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")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Uber is an interesting example. I think there are genuine improvements that came out of what they did, most notably the idea of having a unified app that you could go to just to request rides that felt usable and that could do things like tell you how close your driver was and that would allow you to pay online.
On the other hand, I think it's become clear that Uber's pricing wasn't sustainable, and part of the reason why Uber was less expensive was because it wasn't sustainable and rides-on-demand might just be something that is naturally expensive because it's expensive, not because taxis were all exploiting the market.
I don't want to say that the taxi industry shouldn't have been "disrupted", everything I've heard about how taxis operated makes it feel like that industry was a poorly run cartel. But I sort of feel like there must have been a better way to disrupt it than what Uber did, and the winner-takes-all approach that Uber took probably introduced some harms as well. Having a decent app that allows you to know in advance what you'll pay, to be able to pay online -- those are value propositions that in theory should have been enough to make Uber competitive even without shoveling VC money into a furnace and saying, "we'll figure out the profit part once we own the market."
But I can't know for sure what would have happened.
It feels like when the VC model does yield improvements we end up getting those improvements in a batch lump during the "nice" phase of the company. And then we end up back at square one where there are a few taxi services that increasingly care less and less about doing a good job. I'd prefer a system where businesses compete on quality as much as they can without ignoring pricing realities, because who knows -- maybe there were other taxi services that might have done an even better job than Uber or who might have had improvements that Uber might have been forced to copy, but they couldn't operate or compete because unlike Uber they didn't have a bunch of rich investors throwing money at them covering for all of their losses.
The honeymoon period with VC companies is nice and sometimes occasionally we get permanent improvements out of it, but overall it's necessarily temporary, and it masks the fact that Uber probably would have needed to compete a lot harder and would have needed to make their experience even better if they weren't able to charge so little for rides for so long.
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
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
Respectfully, I'm not trying to win people over or proselytize. This is what I believe strongly and I'm not trying to make it digestible. It is what it is.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I picked Github simply because Spotube happen to have been pushed there.
And because Github is by far the most popular platform to host projects that gets discovered.
And because they've taken down many projects in the past, blocking broadwide access not just from jurisdictions where not sure what non ethical law makes not certain what illegal.
Yeah, no shade to you from me. I think my mention of a US law triggered some HNers' (justified) fears of US-centrism, and I was just explaining why I thought it was not unduly US-centric to respond to a comment about a company headquartered in the US with a remark that referenced the DMCA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By far the main source of degradation in any typical analog audio path is going to be transducers (microphones, speakers, phono cartridges, tape heads) and inferior media (tape, etc.). The vast majority of modern amplifiers, and high end older amplifiers, are extremely transparent with good margins beyond typical human hearing; any issues like noise, harmonic distortion, uneven response, inadequate damping factor, etc. introduced at the amplifier would typically be masked by quirks of the speakers, and revealed only by measuring upstream of the speakers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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].
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 :).
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?
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....
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.
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.
Oh I didn't realize they were still adding APIs to AppKit. That's cool.
Yea I mean the ObjC vs Swift thing.... a matter of preference. I trust Steve Jobs more than I trust Tim Cook. I hate the feature creep in Swift. I hate Swift optionals. ObjC compiles faster than Swift. The ObjC ABI/runtime is superior to the Swift ABI/runtime (which allows for cool stuff like https://cycript.org). I like the dynamic typing a lot. Managing headers is a non-issue for me, I just consolidate everything into one monolithic header file.
I've worked in pretty big ObjC codebases (1M+ lines) so I know most of the tricks to deal with complexity. For Swift, max I've dealt with is 100k lines and it was crippled with tech debt. Frankly, the other engineers on the team were terrible, so maybe that's why. They abused the shit out of RxSwift and refused to use the `!` force-unwrap optional feature
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
People will always complain, but in reality you can make an electron app which no one will distinguish from a native app, and you can make a native app which will lag so hard that it would feel like a browser page from 2004. People just like to put the label "electron" or "flutter" on it and base their blames on that.
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?
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?)
>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.
"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 €10.99 is a huge ask.
PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess that would depend on how much music you listen to. If you listen very occasionally, then yeah €10.99 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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".
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
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…
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the TiVo creator interview in "Programmers at work." There's a line somewhere that you should not cross, lest involved parties take action. The line for TiVo was making it possible to skip commercials. This feels like it has crossed a line as well, especially with text like "eliminating the need for Spotify Premium." If this actually becomes popular, Spotify would have to lock down their API's.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you also integrate Soundcloud, this could be the One-Stop-Shop for all music needs. I've had a Spotify Premium subscription for almost 10 years now, but whenever a song is not available there and it's only on YouTube I wish there was a way to integrate them.
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.
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!
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
> 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.
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.
The problem is with streaming really. Come to a shop where physical works of music are sold, everything is free for listening there. Come to bandcamp – where you can buy and own a digital album, everything is free for listening there. Come to spotify - here you pay to a middle man, who decides whatever crap cut he will pay to a musician per play button pressed – it is instantly visible the whole model is not viable and only makes the middle-man really profit
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.
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.
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:
> 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 $194M is less than 10% of Spotify's revenue.
I'd love to see a breakdown by percentile income per band, but one thing's clear: If I buy something there, then more of my money goes to the artist I'm trying to support than they get from me streaming their album.
> If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best.
I'm not sure that "they get paid so little that we may as well stop paying them anything" is an argument you really want to make here? Yes, Spotify pay is crap. Not paying anything is crap too. Two wrongs don't make a right.
If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp, by going to the physical shows and buying merch, ordering physical copies of their music at the label, patreon, or whatever form of direct support they have set up.
Spotify is just leeching of the culture and as drew pointed out you will be 10000 times more effective if you use one of those options.
Spotify is more or less just a signal booster nowadays - because you have to be on there since everyone uses it.
I for one would never put my music on Spotify, even if I get what like 20$ out of it, what a horrible company and service.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 Yılları 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums
You say that it is better to pay 90$ 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".
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
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
“ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 $2-3 will sync all of your music app playlists/favs/etc to one another.
ALL of them had absolutely useless/bad Android Auto/Carplay apps. I know at least half of them (quboz tidal for sure) didn't have a way to search in the car app. Quboz or Tidal didn't even display your subscribed albums/playlists. I forget exactly but I think I could only play their recommended stuff. Exacts are off here but I remember specifically sitting in my car with both of those apps wondering why I couldn't figure how to play my fav playlist or search for an artist.
Then the social stuff. I share collab playlists with a few friends. Apples adding these feautures IIRC. Surely not important to most people but they really make the other apps just feel barebones. I like gamification, rewinds, badges, etc.
I haven't had many issues with Tidal's CarPlay support. I've only used it in rental cars (so cars that shipped mid to post pandemic) though.
It definitely shows subscribed albums, etc. The one exception was that, on an older Toyota, it only showed the first dozen or so albums in my collection one time out of the dozen I drove the rental. Parking the car then coming back a few hours later fixed it.
1000 annual listens?
That's likely less than 1$/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 50€ 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
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?
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.
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?
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
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 :'( :'( :'( :'(
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Sure, but like the OP, there's a built-in mistaken belief (promoted annually with Spotify Wrapped) that you're supporting the artist by streaming music. I'd rather someone know that they aren't supporting the artist and be aware of that fact than someone think that they're marginally supporting the artist (when in fact they are really just barely supporting the artist).
Again as someone that works in the industry intimately: use this tool all you want, and find ways to support the artist.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
There are at least dozen libs other than Electron that allow to put some lists and images together and be fully platform independent. I'm not even saying what language. This Spotify app was a prototype which stalled at some point because I guess they have much harsher issues to deal with.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The radio station does pay royalties to the artists. And in case you forgot, they play ads as well. Sure, you can "skip" ads by switching to a different station, but the point remains that they compensate artists.
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!
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
not everything that's "in quotes" is from someone in particular or a quote at all really. it's not personal. i'm more interested in how those things get mixed up with all other 'rationales' for not paying, not streaming, not participating in that economy.
'buying an album/merch/etc would pay more anyway' sometimes gets used as a reason to pirate. along with 'artists get a pittance from spotify/streaming and aren't really satisfied with it', casting some kind of shade on that whole streaming thing - is it bad? is it not good? if it's not good, why even use it? - and also getting tangled with 'that's why...if it's pennies, whatever, just pirate it'. or sure, 'buy it later instead', if that ever happens. all that amasses to people skipping streaming, stiffing already unfavored artists (that won't get their merch bought later).
it may be a slight difference, but streaming is not just about 'convenience', it is about artists getting paid regardless of whether they'll get their album or whatever bought later or not. even if it's contentious for artists, it's not just "OK", but the sole acceptable solution at the very bottom of 'how much are you willing to pay (nothing) while still compensating artists in literally any way (that's not nothing)'
i'd go as far as to say that 'buy merch' (specifically in context of piracy and streaming workarounds) is kind of bad advice cause it gets taken as 'oh so I can skip streaming/continue pirating then? great' and taken up as excuse for piracy.
especially when combined with pointing out how artists are dissatisfied with streaming. 'oh, they don't really like it anyway? how about i just don't do that at all then.'
and of course, leaves the rest of artists that won't get favored like that in the dust. what solution do they get? where's the "stream the rest, even if you don't buy it, cause that's still something"? so the 'do they not deserve to be paid' thing actually still kinda arises here huh.
here being, in a comment section about piracy, about an app that's kinda like 'i can't believe it's not piracy!' (just doing it two-fold, circumventing both spotify and youtube at the same time. so actually, twice the piracy, perhaps.)
it's kinda like, 'streaming doesn't pay much and artists don't like it'. well great. that surely would leave an impression that'd incentivize streaming (and paying). it doesn't actually follow from it that 'you should still stream anyway'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
> 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.
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.
Not everything needs to be an activist fight, should I not pay taxes because a party I don’t like is in power?
I think we should all be a bit more open to voices we don’t like. Live and let live, etc.
There are a lot of voices I find worse, and I support them all being free of government persecution. But I'm not paying their platforms--that's _my_ voice.
I think there is no way you are being honest with yourself. there are a truckload of entities that do far more and more objective evil than Joe Rogan and being serious about this issue requires prioritizing attention in such a way that paying any to Joe Rogan is madness, especially when it's not even boycotting Joe Rogan himself but a whole different company that has thousands of contracts just because this one specific guy Do you even boycott other companies that also platform him (and way worse!) like Youtube, Twitter, Reddit?
I would say that the problem is larger than that, with how Spotify worked to close up and monetize a historically free and open medium (podcasts) and aggressively pushed their new business to users who were only interested in music.
The way they deprecated libspotify while promising a fully capable replacement only to never live up to those promises (current APIs/SDKs are incapable of playback) to strip paying users of clients that aren't official also sucks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
I get it, but if my car doesn't have it, and I don't want to buy a new stereo. Also, Bluetooth requires wasting my phone battery, and use either mobile data bandwidth or phone memory space, while I can load a 64Gb USB sticks of songs or burn a bunch of CDs and forget about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.