing/maintaining multiple individual apps.
|
| I think the biggest downside though is that search engines
| don't do well with Flutter Web. It isn't the nice easy to crawl
| HTML, and it's really hard to get a flutter app indexed or to
| give it good SEO. There's also silly rules that search engines
| have about how the content displayed to the user vs crawlers
| has to have the same data. (I.e. when the web-crawler asks for
| your page, you are supposed to give it a page with the same
| data you would give the user.) The best we could do to improve
| SEO was to make the landing page a page that in the background
| ran all the same queries and shoved the data into HTML tables,
| with a popover that said "this is a page for robots that had a
| button that said "Take me to ABC.com" and a check box that said
| "automatically redirect me next time" that we stored in a
| cookie. It was hacky and not a good user experience.
|
| For now, whenever I need to do anything GUI I will use React
| for the web and Flutter for everything else, but it would be
| nice to truly be able to only use 1 framework for every
| platform, which to be fair I've used Flutter web and it isn't
| all to bad if it weren't for the issue with search-engines web-
| crawlers. For apps that don't need SEO.. Flutter is a great
| choice. I suspect we'll see a lot more SaaS apps building in
| Flutter in the next few years. I think it's on the cusp of
| being mature enough to be seriously considered for production
| scenarios.
|
| I'm just mostly worried about the ecosystem. Google chose Dart
| for flutter after the results of a lot of research that only
| Google scale companies can do and to be honest although it IS a
| lesser known language it isn't a bad one. It's AOT and JIT so
| the hot reload is amazing. It reads like "insert most language
| you know" here. If you know how to code nothing in Dart should
| be drastic or surprising. If anything I'd almost say Dart is
| boring, which I like boring things. I've experience with a
| handful of languages, and for me Dart ranks highly in terms of
| usability/ergonomics. But there's a not unsubstantial risk that
| Google could decide to drop the ball and Flutter could become
| kind of like the Windows phone. Really great, but canned
| because people didn't build enough things for it.
|
| If I were on the Flutter team I'd be most focused on figuring
| out how to deal with SEO issues. (assuming impeller does indeed
| provide a full fix for the screen jank, I'd assume it's gotten
| better in the past few months, can anyone comment as to if it's
| "there" yet or not?)
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >can anyone comment as to if it's "there" yet or not?
|
| It's enabled for ios by default. Android probably in two more
| releases if I had to guess. If you were doing a lot of custom
| stuff you may run into issues with Impeller on some CPU bound
| tasks regarding tessellation but for a regular flutter app it
| will almost always outperform Skia especially around previous
| pain points like scrolling and animation.
| no_time wrote:
| The last time I tried Flutter it was hilariously bad. The
| "Flutter Gallery" sample was blasting my GPU to render at max
| framerate without even moving the cursor.
|
| Now with Spotube it appears it has gotten better. But I can
| still see:
|
| - "off feeling" scrolling with the scrollwheel
|
| - some kind of framepacing issue when using the scrollbar at
| the right hand side
|
| - Click latency that's better than electron but still worse
| than anything QML/QT has to offer.
|
| - DPI set in KDE/X11 seems to be ignored. I'm not sure about
| this, could be a personal preference of the developer to have
| things this size.
|
| I'm using the flatpak build with a 6700XT.
| accrual wrote:
| [removed]
| bananapub wrote:
| are you sure you read the link to understand what it does?
| accrual wrote:
| [removed]
| bayindirh wrote:
| It doesn't get the music from Spotify via bypassing some
| safeguards. It searches the music on YouTube and streams
| its audio.
|
| It fuses two free services together.
|
| Edit: I pay for premium, too.
| bananapub wrote:
| even by HN standards, this is an extremely low quality
| reply, amazing
| subtra3t wrote:
| What did they say?
| dotancohen wrote:
| The Holy Grail is found in the Castle of Aggghhhh....
| atentaten wrote:
| Looks interesting, but I only got placeholder images on the
| homepage using the universal mac version.
| EasyMark wrote:
| you have to log in with setting bottom left "gear" to access
| your spotify data.
| atentaten wrote:
| Got it. Thanks
| iamsaitam wrote:
| "It is still recommended to support the creators by
| watching/liking/subscribing to the artists' YouTube channels or
| liking their tracks on Spotify (or purchasing a Spotify Premium
| subscription too)."
|
| I hope musicians can pay bills with likes, since ponying up
| EUR10.99 is a huge ask.
|
| PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their
| spotify checks, but that's not the point.
| WilTimSon wrote:
| > PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their
| spotify checks, but that's not the point.
|
| What IS the point, though? You seem to be criticising people
| who don't purchase a Spotify Premium while also admitting
| Spotify barely pays them anything. Yes, this client gives
| nothing to the artist, Spotify gives next to nothing, both are
| bad in different ways.
|
| If anyone genuinely wants to support musicians - buy their
| merch, go to their concerts, buy their albums on Bandcamp or
| physical media. No streaming platform pays them their dues.
| iamsaitam wrote:
| The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid
| from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something
| isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route
| and not pay anything at all.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Not ridiculous at all. If you use the service that pays the
| artists below the value, you are endorsing that
| underpayment. You're literally voting with your wallet that
| underpaying the artists is fine.
|
| Pirating doesn't support the artists, but it's also not
| weakening their expected rights for future business
| contracts, which supporting services like Spotify does;
| after all, if all these other artists are getting paid 'x'
| much, and all these consumers think this is what it's
| worth, how is anyone but Beyonce or Swift or Kanye gonna
| have any hope of arguing against that?
|
| There is no way to inform Spotify that you don't endorse
| their business practices, except to not subscribe.
| Subscribing is an endorsement.
|
| Personally, I purchase my music individually on iTunes (and
| download and convert to mp3). Apple still takes a cut, but
| it's _much_ lower than the near-100% cut that streaming
| services take.
| Ger_Onimo wrote:
| > near-100% cut that streaming services take
|
| All the main music services operate on the 70/30 split in
| favour of the license holders.
|
| If you pay $10 for a subscription, $7 gets put into a
| pool with all the subscription and ad revenue for your
| country, and that gets divided out proportionally based
| on the playback in your country. If Taylor Swift gets 10%
| of the plays in the US, she gets 10% of the pot.
|
| If you're of the opinion that pirating artists' music is
| better for them in the long run, that's cool. But at
| least be informed on what the business model you're
| complaining about actually entails.
| keymasta wrote:
| And then you can see that the bitrate is 2-20x better. I
| personally get bothered by anything under CD quality
| (44.1kHz 16-bit) so all these platforms are basically
| unlistenable for me.
| westhanover wrote:
| It is the musician's job to figure out how to pay his bills not
| mine.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| and it's your job to figure out how to entertain yourself,
| you're not entitled to get that entertainment from music for
| free.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Radio is free. And I change station when the ads come on.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > ponying up EUR10.99 is a huge ask.
|
| I guess that would depend on how much music you listen to. If
| you listen very occasionally, then yeah EUR10.99 for unlimited
| streaming isn't worth it. In that case, you can just buy songs
| individually.
|
| If the price for individual songs is also a "big ask" for you,
| then you simply don't think music is worth paying for.
|
| This isn't a "pay what you want" model where someone creates a
| product and asks you to pay whatever you feel is appropriate,
| they're creating a product and setting an explicit price for
| it.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Since this is using youtube to play the music, other than being
| open source, what advantage does this have over just using
| youtube music revanced?
| Faceless1230 wrote:
| It has access to your Spotify liked songs collection/Playlists
| and also all the curated Spotify Playlists
| tiku wrote:
| Tried it for a while but it just isn't working for me. Hangs a
| lot while using it in my car. Also can't use it with my Android
| Auto head unit.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Very cool mixup.. I have yt premium, and I boycotted Spotify a
| long time ago. However, Spotify is probably still the best
| service for playlists.
| piva00 wrote:
| YouTube Music pays less than Spotify per stream, if you're
| boycotting Spotify for that reason I think it's good to be
| aware of it.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| I'm boycotting them because of many things.
|
| Although youtube music is in the plan, I don't use it,
| because the UI is not that great and there's this weird
| entanglement with youtube videos.
|
| I generally use (video) youtube and soundcloud for music.
| They're the easiest way to find the stuff I like to listen
| to.
| NJRBailey wrote:
| Do you have average figures for how much each platform pays
| per stream? My colleague has his music on both and has said
| YouTube pays 2x as much per stream compared to Spotify.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Just when rhythm got banned in discord few years ago, I made a
| discord bot that did something similar. I supported various
| sources of playlists/urls, and I'll then go get the metadata from
| the platform, get the song name and few other details, search it
| on youtube and stream from there. It was intended to be self-
| hosted for your own server. Was fun to use until the replacement
| bots started supporting youtube again and it got made redundant,
| a whole bunch of them paused youtube support around the time
| rhythm got the C&D notice.
| npstr wrote:
| I don't know if I was the first to come up with the idea or
| implementation, but my contribution certainly ended up in the
| largest open source music streaming bot at the time:
| https://github.com/freyacodes/archived-bot/pull/90
|
| Was quite a similar idea: load Playlist from Spotify but play
| the actual music from YouTube. Still proud of that one, good
| times when Discord was wild territory.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| For something that uses this approach (metadata from spotify,
| music from yt) but with downloads, take a look at spotdl[1]. Very
| useful for mpd. Disclaimer: not my project, but I've had some
| success with it.
|
| 1. https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I've been relying for years on Mediahuman's downloader:
| https://www.mediahuman.com/youtube-to-mp3/31/
|
| It will download any Spotify playlist or YouTube playlist as a
| bunch of individual MP3s, and do it fast. You can also paste
| individual song links to download them. Great quality and UI.
| bentt wrote:
| Anything that helps shake up the system is good for artists at
| this point.
|
| It would be cool if this app helped you gauge how much to pay
| your favorite artists... If it logged the artists you listened to
| and then gave you something like a bill, periodically. The bill
| would show how minutes listened to for each artist over the past
| month and then would find links to buy their music directly. Even
| better this app would let you listen to that source music if you
| owned it.
| ojagodzinski wrote:
| Please explain how is the app that plays music clips from
| YouTube and hides the ads is "shaking up the system"?
| bentt wrote:
| By taking control of the UX of the most popular platform?
| hcks wrote:
| Good idea! What if the bill you received was in $ every month?
| Even better, what if it was a flat rate so you're not surprised
| by how much you owe?
| CrypticShift wrote:
| In a way, this reminds me of the (much more ambitious) system of
| resolvers [1] of the (now defunct) tomahawk player [0]
|
| The idea was you just give it the metadata and it "resolves" it
| into any service. I really like this idea. it kind of lives on in
| "playlist converters" like tunemymusic or soundiiz. but it is not
| the same as it being built into the player itself (like spotube
| albeit with a different more straightforward aim here)
|
| [0] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk
|
| [1] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk-resolvers
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Congratulations! This is the best performing client I've ever
| used on MacOS, and with a decent GUI as well. YouTube Music is so
| slow and laggy as to be unusable on my powerful computer, the
| official Spotify client is just on the limit of being unusable
| because of extreme sluggishness.
|
| If users could log in with their YouTube account as well, then us
| folks that pay for Premium could also support the artists we
| listen to, win-win.
|
| Playlist management could be improved. It took me a while to
| figure out that you have to hold on a song to select it. It would
| be more reasonable to select a track and delete it with the
| delete key or from a right-click menu. Right now the "Remove from
| playlist" option does not work.
| DotaFan wrote:
| App is very buggy on windows.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Yeah, I just get a white screen on launching. It needs to be
| force closed via task manager for me.
| DotaFan wrote:
| I couldn't open artist details, songs stop playing after a
| while, couldn't uninstall it properly.
|
| Just a few after using it for 30 min.
| swozey wrote:
| The lengths that literal engineers will go to to not have to pay
| $10/mo for music or $3 to rent a movie in 4k immediately.
|
| Can't believe I have adult friends who make 70-300k and they
| still pirate based on money, not quality/directors-cuts/anti-
| cheats, etc. I quit pirating when I got a real job and could
| afford to pay developers and movie teams for their effort.
|
| I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why shouldn't
| they?
|
| And I pirated EVERYTHING as a kid/teenager. I had no money.
| Sketch Russian warez site? I'm in!
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| I think a lot of it also has to do with the ethics of music
| distribution and the fact that spotify pays the actual artists
| almost nothing.
|
| p.s. probably not engineers in the literal sense ;)
| code_runner wrote:
| This is a label and industry problem not specific to any one
| streamer.
| pyeri wrote:
| >> I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why
| shouldn't they?
|
| The way ruthless capitalism works in today's age, the software
| writer barely gets peanuts, bulk is taken away by the
| management, CEO and shareholders.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but let's not pretend that
| software writers are victims of capitalism. Based on the
| reward/effort ratio, software devs are one of the most
| privileged groups that have ever existed.
|
| You can make more money writing javascript that you learned
| on udemy and youtube than a firefighter or a doctor. It is
| absurd.
| gruez wrote:
| Maybe if you subscribe to labor theory of value. Most people
| wouldn't consider someone making 6 figures as earning
| "peanuts" because the company they work for is making even
| more money from their labor.
| someotherperson wrote:
| Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial
| issue. When Netflix's streaming platform rolled around people
| were largely happy to stop pirating, when Netflix's catalog
| fragmented across two dozen different services that forbid
| account sharing then piracy became a thing again for many
| people who stopped pirating.
|
| I had a Paramount+ subscription (alongside Disney, Netflix,
| Amazon, Apple TV) and wanted to watch a certain TV show on my
| device. Oops, my device was out of date so I couldn't download
| the app. No problems, I'll update it. Oops, my account is set
| to an overseas address so I can't download the app. No
| problems, I'll change my account settings. Oops, the app won't
| log in because my DNS blocks ads. No problems, I'll add a
| bypass for this app. Oops, the app sucks and crashes when I
| navigate through the catalog too quickly. No problems, I'll
| make my search more specific. Oops, the buffering speed is
| horrendous and scrubbing through the video crashes the app.
|
| Guess what I did? Uninstalled the app and searched for a
| pirated version of the TV show. A minute later it was streaming
| fine on my device.
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| Might be "largely" true but ignore the existence of just
| cheap people who will not pay for anything unless they have
| to.
| swozey wrote:
| Yeah, I'm on a discord for tracking 4090 prices/stock. So
| it's a lot of gamers who can afford a $2k video card.
|
| I'd say 70% of the people in that discord pirate
| everything.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| With the planet getting warmer and warmer, it must be nice
| to have a little cool breeze from that moral high ground.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This has not been my 99% experience. I'm sure one or two of
| those stories are handy to have to justify a lifetime of
| unnecessary theft, but the bottom line for me is that I don't
| mind playing by their system on principle.
|
| This is how the artists asked us to do it, by selling their
| rights to distributors. Similarly with Spotify. I'd love to
| pay more to artists, I do go buy songs when I love them, and
| I'm happy to pay for a family Spotify account because Spotify
| has brought an amazing amount of positive to our house.
|
| Bottom line I'm actually willing to endure a small amount of
| inconvenience in 1% so that my happy path still supports
| artists and yes industries that have brought so much good to
| me.
| screye wrote:
| I mostly agree, but this tool is for spotify. Spotify is
| about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets.
| That being said, most people (including me) happily pay for
| spotify, so your point still stands.
|
| I refuse to pay for a streaming platform that's not Netflix
| or prime. The former benefits from being grand fathered in
| and the latter is a free bonus on something I would buy
| anyway.
|
| It also sucks that cancelling a subscription is as hard as it
| is. If you want me to pay to watch 1 specific TV show, then
| give me a payment plan that allows me to pay for an expiring
| subscription. Simple.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music
| platform gets.
|
| Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find
| artists who are content with the payments they get from
| Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous
| pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard.
|
| I'm huge into music so I'm "OK" with Spotify for the sake
| of convenience and all that, but if people are really
| digging a piece of music then please buy it directly from
| the label, the artist, etc. via other means, if possible.
| j-krieger wrote:
| >Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find
| artists who are content with the payments they get from
| Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-
| famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get
| heard.
|
| You're aware that you're in a thread for a tool which
| circumvents payments?
| jjulius wrote:
| Well aware, but thanks for that snark. Might as well
| still ask people to support artists they love in a thread
| related to pirating, right?
| MPSimmons wrote:
| I think it's mostly orthogonal. Pirating music only takes
| money away from artists in the case that you were going
| to buy their music, and don't now because you downloaded
| a file, which is probably the vast minority of downloads,
| I would guess.
|
| On the other hand, there are a ton of ways to support
| artists if you have the means, whether it's attending
| shows, buying merch, or what have you, none of which can
| be properly "pirated" in this sense.
| jjulius wrote:
| Oh sure. It even gets more nuanced than that, which can
| make figuring out how to support them a bit of a
| challenge. Some artists will release music streaming-only
| and then tour and make their cash that way, others
| (looking at you, Bibio) never tour and rely on sales of
| their music.
| j-krieger wrote:
| in my opinion, you're much better off buying merch /
| vinyls online.
| jjulius wrote:
| Right, which is why I said...
|
| >... if people are really digging a piece of music then
| please buy it directly from the label, the artist, etc.
| via other means, if possible.
| pxoe wrote:
| while this is adorable and maybe even is "giving more to
| the artist" if ever true,
|
| do artists only deserve to be paid only when someone
| "decides to pony up for an album"? that's a nice $10+
| hurdle that will ensure it happens as rarely as possible.
| even $1 for a single song is apparently enough of a
| hurdle.
|
| do artists not deserve to be paid if their song is just
| being played? it's just stiffing artists, whose music
| continues to play for free, for even that way of getting
| paid.
| jjulius wrote:
| I never said they didn't deserve to be paid if their song
| is played - I haven't argued anywhere in this thread for
| not paying artists. In point of fact, I said I'm OK with
| Spotify.
|
| To expand on that, I have a Spotify subscription. If I
| love the music and find myself listening to it regularly,
| I go and buy it so that they can have _more_ than the
| pennies they get from my Spotify streams.
|
| I also never said the phrase "decides to pony up for an
| album", so I'm not sure what those quotes are for. I
| said, "a piece of music", which could very well be a
| single song.
|
| But thank you kindly for putting words into my mouth and
| then snarkily calling them "adorable". I greatly
| appreciate it. :)
| Moru wrote:
| The reason artists are not happy with Spotify is because
| their record label takes 80% of the small profit they
| would get from streaming. I saw an interview with a
| swedish artist that was quite happy with the streaming
| money thanks to not having signed under any label. All
| the money goes directly to him.
| geden wrote:
| It's more complex than that. A major reason artists don't
| like Spotify because Spotify shows the number of track
| streams and regular listeners. This has a huge negative
| effect on many artists mental health.
|
| Artists signed to Major label's might get <20% of
| Spotify's payment (often substantially less than that
| after the various spurious desuctions). Indie labels
| frequently pay 50% of net profits though.
|
| Spotify's rate per stream is certainly low. And they are
| in no way artist friendly.
|
| (I manage artists).
| Moru wrote:
| Thanks for the confirmation, this is what I have seen
| talked about for a long time. I'm so sad for all those
| artists bound to big labels. Believe the pirates are
| costing them money when they could be their biggest
| advertisement board. I would preffer not to fuel the
| whole record industry when I know the artists creating
| the actual art gets such a small cut. Not only the singer
| or the song writers but album artists, sound engineers
| and so on. And I have seen some of the "various spurious
| desuctions" on paper, it's insane but good name for it.
|
| I guess a lot of older artists that made it young would
| do it differently if they knew more about how the rest of
| the world works.
| jonplackett wrote:
| The solution isn't to then pay them nothing
| jjulius wrote:
| Did you miss the part where I implored people to buy
| music they love?
|
| Perhaps the "if possible" part at the end confused you.
| That was referring to times when artists only release
| music on streaming platforms and you can't buy it
| anywhere.
| anta40 wrote:
| Indeed. Spotify is convenient but the audio files are
| locked and cannot be easily copied to another devices.
|
| Buying the CD/audio files don't pose that issue.
| fullstop wrote:
| I pay for Prime, and we're soon to have ads unless you pay
| _more_ to remove them. I wouldn 't feel bad taking to the
| high seas while keeping the prime subscription.
|
| I'm at the point with other services where I will subscribe
| for a month or two in a given year, watch full seasons of
| what I want, and then cancel. Things like Max / Discovery /
| Whatever they call themselves this year are making this
| more difficult by removing content. In some cases, it's
| difficult to find a legit place to watch it, with _Raised
| by Wolves_ and _Westworld_ being prime examples.
|
| Maybe I'll just read more books instead.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, in regards to HBO Max, I signed up a couple years
| ago specifically to watch cartoons like Close Enough and
| Infinity Train. Not only were both those shows canceled
| but they were purged from HBO Max for streaming entirely.
|
| I managed to buy legit copies of Infinity Train on
| Amazon, but now the only way that I am aware of to watch
| Close Enough is piracy.
|
| The recent Amazon "pay us more or you get ads" thing
| feels a bit rent-seekey to me. I don't watch Prime enough
| to justify paying an extra $3/month, and so I think
| what's going to happen to me is that I just stop watching
| Prime entirely.
|
| What really frustrates me is that companies are basically
| stopping releasing Blu-Rays, particularly for TV shows. I
| have over 400 legitimately purchased movies about about
| 40 complete series in Blu-Ray; I am more than happy to
| support creators by paying them a reasonable
| compensation, what I _don't_ want to do is pay those
| creators _forever_ for the privilege of watching the same
| thing over and over.
| dangus wrote:
| > then give me a payment plan that allows me to pay for an
| expiring subscription. Simple.
|
| All the streaming services do that. You just subscribe then
| immediately cancel. You'll get service for a month until
| your time runs out.
| k__ wrote:
| _" Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music
| platform gets"_
|
| That doesn't mean that an alternative client isn't more
| convenient.
|
| We don't need a bunch of corps gatekeep human culture from
| people just because they live in the wrong country...
| paulcole wrote:
| What was the TV show?
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial
| issue.
|
| I'd say it can definitely be both. For example, when I was a
| broke teenager, I pirated all the video games, because the
| alternative was simply missing out on them and the option to
| acquire them through dubious means was there.
|
| When I actually got disposable income I realized that Steam
| is so well made, that I buy all my games there nowadays. It's
| gotten to the point where I'd rather buy a game than pirate
| it, especially when the game does have some sort of an online
| component. The only exception is cases when I feel like I
| might need a refund (e.g. seeing how a VR game runs before
| buying it, because refunds still feel like a hassle).
|
| I still sometimes resort to something like G2A (Steam key
| reseller site, not a very good reputation) or just buying
| games on other stores like GOG or Epic when they're much
| cheaper there, but aside from that it's easier to just not
| play some expensive AAA game on launch altogether, since I
| don't care that much about being first to experience it
| anymore.
|
| As for music, I can actually just listen to whatever I want
| on YouTube which is good enough for me, but I don't see why
| the same principles couldn't apply to something like Spotify.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Yeah I just don't understand how paramount+ is so bad. I've
| unsubscribed but I got it to watch a tv show on a plane, and
| so downloaded it onto my phone. The app would NOT play the
| video on the plane. At first I thought for some reason it
| needed to connect to the internet. Then after landing it
| wouldn't play even with the internet.
|
| Then there's the chromecast app. I want to watch an episode
| of survivor, a show with 45 seasons now. Apparently it just
| loads all the episode data for the entire show in one go, and
| hangs for a bit when opening the episode select page. This is
| one of their bigger shows I think.
|
| It's just so lazy and bad.
| swozey wrote:
| I had the same thing happen on a flight last year so when I
| got home I tested every streaming app I could think of and
| a bunch of them removed their download feature from the
| last time I used it or they put it behind a connection
| requirement like you said.
|
| I forget if there's a second one, I know Netflix says you
| can download on its ad but I don't have netflix to test.
| The one I know for sure that you can download and watch
| offline is Prime.
|
| You MIGHT be able to download and watch offline with HBOgo.
| I know at one point I could. But that might also be one of
| the ones that took that feature away.
|
| I also don't know about any of the disney/paramount/apple
| ones. I think I tested Prime, HBOgo, Crunchyroll (iirc this
| can do it but theyre always missing episodes its annoying),
| Youtube (requires connection) and hulu.
| wombat-man wrote:
| It's just gotten to the point where I optimize for
| laziness. When I'm at home I watch on the streaming apps
| for the most part, because it's easy.
|
| When I'm traveling, I download tv shows I think I want to
| watch and stick it in VLC on my iPad. The exception being
| movies from the apple TV app. I have had no problems
| renting and downloading the video through that.
|
| Maybe they fixed it, but ever since I downloaded a bunch
| in the HBO app only to find it would NOT play once I was
| in the air, I just gotta do what I gotta do to be able to
| actually watch in flight.
|
| Oh man, and the other thing apps will do, is if you're
| not careful, they'll download some awful low res version
| of the show by default. ugh.
| swozey wrote:
| You know what got me last time. Ipad offloading my apps.
|
| I hadn't touched my ipad in 4-6 months I only use it on
| flights and I opened it up and had almost no apps. I
| might have actually had no apps but the apple apps if
| thats a thing. I couldn't open ANYTHING. Then I got to
| the airport for my next flight and was franctically
| running around hoping to find a guest wifi network..
|
| That's disabled now.
| mort96 wrote:
| When I pirate, it's sometimes based on convenience or quality
| (where else can I download DRM-free blu-ray quality movies?
| Or a band's discography lossless?), but other times, it's
| certainly about money. For example, I don't use FL studio
| anywhere near enough to warrant paying for it (I have
| literally just opened it a couple of times to play with it),
| but paying for a license would have been less work than
| pirating it. Same with Windows; I pretty much never use it,
| the last time I booted into it must be around a year ago, so
| I'm not gonna pay $250 for it. I like to have it on my PC
| however for the occasional situation where I need it to play
| some game which doesn't work in Proton with friends, so I
| pirated it, even though buying a license key would've been
| more convenient than dealing with cracking tools.
| mock-possum wrote:
| $250 for Windows?? You're off by an order of magnitude,
| just buy it from a reseller:
|
| g2a.com/search?query=Windows
|
| I've never had a problem with that site.
| eek2121 wrote:
| You don't even need to buy a license. Alternate
| activation servers exist.
| mort96 wrote:
| Which is certainly a form of piracy.
| saintfire wrote:
| It used to be the case that they were all keys that
| aren't technically allowed to be resold per their
| agreement. Either OEM or business copies and the like.
|
| So really we're back to some form of piracy because
| Windows is too expensive.
| mort96 wrote:
| I went to Microsoft's store and found the entry for
| Windows Pro. It's the actual price.
|
| Other comments have pointed out why G2A is also more or
| less piracy except you pay someone for an illegitimate
| key instead of using a cracking tool to generate one.
| nlnn wrote:
| It's also about having more control over the
| viewing/listening experience for me. I pay for a bunch of
| services (Deezer/Netflix/Prime Video), but I'll often end up
| watching pirated versions of content I can legally watch on
| those platforms.
|
| Often that's down to tons of annoyances and lack of control
| over the viewing/listening platform. E.g. in VLC or similar I
| can tweak subtitle positions, sizes, fonts etc. for the best
| viewing experience. I can nudge the audio back/forwards a bit
| if it's out of sync with the video.
|
| It also means I don't have to deal with whatever nonsense the
| platform is trying to push on me. I don't want to be
| bombarded with ads for podcasts, I don't want to have various
| videos autoplay at me just because I've hovered over them for
| too long, I don't want giant animated album artwork taking up
| 90% of my mobile screen and wasting battery, I just want to
| listen to music and watch films, not interact with a
| platform/app that changes on the whims of some revenue-driven
| organisation.
| dangus wrote:
| Most of the problems you had were self-imposed to be fair.
| jsnell wrote:
| This submission shows that it's not about convenience.
| Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are all incredibly
| convenient. They range from free with ads to very affordable
| monthly subscriptions (the price of a single CD for unlimited
| music for a month). They have vast libraries with more music
| of all styles than anyone could listen to in a lifetime with,
| as far as I can tell, effectively no geo restrictions.
|
| And despite that, look at where we are. A "pirate your music
| for free" app with 400 upvotes is at the top of HN, with some
| posters pretty much writing fanfic about how this will be
| great for the artists. "It's just a service problem" my ass.
| It's about people wanting something for free, and taking it.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| 70-300k is a crazy wide range to lump together. Quality of life
| and flexibility to pay for things is extremely different across
| it.
|
| That said, the reason is simple, there's no good product out
| there so people pirate. I haven't pirated music in ages because
| Spotify solved that industry with a single reasonably priced
| offering.
|
| On the other hand the dozens of streaming services have gotten
| out of hand by now. Same with renting movies, I'd rather enjoy
| in the cinema or torrent it, especially given how mediocre 95%
| of production has been in recent years.
| ralusek wrote:
| > especially given how mediocre 95% of production has been in
| recent years
|
| Okay, then don't watch it. If you're watching it, though, you
| should pay for it. Your logic is the equivalent of going out
| to restaurants to eat, and then not paying because
| "restaurants aren't good these days."
| someotherperson wrote:
| It's probably closer to having to pay a monthly
| subscription fee to eat at the restaurant. And you actually
| have to get six different subscriptions at different
| restaurants because each one has a different rotating menu.
| And you're not allowed to share your food with your friends
| because they don't live with you -- they each need their
| own subscription. And no to-go boxes, you gotta eat it
| right there at the restaurant since you're only allowed to
| eat the food while you have an active subscription, you
| know, just in case you cancel the subscription to that
| restaurant or try to share the food with your friends who
| don't have an active subscription.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Also, you can't figure out what to eat because instead of
| being indexed by nutrition information or by whether it
| contains potential allergens it's always indexed at the
| top level by subscription so you have to do a little
| inner join there on your napkin before you can tell your
| kid what their options are.
| gtirloni wrote:
| The analogy doesn't hold because piracy in that scenario
| would be going to one of those subscription-based
| restaurants and getting their food but not paying. We go
| back full circle to the comment you were replying to.
|
| You could argue piracy is going to the chef's place and
| eating their food before it gets to the restaurant for
| distribution, now the chef is angry too.
|
| Not a good analogy.
| swozey wrote:
| Most of us who make 100k-300k made 70k at one point. I made
| 70k (5-8 years?) a lot longer than I've made 235k.
|
| I was absolutely not broke at 70k. In fact I thought that was
| the most money I'd ever make and that I was killing it for 25
| or whatever I was.. lmao
|
| I made quite a bit more money than everyone my age I knew,
| most were still in college or in the 35-50k brackets.
| jjulius wrote:
| >I was absolutely not broke at 70k.
|
| I'm genuinely glad that you weren't. Your experience is not
| everyone else's. I know people who have made around that
| salary who, for various reasons, were essentially broke.
|
| Much of the rest of your comment just sounds...
| braggadocious.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If you're broke at 70k you are simply bad with your
| finances. There are no excuses, unless you have a super
| rare medical condition. You can't blame anybody but
| yourself.
| jjulius wrote:
| An absolute that has been shown to be untrue for a litany
| of reasons time and again, but OK. For many people, yes,
| you're right, but I would wager you'd be surprised at the
| number of people trying to claw themselves out of varying
| circumstances while making that much.
|
| And this isn't a judgement towards those in those
| situations, it's empathy from my end - I feel the need to
| clarify after another user's flippant comments elsewhere
| in this thread.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Not wanting to argue, just want to say my point of view:
| Excepting for rare medical conditions, we all as humans
| have the same needs and "cost" of existing and living our
| lives. And therefore I don't think it can be very
| dependant on circumstances or subjective as to what is
| "making ends meet".
|
| I can't really emphasise with people who are wealthy or
| high income (which 70k is), who say they are struggling
| with monetary matters. They've made some choices and
| prioritizations. People who own multiple properties say
| that they "can't afford" some basic consumer good, or
| indignant that they have to work a lot of overtime to
| make ends meet. Yes, you chose a high cost life style.
|
| I try to set aside a disproportionately large part of my
| income for high risk investments. Everybody I know says
| they can not afford to make any investments, and
| especially not risky investments. How can they not afford
| it when they are wealthier than me and have larger
| incomes than me? Because they prioritised something else.
| And that's cool, but why can't people cut the bullshit.
| And I don't ask others about their finances or bring up
| the topic.
|
| So I'm going to double down and say that there are
| exactly 0 cases - outside of rare medical disorders -
| where somebody has to struggle to live on 70K.
| jjulius wrote:
| I don't know how to have a conversation with someone so
| willingly burying their head in the sand. I respect that
| you have that view. Have a nice weekend! :)
|
| Edit:
|
| >And I don't ask others about their finances or bring up
| the topic.
|
| Not that it's necessarily couth to bring this subject up
| socially, but I do get the vibe that you could benefit
| from hearing from others regarding their situations.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I don't know how to have a conversation with someone so
| willingly burying their head in the sand. I respect that
| you have that view.
|
| Thank you! Have a nice weekend also.
|
| > Not that it's necessarily couth to bring this subject
| up socially, but I do get the vibe that you could benefit
| from hearing from others regarding their situations.
|
| I think I'll first want to make 70K myself, before I seek
| out somebody to complain about how hard their life is
| with only 70K. Likewise, I'd like to own multiple
| properties myself before I have to listen more to people
| with multiple properties complain about their life.
|
| Likewise, I don't think anybody working minimum wage or
| living in a rented trailer would like to hear me complain
| about my money woes, wouldn't you agree?
| redserk wrote:
| Add in college debt payments, maybe a car payment, maybe
| you just graduated and need to furnish at least part of an
| apartment (even with roommates), maybe having to help pay
| down parents medical bills or whatever because you're the
| first to break out of very low income employment...
|
| $70k isn't a magical feel-good-be-happy number for
| everyone, especially in HCOL+ areas.
|
| I don't think this was your intent, but your comment comes
| across as really dismissive to a wide range of financial
| situations.
| jjulius wrote:
| >... especially in HCOL+ areas.
|
| Right? NYC and the Bay Area would like a word...
| swozey wrote:
| I don't know a single engineer in the last decade that
| I've worked with or known that wants to live in SFBay.
| Hell, Google literally opened an office on 2nd and
| congress in Austin because people wanted to live in
| Austin and not SFbay. I was there on its opening day!
|
| $70k is completely fine in Houston, Dallas, Austin. I
| made around that in each one. Almost everyone I know here
| in Denver makes 70k-100k max and I'm in the most trendy
| neighborhood downtown and these are (actual, like
| structural) engineers, lawyers, etc. My hair stylist
| makes 50k and has a nice 1br. Personally my rent is $4k
| which is absolutely common for a 2bdr in sfbay but mine
| is very nice, probably much newer than would be in SF. I
| made 90k living in Chicago. 40-60k living in Tampa. I
| always had a new car new a twin turbo z4, mazda 3, crv,
| sometimes I had 2 cars (sports/daily), always had my own
| place, etc. Zero debt. Went out ALL the time.
|
| Everything isn't NYC or SFBay. I didn't start my career
| making 40k and go "OK great, now I'm off to San
| Francisco/NYC!!" I moved more west as my income grew.
|
| The privilege.. I promise you that there are service
| industry people making 30-45k in SF/NYC who are
| absolutely content or happy with their lives whether it's
| living in a 10x10 shoebox or an attic in a loft with a
| roomate. I'm not doing that, but I have a lot of industry
| friends from a past life that do. The average hourly for
| a nyc bartender is something like $16-18. I used to do it
| on the side.
|
| We're privileged beyond belief.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Everything isn't NYC or SFBay.
|
| Never said it was, I just pointed to two areas where $70k
| doesn't go very far. Simple as that.
|
| Edit: Your comment is very "I"-centric. Nobody cares
| about how many cars you have owned, because your life
| experience cannot be copy/pasted to everyone else. It's
| like you've missed the point.
| swozey wrote:
| Jesus. The point was that people are, and can be content
| on living in SF and NYC on under $100k. It's offensive
| that you think that every single person who makes 70k or
| whatever range is living in a box filled with rats or
| whatever you think it is.
|
| Who do you think cooks, cleans, and serves drinks to
| people in SF/NYC? Sorry they aren't up to your standards
| living wise.
| jjulius wrote:
| I never said they're not content. I said that people
| making $70k in those areas might not be able to afford
| the same things you can, up to and including Spotify.
|
| That's. All. I never said that that's how everyone lived,
| I just said that _not everybody making 70k lives
| comfortably_. That could be one person, it could be a
| handful.
|
| I never blanket generalized, _you_ did by saying everyone
| making $70k should live just fine. All I said was,
| "That's not always the case", and now you're trying to
| say that I think everyone living in those areas making
| $70k are scum.
|
| You need to relax.
| swozey wrote:
| I definitely didn't mean to infer equitable life style,
| that'd be kind of goofy to think. I'm single and kid-
| free. I'm not saying the parent of 2 kids could or should
| drive a new car, or go out all the time, live downtown,
| etc. especially on that income. I'm sure a LOT of people
| live in Vallejo and work in SF for instance. Mortgages,
| Medical problems, alimony, blahblah. Millions of
| differences. I just meant that there ARE people happily
| living off of salaries in that range, less so in SF for
| sure. That's why I never moved, never felt like I could
| afford it, had the option to live in Los Gatos and around
| San Mateo (san jose for sure probably).
|
| I was curious so looked it up, 75th % salary in SFbay is
| $76k. 25th % $113k. These are salaries from the
| ziprecruiter database- I put in Bartender - $34k, Teacher
| - $47k, Police - $60k (I know this is wildly off not
| including their overtime, they make like $150-250k in
| sf).
|
| https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/-in-San-
| Francisco,CA#Y...
|
| This newer article says the amount of people in that
| bracket drpoped 10% 2019-2022. Wonder if that's people
| moving out, layoffs / biz shuttering, or maybe the covid
| checks ending lowering peoples income across the board.
| Those didn't affect the $100k+ market (limit was 80k i
| think?) which grew 10% regardless. That sucks if it's not
| them leaving I can only think of negative reasons aside
| from that or getting raises.
|
| https://www.axios.com/local/san-
| francisco/2023/09/18/median-...
|
| Sorry, I'm just on a tangent now. Didn't mean to come off
| rude in general, though.
| acheron wrote:
| Yeah, and add in when you have to buy the new BMW, and
| have to go on international vacations every year, and
| that salary looks even smaller!
|
| Or you could buy a used Honda instead, go somewhere
| cheaper for vacation, and not live in the most expensive
| area in the country. All those are voluntary consumption.
| redserk wrote:
| This response is a strawman and unhelpful to the
| conversation here.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why
| shouldn't they?
|
| How about the Spotify client being crap? Can't believe this is
| the top comment on HN.
| swozey wrote:
| What does Spotify being crap have to do with a software
| engineer or musician being paid for their work?
|
| You think they shouldn't be paid because you don't like the
| company they work for?
| latentcall wrote:
| Quite a lot actually. If the software engineers write an
| app that's a bloated buggy mess that inconveniences people,
| some people will look for other ways to listen to the music
| they want to hear.
|
| For musicians, they have other avenues (arguably better
| anyhow) such as Bandcamp. I've bought tons of vinyl albums,
| tapes, and even just digital releases from there.
| swozey wrote:
| Your first point is incredibly subjective. I love the
| spotify app aside from the fact they keep gutting its
| features. I've used almost every other music app in
| testing to potentially leave spotify. I've been a spotify
| member for 16 years and can't think of a single time I
| thought it was bloated.
|
| The spotify carplay/android apps absolutely DESTROY the
| other car apps.
|
| I hated every single other app. Quboz, Tidal, Apple, YT,
| Amazon.. Most of them were so featureless I felt like I
| was using Winamp. But some people do love that.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> some people will look for other ways to listen to the
| music they want to hear._
|
| Those ways probably should involve some sort of
| compensation to the artists. Is that happening?
| prmoustache wrote:
| If you actually clicked on the link, it says this in the
| readme file of the spotube project:
|
| 1 It is still recommended to support the creators by
| watching/liking/subscribing to the artists' YouTube
| channels or liking their tracks on Spotify (or purchasing a
| Spotify Premium subscription too).
| andrepd wrote:
| Give me a link to download your game without spyware and I pay
| for that.
|
| I buy games on gog. I buy games without drm on steam. I
| absolutely refuse to install ring 0 Internet-connected malware
| on my computer to play a fucking game.
| hattar wrote:
| I pay and would still like an alternative client. The official
| one has several annoying deficiencies that are unlikely to ever
| be addressed.
|
| From a monetary standpoint, most companies would throw me into
| a wood chipper were it profitable. Hard to feel any sense of
| "fair behavior" is warranted when that's the case.
| sumuyuda wrote:
| There are other factors here besides price to choose this
| client. Privacy and no usage/analytics spyware are some big
| ones, as well as native apps on desktop.
| andrepd wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhv7bgmz64
| metadat wrote:
| Great guide, this about sums it up.
| nouryqt wrote:
| In case anyone else wanted to check the Pokemon page. It's
| real https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-
| pokemon-...
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Kind of related to this mentality, perhaps: On Sam Harris's
| most recent episode of "Making Sense" with TED's Chris
| Anderson[0] he shared a Reddit conversation he came across
| where people were discussing whether or not they subscribe,
| i.e., pay, for his podcast:
|
| >> I spectated upon this [Reddit] thread, something around "Do
| you support Sam's podcast and and you if do, why or why not?"
| and someone said "Well I would support the podcast if I knew
| what he was going to do with the money" and another person said
| "Well I would support the podcast if I knew how much it cost to
| run a podcast" and another person said "I would support the
| podcast if I knew how much I thought a person should earn from
| a podcast" and I looked at those three statements and my head
| practically fell off my shoulders, because I realized at a
| glance there was something deeply wrong here because these are
| the kinds of considerations that would never have occurred to a
| person when they were thinking about buying my next book. I
| mean there's literally no person on Earth who's ever thought
| the thought "Well I would buy his next book if I knew how much
| I thought an author should make from writing books" or "I would
| buy his next book if I knew what he was going to do with the
| money." These are just not the kinds of thoughts people think.
| Either you want to read the book or you don't and you buy it or
| not. [1]
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCl-5vC7aW8
|
| [1]https://youtu.be/cCl-5vC7aW8?si=CqRcQ-kLUF7JMyXg&t=3604
| swozey wrote:
| What even is that? Just straight up entitlement? Ignorance to
| the situation? Just not caring?
|
| He has a great point, I can't think of any times I've ever
| asked those questions unless I thought the book author was
| grifting, where I'd go "Oh they're dog whistling to their
| flock for sales."
|
| I never thought "I hope mac miller doesn't use this $20 for
| drugs" buying mac miller albums..
| jeegsy wrote:
| That's the question isn't it? If its entitlement as you
| say, why feel it with a podcast and not books?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I might understand the moral reasoning here. Here's my guess:
|
| The podcasters were weighing the cost to themselves vs. the
| benefit to the podcaster.
|
| If the podcaster was poor and the listener was rich, the
| cost/benefit tradeoff favors paying. The listener feels happy
| to be supportive.
|
| If the situation were reversed, the math swings the other
| way. A principled listener might pay, but wouldn't
| necessarily feel happy about it.
| msluyter wrote:
| Not sure if this is a complete explanation, but people tend
| to ascribe more value to physical objects and perhaps,
| because the general price of books is bounded within a known
| range that is fairly stable, don't question the price as hard
| as they might. That is, if a book is roughly the same price
| of other books in the category you'll tend to view the price
| as "fair."
|
| The value of a podcast seems more nebulous to me, and perhaps
| this raises more questions. Unless you already subscribe to a
| lot of podcasts you may not have the equivalent comparison
| point, so more questions arise.
|
| On top of that, subscriptions create another barrier to entry
| and raise even more questions.
| molave wrote:
| It's like the Matrix. In my opinion, there's 1%-2% of the
| entire population that pirate out of principle or "cost
| savings"
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I used to pay for Spotify but canceled because the player
| experience was so bad, not because of the cost.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I usually keep my opinions on software to myself, but I
| struggle to understand how the audio playback code path is
| not rock solid at this point.
|
| It's a state machine. That's it.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's not audio quality or the specific playback experience
| I had a problem with. It's all the features around it. I'm
| used to players like Winamp, foobar2000. Real native
| applications that are responsive and customizable and
| feature rich.
| empiricus wrote:
| As some basic examples, the spotify app does not have a
| listening history, or at a minimum some counts and the most
| listened songs. Or the app on the samsung tv does not have
| any setting or information about the audio quality.
| seanthemon wrote:
| My problem is region locking, if I can't access the content in
| any way without potentially purchasing a very expensive TV
| package, I'm left with only one choice. A lot of music on
| spotify can't be accessed in my region and same with
| movies/series.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > My problem is region locking, if I can't access the content
| in any way without potentially purchasing a very expensive TV
| package, I'm left with only one choice.
|
| Do you mean that literally? Because I'd think buying physical
| copies, or forgoing access, would also be options.
| beej71 wrote:
| Some programs aren't available on DVD in my region. But I
| suppose DVD players are cheap, so people can just buy one
| per region.
|
| ... Or does piracy sound like a better experience?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| It probably comes down one's personal ethics, views about
| civic virtue, etc.
|
| I want my neighbor's pile of firewood. They probably
| wouldn't miss one or two logs, but I have other reasons
| for not taking any.
|
| I'm not trying to persuade anyone that my view is
| correct, I'm just saying that I think this is one aspect
| of how different people approach the question of how to
| obtain digital entertainment.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| What does your personal ethics say about paying somebody
| to build a system that prohibits certain kinds of people
| from receiving certain kinds of information? Even if a
| trickle of that money makes it to the artist, doesn't
| that seems like a technology that's ripe for abuse?
| beej71 wrote:
| The "piracy==stealing" argument doesn't work here. I
| don't doubt you'd make a copy of your neighbor's pile of
| firewood if you coveted it.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Yeah, it was a flawed example for sure. All of the other
| examples I could think of at the time seemed like they'd
| be inflammatory in various ways.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Physical copies (Blu-rays especially) are heavily region
| locked. A Japanese region coded Blu-ray won't play on an EU
| coded player, unless you're able to flash the firmware to
| unlock it. And a lot of Japanese movies, especially classic
| films, never get a Europe release.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Is it hard to find a non region locked player nowadays?
|
| Back in the days when I was living in Switzerland, the
| DVD players there weren't region locked so a number of
| french, italian or german people would just drive to
| Switzerland and buy their DVD player there. No idea if it
| applies to Blueray as well, I never owned a Blueray
| player.
| seanthemon wrote:
| Have you ever had your content region locked? Wanting to
| watch something but can't because of where you live? What
| if you're half way through a series and a company rips away
| access to your country? Do you just shrug and 'forgo' your
| access?
| paulcole wrote:
| They refuse to say it's about money. It's some kind of mish-
| mash rationalization of sticking it to the man, convoluted
| technical explanations (they're my HTTP requests you can just
| return a 403 error), and moral outrage.
| junon wrote:
| Living in Germany, but I'm an american. Signed up for Crunchy
| Roll. Most the shows my friends are recommending are region
| locked. The remaining ones are mostly German-dubbed only, with
| no subtitles. Most don't have original Japanese either.
|
| Only a handful I want to watch actually have subs or English
| dubs.
|
| It's not like I don't want to pay for this stuff but when it's
| a huge conditional tree of if I'm going to have a good
| experience, with no other (non-pirate alternative), what do you
| do?
|
| Meanwhile, Spotify doesn't have this issue. Happily pay for
| that, despite not being a fan of how the company operates.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The anime situation in Germany is years behind. Germans are
| famously moralising against piracy but this seems to be a
| case where they do it anyway because it's just impossible to
| find anime otherwise
| jzb wrote:
| Wouldn't a VPN solve this for you?
| pokey00 wrote:
| Until they start blocking VPNs like other streaming
| services? Piracy is a solution that doesn't end up a cat
| and mouse game. Sounds like op is paying for the content
| but it's region locked, so the dumbest form of pushing your
| customers to piracy.
| paulsen wrote:
| The problem is that I have to pay for another thing just to
| watch the thing I was already paying for.
|
| Piracy almost always is caused by a lack of convenience,
| namely:
|
| "I get the service, have a (sometimes very) limited
| selection of stuff, and have to pay for it, and if I want
| that other thing I have to pay for another entirely
| different service"
|
| or
|
| "I get anything I want with a little hassle, but for free"
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| What's the difference with pirating then? I do pirate when
| media owners go to great length to make consuming it
| legally very hard.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Interesting that you mention Crunchyroll.
|
| I subscribe to both CR and Spotify im the U.S., and one thing
| they have in common is _terrible_ user interfaces (IMHO).
|
| I would be so excited if CR provided an API to let
| subscribers write their own clients.
| swozey wrote:
| Yeah CRs UX is bad. Check out this chrome extension its a
| huge QOL jump https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mal-
| sync/kekjfbackd...
|
| My other huge complaint about CR is it will just be missing
| a season of a show. I tried to watch one and it had only
| seasons 2-3-4 etc.
| ruune wrote:
| It's really not that bad. CrunchyRoll has _almost_
| everything, especially since Sony bought Funimation and AOD
| shut down. Some of the real Blockbusters miss sometimes (Oshi
| no ko, Cyberpunk, Pluto, etc.) because those are the ones
| that are worth it for Netflix, Amazon and Disney+. CR is
| great for someone watching a lot of anime. If you want to
| watch the one or two big shows each season you might not find
| them there though. I rarely find anything I can't watch in
| Japanese with english subtitles.
|
| (Old stuff is often missing too. if you're after that those I
| understand what you mean.)
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I'm tempted to try if only because they might be more focused
| on music playback (the core value proposition of Spotify) than
| Spotify is at this point.
|
| Limitations of team size can be a blessing.
| justaj wrote:
| Am I able to pay Spotify in cryptocurrency or a SEPA
| transaction? If not, then that's a big convenience issue for me
| and thus not worth it.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| It's not about money, it's about freedom and independence. I
| don't want to lose access to my music and videos because some
| company decided to apply current idiotic understanding of
| morals or because of some temporary SJW craze. I don't want
| them to profile and spy on my tastes and preferences and then
| sell all of this information about me to any idiot out there
| with money. I don't want to rely on unstable internet
| connection or the silly "cache" the app offers. I don't want to
| use their bloated inconvenient app that needs constant internet
| connection when I can use a lightweight mp3 player app on my
| phone that I like and am used to.
|
| So no, it's not about the money. I don't want to use their
| service and support their business model. I don't think their
| business model is making the world a better place. I wouldn't
| subscribe even if the price was 10 cents. I buy CDs and support
| directly the artists and groups I love.
|
| On the end note. Think about, I'm paying 10 bucks a month, but
| the artists I love will get peanuts from it. The overall chunk
| will go to some over hyped nonsense like Taylor Swift, simply
| because she is getting more plays on their platform. Nope.
| mock-possum wrote:
| > some temporary SJW craze
|
| Sorry _what_?
| ta988 wrote:
| Look at the history of posts of that person. They seem to
| be excited by triggering people.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| I'm sorry, what is exactly triggering in my comment?
| Arch-TK wrote:
| I happily pay for anything I can get DRM free.
|
| Not interested in paying to rent access to something which
| requires giving shady companies like Netflix control over my
| graphics pipeline (which also prevents me from watching the
| thing I am renting on any device I want because, for example,
| my mediacentre PC is not blessed by the right big-corps to work
| with the intrusive DRM software).
|
| If movie publishers had an easy and convenient way to donate, I
| would probably donate an appropriate amount every time I pirate
| some of their media to allow me to watch it on my TV.
|
| You can argue "just buy the bluray and pirate it then" but I
| feel this just encourages these companies to continue relying
| on these intrusive DRM technologies.
|
| I know my boycott is insignificant but it's a matter of
| principles more than anything else.
| prmoustache wrote:
| https://us.7digital.com/
|
| (or any of its region specific stores)
|
| or https://bleep.com/ for independent electronic music. There
| are probably other genre specific stores still alive.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| This is neat, thanks. Although while I appreciate that I
| left a comment on a post about Spotify, I don't maintain a
| music collection as I find it too difficult to remember
| what I like. I generally just listen to some playlists on
| youtube. I have bought music whenever I found an author I
| liked a lot though.
| voidwtf wrote:
| Last night the family and I tried to watch Thor on Disney+.
| Everything appeared to be fine at first, but something was
| obviously off. The audio mix was screwed up really bad to where
| I could barely hear them speaking, and all the sound effects
| were basically non-existent, but the ambient music was
| extremely loud. I flipped over to Amazon Prime and rented it so
| we could continue our movie.
|
| I pay for Disney+, Disney got their money and if I'd decided to
| pirate it instead of the convenience of Prime video I wouldn't
| have felt an ounce of guilt. I keep trying to do the right
| thing, and they keep moving the goal posts. Whether it be
| adding DRM that increasingly causes the media to be available
| on less devices, or adding yet another service I have to invest
| in. DRM doesn't work and only diminishes the user experience.
|
| If you want my money meet me where I'm at. Stop forcing garbage
| down the pipeline.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I've heard that some of those problems are related to the
| audio settings; the video being configured for one of the
| surround sound formats that your audio system doesn't
| support. Not saying the audio wasn't jacked up, but just
| wanted to put it on your radar to go into the video settings
| (like where you set up captions I think) and try a different
| audio format.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> decided to pirate it instead of the convenience of Prime
| video I wouldn't have felt an ounce of guilt._
|
| You shouldn't feel an ounce of guilty. Really. They've failed
| you and still got their money. You had to spent extra time to
| pirate so you'd get the level of service you already paid in
| the first place.
| zulban wrote:
| I recently pirated James Bond because the streaming service we
| pay for screwed up the subtitles.
|
| So to be fair to your friends, they may also feel like they
| like pirating also because it is still more functional and
| customized. And streaming needs flawless internet while
| watching.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| This is an extremely half-baked take on piracy.
|
| The music piracy community are some of the best archivists of
| music history we have. What.cd had a wonderfully curated and
| deep archive of music. I discovered so many small punk groups
| that would drop an LP then vanish.
|
| Fortunately it's still relatively easy to support active bands
| directly via Bandcamp / physical media / tours. I cherish my
| personal collection, and it's all self-hosted on my NAS at
| home.
|
| As for movies, half the time features don't even get a Blu-ray
| release. Back in the day I had a region unlocked player that
| would allow me to watch my favorite Japanese directors (which
| never got a US region release)
|
| Streaming wise it's terrible, especially if you live outside of
| the US. A lot of films are not even available to "buy" via
| Amazon, etc. And even then services that do stream outside of
| the US have "4K" streams with low bitrates. It's not even funny
| how much better true 4k HDR remux's look when played back
| locally versus streaming it from HBO or something, even though
| it's the same source.
| guluarte wrote:
| have you seen some apps? yt music is shit and already have yt-
| preimum, why would I pay for another music service?
| ponector wrote:
| Spotify app is rubbish, and you cannot listen on different
| devices with the same account.
|
| Also Spotify have censorship issue, they are removing some
| songs. Other are not available due to copyright issues.
|
| If you don't want to listen playlists with new random music it
| is more convenient to have a local mp3 library.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Why pay when I can access content for free?
|
| YouTube pays some cents to music labels, I can listen to music
| for free on YouTube and I can block ads.
|
| The only purchases I make are to reward creators, often only
| after I've enjoyed the goods.
|
| Copyright is highly immoral as I never got into any contract
| with anyone and yet I'm supposedly a criminal because I
| download pirated content. Whoever is sharing copyrighted
| content is breaching a contract and should be prosecutable.
|
| I sell software and it's nice to have passive income. I found a
| few communities who heavily pirated my code and I couldn't do
| jackshit because I don't make lawyer money and dmca does
| nothing but waste time.
|
| I think piracy is a natural tax imposed on the market: if you
| can't point to your customer who shared your property and sue
| him you are probably making some nice passive money. There's
| always going to be someone smarter than the average who will
| bypass your security.
|
| I don't mind pirates. The problem we have is with major
| publishers being rich enough they can bribe the government to
| do crap like dmca and infringe on our rights.
| swozey wrote:
| Because if everyone did what you did, the artists wouldn't
| make _any_ money. And a lot of people already to pirate. I
| couldn 't tell you what percentage of people pirate vs stream
| but at what point does the scale tip to the other side where
| piracy is actually causing a hugely negative affect to the
| artists income?
|
| You, and we, don't know if you're the 10,000th or the
| 100,000,000th pirate of whatever you pirate.
| demondemidi wrote:
| And then complain that there isn't enough content they are two
| absolutely insatiable generations when it comes to content.
| Free free free more more more ... of course, that also
| describes the billionaire class and material goods. Ironic they
| both meet at greed.
|
| The Spotify macOS app constantly truncates classical titles,
| which I find infuriating. I subscribed to Apple Classical,
| which was phenomenal in its organization and catalogue, but I
| couldn't download and I fly a lot which is a dealbreaker.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It's not about saving a few bucks, it's about taking
| responsibility for the consequences of your spending. If $1 out
| of $10 goes to supporting the artist and the other $9 goes
| towards stripping users of the ability to control their own
| devices, or towards other zero/negative sum games being played
| by the platform in the spirit of moat building, then paying for
| content through normal channels is doing more harm than good.
|
| If there was a way to configure my players to fingerprint the
| content and send money to the artist as I play it (or probably
| at the end of the month, so the total spend for that month is
| configurable) I'd use it. Payment should be irrespective of
| where you got the bits. I'm trying to build such a thing.
|
| But until a better way exists, I'm not going to feel bad about
| my occasional piracy in the meantime.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> If there was a way to configure my players to fingerprint
| the content and send money to the artist as I play it_
|
| There isn't.
|
| I fail to see how piracy helps artists today.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It drives movie and concert ticket sales. It could do more
| and we should fix that.
|
| Do you also fail to see how investment in technology that
| prevents certain groups from getting certain information
| harms everyone tomorrow? It's not like they'd have retool
| completely if they pivoted from censoring Finding Nemo
| because you're the wrong kind of customer to censoring
| political dissent because you're the wrong kind of citizen.
| The tech from the former can be reused in the latter and
| there's more money in the latter.
|
| That pivot hasn't happened yet because the DRM hooks aren't
| in deeply enough. People would work around it. Piracy helps
| because it creates a space for us to fight back against
| that sort of thing. It keeps the set of people who can
| circumvent censorship large and it keeps them in practice.
|
| At the end of the day, protecting an artist paycheck is
| just not as important as protecting user freedom. We can
| have both, but paying the streaming platforms and hoping
| they spend that money wisely is not the way to get there.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> protecting an artist paycheck is just not as important
| as protecting user freedom_
|
| Not in my book but thanks for the perspective.
|
| I feel my freedom to enjoy some music someone made on
| their own time has zero priority over said artist paying
| their bills.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If it were just about entertainment I'd agree with you.
| What I'm trying to protect is dissent.
|
| I don't want to live in a world where there are no
| channels not controlled by a third party, and that's the
| world the content industry is building. Entertainment is
| just a stepping stone for them.
| oldtownroad wrote:
| People say this but don't understand the reason artists don't
| make much per-listener on Spotify etc. is because of their
| record deals, it's nothing to do with Spotify. If you're an
| independent artist you can live comfortably off of a small
| Spotify audience!
|
| The stories you hear about an artist getting pennies on
| millions of listens are because of their record deals and the
| credits on their work. You can't solve this with software:
| artists enter these deals long before software is involved.
|
| I'd argue that Spotify (and YouTube and TikTok etc) have done
| more for musicians because they've made it very easy to make
| a living when you have a core listener base. Software has not
| rescued major label artists from major label contracts
| because... how can it?
| 1shooner wrote:
| >If you're an independent artist you can live comfortably
| off of a small Spotify audience!
|
| Didn't Spotify recently stop paying _any_ royalties for
| tracks with less than 1k streams?
| oldtownroad wrote:
| I mean small relative to big artists, not small in
| absolute numbers. If you have less than 1k streams you
| probably have less than 50 listeners which is basically
| nothing.
|
| A (relatively) small audience would be made up of tens of
| thousands of listeners generating millions of streams.
| There are many, many independent artists that fall into
| this group.
| 1shooner wrote:
| According to Spotify's data report site[0], there were
| 17,800 artists grossing over $50k from Spotify (7,800
| being between 50k and 100k), out of a denominator of ~8
| million, or 200k if you use Spotify's estimate of
| "professional or professionally aspiring".
|
| I don't know much at all about the music industry, so I
| don't really have a conclusion from those data, but that
| seems low. It also does put a (not insignificant) number
| on the independents accomplishing what you describe.
|
| 0. https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| The artist signed a contract with a label. I was not party
| to that contract, I'm not bound by it. I can send them
| money if I wish.
|
| If only they'd give me an address (of a smart contact which
| would distribute the funds appropriately. I want to pay the
| parties whose names I don't know also, provided they're
| involved in actually creating the art.)
| dangus wrote:
| Under your same logic nobody should buy anything from your
| employer because they don't pay you 100% of their profits.
| Probably only 2 or 3 dollars of every 10 they make goes to
| salary.
|
| But we all know running a business has costs that aren't
| salary.
|
| Artists who sign to major labels get promotion and other
| assistance that costs money. That's the trade off.
|
| And they're making less money than before because people
| pirated with Napster. Just look at music industry revenue
| charts. It only just recently exceeded pre-Napster levels and
| that is before adjusting for inflation. The average person is
| spending less money on music than they did in the 90s.
|
| A new release CD was like $17 in 1995. So that's $34 today.
| That would buy you one album. Today that buys you 3 months of
| listening to unlimited music.
|
| So the price of Spotify is like when someone only buys 4 CDs
| every year.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/05/arts/pennies-that-add-
| up-...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Luckily for me, I don't feel like my employer has tasked me
| with working against our users interests. I want them to
| succeed at the things they're trying to do and I'm working
| in support of that goal.
|
| But if things were otherwise? Then yes, the users should
| either walk away or they should circumvent whatever
| handcuffs I'm hypothetically building for them.
|
| In that scenario, I'd absolutely participate in cutting my
| employer out of the loop so that I could do less evil work
| and instead get paid directly by the people who benefit
| from what I'm working on, and I hope you would too.
| dangus wrote:
| Sounds like a pretty luxurious position to be in. I
| wonder if your local Walmart associate ever thought of
| working for a more morally upstanding company? Maybe they
| could start their own retailer with better values. Should
| be pretty easy to spin up some distribution centers
| right?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed, I'm fortunate, as are many of us on this site. We
| have opportunities to keep the powerful in check that
| others do not. Therefore we have a responsibility to take
| advantage of those opportunities, because it's a bit much
| to ask the Walmart employees to do so.
|
| Also, you seem to me implying that a malware author and a
| shelf stocker are equally culpable for the actions of
| their employer, which is an odd sort of moral stance to
| take. Treating your users like enemies is a rather direct
| thing, and working for someone who behaves badly in some
| dimension unrelated to your work is quite another.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Pirating at least on legitimate private trackers is about
| quality and availability. For example, you CANNOT stream
| certain episodes of South Park, always sunny, etc because of
| wrongthink. Some things are also unattainable like gravity Lux
| edition. But yes I agree otherwise, just buy stuff. I stopped
| pirating games when I got a real job.
| znpy wrote:
| To be honest if i was making $300k/year i'd be pirating even
| more... i could spend a lot more on hard drives!
| arthur_sav wrote:
| Good luck finding your favorite movie on Netflix. And Spotify
| keeps taking songs off their catalogue which ruins my favorite
| playlists and saved songs.
|
| To be fair, streaming services are usually not at fault here.
| They have to negotiate with the content owners. But at the end
| of the day, I don't care.
|
| Piracy still has place and it's not a money issue.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| Exactly. This content is actually important to people,
| despite the common idea that culture, even purely
| entertainment culture, not to mention more artistic things,
| is a commodity.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > To be fair, streaming services are usually not at fault
| here. They have to negotiate with the content owners
|
| If their behavior has resulted in an ecosystem where the art
| doesn't reliably make it to the artists' audiences then
| perhaps they are a little bit at fault. That's their job and
| they're doing it poorly and they're big enough to influence
| the factors that constrain them if they cared about doing
| better.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The entire list of features are all things the official clients
| don't offer.
|
| I DO pay for spotify and still want all those features.
|
| You attempt to critique other people's behavior, while
| completely failing at "be a good person" yourself. It is always
| that way. The person pointing the finger is the one most in
| need of a mirror.
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| Mostly agree, but I think that people have a reasonable desire
| to "own" the pieces of culture that are important to them.
| Especially with movies and TV, your access to the content, even
| if you "bought" it, is temporary. Where there is a fair way to
| purchase your own copy (e.g. Bandcamp for music, at the
| moment), that's great.
| swozey wrote:
| Oh I'm 100% for archiving and keeping the music around
| forever, even if the artist wants it gone honestly.
| alerighi wrote:
| It's not the 10$ a month for Spotify: 10$ to Spotify, 10 to
| Netflix, another 10 to Disney+, to Now TV/SKY (in my country),
| to DAZN, to Prime Video, etc. If you sum all the services you
| have to pay you spend easily more than 100$ a month in
| streaming services, that is 1200$ a year that is for most
| person in my country a month of work! And the others would
| rather spend if for other things, such as a vacation.
|
| Finally pirating is most of the time more convenient, for
| example using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry
| Pi etc is not possibile, also they require internet and you
| can't just for example save the files on an USB stick or CD to
| play on the car stereo.
| sudobash1 wrote:
| > using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry Pi
| etc is not possibile
|
| I can't speak to Raspberry Pi (and other non-x86 boards), but
| on my PC I can listen to Spotify just fine. I don't even have
| to use Chrome. It works as well on Firefox.
| alerighi wrote:
| On a PC, yes. But let's say that I want to listen to music
| in my car, and I have an old stereo (that I don't want to
| replace) that only has CD and/or USB input. I can't from
| Spotify just take the music and download it to an USB stick
| or burn a CD, even with premium (I can download it to play
| offline, but they are DRM protected and I can play only
| from the official player)
| recursive wrote:
| For most people, that's a solved problem with bluetooth.
| recursive wrote:
| I subscribe to netflix, and none of the others. You don't
| have to subscribe to all of them.
| alerighi wrote:
| And if you want to see a movie or show that is not on
| Netflix? What you do?
| traverseda wrote:
| I still pirate TV and movies, and that is to the best of my
| knowledge legal in my district. I sometimes pirate console
| video games, but pretty much never do if they're available on
| steam.
|
| Piracy is a service problem, not a financial problem. I also do
| use patreon for some creators I enjoy.
| mock-possum wrote:
| How long have you been using Spotify?
|
| It seems to me that at every opportunity, the team responsible
| for Spotify has made it _worse_. The UI is made significantly
| worse every major update. The only good thing I can think of
| that they've added over the past decade or so has been dark
| mode and I am not exaggerating. Have you seen the state of
| playlists and sorting /filtering options? You know, one of the
| most important things about music software?
|
| Literally the only reason I'm using (and paying for) Spotify
| now is that there isn't a legitimate competitor to switch to.
| Spotify is not worthy of respect of loyalty and it's certainly
| not deserving of not being pirated from.
| swozey wrote:
| I've used it since 2008 or 2009.
|
| You're not wrong. Their constant changes and removing
| features the last few years is frustrating. They just did
| that big recent UI update, I've barely used spotify since
| they did it so I can't tell if I like it or hate it yet but
| they constantly change it. It looks like it's missing things
| now but I'm not too sure.
| Bayart wrote:
| I stopped pirating for a decade and started again when
| platforms became so fragmented and inconvenient that torrenting
| is the more convenient option again. On the other hand I buy a
| _lot_ of records, both old and new, so I 'm objectively
| spending more on music than I've ever been. MUBI is the only
| content subscription I still happily keep.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| Agreed. I have bought many many things on Apple iTunes store,
| and I have an archive of MP3s that I've collected that I don't
| want to lose, and I also pay for Spotify because it's the most
| convenient service for listening to music and it'll probably
| the be last one I cancel before I move into a cardboard box.
| john-radio wrote:
| Part of your point seems to be that the OP, being a software
| engineer, should not have to pirate Spotify since presumably
| they have access to money. But that's not really the case for
| all devs, and moreover, nobody who isn't a dev is able to make
| a tool like this in the first place.
| beeboobaa wrote:
| Feel free to pay for my Spotify subscription if you feel so
| strongly.
| beej71 wrote:
| For me, it's not that I don't want artists to have money. (I
| just found an artist I liked who uploads all their live music--
| quality recordings!--to Internet Archive under a CC license. I
| went to their website and bought all their albums on the spot.
| They should arrive in a couple days, and then I'll rip them to
| FLAC and put them on my jellyfin server.)
|
| But questionably-ethical companies I try not to give money to,
| e.g. companies that only pay artists pennies, or might suddenly
| disappear music that I "bought". And that's on top of the fact
| that Spotify in particular actually kinda sucks at suggesting
| good music. I quit them in the middle of my free trial because
| I got tired of hitting "next". My friends are much, much better
| suggestion engines.
| digitalsin wrote:
| It is not about the money for me, and also I'm happy to support
| the artists and regularly do by buying their vinyl when I can.
|
| It is about the fact at any time Spotify, Apple, etc can remove
| music from my playlist for any reason and at any time. It's
| about the fact they require me to use their invasive, spyware,
| data mining BS apps in order to listen to my music. It is about
| the fact that when I want to listen to music in my car, I have
| to listen to it using the way _they_ say I can.
|
| I can't believe I have adult friends who really don't care
| about their personal privacy or freedoms and are ready to give
| it up at a moments notice for convenience.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I can afford streaming services but I pirate anyway. Why? Ads.
| I'm not paying to watch ads. Simple as.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Piracy is a moral imperative. The internet was supposed to be
| free and break down barriers. Instead what we have now is a
| show available in the UK but not available in the US. This is
| not acceptable.
|
| This plus the fact that actual artists get a pittance, means
| the flag will fly high till companies learn.
|
| Also piracy has become much more reliable these days. There are
| systems which will make sure you get 4k streams based on any
| genre you enjoy. New shows from around the world. No need to
| wait for Netflix to add it to your countries playlist that to
| hidden behind garbage UX.
|
| At the end of the day it is about availability, user control,
| artist benefits and showing the middle finger to large
| corporations.
|
| That is the hacker mindset. That is what I grew up with in the
| early 2000s and it is substantially better than what we are
| "supposed" to do now. Hope that makes sense.
| ape4 wrote:
| Isn't Spotify going to shut this down quickly
| pacomerh wrote:
| The actual content is from youtube
| wiseowise wrote:
| > nor uses Electron
|
| > Flutter
|
| ...
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Reason #1,000,000 why I'm glad I'm on Android. Can't even install
| this thing on iphone. Works great btw, using this app on my
| desktop and pixel thank you!
| znpy wrote:
| Reason #1,000,001 i'm glad i'm european: soon thanks to the
| digital markets act I'll be able to side load this app onto my
| iPhone.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| That sounds excellent, hopefully it's hard for Apple to
| maintain both set ups and just go global, like they did for
| their chargers.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| This is definitely the sort of thing that forces "evil" companies
| to close their API's
| 3abiton wrote:
| I don't think companies need more excuses to do it. Look at
| reddit, X, etc ... I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify made
| their API a "paid" service.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I'm surprised it's open to begin with.
|
| Their recommendation component is one of the few reasons I
| pay. Everything I ever wanted to hear is on YouTube.
| polski-g wrote:
| I just want a spotify client that works behind an HTTP proxy.
| icar wrote:
| Worth mentioning that Spotify doesn't use Electron, but CEF.
| felixbraun wrote:
| Worked on an open source cloud player 10y ago: idea was to have
| one place to curate playlists and your music library in general
| -- basically an access and authentication platform where the
| underlying providers can change over the years without impacting
| your collection.
|
| Still feel this is the right way to think about collecting and
| curating music going forward...
| seemack wrote:
| I had a similar thought a few years ago when trying to think of
| "useful" uses of NFTs. It could be great if I could buy music,
| etc and then play it on any streaming service via some sort of
| proof-of-right-to-play mechanism.
| ang_cire wrote:
| It will never happen. Why would the future platform owners,
| or especially separate service owners, want to let you enjoy
| the benefit of their hosting costs when they get nothing?
| MisterKent wrote:
| Imagine Spotify being able to continue streaming you music
| that they no longer have access to, because you "the user"
| still have individual rights to the music.
|
| Thwn, you can stream your own music and Spotify's music
| side by side.
|
| And, it's a double win, since they're not paying an royalty
| fees for a single user streaming music they already own.
| darrenBaldwin03 wrote:
| No Electron? Sign me up!
| linsomniac wrote:
| Somewhat related: A month ago I migrated from Spotify to YTMusic
| (Youtube), and published the scripts I used to do it. People have
| kind of come out of the woodwork: reporting issues, starring the
| repo, asking questions, last night I found someone has written a
| GUI for it.
|
| https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic
|
| The biggest reason I ditched Spotify is that their shuffle play
| of playlists is laughably bad. I like listening to just a shuffle
| of my favorite music, but their player seems to "stick" on just a
| few of them. I ask it to shuffle a few thousand "liked" songs,
| during my shower every day, and I'll hear the same song 3 times
| in a week, for example.
|
| There was a "bug" open in their support forum since 2017 that
| they replied "maybe we'll look at it eventually". It has hundreds
| of pages of replies. And they just laid off a significant portion
| of their workforce, so I figured it'd never get resolved. And for
| a company doing music playback, it just seems like they can't get
| one of the basics right.
|
| Since going to YTMusic, I've been hearing songs from my playlists
| that I haven't heard in years.
| mkobit wrote:
| They wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random
| shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their
| algorithm works (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-
| to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their
| approach has changed or that it does not perform well under
| certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well
| for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I agree with you that it seems to work fine on playlists of
| less than 50 or 100 songs.
|
| The problem seems to be that on larger playlists they will
| only use 50-100 of the tracks to shuffle through. Most times
| I'm listening to music I just want to put on a shuffle of all
| my favorites and listen. It's been that way since I got my
| first CD changer. Maybe that's a super unusual use case, but
| it's my primary one, and I get really tired of hearing the
| same songs repeatedly over a week. YMMV, my wife for example
| likes listening to the same songs every day.
|
| As I mentioned above: I copied my Spotify playlists to
| YTMusic and am doing the same "shuffle my liked songs" and
| I'm literally hearing songs Spotify hasn't played for me in
| years. Usually the algorithm complaint in music players is
| that they are using random rather than shuffle, but even in
| that case I'd think that 2K songs over 2-3 years, I'd be
| hearing _SOME_ of those songs that YTMusic is playing but
| Spotify is not. The cynic in me figured that they were
| prioritizing the songs by the ones that made them the most
| money, or from artists that paid for placement. But something
| about their shuffle is just totally off.
| achairapart wrote:
| Yes, it looks like there is some artificial placement. This
| may be driven by malice (some sort of paid or more
| lucrative placement, like you said), but also by stupidity
| (algo prioritizing songs already in the client cache, to
| save some egress bandwidth perhaps?).
|
| So I started clearing the Spotify client cache more often,
| and it looks to me there is more diversity, at least on the
| auto-generated "recommended songs" playlists. But still, no
| hard proof of this.
| linsomniac wrote:
| The "recommended songs" playlists seem to have more
| diversity, but also seem to be fairly short (they'll
| repeat in a couple hours it feels like; I rarely listen
| to them when I'm working because they'll start repeating,
| and I don't usually listen to music for a large fraction
| of the day, so I'm guessing 1-2 hours).
|
| My best guess is that they are assuming no playlist is
| more than 50-100 songs, and are limiting the shuffle to
| that number, so that a shuffle doesn't consume too many
| resources (memory, database hits, CPU cycles). Maybe
| someone, possibly in the distant past had a large
| playlist that caused service problems. And because of
| that they clamped WAY down to prevent it.
| CatDaaaady wrote:
| Oh my! I thought this weird behavior was just something _I_
| experienced on Spotify. I'm always asking myself, "didn't I
| just hear this song?"
| linsomniac wrote:
| Nope. Here is the Spotify Forum thread I was mentioning:
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-
| Op...
|
| A couple corrections: It's from 2020, not 2017, and it "only"
| has 114 pages of replies rather than 200.
| fermentation wrote:
| I wanted to like ytmusic, but their ios client is somehow worse
| that spotify. Main daily gripes are toasts (stop doing toasts
| on ios, never do toasts) hiding ui elements I want to touch and
| the app forgetting my queue every day or two
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| YTMusic is still a pale imitation of what Google Play Music
| used to be... but it's also still my main streaming service
| simply because most of my library transferred from GPM.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Agreed, I switched to Spotify when Google ditched Play Music,
| largely because my Google Home was terrible at using voice
| commands to play YTMusic "Liked Songs", I could never get it
| to work reliably. Then I found Spotify is just as bad at that
| use-case, but also worse at shuffle.
|
| I had a friend that worked on Google Play, and he said it
| would have been much better if the labels hadn't gotten
| involved, in the form of demands made...
|
| My primary complaint with YTMusic is that there isn't a way
| to "shuffle play", you have to start playing a playlist and
| then click "shuffle" and then click "next".
| nprateem wrote:
| I love the fact that whatever song radio station I choose on
| spotify it always recommends me the same 30 songs. I'm starting
| to think they only have 50 songs in their whole library...
| throwoutway wrote:
| Spotify product management has a history of not listening to
| customers, and thinking they know better, with lots of HN
| examples in threads about it
| linsomniac wrote:
| Another option is to use a tool that shuffles your playlist:
| https://spotifyshuffler.com
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Hah! I wrote something to go the other direction (YT->Spotify)
| because the dating apps only work with Spotify.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Spotify premium user here; I'd like a better interface please.
|
| Its the only reason I clicked, and I am disappointed that this is
| more about piracy than sane gui.
| nsteel wrote:
| I don't get it at all.
|
| > No ads, thanks to the use of public & free Spotify and YT Music
| APIs1
|
| There's zero permission to use Spotify's APIs in this way. So
| what does "thanks" mean in this context?
|
| I don't like projects like this that potentially ruin it for the
| rest of us.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| there are easier ways to get Spotify for free that requires
| more bandwidth
| thfuran wrote:
| https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-thesaur...
| mock-possum wrote:
| why would you need spotify's permission to look up a youtube
| video?
| nsteel wrote:
| Using Spotify's API data in another service breaks Spotify's
| terms of use. The terms are there for you to read. I've no
| idea if they are actually enforceable.
|
| But if you aren't going to apply things in context they won't
| make sense.
| mderazon wrote:
| Wow this is really well made
| Bayart wrote:
| Quite smart idea, it does completely fill the huge gaps in the
| Spotify catalogue and trying it out it seems to get the right
| tracks even with insanely niche stuff.
| mderazon wrote:
| Wow this is really well made and polished, congrats for the
| creators for this acheivement.
|
| One thing I notice, and that's not an issue of the app but rather
| that of the youtube sources is that the sound quality between
| songs is not consistent and overall worse than Spotify
| twerkmonsta wrote:
| Started downloading FLAC music after discovering how bad Spotify
| compression is even at the highest quality. I still subscribe to
| Spotify for discovery and convenience, but almost never use it.
| hackernewds wrote:
| use TIDAL HIFI
| e44858 wrote:
| Tidal's "HiFi" format was actually the lossy MQA. Seems they
| recently started to convert their catalog to the truly
| lossless FLAC:
| https://www.techhive.com/article/1974696/tidal-flac-
| preferre...
| deltaburnt wrote:
| Apple Music supports lossless music and uploading your own
| songs, that's part of why I prefer them over Spotify. Though
| I'm not sure if they support lossless uploads now or not.
| shunyaekam wrote:
| As an aside, I think YouTube Music is superior to Spotify in
| terms of music catalog.
|
| You get "everything on Spotify" (high quality audio) plus the
| YouTube videos (eg mixes that are put up) in a battery-friendy
| player (possibility to go audio only on these videos). Of course
| minimizable with YT Premium.
|
| I believe that the discoverability algo is much better with
| YouTube Music as well, which is important to me...
|
| I pay ~$15/month (in my local currency) for YouTube Premium which
| also gives me the ad-free experience on YouTube.
| squid_fm wrote:
| Fully agree, it is the most underrated platform.
|
| Ultimately, it comes down to the catalog. Anything even
| slightly more obscure (older house music, rare b-sides,
| unreleased tracks) just isn't found on Spotify. Pretty much
| everything is on YouTube though.
| smt88 wrote:
| Unfortunately YT Music pays the least to artists.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| YouTube is also better if you're looking for original mixes and
| not the remaster, as well as for anything out of print.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| And live stuff. Bands that allow fans to patch into the audio
| board, or stream, their concerts live on SiriusXM, get them
| all uploaded to YouTube.
|
| Also, covers by random people. Some of my favorite music is
| basically just a dude doing an acoustic guitar cover of a
| great song.
|
| https://youtu.be/2rFpZL6BiCs?si=5qFHjGQLHTfDB1zG
| artninja1988 wrote:
| The only thing Spotify has over YouTube are the playlists and
| recommendation engine imo. The ai dj feature is also neat
| mrtksn wrote:
| I actually like YouTube itself for casual listening, it has
| everything. My only problem with it is that on autoplay will
| put 2 hour long albums as a single video instead of picking the
| most relevant next song.
| saos wrote:
| Spotify about to kill off their API
| Narishma wrote:
| It's using Flutter though, which isn't that much better.
| costco wrote:
| Protip: librespot doesn't actually require premium
|
| Just modify the authentication code in
| https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot-golang/blob/maste...
| to look something like this: packet :=
| &Spotify.ClientResponseEncrypted{
| LoginCredentials: &Spotify.LoginCredentials{
| Username: proto.String(username),
| Typ: authType, AuthData:
| authData, },
| AccountCreation:
| Spotify.AccountCreation_ACCOUNT_CREATION_ALWAYS_PROMPT.Enum(),
| SystemInfo: &Spotify.SystemInfo{
| CpuFamily: Spotify.CpuFamily_CPU_X86_64.Enum(),
| CpuSubtype: proto.Uint32(0),
| Brand: Spotify.Brand_BRAND_UNBRANDED.Enum(),
| BrandFlags: proto.Uint32(0),
| Os: Spotify.Os_OS_LINUX.Enum(),
| OsVersion: proto.Uint32(0),
| OsExt: proto.Uint32(0),
| SystemInformationString: proto.String("Linux [x86-64 0]"),
| DeviceId: proto.String("libspotify"),
| }, PlatformModel: proto.String("PC desktop"),
| VersionString: ..., ClientInfo:
| &Spotify.ClientInfo{ Limited:
| proto.Bool(false), Language:
| proto.String("en"), }, }
|
| In the go version of the library they set some boolean in the
| request that makes it not work with free accounts but if you
| change it to this it will work. You can also use this Wireshark
| dissector to read Spotify protobuf messages directly:
| https://github.com/plietar/spotify-analyze/blob/master/disse...
|
| Then you can make the authentication packet look exactly like the
| desktop client (though this is not required because Spotify has
| lax validation).
| ObscureMind wrote:
| protip: if you use freemium spotify in the browser with an
| adblock you won't be bugged with ads
| breadsniffer wrote:
| Spotify is one of those subscriptions that is 100% worth it.
| Rather listen to HQ audio than youtube vids made in iMovie
| fHr wrote:
| If I have to hear at one more interview that they now use scrum
| and spotifys agile model with tribe/squad/guilds/chapters I'm
| gonna end myself.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Yeah, OK but Spotify premium family plans are like 16 bucks a
| month for 6 people...
|
| $35 a year or so per seat? Meh. Hardly worth pirating is it? It
| seems like a pretty fair price for literally all the music ever
| made available on demand. Ha.
|
| I always think how much money I wasted on CDs when I was in high
| school... and then how much time wasted on MP3s in college -
| downloading, organizing, sharing, syncing... at one point I had
| 200 GB of audio media files that had to be perpetually curated
| and stored on an expensive NAS. Insane.
|
| (Not that I didn't enjoy it a bit... especially finding new tools
| to help me automate downloads and deduplicate and organize all
| the files. I had another 16 TB of video files on the NAS shared
| via Plex server with friends... 2012 or so. It just took so much
| time!)
|
| So for me, Spotify is a just a better system.
|
| Maybe make a "find a Spotify account friend" matching service. =P
| audidude wrote:
| Linux version doesn't have aarch64 builds in case you try Flatpak
| and it doesn't work.
| sciencesama wrote:
| we need a youtube client to scrobble and buffer video in full and
| fast forward much smoother !!
| dartharva wrote:
| It's puzzling to me how much excitement this is suddenly
| generating on HN.
|
| Yes, mixing Spotify playlists with a YouTube frontend is a great
| idea, but in no way is this new. Anyone following the app modding
| scene on XDA-Developers (pre-enshittification) or Telegram has
| likely seen atleast half a dozen apps that have been implementing
| the same thing for the last five years.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Anyone following the app modding scene on XDA-Developers (pre-
| enshittification) or Telegram
|
| Because that's not everyone.
| nXqd wrote:
| It's just much faster than spotify, very interesting idea.
| Aissen wrote:
| The comment about supporting podcasts in the Readme is a bit
| weird, since many podcasts (and all the ones I listen to) are
| available with an open RSS stream. Sure, Spotify-exclusives won't
| be available, but it does not say that.
| benkaiser wrote:
| This being native is super nice!
|
| I maintain an open source web-based music player called
| Stretto[1]. It works well as a PWA on Android, but it depends on
| a chrome extension to bypass CORs.
|
| Allows you to import playlists from Spotify and automatically
| backs them with a YouTube track (similar to this service). Also
| supports adding SoundCloud tracks, for those that love their
| remixes.
|
| [1]https://github.com/benkaiser/stretto
| mock-possum wrote:
| small nitpick: what's the point of specifying a value for
| "%ProgramFiles%" if installers aren't going to respect it?
|
| The default install location for Spotube on windows is in the
| same directory the installer is launched from - so if it's
| downloaded to the default "%UserProfile%\Downloads" then it's
| going to install to "%UserProfile%\Downloads\Spotube" ... and,
| like, who wants it there?
| kurokawad wrote:
| Definitely was not expecting somebody claim so hard they are not
| using Electron and being native, then use Flutter
| dimaor wrote:
| Wow, you beat me to it. I have been building my own version of
| the same application for myself.
|
| Great job, I will be happy to contribute as well.
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