• unfnknblvbl@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Space Sloth@feddit.dk
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • rockhandle@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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

    • bblfrnz@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • bblfrnz@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago
          1. 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.
          2. 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.
          • hunt4peas@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Does it convert them to 320kbps when I choose that quality? Because when I play those downloaded songs, it indeed shows as 320kbps.

            • bblfrnz@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              That’s the question, because as far as I know, the highest ytmusic quality is 256 kbps. I would avoid using it

        • bblfrnz@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Oh man, you shouldn’t be using iphone in the first place, the most useless device piracy-wise.

          • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            Most people don’t pirate stuff on their phones. I use an iPhone and my hundreds of gigabytes of pirated stuff is available on my iPhone via plexamp/plex/etc.

        • bblfrnz@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • evranch@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      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.

          • Zitronensaft@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Spotify gives me ads and when I complain they tell me they’re not ads and that they’re offers lol. My only complaint.

    • satanicleftist@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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

  • lud@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It does make sense though since Spotify has to pay musixmatch for the service.

      • lud@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          The majority of their investors are record labels now, so there’s also an incentive to prevent competing streamers from taking Spotify’s position

      • FfaerieOxide@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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?

          • FfaerieOxide@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              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.

            • Sparky678348@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              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

              • FfaerieOxide@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                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.

            • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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              1 year ago

              Spotify is receiving money for something they did not create.

              Spotify are paying musixmatch for the lyrics.

                • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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                  1 year ago

                  Irrelevant. It’s up to musixmatch to pay the creators or supplier of their content, not Spotify.

  • kworpy@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I just love watching everyone freak out about Spotify’s shitty business practices while I’m casually looping YouTube videos with an adblocker.

    • DaDragon@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

            • UrPartnerInCrime@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Have you checked out the made for you playlists? The Monday discover and Friday new music playlists have been key in how I find music the past like 10 years.

              • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє@lemmy.sdf.org
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                1 year ago

                They don’t really work for me. I listen to different genres, different languages. Sometimes I only like a single song from an artist. My taste is weird. I usually discover new music organically through friends, or sometimes I’ll hear something playing somewhere and stuff.

                To me, it seems like the Spotify algorithm has a heavy bias towards newer songs, and also towards English songs. Both of those are a minority in my playlists, but somehow that’s all it recommends me.

    • cambriakilgannon@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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

    • crab@monero.town
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      1 year ago

      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

      • totallynotfbi@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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

        • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • totallynotfbi@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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)

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • crab@monero.town
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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      1 year ago

      There are some add-ons that turn off the video to avoid wasting energy.

      • DrQuint@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        But they still waste the bandwidth. The YouTube music either premium or revanced is still the “most economical” way.

  • darkl1nk@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Solid business decision by Spotify here, I support this move. I’ll probably switch over to them from YouTube music.

        • butter@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          So someone can ignore the ads, ignore not being able to chose a song, and ignore no download. But having to open musixmatch in a separate app is the straw that broke the camels back

          • TheMadnessKing@lemdro.id
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            1 year ago

            The idea of suddenly having something taken away fro you really triggers people.

            If they had introduced as premium from start, then no would have cared about it.

          • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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            1 year ago

            It seems they were right going by how upset people are in here. Many of these people that are carrying on like spoiled children will no doubt subscribe to premium now.

  • emhl@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    They’re still visible with the current xmanager version

      • crag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        No. Xmanager patch unlocks premium features. So literally you’re a premium user.

        • iamroot@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          It depends on whether the feature is server-side restricted. For example, xManager can’t set audio quality to very high.

        • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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          1 year ago

          As I mention further in the thread, I am a premium Spotify user and they have been removing lyrics from songs that used to have them recently. It may not matter if you have the features or not, if they’re just going to be removing the lyrics anyway. Which makes it even shittier that they would advertise it as a premium feature, just for users to subscribe and find out none of the songs they want lyrics for have them anymore.

  • XYZinferno@lemmy.basedcount.com
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    1 year ago

    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

    • ArcRay@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Mothra@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I’ve seen xManager and couldn’t convince myself to install it. Do you need a Spotify account? Does it let you create playlists as you wish?

    • rgb3x3@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Tidal. I use it because Id gotten tired of Spotify and YouTube Music’s BS

    • buskbrand@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • lud@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • pipes@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It’s all about having the .lrc file, it gets read automatically (as long as it’s named like the song file) by mpv player and many android players.

      It’s a simple text file containing the lyrics with timestamps. You can get them from deezer for example with certain downloaders. Or look for them on Soulseek.

      • WoodenDing@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yup. Recently let a foobar extension run through my music library and download .lrc’s. Now I can read them with Poweramp on my phone.

      • chemsed@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        It’s out of sync and I don’t know how to scroll manually when it happens.