On Monday, the company announced that free users globally will now be able to search and play any song they want or play a song shared by a friend or an artist they follow on social media.
  • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
    121·
    2 days ago

    I love product updates as part of my technology feed…

    I miss old technology feeds in the classic internet days. That actually posted and listed out cool stuff with technology

    • Jack_Burton@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      RSS is still going strong. I’m in the process of shifting my screen time from lemmy to RSS. Just articles, no comments. Makes me realize how addicted I’ve been to comment drama, I say as I post a comment.

    • _g_be@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      2 days ago

      Nope. At some point spotify forced FREE users to shuffle play playlists. You couldn’t pick which specific song you’ll hear first. And with ads, obviously.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Damn, when I joined way back when, you could pick the track you wanted you just couldn’t skip and had to hear ads. Being able to pick a track is the whole reason I moved away from Pandora.

        • _g_be@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          I’ve recently moved away from Spotify and to Pandora, ironically.

          Pandora premium let’s you play whichever track you want, they are not longer exclusively stations, but their station algorithm is the reason I decided on them over other spotify alternatives

          • ThunderQueen@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            I like tidal a lot. They pay their artists the highest percentage last i checked, and they have sound quality as their main selling point. The station algorithm is a little bunk though.

            I am slowly rebuilding my mp3 library after switching to streaming 15 years ago when it was the hot new thing. Hopefully i can ditch them all together soon.

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.comEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Too late, already got sick of their shit and went back to downloading everything myself. I have to have two media player apps on my phone to account for podcasts and music but it’s still better than using spotify. Probably a better way to do that too but haven’t been bothered enough to look into it.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      555·
      3 days ago

      It’s probably the most popular music streaming service at the moment.

              • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
                4·
                2 days ago

                Sure, that’s true, though if you allow streams on Bandcamp, those pay $0, so in terms of “try before you buy”, any streaming service is better. It’s only if you actually sell an album on band camp (or AmpWall, a smaller indie service that does a lot of the same stuff) that you’d get paid, as an artist.

                I say this as a musician who has put out several albums both independently and with a label.

            • dan@upvote.auEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              Buying albums is great because you can host them on your own Plex server and use Plexamp.

              (or something like Jellyfin, but IMO Plexamp is still the best app available for streaming your own music collection)

          • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            Tidal doesn’t host far-right mouthpieces, offers much higher quality streams, and pays the artists far, far more per play.

            Edit: Here’s a chart from 2022:

            music streaming chart showing Tidal paying out three times what Spotify does

        • berno@lemmy.worldEnglish
          46·
          2 days ago

          -Sent from my iPhone built with slave labor and suicide nets at foxconn factories

            • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
              316·
              3 days ago

              Even if that was ok, I’m sure people who pirate buy a ton of merch from all the artists they pirate, that’s why all those artists get a ton of money.

              • Prunebutt@slrpnk.netEnglish
                10·
                3 days ago

                I’m sure that small to medium artists don’t get fleeced by Spotify and get a ton of money from a service that almost everyone in the west is using. /s

                • zecg@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  5·
                  3 days ago

                  Some more things I’m sure of include that Spotify exists for the artists and won’t sneakily replace them with Suno-generated shit at first opportunity or fuck with people’s legacy of holy playlists or make the interface more cumbersome to alter users’ habits, or increase the price until the frogs start jumping out. It’s allowed to exists through the graces of biggest publishing conglomerates whose C-suite and shareholders get the lion’s share. Fuck fucking Spotify.

                • Mihies@programming.devEnglish
                  47·
                  3 days ago

                  I’m sure they are on Spotify (which is shitty anyway) and other streaming services by choice. And if you are against streaming services, feel free to buy their albums.

    • ramenshaman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Yeah. Just started my self hosting journey a few months ago, looking to replace Spotify at some point. I got a NAS with Jellyfin set up, my next step is replacing Google photos with Immich probably.

      I do appreciate Spotify will be adding lossless music soon, but they have so many other issues.

  • rayf@lemmy.zipEnglish
    381·
    3 days ago

    Is this the onion? They add the basic feature of a media player where you can listen the title you clicked and not random stuff? If I understood correctly, this is not a feature, it’s just a restriction being removed

    • Australis13@fedia.io
      18·
      3 days ago

      The mobile application has always had this restriction for free users (as far as I know), but the desktop application has not.

  • tino@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Call me a hardcore Spotify fan boy: I paid for Spotify for 15 years, I loved it, I even applied to worked for them. The product was great and unmatched so as I didn’t care about the problems, so many problems. things were getting progressively more problematic but in the end, King Gizzard convinced me to quit. I don’t regret it a single minute. Fuck Spotify.

    • bigb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I had an account day 1 when Spotify launched in my country. It was such a big deal to me, a person who spent their teens and 20s hoarding music. One service and it was most of the music I wanted. I could sideload my own music and shuffle it all together.

      I miss that little app store on the desktop client. You could join shared radio stations and vote on the next track while people wrote to each other in a chat.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    wow the music app finally lets users select music! I’m sad that this is actually something to look forward to.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      Be happy it was free and ads could probably be blocked.
      Would you appreciate it more if they blocked the view of the library like the videostreamers like Netflix or D+ do?

      • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Idk I haven’t used the free tier of Spotify in a decade. I think add supported listening is enough and all features should be available to the free user except offline listening.

        • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          And I think that’s sufficient enough for free.
          Though non-random playback is a nice addition :)

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    I haven’t used Spotify, until recently, since it was first released. Its big value over Pandora was that it let you choose what to listen to…when did that change?

    I’m using spotx on Linux so I don’t get ads, can search individual songs, etc. I thought the free tier was just ad supported, I didn’t realize that they didn’t let you pick what you wanted to listen to.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        What a ripoff.

        Oh, there’s a Spotx for Windows too. There ya go, anybody using Spotify free who doesn’t want to buy into the tiering enshittification go patch your Spotify client. No ads, pick your own tracks, like Spotify used to be when it was a new and a good value for the service.

        I’m just too lazy to find a music private tracker and setup Lidarr, I’ll do that eventually and then just stream through Jellyfin like one of the cool kids.

  • parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    I’ve not seen anyone recommend an alternative like Qobuz in these “fuck spotify” discussions - I think it’s a good honest alternative?

    • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      I use Musify on Android. (From the F-Droid store) It pulls the music off of YouTube and works pretty well. Save playlists,download individual songs, it has recommendations but u didn’t know how they work.

    • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Seen the recommendation plenty of times.

      Is it better than TIDAL? I’m interested in switching to either of those, perhaps.

      • parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        I only used Tidal a while back during a free trial, so can’t comment too much. I think Tidal might have more wide spread functuonality adoption than Qoboz - but they do seem to be pushing out updates to meet feature parity.

        Qoboz has been great to use though. I actually find I get a wider spectrum of recommendations than Spotify. Spotify seemed to type cast my current listening habits agressively, and it would take a while to break out of that loop each time.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I recommend <your jellyfin instance>.

      Jokes aside, the only reason I use Spotify is for discovery and the vast catalog (primarily the JP music market).
      And I havent seen Qobuz be mentioned in any capacity by japanese artists.

      • parmesancrabs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Ah this is an interesting point. I think Qoboz are active in expanding their libraries and they do take requests on site. Do you have any JP recommendations - its not a region I’ve ever really listened to?

  • 60d@lemmy.caEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    Or you’ve been using spotube and been doing this all along