There's no concrete criticisms in the blog post other than vaugarities around "big Spotify". As a very happy Spotify customer (after ditching both Google and Apple music), all of the bemoaning of self-promotion is very easily ignore by scrolling past the first two rows of promoted content in the app. It's essentially not even recognizable to me anymore.
The author touts Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close. Author then goes on to say they've gone to some niche streaming service that provides FLAC (nobody actually cares except audiophiles) and has no meaningful recommendation service. So author is just cutting off their nose to spite their face.
I agree that Spotify has problems, specifically around financials but that story is as old as music itself. Artists rarely make money of the actual music but off merch and concert sales.
You wanna support your artists? Stop being lazy and go so see them live or buy their merch. Boring article otherwise.
edit: You wanna keep your data too? Hook up to last.fm scrobbling and it's all yours. Last.fm has a very good integration with Spotify.
> There's no concrete criticisms in the blog post other than vaugarities around "big Spotify".
Simply not true. He describes and discusses several concrete problems, all of which are related: Spotify is trying to control his experience in favor of their goals and counter to his. You may not agree with his goals, but they’re plainly stated.
> “… the consumer has a perception of control, but almost everything is controlled by the app-masters and faceless algorithms.”
> “I got tired of the dealing with an app (and a platform) that shoved podcasts and audio books in my face, despite having no interest in them.”
> “… dowdy app that exists not to delight its customers but instead meet the growth objectives of its stock market masters.“
Although I also don't like the podcasts available in Spotify, I agree podcasts do make strategic sense for Spotify from a business perspective compared to recorded music. Spotify competes with internet content creators that make hundreds of hours of content per month. Music production is very labor intensive and musicians usually make 1-2 hours of recorded content per year. To match the output one streamer/YouTuber, you might have to have a team of 100-200 musicians, but I'm not sure most people can name even 50 artists they regularly listen to.
Podcasts, on the other hand, are also capable of cheaply producing hundreds of hours of content per month, and therefore for Spotify, are a logical solution to this problem, and theoretically allow them to compete more effectively with YouTube and streaming.
Whether they can actually produce enough good-quality podcasts is another story though. In some sense The Joe Rogan Experience was supposed to be their Halo, but I'm not sure how much traction it has given to Spotify's platform.
That's not my argument. My argument is this: a reason Spotify might have decided to move into podcasts is that podcasts are more efficient at generating content (measured in hours) than musicians are. It doesn't go the other way though; there's little incentive to generate content less efficiently. (Ignoring the fact that Amazon/Audible do in fact distribute music through Prime Music.)
> The author touts Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close.
Actually the author does the opposite, saying that YouTube’s algo is superior.
For me, Spotify used to be THE recommendation engine, but the last few years I found it to regurgitate a lot of the same songs, and recommended the same songs to people around me.
To be fair, I’m far less in “discovery mode” than I used to be, but Spotify is contributing to this by no longer inspiring me. It’s easy to get Spotify like everyone else and just be over with it, but a healthy discussion about active choice is always welcome.
> is very easily ignore by scrolling past the first two rows
Right? I personally don’t use the home page at all. So, it is just a click.
> Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close
For the people who dislike AI recommendation, try to be more creative with your playlist search keywords. You will be surprised (it's heading past the 500 million users, many of them are also “curators”)
> You wanna keep your data too? Hook up to last.fm
Not only that. Spotify tracks are just "text" (copy/paste...). I personally keep all my library data (playlists, favourites...) in simple txt files. Then you can do whatever you want with it (data maintenance, API enrichment...)
>Given, the most of my music discovery is analog — through friends, magazines and music blogs, I don’t rely on recommendation engines as much.
>I know what I like. In 2022, I tuned more to jazz classics, ambient electronica and ambient classical music for nearly 30,000 minutes.
I think the reason the author is able to live without Spotify's recommendation algorithm is that many of the artists producing music in their genres are either dead ("jazz classics" i.e. 1930-1960) or few in number and studied intensely by human academics ("ambient classical", whatever that means). In other words, their music either has been or is currently being catalogued and classified by humans.
For other genres this is not possible. I listen to a lot of jazz in general. Jazz is very much the Wild West; there hasn't been a lot of money in it for the past 50 years and I certainly don't have an army of humans or "piano friends" curating it for me for free. And to put it bluntly, there's a lot of bad or uninteresting music.
Spotify does a pretty good job of recommending me good music, at high scale, based on content rather than popularity, and often from musicians that no one's ever heard of. I don't have a lot of time to triage, classify, and curate music myself, but even if I did, there's no way I could possibly get even close to what Spotify does via my manual human labor. So that's why I pay for and continue to pay for Spotify.
>You wanna support your artists? Stop being lazy and go so see them live or buy their merch.
My gut says a Patreon-style system for music is less viable. Internet content creators put out hundreds of hours of quality content every month. Musicians put out maybe 1-2 hours/year of recorded music that can be accessed over the internet (i.e., excluding private live performances.) Unfortunately for me and my wallet, there's less incentive to donate to musicians than other content creators given the difference in output and value to me. I'm not sure the content creator model can be the same for musicians; I can't name off the top of my head a single musician I like that regularly produced content worth $5/month or more for me. The mass distribution model sounds more effective for music: if a musician can produce content worth $0.05 individually to millions of people, it's profitable. Given the labor-intensive model of creating music compared to other content, the mass distribution style of business model makes more sense.
I don't think OP was suggesting a monthly donation, unless buying merch has taken on a new meaning?
A tiny amount of artists get anywhere near that number of listeners - I'm not arguing that you should feel obliged to do so but for anyone that wishes to support the average artist it makes much more sense to put money in their pocket than hope they manage to get huge amounts of streaming plays.
The author touts Spotify's recommendation engine and rightly so, nothing comes close. Author then goes on to say they've gone to some niche streaming service that provides FLAC (nobody actually cares except audiophiles) and has no meaningful recommendation service. So author is just cutting off their nose to spite their face.
I agree that Spotify has problems, specifically around financials but that story is as old as music itself. Artists rarely make money of the actual music but off merch and concert sales.
You wanna support your artists? Stop being lazy and go so see them live or buy their merch. Boring article otherwise.
edit: You wanna keep your data too? Hook up to last.fm scrobbling and it's all yours. Last.fm has a very good integration with Spotify.