Spotify to raise prices in September
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That is fascinating to me as well:
Movies > Big filesizes > many public trackers and seeders
Music > smaller and easier to store/play > less public trackers, only slsk is really viable
Books > even smaller > there are some websites like anna and a lot of small ones
But then:
Sheet music > even smaller files > almost impossible to pirateIt is fascinating to me that there isnt one clear spectum along filesize.
I guess it has to do with the target audience and demand.
There are a lot of reasons for this but mostly because music streaming has been so popular that it wiped out the market for music. Its also a huge pain in the ass to sort and organize music when nobody follows a standard when they rip music so it makes automating things a lot harder as well.
I have several thousand songs I've downloaded over the last 25 years but even with modern tools like MusicBrainz Picard or Lidarr, there's no good way to organize your collection. You wind up with a bunch of singles or oddball songs from a compilation album, from a sampler, or you download an album and half of the songs come from the US version while the other half is from a UK version of the album and the uploader forgot to include a bonus track that comes on that version. Its just a huge mess that you dont see with movies and TV because apart from things like a "Director's Cut" or "Extended Version," you know what you're getting when you download them.
Additionally, playback isnt easy either. Are you going to manually transfer hundreds of files to your phone? Stream from your home media server to your phone and use a bunch of bandwidth? You're getting tired of 30% of your songs so are you going to go through your collection one by one and erase them?
There's a huge convenience factor for services like Spotify. With movies and TV the convenience factor definitely favors the self-hosted side of things.
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Damn, you got me! Now I have to rethink my whole plan to undermine Spotify's revenues one comment a time!
Get riled.
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Dropped it for Tidal years ago, never looked back.
I've started collecting CDs and building my own Jellyfin library so I don't depend on streaming services.
On Qobuz here. I just buy vinyl then rip it directly from Qobuz generally.
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of course there are ways round it, but that's not my point. Getting expensive
wrote last edited by [email protected]Getting expensive would be the wrong wording. The price of subscription is simply following inflation. Otherwise as long as the price stays the same while people get raises, you could say it's getting cheaper.
But it could becoming increasingly not worth it. Depends how much % of your pay is spent on the subscription long term, as both of them go up. If the % is growing, then it's bad, if it's mostly the same or going down, thats good.
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I ripped CDs to FLAC, put them on a Plex server, and use Plexamp on my computer and phone. Now I've got my own personal streaming service.
I have a 50TB library of movies and TV, Plex, the *arrs, a dedicated server, and even I dont bother with music because its a huge pain in the ass to deal with. I have a bunch of songs from before music streaming was popular and a few I've gotten from SoulSeek since then, but that's about it. Ripping CDs, labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure is just too much work especially when you get into thousands and thousands of songs. There are software solutions to this but they don't work very well because music is much harder to deal with when you can have 50 versions of the same song floating around out there.
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Unfortunately true. It's the uninformed (and who don't care enough to get informed) that allow the violation of rights and privacy continue.
I have a 50TB library of movies and TV, Plex, the *arrs, a dedicated server, and even I dont bother with music because its a huge pain in the ass to deal with. I have a bunch of songs from before music streaming was popular and a few I've gotten from SoulSeek since then, but that's about it. Ripping CDs, labeling and tagging each track, and sorting them into a properly named folder structure is just too much work especially when you get into thousands and thousands of songs. There are software solutions to this but they don't work very well because music is much harder to deal with when you can have 50 versions of the same song floating around out there.
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When you bought an album you owned it for life. With spotify you are borrowing the music and if you stop paying you get nothing left
For most people, that's an acceptable trade, because they don't want to maintain a library. And with Spotify, you get access to a much larger library than you could ever possibly keep.
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Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and 'just works' with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It's French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you're trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
Do they have an API? I use a lot of third party recommendation services, to avoid Spotifys and would love to make sure I can create playlists into it
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I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers...
Bandcamp is not banned in the UK yet.
But i think the government has strong intelligence that they are a terrorist organisation. -
Spotify was an amazing service. I've used it for years but its getting worse. More and more things that are intrusive are being added, prices are going up. It just sucks i wish they would have just split it into different tiers so i dont have to pay for all this extra shit.
Inflation is also rising. I am not so sure Spotify raised its prices more than inflation.
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I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers...
You can rip MP3 files by using a Youtube-to-MP3 converter.
Just stop using Spotify entirely.
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You can rip MP3 files by using a Youtube-to-MP3 converter.
Just stop using Spotify entirely.
https://github.com/justin025/onthespot
Way better. My personal library is reaching 375k songs.
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You could just be young. By the time I was old enough to start pirating Spotify had already existed for years and it's just significantly easier than getting into a tracker. My wife has yearly playlists she's been making since she was a teen and doesn't want to loose those.
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Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and 'just works' with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It's French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you're trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
I'm on Tidal right now and currently considering the switch to Qobuz. There's no official (or unofficial) Linux client which is kind of a bummer. Tidal at least has a half-decent unofficial one...
Yeah, I could just use the web player or strawberry but I just prefer having a dedicated app.
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Of course... not quite my point but yours is valid. I'd just like a more ethical alternative which I know is asking far too much in 2025
Bandcamp?
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I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers...
Well my decision to cancel Spotify last month is already paying off.
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Inflation is also rising. I am not so sure Spotify raised its prices more than inflation.
They have
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Do they have an API? I use a lot of third party recommendation services, to avoid Spotifys and would love to make sure I can create playlists into it
Im 90% sure they have an API, I've seen github projects that mention using it
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Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and 'just works' with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It's French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you're trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
I also just switched to Qobuz. I like to listen to albums and playlists. The UI is more minimal than Spotify which I enjoy.
I like the fact it's not constantly trying to push new things like podcasts, concerts etc. on me. I just want to listen to music and pay the artists for it! -
I'm on Tidal right now and currently considering the switch to Qobuz. There's no official (or unofficial) Linux client which is kind of a bummer. Tidal at least has a half-decent unofficial one...
Yeah, I could just use the web player or strawberry but I just prefer having a dedicated app.
Yeah, the web client works just fine on Linux. A good native client would be better, of course, but I'd rather use the web one than a half-assed native one.
