Spotify to raise prices in September
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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.
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Yeah I have been top member for over a decade. It is convenient, there are some things pushing me away though.
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The podcast push, autoplaying unremoveable videos on the homescreen.
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The algorithym pushing US style hack shit like what loser group of comedians take on politics is despite I exclusively listening to Australian comic book movie news and British Ukrainian war coverage.
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Worsening UI/UX, poor offline management
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Shorts/Reels
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Removing features, from the running tempo sensor to family mixes.
The offline features on Spotify are abysmal. Half my downloaded albums don't even work. It's the primary reason I'm looking for an alternative. How can an app with such a high market share be this shitty?
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You can rip MP3 files by using a Youtube-to-MP3 converter.
Just stop using Spotify entirely.
And once you have them ripped (however you choose to do that), host them via a media server so you can access them from whatever device you like.
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They don't have any other recommendations apart from those human made ones though? Couldn't find what I wanted.
The UI is awful and their artist pages are normally blank for indy artists.
The migration is pretty seamless though, and they apparently pay their artists way better.
They have the human made ones, they have the "artist radio" function that plays songs similar to a band you like, they have a weekly top 30 based on stuff you've been listening to. The headline 'albums of the week' are based on what they like, which I don't think is unfair - I've really enjoyed some of them.
I listen to a lot of metal and electronic, and I've always found the descriptions excellent - usually several paragraphs even for the most obscure of bands. Was well impressed that they had Lambrini Girls as one of their 'albums of the week', and their album at studio quality. Not that that's essential for punk. Admittedly I don't listen to a lot of indy, but they've always had what I've wanted to listen to.
My main complaint about the UX is that it's nearly identical to Spotify, but I suppose there's not much else you can do. Something particular about it that you dislike?
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Bandcamp is not banned in the UK yet.
But i think the government has strong intelligence that they are a terrorist organisation.wrote last edited by [email protected]Well, it's owned by friggin' Epic, now... so they're not that far off with their Intel. -
Also Daniel Ek is investing in AI war company:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html
So glad he didn't get his grubby hands on Arsenal FC in the end.
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Like a million songs come out every week. Can't keep up when it's mostly digital now, no cd to get. But you can rip Spotify!
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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...
Will they be raising their rates in India? Because that's where Spotify thinks I live now.
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Ditched Spotify and bought myself a galleon and a tricorner hat instead. Haven't looked back.
Lidarr + Navidrome + Feishin + Metube
Mullvad for acquiring, TailScale and Symfonium for listening while away from home
This sounds like a lot of setup but probably took a few hours in total to set up the various docker images and get them working together.
I spend my saved money on vinyls, official merch, and SoundCloud or BandCamp purchases for my local library.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Out of curiosity, what is your experience/usage like with this? Spotify is very easy to justify if you heavily use some of their features because there's not a way (that I know of) to replicate them. For example:
- Shared playlists
- Universal links directly to songs
- Playback control from a second device
- Group listen/jam
- Zero overhead for search and discovery. From someone mentioning a band you can find, sample, and add to a playlist in 30s or less
- Public playlist discovery
- Easy crawling. Eg. browsing from Song -> Featured Artist -> Album -> Record label -> Related Artists etc...
From my usage, sacrificing a majority of those is a non-starter because my Spotify usage has become more than mp3 hosting and organization.
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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.
Somewhere out there is a person with a single folder named "music", with zero sub folders, containing thousands upon thousands of tracks with names like "1.mp3" and "1 (1).mp3" and they're totally okay with it.
Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.
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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.
“Youngins” dont understand that when Spotify came on the scene people had already stopped playing music on CDs and MP3s largely. It was when the ipod and iphones already existed and people were getting ripped off by apple for $1.29 per song that they wanted to listen to.
I vividly remember at the time trying to tell people to try Spotify instead of paying for literally every song they wanted to listen to, and people were skeeved by it because it sounded too good to be true
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Well, it's owned by friggin' Epic, now... so they're not that far off with their Intel. -
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Re: Transferring, I bought a 1TB sd-card for my phone and use Syncthing to transfer music from desktop to phone.
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
Wow, that trade went by very quietly. Glad they're out from Epic at least i guess... scummy as hell behavior from Songtradr...
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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...
When I got tired of Spotify's shitty practices, I looked into other streaming services that could compare, and honestly I didn't like any other offerings. So I said fuck it, I'll just download everything and play it locally.
What made the jump easy was a service called Spotidown, I even paid for the ad free version it was so convenient. You literally copy the spotify link for songs and playlists and it let's you download it. There's a couple different services like this, that will make the switch easier.
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They have the human made ones, they have the "artist radio" function that plays songs similar to a band you like, they have a weekly top 30 based on stuff you've been listening to. The headline 'albums of the week' are based on what they like, which I don't think is unfair - I've really enjoyed some of them.
I listen to a lot of metal and electronic, and I've always found the descriptions excellent - usually several paragraphs even for the most obscure of bands. Was well impressed that they had Lambrini Girls as one of their 'albums of the week', and their album at studio quality. Not that that's essential for punk. Admittedly I don't listen to a lot of indy, but they've always had what I've wanted to listen to.
My main complaint about the UX is that it's nearly identical to Spotify, but I suppose there's not much else you can do. Something particular about it that you dislike?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Thanks for the long reply.
Did not know the radio function existed. On mobile at least I can't find it on the artists page? I have to go into the ... Menu on a track in a playlist?
I listen to a lot of instrumental stuff while working, so I may be going too indy? Someone like soundcriters should should have something on their page?
https://open.qobuz.com/artist/5003476
I dislike that you have to go to a playlists page to play it in shuffle, you can't do it from the playlists menu.
Double clicking should play a track but doesn't.
