I’ve never used the free tier on Spotify and I don’t understand how anyone can. The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust. So yeah, not going to affect me, and I do enjoy reading the lyrics a lot.
That said, I am experimenting with swapping over to Apple Music because I feel Spotify has become too expensive.
The ads alone would make me throw off my headset in disgust.
For a mobile, there is a modded apk,I’ve never heard ads there. For a PC, web player in Firefox with uBlock Origin, there are no ads at all there. The same goes for Tidal, I’ve never paid for these apps.
Doesn’t solve the offline mode/taking a 13 hour flight use case, unfortunately.
Well, that’s very specific case to be honest. In that case you can just download whatever you want beforehand, from soulseek, for instance. Generally people make preparations in advance for such things.
Zotify works very well at downloading Spotify lists, from playlists to whole discographies. You have to sort the output a little as you’ll often get multiple copies of tracks due to remastered editions, songs released as singles etc. But overall it’s an incredibly easy way to download music.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/3223099 For both PC and Android.
- spotx - well, I tried, but honestly, I don’t need one more app especially when everything works in the browser. Plus, I prefer portable setups and there’s no portable version of spotx, so, it’s pretty useless for me.
- It’s explicitly said on the Spowlo GitHub page that they use YouTube for downloading, so, there’s no way to get 320 kbps tracks or flacs. Instead, I’d recommend to try some Qobuz/Deezer-based solutions, there are quite a few of them there. Or use slavart or something like this, or good old soulseek, there’s even an Android client for it.
Does it convert them to 320kbps when I choose that quality? Because when I play those downloaded songs, it indeed shows as 320kbps.
That’s the question, because as far as I know, the highest ytmusic quality is 256 kbps. I would avoid using it
I use an iPhone though and I’d prefer not to use YouTube for music, or anything, really.
Oh man, you shouldn’t be using iphone in the first place, the most useless device piracy-wise.
This isn’t an issue about piracy anyway.
The ads aren’t even for anything. It was just really patronising ads for Spotify Premium.
Their business model is genuinely to just annoy you into paying.
It only annoyed me into stopping using their service
You either pay or you leave. Spotify wins, in both cases
OR you get an adblocker
They were so much more expensive than Pandora when I tried them out and the free tier was too awful to want to reward them with my money, so I did pay but it went to a competitor. Their music recommendations were terrible compared to Pandora, too.
I don’t use Pandora now though, they got bought by SiriusXM who I will never pay again after they made cancelation such a difficult process.
With xManager, the free tier comes quite close to premium. No ads, play whatever music you like. The only issues are lower sound quality & no downloads, which are really non-issues since you can just find other sources to download the music from, at flac quality
I recently flipped to apple music and apart from seeing a few songs missing on albums i don’t really listen to anyway, it’s only been an improvement. the lossless audio is quite nice
Spotify gives me ads and when I complain they tell me they’re not ads and that they’re offers lol. My only complaint.
Do the people who wrote those lyrics get a cut of Spotify gatekeeping them?
hahahahaha spotify and paying someone lol
Spotify is not profitable right now; their current revenue doesn’t come anywhere close to covering their costs. The only reason they’re able to survive is investors holding on to the belief that, some day, it’ll be possible to actually make the numbers work.
The majority of their investors are record labels now, so there’s also an incentive to prevent competing streamers from taking Spotify’s position
Spotify purchases their lyrics from Musixmatch
Musixmatch has a free, public database where lyrics are displayed. To contribute to the database, users can sign up and contribute lyrics, synchronizations, translations, and structuring to get points and move up levels. Musixmatch’s points have no redeemable value, but are instead a marker of a particular user’s contributions.
So no?
You as an individual can go access the public free database. Spotify as a corporation is a customer of musixmatch.
https://about.musixmatch.com/business/customer-stories/Spotify
I’m not sure what exactly you’re trying to say?
Spotify is receiving money for something they did not create.
Neither the writers of the lyrics nor the fans who transcribed them get a cut.
That is fucked up.
It is fucked up that the fans who are transcribing do not get a cut, but it’s not like they were misled to believe they would make a cut before they started doing it. The people doing that are doing it out of a passion for the music.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paid of course they should, if it was up to me I’d say make them all rich. I just think it’s a stretch to imply that Spotify is stealing anything here
I like stealing. According to my belief system theft is good.
It’s the fact Spotify is charging users for something stolen is what I think is fucked.
Something stolen should be freely shared.
The writers almost certainly do get a cut. Musixmatch does not own the copyright to any of the lyrics, and as such, negotiated with the copyright holders in order to be allowed to store, display, and sell access to the lyrics. This almost certainly involved some amount of money changing hands.
Spotify is paying money for access to the lyrics and using that as a feature in their product. A chunk of that money is almost certainly going back to the actual writers.
I just love watching everyone freak out about Spotify’s shitty business practices while I’m casually looping YouTube videos with an adblocker.
Eh, I switched to Spotify last year (++, of course) and there’s a lot to be said in favour of the Spotify algorithm when it comes to music recommendations, as opposed to YouTube.
This. You get actual bang for your buck
I have gotten good recommendations from both but of course Spotify more often
Spotify algorithm pushes artists that pay them to push them to you. Get your recommendations via more organic means if you can. That means blogs, real people. Screw the spotify recommendation slop (and I say this as someone who has spotify premium.)
YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.
Edit: or better yet vimusic
I finally got a sub to Apple Music when I learned I get lossless by default. Yummmmmm.
I still hoard flacs, but Apple Music is dope.
Waiting for Spotify lossless to ditch flacs, I really want to like Tidal but I’ve had major issues every time I try and stick with it.
Spotify capping out at 192 was a nope for me hahaha. Someone on Lemmy mentioned AppMus had hi-rez lossless and regular lossless and I was like “yep done”
I don’t like iTunes though, so on my computers it’s still flac o’clock.
Spotify runs at 320kbps AAC which is totally fine quality-wise.
YouTube’s sound quality is comparable to Spotify’s - IIRC it’s 128kbps AAC versus 160kbps MP3. Also, a static video’s bitrate is around 300-400kbps, so you’re not wasting that much bandwidth
YouTube supports 160kbps opus, which should be pretty much transparent to our ears. But the audio is reencoded in the uploaded video, which then gets reencoded by YT again.
These multiple lossy reencodes are probably why YouTube audio sounds worse then Spotiy. Artists upload there songs as lossless wav/flac, which the gets reencoded/compressed a single time.
Didn’t know that YouTube had 160kbps audio… I checked a auto-generated upload on yt-dlp, and while it had an Opus stream, all of the audio streams were encoded at 128kbps.
Both Opus and properly-encoded AAC audio should be virtually indistinguishable from the original source, but I do believe that Opus performs slightly worse in blind ABX testing. Again, you’d barely be able to tell the difference, so sound quality is basically the same.
(As for encoding, I believe that YouTube uses the source audio if it’s already encoded as AAC, which most video editors do by default, and music distributors send the same lossless source to YouTube as they do to Spotify, so I don’t think re-encoding will make a difference)
ublock origin blocks spotify ads well. I have found a lot of new artists using spotify, I avoided it for a pretty long time. When I find artists I like I usually buy their stuff on bandcamp cause i can get flacs
There are some add-ons that turn off the video to avoid wasting energy.
But they still waste the bandwidth. The YouTube music either premium or revanced is still the “most economical” way.
I’m not sure if the bandwidth is wasted or not with those add-ons.
To be fair, Spotify is unsuable without premium.
Spotify is unusable without
premiumXmanagerIs what someone would say if they didn’t know any better.
Using Spotify without premium, as Spotify offers it, is unusable. There might be other options than paying, but the vanilla Spotify experience is horrendous
That’s fair
It does make sense though since Spotify has to pay musixmatch for the service.
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That’s true. But to be fair, I have added one song and synced a few. I didn’t do it because I wanted pay, I did it because I wanted the song’s lyrics to be on Spotify and on the app.
They built a service and people seem to like it, so I don’t mind.
As a Spotify Artist, I bet I don’t even see a single hundredth of a penny for somebody paying extra for the lyrics, either…
And even if Spotify did pay out extra for lyrics, I’m sure they’d find a way to screw my band out of royalties like they currently are anyway.
Even then you might not see them. I’ve noticed recently that a ton of songs that used to have the lyrics attached no longer show the lyrics or have the button to show them. And I do have premium.
I noticed that as well, and I, too, have premium
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with my pirated apk and I can still see all the lyrics 😂
Music is one of the easiest things to pirate, so much so that I often forget me downloading flacs of the songs I listen to is supposed to be a no-no
Between a flac playing app (Musicolet on Android and MusicBee on PC) as well as YT Music Revanced, things go smoothly
The only reason I don’t pirate music is because of discovery. I haven’t found a good way to find new music without using a streaming service. And then, I’m already using a streaming service, so why bother.
This. Back when I was a spring chicken I had nothing better to do with my time than download random songs and albums. Ain’t nobody got time for that now.
Streaming is fine to discover music, but you are not guaranteed that an album you like will be there for you the next time you want to listen to it. I do listen music in Spotify with a modded app, then I download the albums I liked. There are albums that I can’t listen to Spotify anymore, but I still have the audio files in my Subsonic server.
Solid business decision by Spotify here, I support this move. I’ll probably switch over to them from YouTube music.
I know right. What’s Spotify’s goal with this move
Still working for me with just the basic bitch plan on the web/desktop.
That being said: Fuck you Spotify lol
Edit: fuck GadolElohai and CybranM too ya low expectation having downvoting motherfuckers lol
Soulseek is still around ;)
slsk forever
Failed me
Recently ditched subscription services because of non-stop price hikes. Now I’m on Navidrome with a VPS and using Ultrasonic on my Android for mobile and Android Auto listening. For music, I turn to good old Soulseek and Telegram bots.
Never going back. The control and savings make it all worth it.
Does anybody know of an alternative app that can do live lyrics?
The lyrics source that Spotify uses is free with a few caveats, like ads. The normal synced lyrics are free though.
The source is musixmatch and they have a floating lyrics window on Android which is neat.
Spotube.
Note that it’s not really a Spotify streaming app, rather it uses your (free) Spotify account for playlists, search, recommendations, etc. and then goes and find the song you want to play on YouTube, and the lyrics from scraping websites I think. Pretty clever.
Googles YouTube music just got updated for live lyrics.
It’s out of sync and I don’t know how to scroll manually when it happens.
Tidal. I use it because Id gotten tired of Spotify and YouTube Music’s BS
ViMusic
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I believe the squabble you’re talking about was between Genius and Google, don’t think Spotify was stealing lyrics from anywhere
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I have this memory, that apple was accused to have pirated sone lyrics as well, lol
IIRC correctly, Genius added white space to some of their lyrics so that when Google scraped them, they could prove they got it from their site since the scraped content also had the random white space.
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I’ve been using Qobuz. Sure it’s still paid, but I can buy downloads for any of the music on there. Same with Bandcamp. I’ve been buying one album every paycheck and putting them on my storage blocks, then putting them on my media player and phone. I support my favorite bands, and get to keep something in return. On top of all this, I hunt down CDs. I’ve got a massive physical music collection, and it’s nice.
