Spotify fans threaten to return to piracy as music streamer introduces new face-scanning age checks in the UK
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As much as I'd like to do that, I have listened to over 7000 artists on Spotify.
I simply don't have the time (or money) to look those up individually.
So I can either choose to have worse experience, or stick with Spotify for now.There is a cost to convenience ratio. Each individual has to decide based on their own ethics and preferences whether they're willing to sacrifice their own personal experience for the right of ownership. I personally chose to cancel my Spotify subscription some time ago and start buying digital downloads and CDs again.
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Bandcamp, Soulseek, Navidrome, ListenBrainz.
Has been a pretty solid Spotify-replacement stack.
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We live in a rural part of Canada that has been left behind by modern times. Mostly by the choice of the residents. I grew up during satanic panic. It was crazy here. My wife and I let our kids listen to anything they want. They always have. They're 10 and 12.
Their friends often comment about swear words and "sex, drugs and rock and roll" themes of the music they listen too. As an old man I get to regale them with stories of how crazy the Christians were over heavy metal and punk rock when I was a kid, including their grandma.
Now I yell "you're gonna go to hell!" As a joke to them every time their friends bring it up and I am around.
“you’re gonna go to hell!”
if where all the "christians" go is heaven, then i'd rather go to hell
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It is 1970-01-01 like me, no?
it's 2000-01-01 for me
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It's mostly the discovery aspect, it's easy to find new and emerging artists through these services, and they make playing that music very convenient. YouTube does have some of it with YouTube music but I've not found the algorithm to be as good as Spotify or Tidal
I used to use and praise Spotify and their algorithm, but I was starting to find that it would insist on playing the same 20 or 50 songs regardless of the playlist I was trying to generate music suggestions from. I read a rumor somewhere that it was a way to decrease the load on their servers and rely more on the cached songs already on the device, and got sick of that enough to switch to Pandora after over 10 years of Spotify
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It's not necessarily your music though, it's the closest that they found in their library sometimes. I have tons of tracks that I uploaded the explicit copy of to gmusic but my library downloads only had the censored/radio version.
Found that out the hard way after a drive crash a few years back. Have spent a bit of time reacquiring the stuff I cared about.
That's why I have it uploaded to a cloud service but I have the entire collection backed up on my phone, 3 computers and a few miscellaneous SD cards.
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The streaming services are run by shithead C-suites who think last quarter is the way it's always been. They forget the only reason most of us use their services is someone more visionary than them made it more convenient than piracy half a generation ago. Let's remind them there's an alternative.
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Do it.
It's easy. Just use a Youtube-to-MP3 converter.
This is cool if you’re okay with low fidelity music.
After years of lossless and headphones to distinguish, this sounds like fingernails on a chalk board.
It’s akin to using a tape deck to aux adapter in an old car or recording a tape off of an old boombox radio lol. I’d rather listen to nothing.
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That I don't know. I mean you could always just use something to record the sound played by your PC, but at that point A) You're not getting as good of quality as you would from an actual download of the source material and you'd have to manually assign metadata, make sure no notifications or other sounds played, make sure your recording settings were optimum, etc. It's easier, right now at least, to just buy what you want on CD or from a store that sells digital downloads legitimately.
The sound isolation could be fixed by using a separate audio channel for Spotify, but no way it's gonna be worth the effort as it's not gonna be as good quality and if you're considering doing all that you would be better off sailing the high seas (on one of the big music trackers)
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I used to use and praise Spotify and their algorithm, but I was starting to find that it would insist on playing the same 20 or 50 songs regardless of the playlist I was trying to generate music suggestions from. I read a rumor somewhere that it was a way to decrease the load on their servers and rely more on the cached songs already on the device, and got sick of that enough to switch to Pandora after over 10 years of Spotify
Same for me, I got tired of the same artists being played over and over. I've switched to Deezer who does a much better job. I will probably switch to Qobuz soon.
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Seriously, fuck Spotify and anyone else using that error-prone, intrusive, insecure bullshit.
You can say a lot of Spotify and of Apple, but the iOS app of Spotify is basically bug free and has been bug free for more than a decade now for me. The webclient has been buggy for me though.
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Personally I could never get into the whole Spotify and Pandora thing. I want to listen to what I want to listen to and when I want to listen to it, without ridiculous restrictions and rules. YouTube has honestly been the far better choice for music for me.
Pandora is sadly not available in NL and if I saw it correctly Pandora is also America which does mean that it will turn to shit somewhere in the future.
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I'm returning to car boot sales to buy cubic meters of CDs.
That, and BandCamp. -
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I mean, fuck Spotify and all that, but this one is really the UK government's doing.
And soon, this shit will come to every country. They're all drafting laws to mandate real age verification for adult content. The UK is just the first to implement it.
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Do you have any other good alternative to recommend? Nice quality, not too much tracking, low/fair price, nice recommendation algorithm, has lots of musics...
Unfortunately most of the major players are involved in some sort of evilness as far as I am aware. Spotify/Google/Apple are all pretty unethical companies. Personally, I have made the decision to cut out the middle man and sail the seven seas while also supporting the artists I like by being a vinyl wanker and going to gigs.
As for streaming services (I am very happy to be corrected here because I am not certain) AFAIK both tidal and qobuz are good alternatives. Qobuz is based in France so your data will be safer but Tidal is a bit cheaper.
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Flac files contain orders of magnitude more data. As for the listening experience it's only ever going to be as good as the speakers at the other end. You'll also need a wired connection to said speakers in order to avoid some compression over Bluetooth. (Unless there's some newfangled lossless BT protocol that I'm unaware of.)
That makes sense. Thanks.
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won't they suffer the same fate?
For now yt music is what new Spotify was , but when one goes down the other cums and dominate
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The space it takes up is negligible in the modern era of cheap SSDs (and even cheaper hard drives).
The main benefit is not in being able to hear a difference from 320Kbps mp3 (I know I sure can't), but knowing that you can re-encode the file as many times as you want, without any quality loss (assuming you're going from lossless to lossless, of course). Or create an mp3 from the flac file at any time, with the same quality as a ripped CD.
So basically FLAC is great if you produce/edit/re-encode your music files often. If you don't do any of that (and have no plans to future-proof your music collection), then 320Kbps MP3 is more than adequate for your needs.
My concerns with space mostly deals with my cell phone but you make a lot of great point of being able to convert Flac for any use case. Thank you for your input.
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What do you think of Qobuz? From what I've seen, it's got more stuff than bandcamp (at least from my library).
It seems to pay the artists well too. -
It is better, but it depends on the audio for the difference. Also, it would probably be hard to hear the difference playing over a phones speakers. The weakest link in the chain is always the problem you notice the most. Having a good setup for amp/speakers and you can hear the difference. Using Bluetooth earbuds to mow the lawn, it doesn’t matter. Sitting in my living room on my nice stereo, I notice.
I have Sennheiser HD 25 I bought 15 years ago. I play music through my Pixel 5a with a headphone jack and my iMac.
Is this good enough to be able to tell? I have no idea what devices have a good DAC or not.
Thank you for your input.
