This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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...
They have prices? People are paying? 🤔🏴☠️🦜
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.
Man, music is one of those things where file sizes, quality and performance all conspire to make both offline media and self-hosting so viable. I never understood Spotify's role.
I mean, you can like physical media and understand why Netflix was more convenient than digging through enormous TV DVD boxsets. But who the hell didn't have a MP3 dump of hudreds of CDs by the time Spotify started being a thing?
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 pirate
It 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.
I'll weigh in since I started hosting my own subsonic server.
I dropped lidar because, like you said, its full album based and doesn't play well with partial collections. I dont want to collect music albums, I want to listen to music. I've not found a good solution for it yet, but I don't even think I even need it. Once I get music, I tag the files with a desktop app which uses musicbrains for data and then drop the files on a SMB share. Navidrome picks them up and makes them available for streaming in 2 seconds.
Bandwidth is free and file storage space is cheap. Any convenience I gained from spotify is lost when music gets removed from it. Most recently it was king gizzard who removed half their library from spotify and I actually purchased some of their albums from bandcamp before. I own the mp3s already, but used spotify for convenience. Now I host them myself. Now I'm in control.
Obviously though, I'm the odd man out. Not everyone will be able to do this. But if I can, I will. And since I can, I do.
A big part of it that finally made me pay for spotify is it helping me to find new music. Its not perfect, but when the app actually works correctly it will queue up music similar to the song or playlist you searched and it can help you find new bands or other songs by the artists you like. When i was just listening to my downloaded music I'd get stuck in a rut of the same few albums or artists.
I wouldn’t have subbed to Spotify on my own. I’m inherited into my wife’s family plan. For me the biggest benefit is just discovering new music. I used to have a big MP3 library, but after a couple computer upgrades, they’ve kind of disappeared over the years. Having Spotify there has been really convenient for just listening toto old stuff I’ve lost as well. This said, if my FiL cancels, I probably wouldn’t sub for myself anyway.
I'm quite unhappy with spotify. I don't care about the price, but it keeps repeating the same and same music again, and the percentage of crappy AI music is increasing. You can clearly hear it. Their client isn't open source, and it's just a wrapped website. It sucks.
My main beef with spotify is their attempt to privatize and monopolize podcasting.
Spotify offers audio hosting and a large userbase, but does not provide rss. A few people I like are trapped in this, and I have no way to listen to their shows apart from using spotify. They refuse to understand that this is an issue, just like youtubers are ok with lock-in.
Podcasting infrastructure is not monopolized yet, like video is. It is even bigger problem for me than underpayid artists.
So boycotting, and if you undersrand that, you should too.
The podcasters that you are referring to being "trapped in this" chose to be "trapped". So don't just be upset with Spotify over it.
Podcasting infrastructure is not monopolized yet, like video is. It is even bigger problem for me than underpayid artists.
It helps a lot that audio hosting is so much cheaper than video hosting
ive been using apple music for years, mainly like how for edm it tends to have highquality recorded live sets for all djs, and they are seperated instead of being one long continuous track, like youll get
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
And Trump!
Well my decision to cancel Spotify last month is already paying off.
Lazy doormat Spotify users: "Okay... but this is the LAST, LAST, LAST TIME FOR REAL. Do it again and there'll be a hashtag and a series of Tiktok memes!"
There are ways you can use a Spotify account registered in another country and you basically pay about £2 a month. I'm mainly into 80s and 90s music and used Spotify to discover music, and once I come across a song I like I add the album name to a list (i.e. note it down) and find the CD from a second hand shop or failing which obtain the FLAC files some other way. This way I now have an offline library that has most of the songs that I love. Spotify will be there as long as I can just pay £2-ish but the moment they try the age verification or raise prices, its bye-bye for them.
They age verify in the UK already...
For most people though they won't be hacking things to use Spotify. I agree £2 a month is OK but for me the issue is they charge a fortune yet pay artists a pittance
What pisses me off is that I can't have a family plaln associated with my main Google Workspace account. Because it's a Workspace account. So if I want to have a family plan for YouTube Music I need to have it associated with a gmail account not my workspace account. That's such bullshit, if you ask me!
Still no lossless?
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.
And?
It's cheaper if you have 5 friends and take the family plan. I'm paying ~€2 a month for the last couple of years.
