definitely not what you have in mind here, but at least something going a different route: https://offbridge.net
of course nothing that would help iranians right now. even if, the numbers would be blocked quickly i guess. but also there doesnt seem to be features that would help in such a serious situation
what‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs & managing their own library.
m a y b e some devs would. but those thinking about it, wouldn‘t be stopped like that. i am thinking about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time & motivation to crawl down yet another rabbit hole of diy.
I will never START paying for Spotify. I like my music and so I like to know my music, I have no problem curating my collection, chasing rare works for artists I really like. I enjoy the process, I enjoy the result, I enjoy that I own it. I really don't see why I would rather spend hundreds a year for the privilege of owning nothing at all in the end, while being prescribed what I shall listen to, when and where.
My old mp3 collection is too big for my mobile phone and I did not set up a private streaming solution yet. So out of convenience, I also used spotify. Stream anywhere anything is nice.
And I did enjoy finding new artists through the algorithm there .. but I do made up my mind about letting go of the concenience and owning all my music again. It is a big effort, though and I don't enjoy it so much like you.
I encourage you to have a look at subsonic-compatible servers (navidrome, airsonic & forks), that's a good compromise IMO/E when you've got to pick what music you want to carry with you.
Seems like a reasonable hobby, people love doing this, but idk that not doing something you already wouldn't be inclined to do carries much weight.
Almost like how people who haven't moved out of their hometown cite all sorts of reasons or apparent faults of the place they haven't moved to, like it's too expensive; it's too rainy; it's too busy; it's not sunny enough; but really, they weren't in the business of leaving anyway, because they're comfortable or don't know how to make friends, or they stubbornly try to love a place they actually hate, or they have family there and a support structure, or they have no ambition, or they actually just like the place. Either way, the moving goalposts and random critiques don't matter, it's not the hypothetical destination's burden to court someone who won't make that leap anyway, but there may be a select few fence sitters who are just waiting for a push.
I don't think Spotify's main objective is to persuade hobbyist music collectors to stop, but rather it's to persuade people who want to access music anywhere to pay for the service, which may or may not be someone forced to ditch their vinyl collection or Zune. Voting with your wallet only matters if the service you actually might pay for or are paying for stops being a compelling product.
I'm old enough to have an mp3 collection, so I haven't needed spotify. They don't have 20% of the tracks in my playlist and their integration of local audio has been steadily eroded to be almost unusable now (i.e. it's completely separate, doesn't show up in regular search, playlists etc.). They also push audiobooks and sponsored results in my face even on the Premium subscription, and their UI sucks.
If you already have a collection and are reasonably content in what you listen to, topping it up with a few albums a year is not that hard.
> Even if you have an mp3 collection, the streaming apps are good for discovery, recommendations ...
No they are not. Hi there. We noticed you have been listening to Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Deftones. Why not have a listen of this Robbie Williams song too ... blasts out some pop song at extra high volume.
Many people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for subscription services.
Yeah I'm not saying my friends who cancelled are going to torrent music like it's the 2000's, but when so much music is freely available on the web, why pay? For me it was mainly that the app kept getting worse though.
Aside from all the middle men nibbling at artist take, its also a symptom of trading on fundamentally un-scarce resources. A better business model is selling access to the scarce things like the artist themselves. Trying to maintain stranglehold on a particular order of zeros and ones is always going to be tough.
That’s part of the reason that artists have made a bigger push toward selling merch as a means of making a living. But that feels so arbitrary and unsustainable to me.
Why should I buy a tshirt from somebody because I like their music? Fashion design is its own unrelated art form.
Every entertainment market is saturated. Even if every creative endeavour stopped now, there would still be more freely available content to last more then any individual human life span.
Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something and goes out of their way to consume a specific niche, there isn’t much reason to pay much, or anything for entertainment.
>Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something
to be fair, that's a billion dollar business of an audience. Bandcamp is still a thing because people like that exist. So I wouldn't readily dismiss that.
But yes. We're in an age where people treat TV shows as "second screen entertainment", the silver screen is dying out, and where Spotify is flooding its library with white noise and AI slop. And people at best shrug. There's never been less respect for the arts, and it reflects in wider consumer patterns. Any future artists will need to appeal to a shrinkingly few fanbase of those who care about quality.
If you get a Spotify subscription to support small artists, you'll be in for a rude awakening once you realize how Spotify allocates your funds.
Hint: Your subscription pays for the listening habits of free users. Who do those free users listen to?
The reason why Spotify is a raw deal for the artists you listen to is the same reason why it is possible to bot listens of your AI generated songs and get out more money than was paid for by the bot's subscription.
The entire Spotify business model is very peculiar in how stupid and wasteful it is and who the beneficiaries are.
What you should do instead is give yourself a fixed music budget, export your stream counts and subscribe to their patreons in proportion to how much you listened to them.
Spotify is a model where the artist suffers, the company itself works on a slim margin, and the record labels gets the lion's share. It's pretty much the worst case scenario business.
The issue even goes back to the days of CD's. The artist still wouldn't get that much back compared to the label publishing the disc. even in 2000 is was still more profitable to buy a tshirt than a CD from the artist.
I'm not very well versed in this area, but clearly something needs to change. Being able to independently published helps, but Spotify's model does indeed make it harder to sell your own albums despite it being easier than ever to distribute it without a middleman.
> This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit.
The pie that Spotify divides up among the artists is a global one. It's not like you listen to one artist, so they get your 10 bucks every month. You're paying Taylor Swift, even though you never listen to her.
it's not bad by itself, but I argue the opaque structure of it is horrendous. Especially in financial matters, you should be able to estimate how much money you get if you put X effort in and get Y metrics. But even getting a proper Y isn't straightforward, let alone Z payout.
I run a Navidrome server I stream my own music from. I tag everything with Mp3tag and have a shell script to organize and upload the tagged files. Not all of the music I listen to regularly is on Spotify and their treatment of artists is abominable.
I've ripped and archived CDs for well over a decade, purchase from Bandcamp and — if I can't find a way to buy it — I'll find it and buy a shirt or something from the band as directly as possible.
ATLANTIC RECORDING CORPORATION;
ATLANTIC MUSIC GROUP LLC; BAD
BOY RECORDS LLC; ELEKTRA
ENTERTAINMENT LLC; ELEKTRA
ENTERTAINMENT GROUP INC.; FUELED
BY RAMEN LLC; WARNER MUSIC
INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LIMITED;
WARNER RECORDS INC.; WARNER
RECORDS LLC; SONY MUSIC
ENTERTAINMENT; ARISTA MUSIC;
ARISTA RECORDS, LLC; ZOMBA
RECORDING LLC; UMG RECORDINGS,
INC.; CAPITOL RECORDS, LLC; and
SPOTIFY USA INC.,
Plaintiffs,
Factual Background - III
The Record Company Plaintiffs’ business model relies
in significant part on the licensing of their catalogs of sound recordings
to legitimate streaming services like Spotify.
IMO Spotify couldn't care less. The actual owners of music care.
Cozy secondary relationships with music labels. Payola goes one way and industry demands go the other.
Since "owners" take such a big chunk (50%) of paid royalties for streaming there is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers. Controlling the number of "spins" an song or album of theirs gets is still a huge concern of the labels.
> here is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers.
Spotify has exactly zero music "directly by artists and performers". Even indie artists have to go through distributors and labels. Because without "owners" that own 60-80% of all world music, and that Spotify pays 70% of revenue to there would be no Spotify (or any music streaming service).
Honestly, Spotify itself probably couldn't care less, for the obvious reasons you say.
But the music labels sure do. Their contracts with Spotify surely require it to implement appropriate DRM, stop all attempted piracy, etc. If Spotify wants to be on good negotiating terms with labels, they have absolutely no choice but to take as much legal action as possible.
I put Rockbox on a non-techie friend’s new mp3 player just the other day. Some folks absolutely went back to buying/pirating music after the whole Spotify playing ads for ICE thing. It’s apparently fun curating a collection like in the olden days, and sites like fmhy have gotten pretty popular recently.
Spotify cancelled my subscription. I started off with a Spotify partner subscription with my wife, which grandfathered into some other thing, like a family subscription, and then whatever I had got cancelled. Meanwhile I found a new local radio station has started playing 60% of what I like, some new (to me) joint venture thats a web first marketing company and they bought a bunch of radio stations to add local radio advertising to their list of services. Between spotify with ads, radio with ads, I am listening to radio, while planning out how to most easily go back to just having my favourites on my phone or maybe even an mp3 player.
IF I were still a Spotify user - this would be the nail in the coffin. Not that the founder wouldn't give me enough reason. But they lost me due to other reasons.
I am still paying for streaming, though. Still. Not sure if it is really worth it - and once I have my local mp3 collection available for myself - not sure, if I need a paid streaming service. I am getting too old and I return more and more to the songs I grew up with. And to be honest - if I would be missing anything, I could easily yt-dlp it, store it on my server and have it available ti myself via self hosted streaming.
I am loosing more and more interest in streaming. For video and music.
I think the main use-case for the metadata-enriched 300TB archive is training AI models like suno. Anyone torrenting music for personal consumption had higher quality sources available already.
> i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs
I'd love to self host my music, but curating my collection is a lot of work. I made several attempts, but looking for music I like was too much work for me. If getting "illegal" music becomes easier I'll definitely eventually do this.
I would go back in an instant. I think a lot of people would if it is convenient.
Furthermore, all someone has to do is make a Spotify clone to interact with the archive and you have consumed their entire business.
Even if you didnt want a DIY solution, I bet you would accept a free clone, along with every other customer
I use the Mudita Kompakt specifically cause it allows sideloading so I can still have a few extras. Right now I have Kiwix and Libby. It works really well.
I have a $10 a month plan from US cellular with only 2gigs so I try to keep everything offline that I can.
Honestly it's mostly the news... so I draw the line at browser, I'll never install a browser, that's basically something I can do when I sit down at a PC. I read quite a bit and I like to have the ability to look up a word or a historical event or some reference from something I read using Kiwix and it's been great for that, just needed to add a 512gb micro sd card. And Libby I just use at the gym when I'm on the treadmill.
i do use LLMs a lot for programming recently. i do not use „agents“ or any other new stuff. while i have always felt behind, i do not feel more behind now, not using agents, mcp etc.
maybe i am too ignorant and don‘t see what i am missing. and i am still writing code and enjoying it.
just the terminology of agents, vibe coding, prompt engineering etc is weirdly offputting to me.
I mean what does anyone expect from a future where images like this can be generated by any moron for any place, in thousands of variations, with just a few clicks? And then video?
I am surprised headlines like this are only coming out now. I've been saying it for a long time, but people said i am crazy. The web as we know it will be unusable. And a new one will not solve all issues, as we have already made ourselves too dependent on the current web and tech. So the impact on the real world is gonna turn a lot if things upside down. It's gonna be a lot of fun. But sure, let's keep pretending AI can either be nothing but bullshit OR we should only fear losing jobs to robots... i don't get why no one every thinks about the societal impact... it's so obvious, still... i am baffled...
of course nothing that would help iranians right now. even if, the numbers would be blocked quickly i guess. but also there doesnt seem to be features that would help in such a serious situation
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