Technology

Many of my friends use it. I'm old school and just keep a collection of mp3s on multiple devices for backup.

Can anyone tell me how to cancel Spotify service? I went to their website, but it wouldn't let me in without installing or logging into their app. And from their app I can't find a way to cancel!

Bandcamp is the way to go and Tidal if you really need streaming.

I just use ViMusic or RiMusic or one of those types of forks. I believe it uses YouTube and other sources. It is ad-free and has the usual stuff you'd expect like suggestions, playlists, genres etc. Occasionally the source platform will make a change that breaks it, an update comes out fixes it.

That and there are still (probably ancient at this point) desktop clients that scrape your Pandora and download local copies of all the tracks. That's another good way to never listen to ads.

Intermediary platforms are like this, yes. They take place of what should be infrastructure.

I hope everybody understands that if some standard, easy to get into payment and catalogue system were in place, nobody would need these platforms. If you could pay to an IP address as easily as you can ping it. I mean, I think identities should be cryptographic in that, but you get the idea. It should be lower level functionality.

the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it's a great watch if you understand german!

it's called Dirty Little Secrets

EDIT: here's episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call "ghost musicians"

For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.

What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

That it all-around sucks? That I've been telling people this since it's creation? That nobody fucking listens to me? Or that this preview picture looks like ET and Titanic had a mash-up. Or all of the above.

It's all of the above, duh.

So happy I switched to Tidal long ago because the pathetic music stream quality it has. I made me had headaches , literally. For the ones who don't know Best quality audio streaming are Tidal and Apple music . YouTube music is pure crap quality as Spotify.

Pirate the music, use ListenBrainz (which is FOSS) to analyze your listening behavior and make recommendations

I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.

"Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians."

Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection..