- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
I still download my music. Two pros: I have control over where, when and how I listen to it. And I only download music I actually want to listen to.
One con: Finding new music is harder (I imagine).
One con: Finding new music is harder (I imagine).
That’s what radio helps with, there was also Pandora, but I didn’t know if it is still alive after Sirius XM bought them.
Find an online radio station you like and you don’t need Pandora any more.
Shoutcast is still running strong! Also super easy to setup your own server https://directory.shoutcast.com/
And there’s also Icecast! https://dir.xiph.org/genres
Finding new music is harder (I imagine)
In my opinion, it’s harder, but not even necessarily because it’s harder to do it in the end. More because it’s just harder to get started.
For example, I find way more music I enjoy listening to through Bandcamp than I ever did on Spotify, but that requires having existing artists that I follow and can see their recommendations for, having a feel for which genres I actually like instead of a vague mental concept of what I like to listen to that I can then keyword search by in Bandcamp’s search/discover section, and hoping that the human curators on Bandcamp’s newsletter pick artists I like. Bandcamp doesn’t really have algorithms, so those are my only real options.
It’s more effort, but it’s infinitely more rewarding.
ListenBrainz is the solution for discovery
One con: Finding new music is harder (I imagine).
You actually should actually try to listen to web radio. Still have a subscription with Qobuz but been listening to bytefm a lot and they have some great djs (they have different shows at different time.). I personally found there more new and great artist or songs than any personalized algorithm ever did.
One con: you’re too busy writing down the songs and you cannot really do anything while listening as you also too scared of missing something. /hj
On Bandcamp you can go on your feed page which shows albums based on the genres and artists you follow, and what fans you follow have bought.
You idiots don’t have a 6 cd changer in your car? Pathetic!
I do it the old fashioned way. Giant binder of discs I get my passenger to flip through and swap in and out
Damn a 100 cd changer then, mad respect
No, but I have a USB stick with over 100 albums on it, so I can listen to the same 5 albums all the time.
precisely
No man, my usb works perfectly
My car doesn’t even have a CD slot :(
A couple of years ago, I had a Napster subscription (the reborn, legal variant of it). At first, I was happy to have unlimited access to music, then after 2 years I realised that I was paying 120 EUR a year for music I’ll never own, so I cancelled the subscription and put my yearly budget for music to exactly that amount. It yields more than enough given I buy used CDs, and then digitalise them. That way I own the physical media as backup AND am able to transfer the digital, PCM-quality tracks unfettered across my devices AND with no need for DRM or shitty proprietary applications.
You gotta put in the effort, which most people are too lazy to do
Is it laziness or a lack of motivation?
I’ve been a Spotify member for 13 years and it gives me exactly what I want. Owning music is good and all, but ripping the CDs and setting it up so my family and I have access to it where ever we go is going to cost me way more than the subscription does a month, in both time and money.
Right, but you would own the music…
You don’t “own” the music on physical media. You just purchased a license to listen to that music for the lifetime of the media it comes on. If your CD, record, or cassette is destroyed, you don’t get another one for free because you “own the music”. You’re still not allowed to copy it for distribution, use it for commercial purposes, or any of the other happy horseshit their lawyers put in the fine print.
I miss the era of physical media, too, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking it was some golden age of consumer rights.
I don’t need to “copy it for distribution” to back it up for personal use.
This would be right if not for the fact that Spotify will regularly introduce you to music that you might like and otherwise might not have heard of. That can be worth paying for.
We had scrobbling services before Spotify and we will have them afterwards.
See Last.fm and ListenBrainz.org
I signed up for this about 2 months ago because someone on here recommended it. It’s absolutely garbage unless you only listen to radio music. I listen to industrial hardcore and uptempo about 90% of the time, the remaining 10% are a pretty even split between hard rock and radio music. It only recommends me radio music, not a single hardcore track.
I have subscriptions for Spotify, Tidal and SoundCloud, and all 3 of them have vastly better recommendations of you listen to less popular genres
It’s true, some genres are better represented than others. The user base on listenbrainz is relatively small. I hope you do keep scrobbling your listens to listenbrainz because it can still help improve the recommendations for other users after you who listen to somethings you do but know a lot less than you in the genres you listen.
industrial hardcore
What are some of your favourites in this category? Spotify hasn’t been giving me any good recommendations on this front either.
I would argue that this is the entire value proposition of Spotify. I may not own the music, but I have all the artist and song names. I can always re-acquire them at any time.
This is why I use Spotify and why it’s gotten so much worse over the last year.
My blocked artists list used to be empty, but now it feels like I’m blocking every third new artist for being AI.
…are people really paying for a music subscription service to listen to the same music on repeat? I pay a service because I listen to like at least 4 new albums every week, minimum.
Me too. However I recognize that many people are content to listen to the same things they enjoyed in high school forever. In which case they definitely do not need streaming
I pay for Apple Music (well, technically I get it as part of Apple One) for one reason: the library matching function. I have half a gig of mp3s on my home computer, many of which are not on any streaming service, and apple makes them all available to every device I own.
For me, thats worth the monthly price.
Wait…that’s a peak feature, rare apple W
You can host it yourself without paying apple.
You’d literally be paying yourself back after not much time at all.
I like Plex amp but there are quite a few options.
I’ve used PlexAmp. It’s shit. It tries its best, but it can’t make up for the flaws in plex’s underlying library system. It also requires having a library host running all the time. Apple host the music for me and I can make library changes from any of my devices.
I’ve tried a number of other self host options, as well, and none of them come close to the feature set in Music. I even wrote my own web app to do it way back in the 2000s, just so I could implement my own UX. This is still better.
this post is just to placate a group of people. i prefer streaming for new music friday. i also don’t want another crate or hard drive of shit i lost interest in.
Man, Spotify were the ones who did it. Like they made the service so significantly better and more convenient than pirating that most of those pirating actually switched.
Not a fan of the platform anymore since the heavy push for sponsored content, removal of audiobooks and the whole Joe Rogan thing, but still credit where it’s due.
The built a thing by burning investor money to artificially lower the price and sell out high on stock IPOs is still going strong I see.
And by massively underpaying the actual artists that create the content that fills the platform.
Okay, but I can access my full library from anywhere at full quality from multiple devices, I have several 5,000 plus song playlists with little to no overlap between a few of them and I have had CDs lost or stolen and had drive failures delete digital libraries. But sure.
5000 song playlist
That sounds like digital hoarding. Why do you need a 2 week long playlist?
Shuffle
I don’t do it personally, but from what I understand, it’s really pretty easy to set up your own self-hosted music server to stream from.
I have jellyfin for movies/tv because there isn’t a more convenient option available. I am not going to VPN from my phone or anywhere to home to play music when Tidal is available.
I mean… you own or have nothing when your Wow sub ends also.
I washed my clown makeup off with a home server
I did return to my old flac and mp3 collection. Got Foobar working again, found a nice skin and I’m rediscovering music that I that skipped over. I buy second-hand CDs when I find them. I’ve managed to get a digital copy of all my favourite albums and tracks.
I will keep Spotify though. A long time ago, I got friends to share their Discovery and Release Radar playlists. With my own, I have a nice spread of recommendations.
I need regular new music. Call it a search for unexpected dopamine. Spotify still picks new tracks that I really like. I also like Spotify Connect and the easily shared collaborative playlists.
The UK has less alternatives for music discovery. I don’t like Radio, way too much talking and ads.
I’ve got rid of Netflix, Prime. I’m getting Disney+ for free at the moment. Back to physical for film and TV.
For now, Spotify recommendations is worth the cost of entry.
*laughs in physical media*
*cries in disc rot*
*wonders what disc rot is*
It’s the terrible reason CDs and DVDs don’t last forever. Curse you, oxidation!
Really hard to get normies to see this. They’re sucked into how easy it is and soon they’ll be fed nothing but ai slop music so corps dont havr to pay artists a cent. Yay future?
Ill hold onto my records and cds, thanks.
What’s really hard for me personally is understanding why people see streaming services as some sort of antithesis of purchasing physical albums.
You know you can do both, right?
I listen to tonnes of music, expand my tastes via a streaming service, but when I find a band that I become a fan of I purchase their albums.
I replaced radio, not albums, with streaming services.
My favourite thing to do is use shit like Spotify and google and stores I hate to FIND the thing I want, then I go get it in a different, nicer store lol. For example I often use a place called Emag to find all sorts of products then use compari.ro and pricy.ro to find the best prices for that item.
I just don’t use Spotify. I pay for Qobuz which pays something around 12x more to artists than Spotify does.
Oh yeah I understand that. The problem is streaming commoditized music even worse than it already was, making it even more worthless. And now 99% of the population wont even buy a cd, and the artist gets even less money than before.
Back in the day, you had to get the record or cd to hear what you wanted. And to me thats what made the strong bond between artist and listener. Its no wonder a large majority of young people have no strong feelings toward music. Also, im not some old man, im pretty young, but I can see the changes.
Also, why would you replace radio with streaming services when literally thousands of internet radio stations (many donations ran only) exist all over the place?
I think people are quick to latch onto streaming because they saw ads for it and thought it was the next Big thing they had to be a part of. We have had internet radio for 15+ years.
The problem is streaming commoditized music even worse than it already was, making it even more worthless. And now 99% of the population wont even buy a cd, and the artist gets even less money than before.
All the more reason to promote services like Qobuz, which pay the artists much more than Spotify. Last I checked it was around 12 times more per track.
And I don’t know if income from streaming doesn’t balance out what artists used to lose to piracy.
Back in the day, you had to get the record or cd to hear what you wanted
Where I grew up there used to be a music store in the city centre. You could walk in, grab an album and listen to it for a bit in special listening stations. If you decided you liked it, you could buy it… or give the clerk an empty tape (or later CD), and they’d copy it for you for a quarter of the price.
By the time those kind of services died out, Internet was good enough that people would download music and burn it on CDs themselves.
Yeah, you had to get the CD, but it’s not like every single person listening to a CD meant any money went to the artists.
Also, why would you replace radio with streaming services when literally thousands of internet radio stations (many donations ran only) exist all over the place?
Because I’d need to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours to check if I enjoy the particular brand of radio. And what if their program didn’t line up with my daily commute to work? Nah, I prefer firing up “artist radio” on the train and, if I hit something I like, just quickly drop it into a playlist of things “to check out later”, then grab the whole album where the song was and listen to it.
I would never buy an album after hearing a single. Twelve Foot Ninja had an amazing song, one I really, really enjoyed, but the album was - to me - completely trash. It was literally like a diamond in a pile of shit situation. Can’t verify that listening to the radio.
I think people are quick to latch onto streaming because they saw ads for it and thought it was the next Big thing they had to be a part of. We have had internet radio for 15+ years.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad for Spotify in my entire life. Maybe because I browse with an ad block…
I latched on to streaming because it gave me exactly what I needed - the entirety of my discography at my fingertips and then some, no ads, no talking, and the potential to discover excellent new music - all of that while actually giving the artists something for the trouble.
I usually have to listen to a song several times before it fully “clicks” if I like it or not, so music streaming subscription is great for being able to grab any song I think I might like and throw it in trial playlist. Back when I bought/acquired music, I would skip over most music I might like because the effort wasn’t worth it for a song I wasn’t sure if I liked or not. So streaming has worked really well for me for music discovery at least.
On the bright side, I’m still getting my $8 a month early adopter price for Google music all access (now YouTube music).
Some of us aren’t privileged enough to buy hundreds of hours of music.
Buy? 🤨
So what you can indefinitely subscribe though? Try thrift shops, used CD stores, etc if you want to buy.
Try thrift shops, used CD stores, etc if you want to buy.
If you’re buying secondhand, that also does nothing for the artists. You might as well just pirate at that point, unless you’re deeply into the vinyl scene or something
Better than indefinite subscription. Buy a shirt if you want to support the artist.
This is why I download all the music I want. I still listen to it primarily on youtube, but it is a ‘just in case’. I also never paid for music.
Artists love you, I’m sure.
















