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Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client

Reubend
186 replies
7h44m

While it's nice to have an open source client, please think twice about bypassing the premium subscription/ads to listen for free.

Musician deserve to be paid for their work, and it's not fair to them to bypass all of the mechanisms to do that. Spotify doesn't pay musicians well, but there are still indie artists making a living from it nonetheless.

I hear a lot of people these days complaining about ads, and that's totally fair. But when it comes time to pay for content, those people rarely are willing to pony up. You can see this happening with journalism, music, apps, etc.

Similarly, most people hate subscriptions, but you can always buy music directly if you don't want to subscribe! A lot of smaller artists provide ways to purchase their music that give them a large percentage of the proceeds, and you can get the music DRM-free if that's something you care about.

drewdevault
91 replies
7h25m

Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this. If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best. You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists; a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp.

Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

viraptor
47 replies
7h1m

If everyone who uses this software were to use Spotify direct, ads and all, in the long run it would make pennies for the artists at best.

I'm not sure that "they get paid so little that we may as well stop paying them anything" is an argument you really want to make here? Yes, Spotify pay is crap. Not paying anything is crap too. Two wrongs don't make a right.

portaouflop
23 replies
6h50m

If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp, by going to the physical shows and buying merch, ordering physical copies of their music at the label, patreon, or whatever form of direct support they have set up.

Spotify is just leeching of the culture and as drew pointed out you will be 10000 times more effective if you use one of those options.

Spotify is more or less just a signal booster nowadays - because you have to be on there since everyone uses it.

I for one would never put my music on Spotify, even if I get what like 20$ out of it, what a horrible company and service.

apwell23
22 replies
6h36m

If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp

Not everyone is on bandcamp. Seems like some sort of north american website.

marcomourao
8 replies
6h17m

Bandcamp is widely used all over the world. My band made 6 times more money from Bandcamp than from all the streaming sites combined. People from all over Europe, USA, Canada and Australia bought our music.

apwell23
5 replies
6h16m

Bandcamp is widely used in all over the world.

Not really.

marcomourao
4 replies
6h1m

My opinion is based on the stats Bandcamp provides me. Care to elaborate on why you proclaim otherwise?

apwell23
3 replies
5h59m

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066807

curious how do ppl discover your band on bandcamp?

marcomourao
2 replies
4h14m

Through Bandcamp itself, social media, music blogs...

apwell23
1 replies
3h52m

does bandcamp give you this info?

marcomourao
0 replies
3h35m

Yes. The free version gives you basic stats, the pro version gives you detailed stats.

lawgimenez
1 replies
5h59m

Europe, US, Canada and Australia is your whole world? Local metal guys I know is on Spotify and not on Bandcamp. I wonder what you think of that. I’m in Asia btw, largest continent of the world.

marcomourao
0 replies
4h19m

Europe, US, Canada and Australia is your whole world?

Of course not.

I’m in Asia btw, largest continent of the world.

Those were only a few examples from the top of my head. We also had sales in S. Korea and Japan.

portaouflop
7 replies
6h29m

I listed four other concrete options and closed with “or whatever other direct support method they have set up” — I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_ besides Spotify since it’s practically impossible to make money through them.

apwell23
6 replies
6h23m

I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_ besides Spotify since it’s practically impossible to make money through them.

you are wrong in your assurances( eg: i am listening to this on spotify at the moment Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi ) and your "other options" have nothing to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl listening on spotify also go to concerts they are not mutually exclusive.

morelisp
5 replies
6h11m

Are you saying Nesrin Sipahi, who received a personal award from the president, has nothing but Spotify?

apwell23
4 replies
6h4m

No idea who that artist is. It something spotify recommended and I am into it.

I didn't find that artist on bandcamp or any other non-streaming platforms. only on spotify, youtube, apple music. Are they not equivalent, didn't realize you were making a point specifically about spotify.

And yes I will surely go to that artist concert if they are in my area. Me listening to on spotify has nothing to do with it. If anything I would've never found that music if it wasn't for spotify.

portaouflop
3 replies
2h57m

Nesrin Sipahi is a far cry from a small indie artist that relies on support by their fan base.

And there are many options to buy her music as physical copies directly from her labels.

Of course it’s fine to use Spotify to listen to music and find new artists - I’m saying the worst way to pay artists that rely on their fan base for income.

apwell23
2 replies
2h44m

Nesrin Sipahi is a far cry from a small indie artist that relies on support by their fan base.

Who said this though?

This is what you originally said.

If you care about the artist here pay them directly either through bandcamp

I responded to this

I assure you that every artist that wants to make money will have set up _something_

Why did you bring 'far cry from a small indie artist ' into the picture all of sudden when you said 'every' in original comment.

Your original comment was about 'small indie artist' only ? You should've said 'small indie artist will always set up something' if you meant that. agree that might be true for small artists.

portaouflop
0 replies
1h12m

Of course a celebrated artist with a 50+ year career that is a national icon won’t be reliant on digital distribution…

I think that would be obvious to anyone that wants to have a conversation in good faith.

hedora
0 replies
2h12m

The argument is that this artist is only available on streaming, and that that's where most of their revenue came from?

https://www.amazon.com/CDs-Vinyl-Nesrin-Sipahi/s?rh=n%3A5174...

They're selling CDs, Vinyl and MP3s on Amazon, but their SoundCloud only has 29 followers.

Maybe they screwed up when they went all-in on indie digital distribution back in... 1978?

https://turkishvinyl.com/record/57/

morelisp
2 replies
6h23m

Please connect to reality.

portaouflop
1 replies
3h1m

If that implies connecting to Spotify, no thanks. If your reality is based on catering to VC funded tech companies I pity you.

morelisp
0 replies
2h34m

Read harder.

tourmalinetaco
1 replies
5h46m

So, instead of interfacing with the actual argument (which is that Spotify pays almost nothing and if you really want to support an artist you actually pay them directly), you decide to zero in that one singular platform of many is not available where you think it should be?

If you didn’t want to support artists you can just say so and cut out the gymnastics.

apwell23
0 replies
5h39m

i support artists in a lot of ways. spotify introduced me to many new artists and told me about their concerts in my area

If you didn’t want to support artists you can just say so and cut out the gymnastics.

classic projection

drewdevault
22 replies
6h59m

I'm not making that argument. I made an argument that you have better options in which the artist is paid more.

jsnell
19 replies
6h52m

Taking the music without compensation and pretending that you're totally going to buy some music or merch from some other artist doesn't actually lead to artists being compensated. While in the plan where you buy music and only listen to the music you bought you don't need this app at all.

drewdevault
15 replies
6h48m

I've spent thousands of dollars on Bandcamp over the past several years, attended many live shows, bought merchandise, etc. Suggesting that one is "pretending" to do these things when making this argument is a hell of a strawman. I feel like pretending that you're supporting your favorite artists by listening them on Spotify is a bit more of an appropriate comparison.

pcthrowaway
6 replies
6h0m

You're supporting the artists you listen to more uniformly (via spotify) though.

If you and I listen to 1000 artists over the course of a year, and you spend $1000/year on album purchases (let's say $10 each) while I subscribe to spotify, I pay $90 a year while supporting all of the artists I listen to, loosely based on how much I listen to them, while you much more significantly support up to 100 of the artists you listened to.

I think what you're doing is better, don't get me wrong, but I can only afford $90 a year anyway.

In your case though, you could support all the artists you listen to by paying for a spotify/itunes/whatever subscription and using that as your primary listening service, while also purchasing their music via bandcamp. You probably won't feel the additional subscription price.

And I think most people who can afford $1000/year for music are not going to be using YouSpot, so I'm not sure why you're pointing out that people can leech off of spotify and then support the artists directly, when the above person said "please also support the artists"

You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists;

Yes, but most people can't afford this. It's good that YouSpot is available for people who can't even afford spotify (no one upthread said otherwise), and many people aren't going to be able to pay bandcamp $1000 per year to support maybe 10-50% of the artists they listen to. So please save your thesis for somewhere it's relevant.

For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums

etaweb
5 replies
4h1m

You say that it is better to pay 90$ for 1000$ worth of goods than to pay nothing. This is a false dilemma, there is a third choice that is paying only what you can afford. Paying only 9% of a physical good wouldn't make anyone less of a robber.

A lot of people here would rather blame those who steal better than they do, than question the industry that allows artists work to be sold off.

Furthermore, I would say that most people using Spotify and alike services do it only for convenience, but certainly not to "support the artists".

pcthrowaway
4 replies
2h58m

These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft (on the part of the consumers anyway).

If you have the means and inclination to pay more I strongly urge people to pay more also. There are issues with the intermediaries, but there is no practical way for people who can't afford $1000/yr to support the artists they like legally, while still being able to listen to them.

So if your suggestion is that someone who can afford $90/year should only have access to the albums they can afford to purchase through bandcamp because those support the artists more directly, I strongly disagree. This just further creates a wedge between the wealthy and regular working class people.

Are you suggesting poor people make do with the few albums they can purchase from bandcamp and then whatever they can listen to on the radio? On youtube? Because I fail to see how those are any less 'theft' than just paying spotify and listening there.

edit: I'm actually legitimately confused about what your idea is here and I'd like to understand. It seems like we're both coming at this from an anti-capitalist perspective, but your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts doesn't seem to align with any anti-capitalist ideology I'm aware of.

Or are you just opposed to the consolidation of the distribution channels which exploit the working class (artists in this case) but somehow haven't drawn the connection that this is a condition of late-stage capitalism?

If so, I'd recommend listening to some content by the wonderful Cory Doctorow

hedora
2 replies
2h39m

Also, if, once a year, every spotify listener picked one band they liked at random, and paid them the amount of an annual Spotify subscription ($132), there'd be a hell of a lot more money in artist's pockets than there is currently.

There are 8 million artists on Spotify, and 551 million monthly active users. That's $9000 per band on average per year. The 99.9th percentile band on Spotify makes $50K, and the 80th percentile artist makes $0. If we split the money across the 20% currently making any money at all, that's $45K per year per band. Therefore, the "pirate + directly pay one band at random" strategy would fund ~100 times more artists then Spotify does.

Also, if Spotify went bankrupt tomorrow and 100% of their users switched to pure piracy, we'd only lose roughly 15K below-minimum-wage jobs globally. There are currently 36,000 Spotify listeners for every band being paid what would be a median income for one person. If a tiny fraction of them decided to go to concerts or donate to appropriate non-profits, etc, it'd be a net gain of jobs for artists.

Note: There are only 220M premium subscriptions, so my numbers are a bit inflated. Ignoring the 330M ad supported listeners would lead to numbers that are too low. Also, I assumed people would pay for a spotify subscription which is more than the assumed $90.

Maybe divide everything I said by two?

Link to subscriber numbers:

https://www.statista.com/chart/15697/spotify-user-growth/

pcthrowaway
1 replies
2h11m

I think you're missing a few relevant things:

An annual spotify subscription in the U.S. is $99 (possibly less with boxing day deals and such), but I'd assume the majority of subscribers are outside the U.S. where prices are lower across the board.

But 6M of those artists may be AI-generated filler content, possibly published by bots. I don't think the correct idea is to divide the potential money people can spend by the number of artists. There should be some connection with what people are actually choosing to listen to, anything else would reward opportunistic publishers of low-effort, uninspired music (and encourage people to do even more of this).

Which then brings up the problem: If people were to fund one artist they listen to (lets say an artist they choose to listen to rather than an artist they accidentally listened to a song by once), are they going to choose at random from their list of such artists? How do they then get that list to pick from? How do they discover new music to potentially listen to more of in the first place

Apps like Spotify, (or OSS like YouSpot that piggybacks on Spotify) are both valid answers to those questions.

Then you have the dilemma of who's paying the cost of the bandwidth, and the development costs.

If you want to be fair, I think people should be encouraged to pay what they comfortably can with their budgets. They're using the infrastructure and platform of spotify (or similar) for discovery, so Spotify or similar should reasonably expect some money to cover costs and pay their devs. Then they can also pay any number of random artists whenever the mood strikes them.

If they can't afford spotify, they can still use YouSpot, kick the YouSpot devs one or several dollar per year, and then purchase music from their preferred artists up to the amount comfortable for them.

Using YouSpot is the closest actual thing to 'stealing' btw, because they're actually consuming a resource (bandwidth and server time) that's intended for subscribers, from a company that pays for it. Add to that, by using their software (and spotify's upstream), if they're not financially supporting the YouSpot devs and the Spotify devs for the work they're consuming then we're back to the initial claim (which I already said I disagree with) that consuming something that can be 'copied' ad infinitum without paying the producer is theft.

But I think any of the above are reasonable options for people who want to maximize the support of creators of the things they consume while staying within their means

hedora
0 replies
1h35m

I mostly listen to long-tail artists, so if I were to pick one at random, it would probably be in the 80-99.9th percentile group. (Assuming 80% of Spotify's catalog is spam -- that could be, but I don't use Spotify, and have never encountered spam any of their competitors).

This would pull some revenue away from the > 99.9th percentile artists, but that's OK with me.

I'm more worried that, even if we count jobs that are way below minimum wage, Spotify is only supporting 15K bands worldwide. That rounds to zero when compared to their listener base and their revenue.

Anyway, I pay more than just a streaming subscription annually, but I went with an estimate of what's going into just Spotify for my calculations. I'm not convinced there'd be much societal impact (in terms of artists not being paid) if they disappeared tomorrow.

etaweb
0 replies
45m

These aren't physical goods, and (my issues with the categorization of piracy as theft aside) given that we're talking about legally listening to music you have access to through a service you pay for, I don't even know how to engage with the suggestion that this is theft.

It being legal doesn't do much about its unfairness.

For the average person who can maybe comfortably afford $90 per year, a subscription service is a much more viable way to support the musicians they listen to than buying 4-9 albums

The option that you describe as the best for people who can't put more than 90$ a year on music (which is perfectly fine), is going through a subscription service, because even if a lesser amount of that money goes directly to artists, more of them get to see a bit of it.

I disagree with that, because you don't know for sure where your money is going, as all of this distribution system around streaming services is pretty opaque. As far as I know, the money from subscriptions on Spotify is not equally distributed among the artists that a user listens to. Bigger artists tend to get more per play than smaller ones.

The other option would be to spend that same amount on buying albums each year on a service like Bandcamp, which is known to distribute the money in a more direct and transparent way, and where artists actually have more control over what and how they want to sell.

It definitely means making a choice about what to buy, but it is still better than letting an obscure algorithm make that choice for you.

We should also consider that we can favor artists who are in need over those who are already earning large amounts. This is the opposite of what streaming services seems to be doing.

your idea that poor people should have reduced access to the arts

This is not my idea and I didn't say that. I criticize those who waste their time chasing the "theft", who they blame for being the origin of the artists being poorly paid, when the subscription model being proposed as the best solution is actually far from it and could also be considered as theft when you put out the numbers of how much artists are asking for their work.

jsnell
3 replies
6h32m

I meant the generic "you" of an user of this app. I'm sure you specifically don't actually use this app, and just listen to the music you bought.

But the main selling point of this app, i.e. the actual submission, is to get the music for free and no ads. The target market of it is not going to be paying a cent, because the entire reason the app exists and was submitted is to avoid paying much smaller amounts for music than what you're paying.

andrepd
1 replies
6h4m

There's also the artist's point of view in this thread, multiple people saying they made many times more money from Bandcamp than steaming services.

apwell23
0 replies
3h23m

multiple people saying they made many times more money from Bandcamp than steaming services.

While it might be true that they get more money on bandcamp. They get exposure through streaming websites like youtube, spotify that brings ppl to bandcamp.

drewdevault
0 replies
6h27m

This is perhaps true (but I'm not sure it is), but consider the context of this thread: we're specifically making arguments to an audience of people who care about artists being paid.

apwell23
3 replies
6h33m

attended many live shows, bought merchandise, etc.

I don't understand what does attending live shows have to do with how you listen to their music. Ppl who do listen on spotify also do that.

drewdevault
2 replies
6h30m

Live shows are generally the largest source of revenue for musicians.

apwell23
1 replies
6h17m

So what? You think only ppl listening on bandcamp go to live shows? How is it relevant to the current topic.

hedora
0 replies
2h25m

If the purpose of Spotify is to pay artists, then it's objectively a failure.

If you want pay musicians for their music, then you'd be better off buying albums on bandcamp or attending concerts. Paying Spotify is marginally better than just lighting your money on fire.

If the purpose of Spotify is to allow you to listen to music with minimal effort and cost, and don't care if the bands get paid then it does a middling job among paid services. It's probably more convenient than piracy, but I don't know what the state of modern music piracy is (I could imagine a gray-area Internet group that does a better job with metadata and recommendation algorithms than the paid sites do, and that links to a popcorn time style torrent thing.)

blibble
2 replies
3h20m

I spend quite a lot on bandcamp and amazon's mp3 store (couple of hundred bucks a year maybe?)

I am very very happy to pay for DRM free music

however this getting increasingly difficult as companies don't even seem to want to provide it for sale at all

under no circumstances am I going to pay a monthly subscription for a digital product that can be delivered as a one off download

hedora
1 replies
2h20m

I know people that still buy CDs.

I've been meaning to dump my Tidal artist list to a spreadsheet or something, and figure out how to pay a few dozen artists directly this year.

One possibility is to buy their albums and copy them to my NAS. Paying for DRM-free downloads seems easier / better, but I'd want to make sure the artists' cut is higher than with streaming.

For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days. I don't want to figure out their terrible GUI, but presumably there's some tool that'll copy the songs out of it and into a filesystem.

blibble
0 replies
2h7m

I would buy CDs and rip them up until about 5 years ago at which point the stuff I liked vanished

For what it's worth, iTunes is apparently DRM-free these days.

I'll try this!

viraptor
1 replies
6h54m

You said "Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this." but that's not the problem this specific software can solve. However the authors of this software can work on adding reporting the plays back to Spotify. (And I believe they should)

drewdevault
0 replies
6h53m

This software is not trying to solve the problem of getting artists paid, and the suggestion that people should listen to Spotify ads and all is not really going to solve that problem, either.

jstummbillig
13 replies
6h33m

a lifetime of spotify listening will make less money for an artist you like than buying a single album from them on Bandcamp.

This is false. And I mean, dramatically.

Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

It's roughly 200$.

Number of songs per hour: 60 minutes / 3 minutes per song = 20 songs

Total listening hours per year: 8 hours/day * 365 days = 2,920 hours

Total streams per year: 20 songs/hour * 2,920 hours = 58,400 streams

Total earnings: 58,400 streams * $0.004 (average pay rate) = $233.60

How high do you think that number should be, to be non-"whopping"?

I am seriously confused about what or who anti-streamers think they are zealoting for, what alternative fantasy they are defending.

As someone who has worked in the music industry (i.e. the people actually making a living through music) I witnessed Spotify/YT and the likes as an absolute force of creation of a new class of musicians, that would never have existed before.

drewdevault
6 replies
6h29m

You and I did the same back-of-the-napkin math and arrived at slightly different numbers; I used a 5 minute average song duration and $0.003 average payout. See my other comments for elaboration on why the Bandcamp model is ultimately better for the artist.

I don't deny that Spotify has improved the situation for many artists, but rather that it hasn't done enough and other approaches do it better, and I believe this is factually true.

jstummbillig
5 replies
6h19m

Yes, Bandcamp leaves a bigger percentage to the musician - from nothing/less. For a variety of reasons, Bandcamp is not actually being used and thus not doing for artists what Spotify has. You can start a personal crusade to combat that, but as long as you do not actually make it work (and I think there is good reasons rooted in what Spotify does well over Bandcamp and the service the former provides that the later won't), this is what is actually factually true.

Let's just skip the part, where we imply it's somehow okay to circumvent fair use, because nobody is making money off of streaming anyway or any such nonsense. Streaming as intended is fine for now. People can just use Spotify, or any of the alternatives, as they are intended and that's fine and on the whole better than anything we had before.

drewdevault
4 replies
6h9m

I didn't actually make that argument, though. I said that a user who circumvents ads on Spotify and buys albums from Bandcamp is more profitable for the artist than someone who just listens to Spotify ads, and I believe that this is factually true. A quick review of Google will turn up endless testimonies from artists who make more money from Bandcamp, usually by an order of magnitude or more. Spotify may be better than anything we had before (I don't believe this is true, but assume it for the moment), it is not better than anything that came after.

For the record, I am steelmanning a position in which abject piracy is a social negative, which I do not actually believe, but if we take that at face value my arguments still hold.

blowski
3 replies
5h55m

1. If you _really_ like an album, buy it on Bandcamp, because it gives more money to the artist.

2. If you just listen to the occasional song, listen to them on Spotify. Artist gets _some_ money, but nowhere near as much as #1.

3. If you don't care about the artist getting anything at all, then use workarounds like this tool, or download on torrents.

Most people used to do #3, and are now doing #2. #1 is just not going to happen, because there's too much friction.

rglullis
2 replies
4h45m

0. If you really want to support an artist, just ask what is the best way to just send them some hard cash every month? Patreon, ko-fi... even straight wire transfer (isn't FedNow already working?).

Why do we keep insisting on having middlemen?

hhh
1 replies
3h45m

I don't believe most people care about a lot of the artists they listen to enough to seek them out and send money this way.

Not that I believe it's good or bad either way, it's just cumbersome. People want easy solutions. A few of my long distance friends are artists, and it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl on Bandcamp above the regular price, and send nice notes with it.

I can do this for more people more easily thru Bandcamp than figuring it all out myself.

rglullis
0 replies
2h42m

most people (don't) care about a lot of the artists they listen

Fair enough. Then don't pay anything?

it makes them happy to see that I have bought their new cassette or vinyl

On the other hand, I do not want to buy merch, I don't care about physical media and I flat out refuse to buy something with DRM and/or through exploitative middlemen.

switch007
3 replies
4h7m

What's the median payout? i.e. is it skewed by some very high earning artists?

hedora
2 replies
3h11m

$0.

13,400 bands (not artists) got paid over $50K by spotify in 2020:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-many-artists-are-...

There are 8 million artists on spotify, and over 80% had under fifty monthly listeners:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/over-75-of-artists-on...

Put another way, 0.16% made over $50K. That's median income in the US. If you assume the money gets split across 5 band members, that's median income in Indonesia.

jstummbillig
1 replies
2h50m

This will also roughly be true for Bandcamp (albeit for each commercially failed band there's at least 3 friends and a mom, who will buy something off of the store and at a show, once when given the chance but I hope no one is cynical enough to argue about that being a lot better than $0).

The fact that every creative endeavour or sport is a mix of a few pros and a lot of amateurs (in the sense that they do not make a living) is not an issue.

The value of Spotify and the like to most artists is enabling them to publish to everyone for basically free, no matter how fringe or bad, and to do it all the time. I think that's wonderful.

hedora
0 replies
1h28m

They don't break down the distribution of how many artists got paid at all, but it looks like they're probably close to the estimated 15K bands that got non-trivial payments from Spotify this year:

https://bandcamp.com/about

In the past year alone, they’ve spent $194 million on 14.2 million digital albums, 10.4 million tracks, 1.75 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 350,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.

Note that $194M is less than 10% of Spotify's revenue.

I'd love to see a breakdown by percentile income per band, but one thing's clear: If I buy something there, then more of my money goes to the artist I'm trying to support than they get from me streaming their album.

ufocia
0 replies
5h33m

Interesting to know. What are the comparative figures for youtube and TikTok videos?

hedora
0 replies
3h1m

This computation is assuming streaming fraud though. If they see an account doing that, they'll flag it.

Assume the album has 10 songs, is one hour long and costs $20. Ten songs means they get $0.04 each time you listen to it. So, you need to listen to the album 500 times for the artist to be paid for the album. I mostly listen in the car; call it under 2 hours a day, but lets assume 4 hours a day of listening to Spotify.

A Spotify subscription is $11 a month. I can fit 4 non-fraud plays of the album into each day, so that's 4 * 30 = 120 streams. It'd take 4 months of listening to nothing but this one album for the artist to break even, and it'd cost me $44.

Bandcamp + bittorrent would give the artists about twice as much money on average. Buying merch also pays artists more, assuming the cost of the item plus shipping is under half what they charge.

apwell23
11 replies
6h41m

Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system, not to this.

How exactly do you do this ? What a dishonest comment to support stealing.

drewdevault
10 replies
6h40m

How exactly do you do this

By reading the rest of my comment.

What a dishonest comment to support stealing.

Copying is not theft.

apwell23
7 replies
6h38m

By reading the rest of my comment.

I did. You made a silly assumption that all artists put their music up on bandcamp. No one even knows what bandcamp is my area.

drewdevault
3 replies
6h34m

Bandcamp is available in more markets than Spotify. Not sure how that's relevant to my argument, though.

apwell23
2 replies
6h19m

Here is an example of an artist not on bandcamp . This is what i am listening currently on spotify( I have no idea who this is)

Odeon Yılları Album by Nesrin Sipahi

westhanover
1 replies
6h6m

So mail her a check? Do we have to think of everything for you?

lxgr
0 replies
3h56m

How do I find an artist’s mailing address? And what is a check?

pcthrowaway
1 replies
6h14m

Why would artists not put their music up on one of the most well-known platforms that allow people to significantly support them by purchasing a copy of their music.

I legitimately don't get it.

I don't necessarily believe that Spotify is necessarily worse as a way to make money from their music (I think ad-supported and subscription "bundling" services such as Youtube and Spotify probably result in more money going to artists than all the options for purchasing artists' music piecemeal, like Bandcamp), but artists should definitely make their music available somewhere for fans to purchase regardless

Substitute Bandcamp with Google/Apple music or whatever, the point remains, one can use Spotube and choose to support artists buy paying for their music.

I don't think most people are actually doing this though..

apwell23
0 replies
6h8m

I legitimately don't get it.

Because its not " one of the most well-known platforms" outside english speaking countries. I assure you no one in Sri Lanka or India know what bandcamp is.

This kind of western arrogance is kind of infuriating to ppl from other parts of the world. Like american tourist demanding that ppl speak to them in english in turkey.

lawgimenez
0 replies
6h16m

I’m the only one buying stuffs on Bandcamp in my family. Casual listeners see no reason to be on Bandcamp when they can listen it on YouTube or Spotify.

For the parent comment, it’s better to support artists on whichever platform they want to be in, because parent comment feels like he has an axe to grind on Spotify.

sdoering
1 replies
6h33m

Copying is robbing the artist of their revenue. So you are actually proposing a solution to make life worse for artists.

What a dishonesty.

drewdevault
0 replies
6h31m

Copying is not theft, it is materially different.

Moreover, I have proposed ways of engaging with music which makes substantially more money for artists. I am not the one being dishonest here.

pinkgolem
4 replies
7h9m

Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

i mean, that sounds fair?

drewdevault
1 replies
7h0m

Maybe, maybe not. If an artist makes up 1% of your listening, that goes down to a dollar, and if you factor in more realistic listening habits that goes down further. Consider that this is paid to the rights holder, not the artist, as well -- the artist usually gets even less. Buy one album on Bandcamp for $10 and the rights holder gets $8.50 (on Bandcamp this is usually the artist directly).

Fact of the matter is that in terms of getting artists paid, Spotify's business model and distribution model is inferior to other solutions and the economic cost of circumventing the ads is little to none, and in fact if you take advantage of Spotify's distribution model for convenience and buy elsewhere for economics then you are performing a net social good.

gnramires
0 replies
5h6m

People are saying about 70% of Spotify revenue goes to rights holders, whereas you're saying about 85% of Bandcamp's revenue goes to rights holders. It really doesn't seem like that much of a difference?

Maybe what you're saying is, you end up spending much more buying merchandise and labuns directly than you would spend on Spotify. (I'm not sure this would be true for everyone though)

Maybe then the solution could be to have a way to just pay more to Spotify (conditional on keeping the revenue split intact).

Something I don't like about Spotify though, is that I don't get to have any kind of say on how the revenue is split. I'd personally prefer if there was an egalitarian bias in payment, and the artists with less revenue would get a greater share of my subscription. But there's no way I can control that, that's the most frustrating to me personally, and I'd gladly switch to a system that pays more (since I currently have the means to).

In fact, I've proposed FunkWhale, the federated (libre-)music streaming platform, should get a subscription service like that, and that I should have some control over the revenue distribution (maybe there would be a minimum revenue split, and the rest I can 'choose my own algorithm', for example one that heavily favors less popular musicians). I agree that meanwhile the best I can do to support them would be paying them directly, and I've found a few have Liberapay (or Patreon) accounts as well.

hcks
0 replies
10m

You don’t understand, there is a parallel universe where people don’t pay for Spotify and totally spend 500 bucks per year on merch for each artist they listen to

dotancohen
0 replies
7h3m

Especially considering that Spotify claims over 500 million users. The traditional bottleneck in the music industry and the entertainment industry has been distribution.

Of course, 500 million users does not mean that 500 million potential fans will be exposed to your work.

jasode
3 replies
5h28m

>You're better off listening to music however you please and buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists;

Often, the "listening to music however you please" will contradict "buying albums on Bandcamp to support the artists" ... because the particular artists the listener wants to listen to are on a big label and thus, their albums are not on Bandcamp.

The "buy on Bandcamp" advice only works if one likes to listen to the type of artists (typically indie) that happen to release on Bandcamp.

On the other hand, if music listeners want the mainstream stuff (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Rolling Stones, etc)... they're only on the big tech music streamers like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, etc.

apwell23
1 replies
4h48m

it also sidesteps the whole discovery issue. I would love to know how that person is discovering music that they buy on bandcamp.

hedora
0 replies
2h1m

Any of the locally-run radio stations in the SF Bay Area are good choices:

https://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/locate?select=city&city=mo...

Here are some that I have found new music on (no particular order):

KZSC, KFJC, KZSU, KSJS, KCSM, KKUP, KSJO, KBCZ, KDFC, KPOO, KALX

There's also SomaFM.

It looks like Pirate Cat Radio finally sold out to The Man, and got a broadcast license for their transmitter. Need to check them out again:

https://kpcr.org/about/

Apparently, there are now a handful of high school radio stations around here too. Does that mean the cool kids have kids in high school now? I must be getting old.

Also, music podcasts are a thing. I like Dark Compass for metal.

FirebornX
0 replies
3h21m

I think the "buy on Bandcamp" advise extends to any other of a large number of marketplaces you can purchase popular artist albums from.

I personally want to own music that I like and not just lose it if I decide to cut my subscriptions. I use Bandcamp for smaller acts and Qobuz for everything I can't find on Bandcamp.

petesergeant
1 replies
6h44m

Direct your passion for getting musicians paid to Spotify and the distribution system

Spotify pay 70% of their revenue back to the rights holders, leaving 30% for operating costs and profits. What percentages would you recommend, and what are you basing it on?

drewdevault
0 replies
6h39m

I would not recommend a different revenue split, I would recommend a different business model. And I did!

specialist
0 replies
3h38m

This Spotify client could autolink to artists on Bandcamp.

Radio playlists often have artist links. Sometimes they work. For example:

http://www.kser.org/content/live-playlist

pg5
0 replies
4h25m

I don't get how this is justification for individuals to pay artists zero with thus bypass. Indie musicians who grow to have 10-100k+ monthly streams are making a nice chunk of money from it.

code_runner
0 replies
5h40m

The lion’s share of Spotify subscription data goes straight to the labels. The labels are the ones not paying artists.

It’s crazy to expect all the music in the world on demand for $12 a month or whatever. Spotify can probably do better in some ways but I don’t see how any of this justifies not giving the artists the pennies your mentioning.

blowski
0 replies
5h39m

I'm sceptical that Drew DeVault has a sock puppet account on HN, created 3 months ago, in addition to @ddevault. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't like non-satirical impersonation.

ajross
0 replies
3h37m

Even if you only listen to one artist, 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, they will earn a whopping... 100 bucks from Spotify.

Is that not reasonable? I mean, obviously this number represents a market price point: the system has reached an equilibrium where the "aggregate value" of being able to listen to music full time is $100/year (plus or minus all the confounding factors like who bears it and how it's distributed, etc...).

Is $100/year wrong? That is, after all, right about the price of the subscription you're likely paying already. So... it sounds right to me? What's the mechanism you are imagining where customers paying for subscriptions of that order somehow produce payments to the artists that are significantly higher?

I think a lot of the disconnect here is that the idea of "music revenue" is different in today's world than it was in the days of the 70's rock star. People used to pay a lot more for music! But they don't anymore, and all the parties take a hit, not just Spotify/Apple/et. al.

9dev
0 replies
7h6m

That doesn’t paint the full picture, though. Artists get something from Spotify in return - exposure to listeners (even those that wouldn’t traditionally listen to an artist or never discover them otherwise), global and immediate distribution, marketing, and simple payment handling.

Today, artists don’t need most of the services traditional record labels provide, which treated them way worse over the last half century. And that’s a good thing.

Not to say I think it’s fair how little streaming services pay to musicians, but this is more nuanced than just Spotify exploiting artists.

bayindirh
28 replies
7h39m

It's not bypassing anything. It gets the playlist data from Spotify, and streams the song from YouTube, arguably still providing income for the musicians.

gnfargbl
23 replies
7h36m

YouTube pays less per stream to the rights holders than Spotify, however.

unnamed76ri
19 replies
7h27m

I don’t know where you get your info but Spotify just effectively demonetized the majority of music on their platform. They’ve decided they have the right to just stop paying small time artists so they can funnel more money upwards to the record labels.

gnfargbl
11 replies
7h10m

If you mean the changes declared in https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-..., then I find it hard to reconcile the description given there with your editorialization.

richrichardsson
8 replies
5h46m

Starting in early 2024, tracks must have reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to generate recorded royalties.

This will take my Spotify income from pitiful to non-existent.

Fuck Spotify.

crazygringo
4 replies
3h37m

Spotify pays ~$0.004/stream.

1,000 streams is $4.00. That's a coffee.

Lots of services for creators have minimum payouts. Google AdSense won't pay you until you reach $100. Patreon has a $10 minimum payout using PayPal. A threshold of just $4 is actually very much on the low side.

I genuinely don't understand how this is something to get upset over. It's comparable to what an artist used to make in royalties from a single CD sold. What's more surprising to me is that Spotify previously didn't have a minimum at all.

unnamed76ri
2 replies
2h44m

You’re looking at it wrong. That $4 per song! What artist only releases one song ever?

Spotify and other streaming platforms pay royalties to an artist’s distributor and that aggregate of royalties from all platforms gets paid out to the artist when they reach the distributor’s threshold. Spotify is making that money no longer exist at all for indie artists.

crazygringo
1 replies
2h14m

Ah sorry, I hadn't picked up on that -- thanks. But it still doesn't change the overall point at all.

So if you've got 2 albums of 10 tracks each, then you need 1,000 listens of each album to reach a minimum payout of $80, which you've got an entire year to accumulate. So Spotify isn't on the low side -- it's comparable with AdSense's minimum payout of $100.

But honestly, compared to the effort involved in producing an album, that's... nothing. $80 is not the difference between making or breaking your music career. It's under $7 a month. A slightly more expensive coffee.

I just don't understand how that can be upsetting. If your streams on Spotify are that low, then you're doing it as a hobby anyways, for the love of it. Which is wonderful. But it isn't your source of income.

unnamed76ri
0 replies
1h51m

You are correct. This isn’t really about income. It is the principle of the thing. Spotify is redistributing subscriber fees and ad revenue from the struggling artist to the record labels and superstars.

As I said in another comment, I’ve cancelled my account so in my case it is costing them more than they are saving. I’m also no longer sending fans to Spotify and this year not all of the music I release will make its way to Spotify.

jwagenet
0 replies
3h9m

Yea, I don’t get it either. This makes sense as a spam reduction move. If an emerging artist wants to make money, you would probably be more successful performing live until you boost your numbers significantly.

unnamed76ri
2 replies
3h54m

As soon as this change was announced, I cancelled my Spotify subscription. I know it won’t mean much of anything to the overall number but at least in my case, they saved less than $10 in royalties at a cost of $132 in subscription fees.

swozey
1 replies
3h31m

I tested getting off spotify last year, but the other apps were so bare bones and featureless. I tried most of the popular ones, Quboz, Tidal, Spotify, Apple music, youtube music, amazon music.. i think 1-2 others. Thankfully there's an app called soundiiz that for like $2-3 will sync all of your music app playlists/favs/etc to one another.

ALL of them had absolutely useless/bad Android Auto/Carplay apps. I know at least half of them (quboz tidal for sure) didn't have a way to search in the car app. Quboz or Tidal didn't even display your subscribed albums/playlists. I forget exactly but I think I could only play their recommended stuff. Exacts are off here but I remember specifically sitting in my car with both of those apps wondering why I couldn't figure how to play my fav playlist or search for an artist.

Then the social stuff. I share collab playlists with a few friends. Apples adding these feautures IIRC. Surely not important to most people but they really make the other apps just feel barebones. I like gamification, rewinds, badges, etc.

The Carplay thing is the killer for me, though.

hedora
0 replies
3h21m

I haven't had many issues with Tidal's CarPlay support. I've only used it in rental cars (so cars that shipped mid to post pandemic) though.

It definitely shows subscribed albums, etc. The one exception was that, on an older Toyota, it only showed the first dozen or so albums in my collection one time out of the dozen I drove the rental. Parking the car then coming back a few hours later fixed it.

unnamed76ri
1 replies
3h52m

Taking the news directly from Spotify? Try this for another perspective: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/01/11/spotify-stream-m...

jwagenet
0 replies
3h11m

I listen to a lot of music under 1000 streams, artists with 10s to 100s of monthly listens. Based on the junk that makes it to my discover weekly or release radar, some big percent of that <1000 listen cohort is spam that’s ai generated or has erroneously added real artists as collaborators to get well positioned. I have a lot of respect for actual musicians trying to make money, but I am honestly ok with Spotify setting a threshold for payouts to divert that cash to real artists.

hutzlibu
5 replies
7h25m

Sources please?

erinnh
4 replies
7h17m
gallexme
3 replies
7h3m

1000 annual listens? That's likely less than 1$/mo revenue the artists get no? Even small time musicians I know have about 1000 listens a month

Seems to me just like yt monetization partner program which required like 50€ revenue for payout and 1000 subs+approval for even enabling monetization (some time ago unsure if it's still limited for new accounts )

Unless I'm missing something it mainly just trims out mass produced content

unnamed76ri
1 replies
6h28m

It is similar but different to what YouTube did (which also sucked).

How many musicians do you know of that only ever released one song? This isn’t about the streaming revenue for one song (though that is how Spotify tries to frame it). There are 1000s of artist who might have even been fairly successful at one point who have dozens or more songs in their back catalog that don’t have over 1000 streams per year. Add up the lost revenue from all of those together and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore.

Further, even approaching the argument from how much it means per song is granting Spotify a pass that this is in any way fair to artists. Why should the top 1% of artists take even more money while the struggling musician now gets nothing?

hutzlibu
0 replies
6h23m

Agreed in general.

"and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore."

And I want to add, that for quite some musicians, a couple of bucks can make the difference between being able to (partly) pay the rent, or not.

And those are usually the ones making interesting music. So I rather would like the trend reversed, less for the superstars, more for the unkown artists. But this is unlikely to change with these services.

richrichardsson
0 replies
5h39m

Even small time musicians I know have about 1000 listens a month

On every single one of their tracks?

Let's say they have 20 tracks on Spotify.

1000 plays/month across 20 tracks gives 50 plays/track/month.

50 plays/month gives 600 plays/year, less than the threshold.

ARTIST GETS NOTHING FROM SPOTIFY.

Fuck Spotify.

letier
0 replies
7h17m

This is quite interesting. I'd be interested in more information on this.

bayindirh
2 replies
7h35m

I don't know the numbers. What I was trying to point out that there's no nefariousness going on.

jsnell
1 replies
7h21m

No, you weren't just pointing that out. You claimed that it is "arguably still providing income for the musicians". How is it arguably providing income for tyhe artists given the app is obviously not playing ads?

bayindirh
0 replies
6h13m

First of all, the tool’s description doesn’t say anything about ads. Second, I’m neither the developer, nor user of the app.

Third, I didn’t say definitely, but arguably. I might be wrong, but I’m not endorsing anything here.

Lastly, I’m an ex-musician, too and prefer to pay for premium and buy proper albums when I can.

So pointing fingers doesn’t do any favor to anyone.

Have a nice day.

bitcharmer
1 replies
7h36m

If it streams from YouTube then it's not really a Spotify client, is it?

bayindirh
0 replies
7h35m

It's aptly named SpoTube, to be frank.

It describes itself as follows:

An open source, cross-platform Spotify client compatible across multiple platforms utilizing Spotify's data API and YouTube (or Piped.video or JioSaavn) as an audio source, eliminating the need for Spotify Premium

svantana
0 replies
7h34m

A very large fraction of music on youtube is also monetized by ads (for free users).

IanCal
0 replies
7h29m

So it shows the ads from YouTube?

vdaea
9 replies
7h34m

People here all day defending p2p piracy but when you are taking the bandwidth from a multibillion, multinational corporation then you're the devil himself :'( :'( :'( :'(

jbverschoor
3 replies
7h14m

"bandwidth from a multibillion, multinational corporation" that started out as a frontend for the pirate bay. They were probably friends, as both are from Sweden.

portaouflop
2 replies
6h44m

So they started out pirating music and then decided they want to get rich from stolen culture while giving nothing back. That is taking the whole pirate meme a bit too literally.

jug
0 replies
6h9m

Their Beta yeah, but the vast majority of their wealth is built on venture capital where they give many things back. It's a very popular service that musicians want to be on. Neither popularity nor musicians would happen if they didn't give anything back.

gsich
0 replies
3h36m

"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing"

__warlord__
3 replies
7h21m

I think the "hacker" part of "hacker news" doesn't mean much anymore.

extheat
1 replies
6h2m

The Hacker in hacker news was never meant to imply black hat/malicious types of hacking. There’s quite a difference between say, tearing something apart, reverse engineering it, breaking into something that _you_ own, versus trying to tear into something you don’t own without a really good reason. At the end of the day it’s about judgement and taste, there isn’t so much a hardline but there is a line on what we consider acceptable and unacceptable areas of exploitation. Beyond the piracy point, I think few could find this exploitative, it seems like a cool open source project that could genuinely offer better and customizable user experience.

elashri
0 replies
5h10m

What in this project is about piracy? It does not give you free access you cannot have without it.

mlrtime
0 replies
4h22m

The article is still link here, so I say the hacker part is very much alive.

That the comments aren't 100% all aligned is great, I come here for vigorous respectful debate. It helps me reflect on my position on topics.

What's the problem?

user_7832
0 replies
3h23m

Well people tend to forget this is Hacker News. Finding creative workarounds is part of the fun.

gumballindie
9 replies
6h43m

HN has sadly become a bit of a #warezcentral. People demanding free stuff, either to train their ai models or for personal consumption.

pelasaco
8 replies
6h38m

What is more hacker than bypassing rules and paid services? What was phreaking all about?

gumballindie
4 replies
6h35m

Stealing content is not the type of rule breaking that phreaking was about.

HeWhoLurksLate
2 replies
6h27m

phreaking was literally theft lol

quesera
0 replies
3h23m

"Theft of services", yes -- but the marginal cost/loss to the provider was effectively zero.

In this way, phreaking was exactly like media piracy.

But all of the above are entirely unrelated to the meaning of "Hacker" in HN.

pelasaco
0 replies
6h12m

phreaking was literally theft lol

Right? People get so attached to their political views that they dont even notice it.

Kevin Poulsen, just wanted to win the Porsche for the poor...

pelasaco
0 replies
6h32m

you were probably not there or in any warez bbc...

jug
2 replies
6h0m

I think there's a difference between hacking for fun and feeling entitled to and arguing with weak arguments how you should be able to play music for free.

This entire thread has absolutely nothing to do with e.g. telling how Spotify can be hacked and everything to do with script kiddies at best wanting to download a binary from GitHub to listen to music for free.

But sure, maybe HN is that sad distribution mechanism now and, what's more, we're calling this hacker culture!

pelasaco
0 replies
3h35m

I think there's a difference between hacking for fun and feeling entitled to and arguing with weak arguments how you should be able to play music for free.

I don't think people want only to play music for free. I don't. But for sure this new definition of "what hacking is" is for sure annoying.

gumballindie
0 replies
1h40m

This. Period.

scosman
8 replies
3h56m

“ It is still recommended to support the creators by watching/liking/subscribing to the artists' YouTube channels or liking their tracks on Spotify (or purchasing a Spotify Premium subscription too)”

Likes/subscribes are not support. Artists deserve to make a living.

I’m supremely frustrated by the current state of TV shows (need 8 subscriptions and still have shows I can’t watch). Music on the other hand is wonderful. Many services to choose from, all including basically all music. Different price points for ads/quality level. We should be delighted to pay $10 a month for unlimited music (or free ad supported) and not ruin a good thing.

gr__or
4 replies
3h46m

It should probably be said that the cuts artists get from the streamers are seen as insufficient and that platforms where you give more directly to artists, like BandCamp, are a better way to support artists you like.

scosman
3 replies
3h42m

Also: choose a platform that pays artists more. Apple and tidal pay out much more per stream than YouTube/spotify.

But any form of paying is much much much better than piracy.

karmakaze
2 replies
3h33m

I liked the good ol' days when you could buy an LP/CD album and know that you'll have access to the music without depending on subscription services keeping them available.

I'm particularly annoyed by Spotify only keeping 'Remastered' versions of tracks that sound smooth/full/pleasing to new-time listeners but shave a lot of character off the original.

scosman
0 replies
3h30m

You still can buy albums if you want. New, used, digital. Lots of options.

Ringz
0 replies
2h34m

The „remaster plague“ is extremely annoying. But that's because artists re-record their music in order to have to give the record label less money.

slily
1 replies
3h32m

If you only listen to music that is on streaming services, then of course you would think that they have "basically all music", since everything else is forgotten. I pirated music before Spotify was available, which exposed me to a wide variety of international artists, and I still periodically look up some of my favorites on streaming services, only to find that they are still absent. So I continue to pirate and buy albums from time to time.

Buying used records or borrowing them from the library does not earn artists money either, but no one bitches about that. As far as I'm concerned, downloading rips is the digital equivalent.

swozey
0 replies
2h51m

Spotify has been missing almost every hip hop b-side I've ever looked for. Like, the eps and lps that got these artists careers started aren't there. I had no idea how many b-sides some of them have until I started looking them up on soundcloud etc too.

hackernewds
0 replies
1h36m

I would rather support the artists on YouTube premium. But I have no easy way to port my music from Spotify to YouTube premium

tiku
4 replies
7h19m

But do you need to get paid for each time someone listens to a copy? The artist isn't doing work for me when I listen to a song. Spotify should pay artists when their songs are added, not when listened.

cqqxo4zV46cp
3 replies
7h18m

It’s not your job to decide what Spotify’s business model is.

pelasaco
1 replies
6h36m

and is your job to say what people should do or not?

westhanover
0 replies
6h5m

Obviously you have had your feelings hurt. If you don’t work for Spotify, it is by definition not your job.

jbverschoor
0 replies
7h15m

You know... I have very little empathy for Spotify. Their whole company is built on pirated music

madsbuch
3 replies
3h43m

But when it comes time to pay for content, those people rarely are willing to pony up. You can see this happening with journalism, music, apps, etc.

I think this sentiment is wrong. Personally, I pay for content and services that I find value adding (Kagi, Fastmail, etc.)

That said: I am never going to pay for YouTube. The issue is that the entire platform and all of its content is catered to ad-revenue.

I could be convinced to pay for a video service like YouTube where everything into its core and legacy has been based around user payments.

Likewise I am never going to pay for news services that has adjusted their entire offering and content towards ad-revenue.

But until I discover such a platform I am going to keep on my ad-blocker.

chefandy
1 replies
2h50m

Personally, I pay for content and services that I find value adding

While it would be a convenient reality, the people on HN are not even close to representative of the general population, and you can't generalize their tendencies. How many Kagi and Fastmail users are there compared to Google and Microsoft? Look at Google Play reviews for apps that front paid services: even for astonishingly cheap ones, a considerable percentage essentially say "not free: uninstalled! Those conniving bastards!"

And if you're willing to pay for services instead of using ad-supported platforms, you must pay all of your music and other content, then? You don't even have to stomach the DRM from Apple Music, Amazon, e-reader platforms, et al with music shops, book stores, movie theaters, Bandcamp, Patreon, Substack -- there are so many services through which you can exercise your principles and pay for content directly.

It's pretty common for the tech crowd to wag their finger at people who feel entitled to free commercial software and services (e.g. Kagi, Fastmail,) yet do the same exact thing with arts and entertainment. Getting access to content on ad-supported services isn't your right. There are alternatives.

I'm not saying you must uninstall your ad blocker-- there are many unavoidable and essential things-- e.g., things for work-- that contain ads even when they really shouldn't. But you can't just assume that since you pay for some stuff, then everybody else is paying for some stuff, and since the distributors are real jerks, you have ethical carte blanche to take people's work without any payment. Creators don't have a choice to use these systems because people won't pay (directly) for things.

madsbuch
0 replies
1h23m

I am quite sure I do not have the ethical card in any of these discussions. I also pay way less than the combined sum of the value I receive from the internet.

But there is a marketplace. And the content of YouTube is not worth the price of YouTubes premium offerings because they embed ads. Ie. I pay to remove YouTube's ads, but not video sponsorships.

That would be like paying for Kagi and still only be presented SEO-optimized worthless content – I pay for Kagi because I feel like they can filter away that content much better than Google.

I am saying that a product you pay for is not the same as an ad-supported product. It is not just about stripping the product of ads after the user has paid.

So everybody not willing to pay for a Gmail offering without ads, I completely understand them.

hedora
0 replies
3h25m

I actually don't mind ads. They're fine. The classified section of newspapers used to fund journalism in the US. Someone's got to pay Clark Kent, after all.

What I do mind is algorithmic targeting. On the ad serving front, it funds an entire industry that does nothing but violate people's basic human right to privacy. On the personalized recommendation front, it provides a strong incentive for publishers to produce click-bait.

There's one commercially viable corner of the internet that hasn't been ruined by this: Podcasts.

Spotify is trying to ruin that too. Screw them.

Also, if you're looking for a decent music service, consider something privacy preserving like Apple Music, or (better) something that uses metadata-based targeting, like Tidal.

I find most of my music by following hyperlinks in album / band reviews that were written by actual humans. There's a button for that in Tidal. I've heard Amazon Music has such a button as well. I've also found listening to high-quality (local) radio stations with good DJ's is a goldmine, as are music podcasts.

I've also found that non-tailored recommendations (people who like album X like album Y, grouping of opening acts with bands, and, when done right, old-fashioned display ads) also provide a decent signal, since they're typically curated or use the things I just mentioned as signal (instead of using your cookware preferences, or sexual orientation, or whatever).

In addition to being the ethical alternative, it turns out that having bands and critics list things that influenced an album or were influenced by an album is a much better way to explore the space of modern music than via payola with a dollop of high-dimensional clustering.

So, in addition to the ad blocker, I'm not paying for anything that tries to spoon-feed me payola or clickbait.

kossTKR
3 replies
7h17m

Deserve to be paid by whom though, Spotify already pays nothing?

A song with 10000000 (10 million) streams , a pretty big hit and only reserved for big artists will give you 500 dollars before cuts, taxes etc.

So not even the biggest artists will make anything substantial.

apwell23
1 replies
6h27m

why are they publishing music on spotify then?

I've discovered many artists on spotify and have paid for their live concerts.

Curious, how do you discover music ?

kossTKR
0 replies
5h42m

I also use Spotify and like you have discovered a bunch of stuff.

Spotify is just the state of things, the monopoly. Like lots of other current status quos bad for on everyone but investors, old money, the richest but there's no real alternatives.

Though i know at least some smaller artists have moved off the platform, but people live in the biggest apps now so it's hard.

Soundcloud somehow never really translated and bandcamp just went bad after it was sold to investors.

I wonder if the scene is ripe for new platforms that's better for artists.

superultra
0 replies
5h25m

There’s a lot of misinformation on this post.

A 10 million stream song will gross about $30-40k. After cuts for an artist, depending on the structure, they might get anywhere from most of that to $5-10k.

Not that Spotify is an equitable payment system but let’s be honest about the numbers.

pxoe
2 replies
7h5m

signing up for a free service (or even just using it without an account with youtube music), and playing music for free, is the easiest way to support a creator, at no cost to you.

the bar is so low - support creators with ad money for free, and some people still can't clear it, or refuse to clear it. the complaining is not fair, it's annoying. if you can't pay, or wouldn't pay otherwise, and still opposed to things like ads, that enable you to get something for free - you didn't deserve to get it in the first place. get over it and pay up or shut up. or rather, put your principles to work and refuse to engage with ad-supported content at all. instead of being like "well...i still want it. so let me get it completely for free. even though i could get it for free, but that's not enough for me." the complaints at their core are just 'i got it for free and i'm still not satisfied'. the annoying kind of entitlement that wants something so badly, it doesn't even dare to just refuse itself the thing it wants.

dotancohen
1 replies
6h53m

I feel that your comment is poorly articulated and ignores the primary reasons that many people use adblockers (malware protection). However, your point is very valid and I 100% agree. Compensate with your time or compensate with your money. I personally still have a large collection of compact discs. The sound quality difference is amazing, though people listening to music produced in the last decade might be less affected as that most of that music was engineered to be played over highly compressed lossy streaming and a half cm mono speaker that cannot reproduce anything below 100 or above 16000 hz as found on a smartphone.

pxoe
0 replies
5h18m

in context of music/video streaming (maybe even youtube and spotify specifically), if there's no malware in video and audio itself of ads that would be getting blocked, that isn't really "blocking malware". juuust a little disingenuous there.

even with ads blocked "for malware protection", malware could end up being promoted within content, or just encountered somewhere, and there's more actual malware protection (some is built in to OS). so...it's not about "blocking malware" with blocking ads altogether, is it. especially when a bunch of ads are non-interactive and not even about software but stuff like food and other things. it's more about not seeing ads at all.

and sometimes, ad blocking just isn't an "anti-malware" solution in itself. like, if you wouldn't be able to navigate app catalogues and kinda sus out what could be malware or just steer away from untrustworthy apps altogether, ad block isn't gonna help you much there. "native" ads (promotional content) throw an even bigger wrench into that.

larodi
1 replies
3h26m

I would actually pay extra for proper open-source, minimal win32 client for spotify which runs every damn winbox. This electron apps Spotify been trying to get right for so many years is such a waste of information and cpu cycles sometimes. Can't believe a company which manages such enormous amount of data is so bad at UI

bitcharmer
0 replies
2h32m

There are platforms other than windows. Electron is one of the simpler ways to get software released on multiple operating systems without having to support different builds and architectures.

jzb
1 replies
2h54m

"buy music directly if you don't want to subscribe! A lot of smaller artists provide ways to purchase their music that give them a large percentage of the proceeds, and you can get the music DRM-free if that's something you care about."

Amen. If you have the money and really like a band or artist, find a way to put some money directly in their hands if at all possible.

One: They're going to see a lot more money this way and be able to make more music in the long run.

Two: Music can and does disappear from Spotify and other services due to rights and licensing issues.

Three: It's not super-common but sometimes the originals are replaced with remasters or something that isn't quite right to my ears. Robyn Hitchcock's first album ("Black Snake Diamond Role") is on Spotify, last I looked. But it was remastered for digital or whatever and they couldn't find all the original masters - meaning that one of the songs that used to have saxophone doesn't. It sounds entirely wrong now.

hackernewds
0 replies
1h37m

Producers and record labels do provide a service with distribution which artists share their commissions for. The idea that the record labels don't deserve their cuts is confusing, do they also not have employees and artists?

Jack Harlow might be one example, but you see the dearth of D2C music and platforms like TIDAL that the marketing and distribution network does matter, and helps good artists take off. Whether you believe mainstream music is "good" or not, is up to your preference

znpy
0 replies
2h16m

Musician deserve to be paid for their work

If anybody actually cares even one tiny bit about a specific musician they should go to live events, buy the original merchandise and/or buy the CDs.

Paying Spotify and similar services is the least efficient way to get money into artists’ pockets.

westhanover
0 replies
6h15m

Okay, I’ve thought twice and I don’t care. Is it okay if I use this now?

vvillena
0 replies
3h14m

Musician deserve to be paid for their work

I agree. Does Spotify use my money to pay the people I listen to on a given month? They do not. They lump all the revenue together and use it to pay for content in a set of deals with music distribution companies, and some individual artists/podcasters. Which means the percentages are skewed in favor of the big names and labels.

A fair subscription music service should be transparent, and even be able to provide detailed information about how much you are paying to the artists you listen to. E.g. if I don't listen to Coldplay, none of my money should go to Coldplay. If the streaming service wants to, they can use part of their cut to pay Coldplay a bit of extra money.

thenoblesunfish
0 replies
2h2m

You can and should buy music you like on Bandcamp (or even directly from artists when they offer it), after you've thrown then a fraction of a cent via streaming.

superultra
0 replies
5h27m

I work in the music industry and am intimately familiar with streaming earnings. While you are technically correct, I would much rather someone use this tool and buy a ticket to a show or an LP that stream over Spotify. In fact, the ad supported tier of Spotify is one of the lesser equitable ways to pay artists.

Your intent is good but gatekeeping people to use an inequitable system is not the solution.

plagiarist
0 replies
4h44m

Paying Spotify does not pay musicians. It pays Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan. The musicians I am listening to are receiving fractions of a penny per song.

pelasaco
0 replies
6h42m

Please nobody needs such disclaimers. If people are not willing to pay for it, they won't pay it. If they are, they will do.

nonbirithm
0 replies
3h37m

I get mixed feelings when reading this comment while remembering the many people gushing about how they formed lifelong friendships through what.cd.

micromacrofoot
0 replies
3h57m

if you think musicians should be paid for their work then you shouldn’t be using music streaming at all

methou
0 replies
4h28m

Which would benefit them more? Buying CD or listening on Spotify?

I’m have a list of artist I want to pay back to:

- the Monty Python - Tom Lehrer - Arrogant Worms - “Weird Al” Yankovic - the Dead South

their work helped through different hard times.

With latest update Spotify’s Home is one scroll away from instagram story like short videos with a timer bar on it, trying to rush me with a decision on what to listen.

OP is the answer to my new routine on consuming music, after which I’ll need more direct ways to support the musicians than using using some Silicon Valley cooked poison.

m-p-3
0 replies
4h21m

And not just that, bypassing restrictions put in place by Spotify, and where they make money from removing such restriction is a great way to get their attention and either receive a C&D or them adding further restrictions to break this bypass, making it a cat and mouse game.

ekianjo
0 replies
3h27m

Musician deserve to be paid for their work

Nobody prevents them from doing live performances, you know?

dvfjsdhgfv
0 replies
3h19m

There is negligent connection between my buying a Spotify subscription and the artists I listen to getting paid because of the scheme they devised to support big fish only. So I try to support musicians directly and treat Spotify as a discovery tool (rather lousy I'd say).

drcongo
0 replies
7h27m

Claiming that the same people who complain about ads are also those who won't pay for services is just wrong.

andrepd
0 replies
6h10m

If you want to support musicians buy their music on bandcamp or go to their gigs and buy their merch. Don't think you're going to Spotify and doing them a favour by giving them 0.0005$ per play.

Spotify is part of the problem, not the solution.

amiga386
0 replies
3h25m

Personally I recommend you check if your favoured artist is on Bandcamp and buy their music DRM free. The artist will get 85% or 90%, Bandcamp will take 15% or 10% (based on sales volume).

As a hypothetical, if you found them selling an album for $5 and you bought it to download on Bandcamp, they'd earn $4.50, which is about the same as streaming their songs about 400 times on Tidal, 1,000 times on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music or Deezer, or 4,000 times on YouTube, Pandora or SoundCloud

swozey
143 replies
3h48m

The lengths that literal engineers will go to to not have to pay $10/mo for music or $3 to rent a movie in 4k immediately.

Can't believe I have adult friends who make 70-300k and they still pirate based on money, not quality/directors-cuts/anti-cheats, etc. I quit pirating when I got a real job and could afford to pay developers and movie teams for their effort.

I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why shouldn't they?

And I pirated EVERYTHING as a kid/teenager. I had no money. Sketch Russian warez site? I'm in!

someotherperson
31 replies
3h34m

Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue. When Netflix's streaming platform rolled around people were largely happy to stop pirating, when Netflix's catalog fragmented across two dozen different services that forbid account sharing then piracy became a thing again for many people who stopped pirating.

I had a Paramount+ subscription (alongside Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV) and wanted to watch a certain TV show on my device. Oops, my device was out of date so I couldn't download the app. No problems, I'll update it. Oops, my account is set to an overseas address so I can't download the app. No problems, I'll change my account settings. Oops, the app won't log in because my DNS blocks ads. No problems, I'll add a bypass for this app. Oops, the app sucks and crashes when I navigate through the catalog too quickly. No problems, I'll make my search more specific. Oops, the buffering speed is horrendous and scrubbing through the video crashes the app.

Guess what I did? Uninstalled the app and searched for a pirated version of the TV show. A minute later it was streaming fine on my device.

screye
13 replies
3h16m

I mostly agree, but this tool is for spotify. Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets. That being said, most people (including me) happily pay for spotify, so your point still stands.

I refuse to pay for a streaming platform that's not Netflix or prime. The former benefits from being grand fathered in and the latter is a free bonus on something I would buy anyway.

It also sucks that cancelling a subscription is as hard as it is. If you want me to pay to watch 1 specific TV show, then give me a payment plan that allows me to pay for an expiring subscription. Simple.

jjulius
8 replies
2h59m

Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets.

Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find artists who are content with the payments they get from Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard.

I'm huge into music so I'm "OK" with Spotify for the sake of convenience and all that, but if people are really digging a piece of music then please buy it directly from the label, the artist, etc. via other means, if possible.

j-krieger
3 replies
2h40m

Convenient for users, but you'd be hard-pressed to find artists who are content with the payments they get from Spotify. And that's across the spectrum, from world-famous pop artists to indie artists struggling to get heard.

You're aware that you're in a thread for a tool which circumvents payments?

jjulius
2 replies
2h35m

Well aware, but thanks for that snark. Might as well still ask people to support artists they love in a thread related to pirating, right?

MPSimmons
1 replies
1h54m

I think it's mostly orthogonal. Pirating music only takes money away from artists in the case that you were going to buy their music, and don't now because you downloaded a file, which is probably the vast minority of downloads, I would guess.

On the other hand, there are a ton of ways to support artists if you have the means, whether it's attending shows, buying merch, or what have you, none of which can be properly "pirated" in this sense.

jjulius
0 replies
1h45m

Oh sure. It even gets more nuanced than that, which can make figuring out how to support them a bit of a challenge. Some artists will release music streaming-only and then tour and make their cash that way, others (looking at you, Bibio) never tour and rely on sales of their music.

jonplackett
1 replies
2h13m

The solution isn’t to then pay them nothing

jjulius
0 replies
2h3m

Did you miss the part where I implored people to buy music they love?

Perhaps the "if possible" part at the end confused you. That was referring to times when artists only release music on streaming platforms and you can't buy it anywhere.

anta40
0 replies
1h57m

Indeed. Spotify is convenient but the audio files are locked and cannot be easily copied to another devices.

Buying the CD/audio files don't pose that issue.

Moru
0 replies
2h24m

The reason artists are not happy with Spotify is because their record label takes 80% of the small profit they would get from streaming. I saw an interview with a swedish artist that was quite happy with the streaming money thanks to not having signed under any label. All the money goes directly to him.

fullstop
1 replies
2h5m

I pay for Prime, and we're soon to have ads unless you pay more to remove them. I wouldn't feel bad taking to the high seas while keeping the prime subscription.

I'm at the point with other services where I will subscribe for a month or two in a given year, watch full seasons of what I want, and then cancel. Things like Max / Discovery / Whatever they call themselves this year are making this more difficult by removing content. In some cases, it's difficult to find a legit place to watch it, with Raised by Wolves and Westworld being prime examples.

Maybe I'll just read more books instead.

tombert
0 replies
1h50m

Yeah, in regards to HBO Max, I signed up a couple years ago specifically to watch cartoons like Close Enough and Infinity Train. Not only were both those shows canceled but they were purged from HBO Max for streaming entirely.

I managed to buy legit copies of Infinity Train on Amazon, but now the only way that I am aware of to watch Close Enough is piracy.

The recent Amazon “pay us more or you get ads” thing feels a bit rent-seekey to me. I don’t watch Prime enough to justify paying an extra $3/month, and so I think what’s going to happen to me is that I just stop watching Prime entirely.

What really frustrates me is that companies are basically stopping releasing Blu-Rays, particularly for TV shows. I have over 400 legitimately purchased movies about about 40 complete series in Blu-Ray; I am more than happy to support creators by paying them a reasonable compensation, what I don’t want to do is pay those creators forever for the privilege of watching the same thing over and over.

k__
0 replies
1h39m

"Spotify is about as convieinient as a streaming music platform gets"

That doesn't mean that an alternative client isn't more convenient.

We don't need a bunch of corps gatekeep human culture from people just because they live in the wrong country...

dangus
0 replies
1h49m

then give me a payment plan that allows me to pay for an expiring subscription. Simple.

All the streaming services do that. You just subscribe then immediately cancel. You’ll get service for a month until your time runs out.

wombat-man
3 replies
2h13m

Yeah I just don't understand how paramount+ is so bad. I've unsubscribed but I got it to watch a tv show on a plane, and so downloaded it onto my phone. The app would NOT play the video on the plane. At first I thought for some reason it needed to connect to the internet. Then after landing it wouldn't play even with the internet.

Then there's the chromecast app. I want to watch an episode of survivor, a show with 45 seasons now. Apparently it just loads all the episode data for the entire show in one go, and hangs for a bit when opening the episode select page. This is one of their bigger shows I think.

It's just so lazy and bad.

swozey
2 replies
2h6m

I had the same thing happen on a flight last year so when I got home I tested every streaming app I could think of and a bunch of them removed their download feature from the last time I used it or they put it behind a connection requirement like you said.

I forget if there's a second one, I know Netflix says you can download on its ad but I don't have netflix to test. The one I know for sure that you can download and watch offline is Prime.

You MIGHT be able to download and watch offline with HBOgo. I know at one point I could. But that might also be one of the ones that took that feature away.

I also don't know about any of the disney/paramount/apple ones. I think I tested Prime, HBOgo, Crunchyroll (iirc this can do it but theyre always missing episodes its annoying), Youtube (requires connection) and hulu.

wombat-man
1 replies
1h56m

It's just gotten to the point where I optimize for laziness. When I'm at home I watch on the streaming apps for the most part, because it's easy.

When I'm traveling, I download tv shows I think I want to watch and stick it in VLC on my iPad. The exception being movies from the apple TV app. I have had no problems renting and downloading the video through that.

Maybe they fixed it, but ever since I downloaded a bunch in the HBO app only to find it would NOT play once I was in the air, I just gotta do what I gotta do to be able to actually watch in flight.

Oh man, and the other thing apps will do, is if you're not careful, they'll download some awful low res version of the show by default. ugh.

swozey
0 replies
1h11m

You know what got me last time. Ipad offloading my apps.

I hadn't touched my ipad in 4-6 months I only use it on flights and I opened it up and had almost no apps. I might have actually had no apps but the apple apps if thats a thing. I couldn't open ANYTHING. Then I got to the airport for my next flight and was franctically running around hoping to find a guest wifi network..

That's disabled now.

mort96
3 replies
2h12m

When I pirate, it's sometimes based on convenience or quality (where else can I download DRM-free blu-ray quality movies? Or a band's discography lossless?), but other times, it's certainly about money. For example, I don't use FL studio anywhere near enough to warrant paying for it (I have literally just opened it a couple of times to play with it), but paying for a license would have been less work than pirating it. Same with Windows; I pretty much never use it, the last time I booted into it must be around a year ago, so I'm not gonna pay $250 for it. I like to have it on my PC however for the occasional situation where I need it to play some game which doesn't work in Proton with friends, so I pirated it, even though buying a license key would've been more convenient than dealing with cracking tools.

mock-possum
2 replies
1h52m

$250 for Windows?? You’re off by an order of magnitude, just buy it from a reseller:

g2a.com/search?query=Windows

I’ve never had a problem with that site.

saintfire
0 replies
1h27m

It used to be the case that they were all keys that aren't technically allowed to be resold per their agreement. Either OEM or business copies and the like.

So really we're back to some form of piracy because Windows is too expensive.

eek2121
0 replies
1h47m

You don’t even need to buy a license. Alternate activation servers exist.

kamikaz1k
2 replies
3h31m

Might be “largely” true but ignore the existence of just cheap people who will not pay for anything unless they have to.

swozey
0 replies
3h27m

Yeah, I'm on a discord for tracking 4090 prices/stock. So it's a lot of gamers who can afford a $2k video card.

I'd say 70% of the people in that discord pirate everything.

gchamonlive
0 replies
3h19m

With the planet getting warmer and warmer, it must be nice to have a little cool breeze from that moral high ground.

paulcole
0 replies
3h9m

What was the TV show?

nlnn
0 replies
2h2m

It's also about having more control over the viewing/listening experience for me. I pay for a bunch of services (Deezer/Netflix/Prime Video), but I'll often end up watching pirated versions of content I can legally watch on those platforms.

Often that's down to tons of annoyances and lack of control over the viewing/listening platform. E.g. in VLC or similar I can tweak subtitle positions, sizes, fonts etc. for the best viewing experience. I can nudge the audio back/forwards a bit if it's out of sync with the video.

It also means I don't have to deal with whatever nonsense the platform is trying to push on me. I don't want to be bombarded with ads for podcasts, I don't want to have various videos autoplay at me just because I've hovered over them for too long, I don't want giant animated album artwork taking up 90% of my mobile screen and wasting battery, I just want to listen to music and watch films, not interact with a platform/app that changes on the whims of some revenue-driven organisation.

jvanderbot
0 replies
3h17m

This has not been my 99% experience. I'm sure one or two of those stories are handy to have to justify a lifetime of unnecessary theft, but the bottom line for me is that I don't mind playing by their system on principle.

This is how the artists asked us to do it, by selling their rights to distributors. Similarly with Spotify. I'd love to pay more to artists, I do go buy songs when I love them, and I'm happy to pay for a family Spotify account because Spotify has brought an amazing amount of positive to our house.

Bottom line I'm actually willing to endure a small amount of inconvenience in 1% so that my happy path still supports artists and yes industries that have brought so much good to me.

jsnell
0 replies
1h34m

This submission shows that it's not about convenience. Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music are all incredibly convenient. They range from free with ads to very affordable monthly subscriptions (the price of a single CD for unlimited music for a month). They have vast libraries with more music of all styles than anyone could listen to in a lifetime with, as far as I can tell, effectively no geo restrictions.

And despite that, look at where we are. A "pirate your music for free" app with 400 upvotes is at the top of HN, with some posters pretty much writing fanfic about how this will be great for the artists. "It's just a service problem" my ass. It's about people wanting something for free, and taking it.

dangus
0 replies
1h51m

Most of the problems you had were self-imposed to be fair.

KronisLV
0 replies
2h22m

Piracy is largely a convenience issue, not just a financial issue.

I'd say it can definitely be both. For example, when I was a broke teenager, I pirated all the video games, because the alternative was simply missing out on them and the option to acquire them through dubious means was there.

When I actually got disposable income I realized that Steam is so well made, that I buy all my games there nowadays. It's gotten to the point where I'd rather buy a game than pirate it, especially when the game does have some sort of an online component. The only exception is cases when I feel like I might need a refund (e.g. seeing how a VR game runs before buying it, because refunds still feel like a hassle).

I still sometimes resort to something like G2A (Steam key reseller site, not a very good reputation) or just buying games on other stores like GOG or Epic when they're much cheaper there, but aside from that it's easier to just not play some expensive AAA game on launch altogether, since I don't care that much about being first to experience it anymore.

As for music, I can actually just listen to whatever I want on YouTube which is good enough for me, but I don't see why the same principles couldn't apply to something like Spotify.

theappsecguy
17 replies
3h30m

70-300k is a crazy wide range to lump together. Quality of life and flexibility to pay for things is extremely different across it.

That said, the reason is simple, there’s no good product out there so people pirate. I haven’t pirated music in ages because Spotify solved that industry with a single reasonably priced offering.

On the other hand the dozens of streaming services have gotten out of hand by now. Same with renting movies, I’d rather enjoy in the cinema or torrent it, especially given how mediocre 95% of production has been in recent years.

swozey
12 replies
3h24m

Most of us who make 100k-300k made 70k at one point. I made 70k (5-8 years?) a lot longer than I've made 235k.

I was absolutely not broke at 70k. In fact I thought that was the most money I'd ever make and that I was killing it for 25 or whatever I was.. lmao

I made quite a bit more money than everyone my age I knew, most were still in college or in the 35-50k brackets.

redserk
8 replies
2h57m

Add in college debt payments, maybe a car payment, maybe you just graduated and need to furnish at least part of an apartment (even with roommates), maybe having to help pay down parents medical bills or whatever because you're the first to break out of very low income employment...

$70k isn't a magical feel-good-be-happy number for everyone, especially in HCOL+ areas.

I don't think this was your intent, but your comment comes across as really dismissive to a wide range of financial situations.

jjulius
7 replies
2h55m

... especially in HCOL+ areas.

Right? NYC and the Bay Area would like a word...

swozey
4 replies
2h22m

I don't know a single engineer in the last decade that I've worked with or known that wants to live in SFBay. Hell, Google literally opened an office on 2nd and congress in Austin because people wanted to live in Austin and not SFbay. I was there on its opening day!

$70k is completely fine in Houston, Dallas, Austin. I made around that in each one. Almost everyone I know here in Denver makes 70k-100k max and I'm in the most trendy neighborhood downtown and these are (actual, like structural) engineers, lawyers, etc. My hair stylist makes 50k and has a nice 1br. Personally my rent is $4k which is absolutely common for a 2bdr in sfbay but mine is very nice, probably much newer than would be in SF. I made 90k living in Chicago. 40-60k living in Tampa. I always had a new car new a twin turbo z4, mazda 3, crv, sometimes I had 2 cars (sports/daily), always had my own place, etc. Zero debt. Went out ALL the time.

Everything isn't NYC or SFBay. I didn't start my career making 40k and go "OK great, now I'm off to San Francisco/NYC!!" I moved more west as my income grew.

The privilege.. I promise you that there are service industry people making 30-45k in SF/NYC who are absolutely content or happy with their lives whether it's living in a 10x10 shoebox or an attic in a loft with a roomate. I'm not doing that, but I have a lot of industry friends from a past life that do. The average hourly for a nyc bartender is something like $16-18. I used to do it on the side.

We're privileged beyond belief.

jjulius
3 replies
2h4m

Everything isn't NYC or SFBay.

Never said it was, I just pointed to two areas where $70k doesn't go very far. Simple as that.

Edit: Your comment is very "I"-centric. Nobody cares about how many cars you have owned, because your life experience cannot be copy/pasted to everyone else. It's like you've missed the point.

swozey
2 replies
1h41m

Jesus. The point was that people are, and can be content on living in SF and NYC on under $100k. It's offensive that you think that every single person who makes 70k or whatever range is living in a box filled with rats or whatever you think it is.

Who do you think cooks, cleans, and serves drinks to people in SF/NYC? Sorry they aren't up to your standards living wise.

jjulius
1 replies
1h27m

I never said they're not content. I said that people making $70k in those areas might not be able to afford the same things you can, up to and including Spotify.

That's. All. I never said that that's how everyone lived, I just said that not everybody making 70k lives comfortably. That could be one person, it could be a handful.

I never blanket generalized, you did by saying everyone making $70k should live just fine. All I said was, "That's not always the case", and now you're trying to say that I think everyone living in those areas making $70k are scum.

You need to relax.

swozey
0 replies
30m

I definitely didn't mean to infer equitable life style, that'd be kind of goofy to think. I'm single and kid-free. I'm not saying the parent of 2 kids could or should drive a new car, or go out all the time, live downtown, etc. especially on that income. I'm sure a LOT of people live in Vallejo and work in SF for instance. Mortgages, Medical problems, alimony, blahblah. Millions of differences. I just meant that there ARE people happily living off of salaries in that range, less so in SF for sure. That's why I never moved, never felt like I could afford it, had the option to live in Los Gatos and around San Mateo (san jose for sure probably).

I was curious so looked it up, 75th % salary in SFbay is $76k. 25th % $113k. These are salaries from the ziprecruiter database- I put in Bartender - $34k, Teacher - $47k, Police - $60k (I know this is wildly off not including their overtime, they make like $150-250k in sf).

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/-in-San-Francisco,CA#Y...

This newer article says the amount of people in that bracket drpoped 10% 2019-2022. Wonder if that's people moving out, layoffs / biz shuttering, or maybe the covid checks ending lowering peoples income across the board. Those didn't affect the $100k+ market (limit was 80k i think?) which grew 10% regardless. That sucks if it's not them leaving I can only think of negative reasons aside from that or getting raises.

https://www.axios.com/local/san-francisco/2023/09/18/median-...

Sorry, I'm just on a tangent now. Didn't mean to come off rude in general, though.

acheron
1 replies
1h32m

Yeah, and add in when you have to buy the new BMW, and have to go on international vacations every year, and that salary looks even smaller!

Or you could buy a used Honda instead, go somewhere cheaper for vacation, and not live in the most expensive area in the country. All those are voluntary consumption.

redserk
0 replies
1h16m

This response is a strawman and unhelpful to the conversation here.

jjulius
2 replies
2h57m

I was absolutely not broke at 70k.

I'm genuinely glad that you weren't. Your experience is not everyone else's. I know people who have made around that salary who, for various reasons, were essentially broke.

Much of the rest of your comment just sounds... braggadocious.

carlosjobim
1 replies
1h42m

If you're broke at 70k you are simply bad with your finances. There are no excuses, unless you have a super rare medical condition. You can't blame anybody but yourself.

jjulius
0 replies
1h13m

An absolute that has been shown to be untrue for a litany of reasons time and again, but OK. For many people, yes, you're right, but I would wager you'd be surprised at the number of people trying to claw themselves out of varying circumstances while making that much.

And this isn't a judgement towards those in those situations, it's empathy from my end - I feel the need to clarify after another user's flippant comments elsewhere in this thread.

ralusek
3 replies
3h25m

especially given how mediocre 95% of production has been in recent years

Okay, then don’t watch it. If you’re watching it, though, you should pay for it. Your logic is the equivalent of going out to restaurants to eat, and then not paying because “restaurants aren’t good these days.”

someotherperson
2 replies
3h12m

It's probably closer to having to pay a monthly subscription fee to eat at the restaurant. And you actually have to get six different subscriptions at different restaurants because each one has a different rotating menu. And you're not allowed to share your food with your friends because they don't live with you -- they each need their own subscription. And no to-go boxes, you gotta eat it right there at the restaurant since you're only allowed to eat the food while you have an active subscription, you know, just in case you cancel the subscription to that restaurant or try to share the food with your friends who don't have an active subscription.

gtirloni
0 replies
1h52m

The analogy doesn't hold because piracy in that scenario would be going to one of those subscription-based restaurants and getting their food but not paying. We go back full circle to the comment you were replying to.

You could argue piracy is going to the chef's place and eating their food before it gets to the restaurant for distribution, now the chef is angry too.

Not a good analogy.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
2h12m

Also, you can't figure out what to eat because instead of being indexed by nutrition information or by whether it contains potential allergens it's always indexed at the top level by subscription so you have to do a little inner join there on your napkin before you can tell your kid what their options are.

__MatrixMan__
10 replies
2h24m

It's not about saving a few bucks, it's about taking responsibility for the consequences of your spending. If $1 out of $10 goes to supporting the artist and the other $9 goes towards stripping users of the ability to control their own devices, or towards other zero/negative sum games being played by the platform in the spirit of moat building, then paying for content through normal channels is doing more harm than good.

If there was a way to configure my players to fingerprint the content and send money to the artist as I play it (or probably at the end of the month, so the total spend for that month is configurable) I'd use it. Payment should be irrespective of where you got the bits. I'm trying to build such a thing.

But until a better way exists, I'm not going to feel bad about my occasional piracy in the meantime.

oldtownroad
3 replies
1h45m

People say this but don’t understand the reason artists don’t make much per-listener on Spotify etc. is because of their record deals, it’s nothing to do with Spotify. If you’re an independent artist you can live comfortably off of a small Spotify audience!

The stories you hear about an artist getting pennies on millions of listens are because of their record deals and the credits on their work. You can’t solve this with software: artists enter these deals long before software is involved.

I’d argue that Spotify (and YouTube and TikTok etc) have done more for musicians because they’ve made it very easy to make a living when you have a core listener base. Software has not rescued major label artists from major label contracts because… how can it?

1shooner
1 replies
1h40m

If you’re an independent artist you can live comfortably off of a small Spotify audience!

Didn't Spotify recently stop paying any royalties for tracks with less than 1k streams?

oldtownroad
0 replies
1h32m

I mean small relative to big artists, not small in absolute numbers. If you have less than 1k streams you probably have less than 50 listeners which is basically nothing.

A (relatively) small audience would be made up of tens of thousands of listeners generating millions of streams. There are many, many independent artists that fall into this group.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
1h16m

The artist signed a contract with a label. I was not party to that contract, I'm not bound by it. I can send them money if I wish.

If only they'd give me an address (of a smart contact which would distribute the funds appropriately. I want to pay the parties whose names I don't know also, provided they're involved in actually creating the art.)

gtirloni
3 replies
1h55m

> If there was a way to configure my players to fingerprint the content and send money to the artist as I play it

There isn't.

I fail to see how piracy helps artists today.

__MatrixMan__
2 replies
1h30m

It drives movie and concert ticket sales. It could do more and we should fix that.

Do you also fail to see how investment in technology that prevents certain groups from getting certain information harms everyone tomorrow? It's not like they'd have retool completely if they pivoted from censoring Finding Nemo because you're the wrong kind of customer to censoring political dissent because you're the wrong kind of citizen. The tech from the former can be reused in the latter and there's more money in the latter.

That pivot hasn't happened yet because the DRM hooks aren't in deeply enough. People would work around it. Piracy helps because it creates a space for us to fight back against that sort of thing. It keeps the set of people who can circumvent censorship large and it keeps them in practice.

At the end of the day, protecting an artist paycheck is just not as important as protecting user freedom. We can have both, but paying the streaming platforms and hoping they spend that money wisely is not the way to get there.

gtirloni
1 replies
1h21m

> protecting an artist paycheck is just not as important as protecting user freedom

Not in my book but thanks for the perspective.

I feel my freedom to enjoy some music someone made on their own time has zero priority over said artist paying their bills.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
21m

If it were just about entertainment I'd agree with you. What I'm trying to protect is dissent.

I don't want to live in a world where there are no channels not controlled by a third party, and that's the world the content industry is building. Entertainment is just a stepping stone for them.

dangus
1 replies
1h40m

Under your same logic nobody should buy anything from your employer because they don’t pay you 100% of their profits. Probably only 2 or 3 dollars of every 10 they make goes to salary.

But we all know running a business has costs that aren’t salary.

Artists who sign to major labels get promotion and other assistance that costs money. That’s the trade off.

And they’re making less money than before because people pirated with Napster. Just look at music industry revenue charts. It only just recently exceeded pre-Napster levels and that is before adjusting for inflation. The average person is spending less money on music than they did in the 90s.

A new release CD was like $17 in 1995. So that’s $34 today. That would buy you one album. Today that buys you 3 months of listening to unlimited music.

So the price of Spotify is like when someone only buys 4 CDs every year.

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/05/arts/pennies-that-add-up-...

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
1h13m

Luckily for me, I don't feel like my employer has tasked me with working against our users interests. I want them to succeed at the things they're trying to do and I'm working in support of that goal.

But if things were otherwise? Then yes, the users should either walk away or they should circumvent whatever handcuffs I'm hypothetically building for them.

In that scenario, I'd absolutely participate in cutting my employer out of the loop so that I could do less evil work and instead get paid directly by the people who benefit from what I'm working on, and I hope you would too.

seanthemon
8 replies
3h10m

My problem is region locking, if I can't access the content in any way without potentially purchasing a very expensive TV package, I'm left with only one choice. A lot of music on spotify can't be accessed in my region and same with movies/series.

CoastalCoder
7 replies
2h39m

My problem is region locking, if I can't access the content in any way without potentially purchasing a very expensive TV package, I'm left with only one choice.

Do you mean that literally? Because I'd think buying physical copies, or forgoing access, would also be options.

beej71
4 replies
2h33m

Some programs aren't available on DVD in my region. But I suppose DVD players are cheap, so people can just buy one per region.

... Or does piracy sound like a better experience?

CoastalCoder
3 replies
2h29m

It probably comes down one's personal ethics, views about civic virtue, etc.

I want my neighbor's pile of firewood. They probably wouldn't miss one or two logs, but I have other reasons for not taking any.

I'm not trying to persuade anyone that my view is correct, I'm just saying that I think this is one aspect of how different people approach the question of how to obtain digital entertainment.

beej71
1 replies
1h3m

The "piracy==stealing" argument doesn't work here. I don't doubt you'd make a copy of your neighbor's pile of firewood if you coveted it.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
44m

Yeah, it was a flawed example for sure. All of the other examples I could think of at the time seemed like they'd be inflammatory in various ways.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
1h55m

What does your personal ethics say about paying somebody to build a system that prohibits certain kinds of people from receiving certain kinds of information? Even if a trickle of that money makes it to the artist, doesn't that seems like a technology that's ripe for abuse?

seanthemon
0 replies
45m

Have you ever had your content region locked? Wanting to watch something but can't because of where you live? What if you're half way through a series and a company rips away access to your country? Do you just shrug and 'forgo' your access?

GaryNumanVevo
0 replies
2h32m

Physical copies (Blu-rays especially) are heavily region locked. A Japanese region coded Blu-ray won't play on an EU coded player, unless you're able to flash the firmware to unlock it. And a lot of Japanese movies, especially classic films, never get a Europe release.

junon
8 replies
3h6m

Living in Germany, but I'm an american. Signed up for Crunchy Roll. Most the shows my friends are recommending are region locked. The remaining ones are mostly German-dubbed only, with no subtitles. Most don't have original Japanese either.

Only a handful I want to watch actually have subs or English dubs.

It's not like I don't want to pay for this stuff but when it's a huge conditional tree of if I'm going to have a good experience, with no other (non-pirate alternative), what do you do?

Meanwhile, Spotify doesn't have this issue. Happily pay for that, despite not being a fan of how the company operates.

jzb
3 replies
2h59m

Wouldn't a VPN solve this for you?

pokey00
0 replies
2h53m

Until they start blocking VPNs like other streaming services? Piracy is a solution that doesn't end up a cat and mouse game. Sounds like op is paying for the content but it's region locked, so the dumbest form of pushing your customers to piracy.

paulsen
0 replies
2h46m

The problem is that I have to pay for another thing just to watch the thing I was already paying for.

Piracy almost always is caused by a lack of convenience, namely:

"I get the service, have a (sometimes very) limited selection of stuff, and have to pay for it, and if I want that other thing I have to pay for another entirely different service"

or

"I get anything I want with a little hassle, but for free"

KptMarchewa
0 replies
1h33m

What's the difference with pirating then? I do pirate when media owners go to great length to make consuming it legally very hard.

CoastalCoder
1 replies
2h42m

Interesting that you mention Crunchyroll.

I subscribe to both CR and Spotify im the U.S., and one thing they have in common is terrible user interfaces (IMHO).

I would be so excited if CR provided an API to let subscribers write their own clients.

swozey
0 replies
1h54m

Yeah CRs UX is bad. Check out this chrome extension its a huge QOL jump https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mal-sync/kekjfbackd...

My other huge complaint about CR is it will just be missing a season of a show. I tried to watch one and it had only seasons 2-3-4 etc.

ruune
0 replies
1h57m

It's really not that bad. CrunchyRoll has _almost_ everything, especially since Sony bought Funimation and AOD shut down. Some of the real Blockbusters miss sometimes (Oshi no ko, Cyberpunk, Pluto, etc.) because those are the ones that are worth it for Netflix, Amazon and Disney+. CR is great for someone watching a lot of anime. If you want to watch the one or two big shows each season you might not find them there though. I rarely find anything I can't watch in Japanese with english subtitles.

(Old stuff is often missing too. if you're after that those I understand what you mean.)

bowsamic
0 replies
2h59m

The anime situation in Germany is years behind. Germans are famously moralising against piracy but this seems to be a case where they do it anyway because it’s just impossible to find anime otherwise

maroonblazer
4 replies
3h21m

Kind of related to this mentality, perhaps: On Sam Harris's most recent episode of "Making Sense" with TED's Chris Anderson[0] he shared a Reddit conversation he came across where people were discussing whether or not they subscribe, i.e., pay, for his podcast:

> I spectated upon this [Reddit] thread, something around "Do you support Sam's podcast and and you if do, why or why not?" and someone said "Well I would support the podcast if I knew what he was going to do with the money" and another person said "Well I would support the podcast if I knew how much it cost to run a podcast" and another person said "I would support the podcast if I knew how much I thought a person should earn from a podcast" and I looked at those three statements and my head practically fell off my shoulders, because I realized at a glance there was something deeply wrong here because these are the kinds of considerations that would never have occurred to a person when they were thinking about buying my next book. I mean there's literally no person on Earth who's ever thought the thought "Well I would buy his next book if I knew how much I thought an author should make from writing books" or "I would buy his next book if I knew what he was going to do with the money." These are just not the kinds of thoughts people think. Either you want to read the book or you don't and you buy it or not. [1]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCl-5vC7aW8

[1]https://youtu.be/cCl-5vC7aW8?si=CqRcQ-kLUF7JMyXg&t=3604

swozey
1 replies
3h14m

What even is that? Just straight up entitlement? Ignorance to the situation? Just not caring?

He has a great point, I can't think of any times I've ever asked those questions unless I thought the book author was grifting, where I'd go "Oh they're dog whistling to their flock for sales."

I never thought "I hope mac miller doesn't use this $20 for drugs" buying mac miller albums..

jeegsy
0 replies
1h48m

That's the question isn't it? If its entitlement as you say, why feel it with a podcast and not books?

msluyter
0 replies
2h9m

Not sure if this is a complete explanation, but people tend to ascribe more value to physical objects and perhaps, because the general price of books is bounded within a known range that is fairly stable, don’t question the price as hard as they might. That is, if a book is roughly the same price of other books in the category you’ll tend to view the price as “fair.”

The value of a podcast seems more nebulous to me, and perhaps this raises more questions. Unless you already subscribe to a lot of podcasts you may not have the equivalent comparison point, so more questions arise.

On top of that, subscriptions create another barrier to entry and raise even more questions.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
2h33m

I might understand the moral reasoning here. Here's my guess:

The podcasters were weighing the cost to themselves vs. the benefit to the podcaster.

If the podcaster was poor and the listener was rich, the cost/benefit tradeoff favors paying. The listener feels happy to be supportive.

If the situation were reversed, the math swings the other way. A principled listener might pay, but wouldn't necessarily feel happy about it.

ekianjo
4 replies
3h29m

I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why shouldn't they?

How about the Spotify client being crap? Can't believe this is the top comment on HN.

swozey
3 replies
3h22m

What does Spotify being crap have to do with a software engineer or musician being paid for their work?

You think they shouldn't be paid because you don't like the company they work for?

latentcall
2 replies
3h9m

Quite a lot actually. If the software engineers write an app that’s a bloated buggy mess that inconveniences people, some people will look for other ways to listen to the music they want to hear.

For musicians, they have other avenues (arguably better anyhow) such as Bandcamp. I’ve bought tons of vinyl albums, tapes, and even just digital releases from there.

swozey
0 replies
3h5m

Your first point is incredibly subjective. I love the spotify app aside from the fact they keep gutting its features. I've used almost every other music app in testing to potentially leave spotify. I've been a spotify member for 16 years and can't think of a single time I thought it was bloated.

The spotify carplay/android apps absolutely DESTROY the other car apps.

I hated every single other app. Quboz, Tidal, Apple, YT, Amazon.. Most of them were so featureless I felt like I was using Winamp. But some people do love that.

gtirloni
0 replies
1h43m

> some people will look for other ways to listen to the music they want to hear.

Those ways probably should involve some sort of compensation to the artists. Is that happening?

cynicalsecurity
3 replies
2h54m

It's not about money, it's about freedom and independence. I don't want to lose access to my music and videos because some company decided to apply current idiotic understanding of morals or because of some temporary SJW craze. I don't want them to profile and spy on my tastes and preferences and then sell all of this information about me to any idiot out there with money. I don't want to rely on unstable internet connection or the silly "cache" the app offers. I don't want to use their bloated inconvenient app that needs constant internet connection when I can use a lightweight mp3 player app on my phone that I like and am used to.

So no, it's not about the money. I don't want to use their service and support their business model. I don't think their business model is making the world a better place. I wouldn't subscribe even if the price was 10 cents. I buy CDs and support directly the artists and groups I love.

On the end note. Think about, I'm paying 10 bucks a month, but the artists I love will get peanuts from it. The overall chunk will go to some over hyped nonsense like Taylor Swift, simply because she is getting more plays on their platform. Nope.

mock-possum
2 replies
1h30m

some temporary SJW craze

Sorry what?

ta988
1 replies
22m

Look at the history of posts of that person. They seem to be excited by triggering people.

cynicalsecurity
0 replies
10m

I'm sorry, what is exactly triggering in my comment?

voidwtf
2 replies
2h40m

Last night the family and I tried to watch Thor on Disney+. Everything appeared to be fine at first, but something was obviously off. The audio mix was screwed up really bad to where I could barely hear them speaking, and all the sound effects were basically non-existent, but the ambient music was extremely loud. I flipped over to Amazon Prime and rented it so we could continue our movie.

I pay for Disney+, Disney got their money and if I’d decided to pirate it instead of the convenience of Prime video I wouldn’t have felt an ounce of guilt. I keep trying to do the right thing, and they keep moving the goal posts. Whether it be adding DRM that increasingly causes the media to be available on less devices, or adding yet another service I have to invest in. DRM doesn’t work and only diminishes the user experience.

If you want my money meet me where I’m at. Stop forcing garbage down the pipeline.

linsomniac
0 replies
2h27m

I've heard that some of those problems are related to the audio settings; the video being configured for one of the surround sound formats that your audio system doesn't support. Not saying the audio wasn't jacked up, but just wanted to put it on your radar to go into the video settings (like where you set up captions I think) and try a different audio format.

gtirloni
0 replies
1h50m

> decided to pirate it instead of the convenience of Prime video I wouldn’t have felt an ounce of guilt.

You shouldn't feel an ounce of guilty. Really. They've failed you and still got their money. You had to spent extra time to pirate so you'd get the level of service you already paid in the first place.

pyeri
2 replies
3h34m

> I write software. I want to get paid too, right? Why shouldn't they?

The way ruthless capitalism works in today's age, the software writer barely gets peanuts, bulk is taken away by the management, CEO and shareholders.

gruez
0 replies
3h27m

Maybe if you subscribe to labor theory of value. Most people wouldn't consider someone making 6 figures as earning "peanuts" because the company they work for is making even more money from their labor.

4gotunameagain
0 replies
3h33m

I agree with the sentiment, but let's not pretend that software writers are victims of capitalism. Based on the reward/effort ratio, software devs are one of the most privileged groups that have ever existed.

You can make more money writing javascript that you learned on udemy and youtube than a firefighter or a doctor. It is absurd.

arthur_sav
2 replies
2h21m

Good luck finding your favorite movie on Netflix. And Spotify keeps taking songs off their catalogue which ruins my favorite playlists and saved songs.

To be fair, streaming services are usually not at fault here. They have to negotiate with the content owners. But at the end of the day, I don't care.

Piracy still has place and it's not a money issue.

thenoblesunfish
0 replies
2h4m

Exactly. This content is actually important to people, despite the common idea that culture, even purely entertainment culture, not to mention more artistic things, is a commodity.

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
2h2m

To be fair, streaming services are usually not at fault here. They have to negotiate with the content owners

If their behavior has resulted in an ecosystem where the art doesn't reliably make it to the artists' audiences then perhaps they are a little bit at fault. That's their job and they're doing it poorly and they're big enough to influence the factors that constrain them if they cared about doing better.

andrepd
2 replies
3h25m
nouryqt
0 replies
2h2m

In case anyone else wanted to check the Pokemon page. It's real https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...

metadat
0 replies
2h49m

Great guide, this about sums it up.

add-sub-mul-div
2 replies
3h17m

I used to pay for Spotify but canceled because the player experience was so bad, not because of the cost.

mattgreenrocks
1 replies
3h0m

I usually keep my opinions on software to myself, but I struggle to understand how the audio playback code path is not rock solid at this point.

It's a state machine. That's it.

add-sub-mul-div
0 replies
35m

It's not audio quality or the specific playback experience I had a problem with. It's all the features around it. I'm used to players like Winamp, foobar2000. Real native applications that are responsive and customizable and feature rich.

thenoblesunfish
1 replies
2h7m

Mostly agree, but I think that people have a reasonable desire to "own" the pieces of culture that are important to them. Especially with movies and TV, your access to the content, even if you "bought" it, is temporary. Where there is a fair way to purchase your own copy (e.g. Bandcamp for music, at the moment), that's great.

swozey
0 replies
1h59m

Oh I'm 100% for archiving and keeping the music around forever, even if the artist wants it gone honestly.

mock-possum
1 replies
1h58m

How long have you been using Spotify?

It seems to me that at every opportunity, the team responsible for Spotify has made it worse. The UI is made significantly worse every major update. The only good thing I can think of that they’ve added over the past decade or so has been dark mode and I am not exaggerating. Have you seen the state of playlists and sorting/filtering options? You know, one of the most important things about music software?

Literally the only reason I’m using (and paying for) Spotify now is that there isn’t a legitimate competitor to switch to. Spotify is not worthy of respect of loyalty and it’s certainly not deserving of not being pirated from.

swozey
0 replies
1h34m

I've used it since 2008 or 2009.

You're not wrong. Their constant changes and removing features the last few years is frustrating. They just did that big recent UI update, I've barely used spotify since they did it so I can't tell if I like it or hate it yet but they constantly change it. It looks like it's missing things now but I'm not too sure.

jokethrowaway
1 replies
2h24m

Why pay when I can access content for free?

YouTube pays some cents to music labels, I can listen to music for free on YouTube and I can block ads.

The only purchases I make are to reward creators, often only after I've enjoyed the goods.

Copyright is highly immoral as I never got into any contract with anyone and yet I'm supposedly a criminal because I download pirated content. Whoever is sharing copyrighted content is breaching a contract and should be prosecutable.

I sell software and it's nice to have passive income. I found a few communities who heavily pirated my code and I couldn't do jackshit because I don't make lawyer money and dmca does nothing but waste time.

I think piracy is a natural tax imposed on the market: if you can't point to your customer who shared your property and sue him you are probably making some nice passive money. There's always going to be someone smarter than the average who will bypass your security.

I don't mind pirates. The problem we have is with major publishers being rich enough they can bribe the government to do crap like dmca and infringe on our rights.

swozey
0 replies
1h32m

Because if everyone did what you did, the artists wouldn't make any money. And a lot of people already to pirate. I couldn't tell you what percentage of people pirate vs stream but at what point does the scale tip to the other side where piracy is actually causing a hugely negative affect to the artists income?

You, and we, don't know if you're the 10,000th or the 100,000,000th pirate of whatever you pirate.

alerighi
1 replies
2h5m

It's not the 10$ a month for Spotify: 10$ to Spotify, 10 to Netflix, another 10 to Disney+, to Now TV/SKY (in my country), to DAZN, to Prime Video, etc. If you sum all the services you have to pay you spend easily more than 100$ a month in streaming services, that is 1200$ a year that is for most person in my country a month of work! And the others would rather spend if for other things, such as a vacation.

Finally pirating is most of the time more convenient, for example using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry Pi etc is not possibile, also they require internet and you can't just for example save the files on an USB stick or CD to play on the car stereo.

sudobash1
0 replies
1h56m

using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry Pi etc is not possibile

I can't speak to Raspberry Pi (and other non-x86 boards), but on my PC I can listen to Spotify just fine. I don't even have to use Chrome. It works as well on Firefox.

4gotunameagain
1 replies
3h38m

I think a lot of it also has to do with the ethics of music distribution and the fact that spotify pays the actual artists almost nothing.

p.s. probably not engineers in the literal sense ;)

code_runner
0 replies
3h16m

This is a label and industry problem not specific to any one streamer.

zulban
0 replies
2h40m

I recently pirated James Bond because the streaming service we pay for screwed up the subtitles.

So to be fair to your friends, they may also feel like they like pirating also because it is still more functional and customized. And streaming needs flawless internet while watching.

znpy
0 replies
2h21m

To be honest if i was making $300k/year i’d be pirating even more… i could spend a lot more on hard drives!

traverseda
0 replies
1h59m

I still pirate TV and movies, and that is to the best of my knowledge legal in my district. I sometimes pirate console video games, but pretty much never do if they're available on steam.

Piracy is a service problem, not a financial problem. I also do use patreon for some creators I enjoy.

sumuyuda
0 replies
3h26m

There are other factors here besides price to choose this client. Privacy and no usage/analytics spyware are some big ones, as well as native apps on desktop.

ponector
0 replies
2h25m

Spotify app is rubbish, and you cannot listen on different devices with the same account.

Also Spotify have censorship issue, they are removing some songs. Other are not available due to copyright issues.

If you don't want to listen playlists with new random music it is more convenient to have a local mp3 library.

paulcole
0 replies
3h9m

They refuse to say it’s about money. It’s some kind of mish-mash rationalization of sticking it to the man, convoluted technical explanations (they’re my HTTP requests you can just return a 403 error), and moral outrage.

molave
0 replies
3h21m

It's like the Matrix. In my opinion, there's 1%-2% of the entire population that pirate out of principle or "cost savings"

mattgreenrocks
0 replies
3h3m

I'm tempted to try if only because they might be more focused on music playback (the core value proposition of Spotify) than Spotify is at this point.

Limitations of team size can be a blessing.

justaj
0 replies
3h3m

Am I able to pay Spotify in cryptocurrency or a SEPA transaction? If not, then that's a big convenience issue for me and thus not worth it.

john-radio
0 replies
1h48m

Part of your point seems to be that the OP, being a software engineer, should not have to pirate Spotify since presumably they have access to money. But that's not really the case for all devs, and moreover, nobody who isn't a dev is able to make a tool like this in the first place.

ilrwbwrkhv
0 replies
32m

Piracy is a moral imperative. The internet was supposed to be free and break down barriers. Instead what we have now is a show available in the UK but not available in the US. This is not acceptable.

This plus the fact that actual artists get a pittance, means the flag will fly high till companies learn.

Also piracy has become much more reliable these days. There are systems which will make sure you get 4k streams based on any genre you enjoy. New shows from around the world. No need to wait for Netflix to add it to your countries playlist that to hidden behind garbage UX.

At the end of the day it is about availability, user control, artist benefits and showing the middle finger to large corporations.

That is the hacker mindset. That is what I grew up with in the early 2000s and it is substantially better than what we are "supposed" to do now. Hope that makes sense.

hattar
0 replies
3h27m

I pay and would still like an alternative client. The official one has several annoying deficiencies that are unlikely to ever be addressed.

From a monetary standpoint, most companies would throw me into a wood chipper were it profitable. Hard to feel any sense of “fair behavior” is warranted when that’s the case.

guluarte
0 replies
2h30m

have you seen some apps? yt music is shit and already have yt-preimum, why would I pay for another music service?

digitalsin
0 replies
1h43m

It is not about the money for me, and also I'm happy to support the artists and regularly do by buying their vinyl when I can.

It is about the fact at any time Spotify, Apple, etc can remove music from my playlist for any reason and at any time. It's about the fact they require me to use their invasive, spyware, data mining BS apps in order to listen to my music. It is about the fact that when I want to listen to music in my car, I have to listen to it using the way they say I can.

I can't believe I have adult friends who really don't care about their personal privacy or freedoms and are ready to give it up at a moments notice for convenience.

demondemidi
0 replies
2h24m

And then complain that there isn't enough content they are two absolutely insatiable generations when it comes to content. Free free free more more more ... of course, that also describes the billionaire class and material goods. Ironic they both meet at greed.

The Spotify macOS app constantly truncates classical titles, which I find infuriating. I subscribed to Apple Classical, which was phenomenal in its organization and catalogue, but I couldn't download and I fly a lot which is a dealbreaker.

beej71
0 replies
1h45m

For me, it's not that I don't want artists to have money. (I just found an artist I liked who uploads all their live music--quality recordings!--to Internet Archive under a CC license. I went to their website and bought all their albums on the spot. They should arrive in a couple days, and then I'll rip them to FLAC and put them on my jellyfin server.)

But questionably-ethical companies I try not to give money to, e.g. companies that only pay artists pennies, or might suddenly disappear music that I "bought". And that's on top of the fact that Spotify in particular actually kinda sucks at suggesting good music. I quit them in the middle of my free trial because I got tired of hitting "next". My friends are much, much better suggestion engines.

beeboobaa
0 replies
1h46m

Feel free to pay for my Spotify subscription if you feel so strongly.

asylteltine
0 replies
2h23m

Pirating at least on legitimate private trackers is about quality and availability. For example, you CANNOT stream certain episodes of South Park, always sunny, etc because of wrongthink. Some things are also unattainable like gravity Lux edition. But yes I agree otherwise, just buy stuff. I stopped pirating games when I got a real job.

andrepd
0 replies
3h29m

Give me a link to download your game without spyware and I pay for that.

I buy games on gog. I buy games without drm on steam. I absolutely refuse to install ring 0 Internet-connected malware on my computer to play a fucking game.

MPSimmons
0 replies
1h56m

Agreed. I have bought many many things on Apple iTunes store, and I have an archive of MP3s that I've collected that I don't want to lose, and I also pay for Spotify because it's the most convenient service for listening to music and it'll probably the be last one I cancel before I move into a cardboard box.

GaryNumanVevo
0 replies
2h34m

This is an extremely half-baked take on piracy.

The music piracy community are some of the best archivists of music history we have. What.cd had a wonderfully curated and deep archive of music. I discovered so many small punk groups that would drop an LP then vanish.

Fortunately it's still relatively easy to support active bands directly via Bandcamp / physical media / tours. I cherish my personal collection, and it's all self-hosted on my NAS at home.

As for movies, half the time features don't even get a Blu-ray release. Back in the day I had a region unlocked player that would allow me to watch my favorite Japanese directors (which never got a US region release)

Streaming wise it's terrible, especially if you live outside of the US. A lot of films are not even available to "buy" via Amazon, etc. And even then services that do stream outside of the US have "4K" streams with low bitrates. It's not even funny how much better true 4k HDR remux's look when played back locally versus streaming it from HBO or something, even though it's the same source.

Brian_K_White
0 replies
2h20m

The entire list of features are all things the official clients don't offer.

I DO pay for spotify and still want all those features.

You attempt to critique other people's behavior, while completely failing at "be a good person" yourself. It is always that way. The person pointing the finger is the one most in need of a mirror.

Bayart
0 replies
1h57m

I stopped pirating for a decade and started again when platforms became so fragmented and inconvenient that torrenting is the more convenient option again. On the other hand I buy a lot of records, both old and new, so I'm objectively spending more on music than I've ever been. MUBI is the only content subscription I still happily keep.

Arch-TK
0 replies
2h51m

I happily pay for anything I can get DRM free.

Not interested in paying to rent access to something which requires giving shady companies like Netflix control over my graphics pipeline (which also prevents me from watching the thing I am renting on any device I want because, for example, my mediacentre PC is not blessed by the right big-corps to work with the intrusive DRM software).

If movie publishers had an easy and convenient way to donate, I would probably donate an appropriate amount every time I pirate some of their media to allow me to watch it on my TV.

You can argue "just buy the bluray and pirate it then" but I feel this just encourages these companies to continue relying on these intrusive DRM technologies.

I know my boycott is insignificant but it's a matter of principles more than anything else.

0xEF
0 replies
1h40m

I can afford streaming services but I pirate anyway. Why? Ads. I'm not paying to watch ads. Simple as.

bayindirh
28 replies
8h0m

Nifty.

Please be aware that this is not a "spotify client" per se. It gets the data from Spotify, and plays the audio from YouTube.

It's an interesting invention, and worthy of the first page, if you ask me.

anotheryou
16 replies
7h28m

oh ok...

I'd have tried it, but I pay for good audio quality so I won't :)

thaumasiotes
14 replies
6h56m

Is there a difference in audio quality between Spotify and YouTube?

anotheryou
13 replies
6h38m

yes, I think so. And youtube is mixed quality, especially for older uploads.

Newer youtubes are "opus (251)", which I think is 128kbps 48KHz Opus (WebM standard).

- Spotify at least used to be ogg vorbis and claims to be "320kbit/s [mp3] equivalent"

I think the 128kps Opus is still considered quite lossy¹ and 320kpbit/s mp3s I know I can hear the difference to wav on some tracks in a blind test, but generally don't find them better or worse.

¹ from some google test:

https://i.imgur.com/odPogeR.png

via https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/

bayindirh
7 replies
6h10m

Lossless still beats MP3@320CBR audibly, but you need a pipeline which can render that difference.

I’ll not rewrite details here, one can search my comment history if more details are required.

Tarq0n
5 replies
2h45m

Some of the best recordings I've heard (NPR) are only on YouTube. This leads me to believe recording quality is orders of magnitude more important than encoding, as long as a decent bitrate and encoding scheme were used.

bayindirh
4 replies
1h57m

The quality ceiling for any recording you have is the quality ceiling of the weakest link in your audio pipeline.

This means, to be able to get a good sound from any system, you have to feed it a good signal, and that path starts with recording.

Current audio codecs are great from a psychoacoustic point of view. A good encoder can create an enjoyable file at modest bitrates (192kbps for MP3, and 128kbps for AAC IIRC), and retain most of the details.

The audible residue when you subtract a MP3 from a FLAC is not details per se, but instrument separation and perceived size of the sound stage. People generally call this snake oil, but I have the same amplifier for the last 30 years, and I can say how different qualities of audio render through the same pipeline. A good recording stored losslessly can bring the concert to your home, up to a point. MP3 re-encodings of the same record will sound flatter and smaller.

Lastly, it's not possible to completely contain the sound of a symphony orchestra in a stereo recording. That's not happening. So there's always a limit.

If you have the time, there's a nice ABX test: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

_joel
1 replies
1h1m

Lastly, it's not possible to completely contain the sound of a symphony orchestra in a stereo recording

Thank god we have more than 2 ears.

empiricus
0 replies
46m

Thank god they recorded the concert using binaural mics on an identical copy of your head :)

kjqgqkejbfefn
0 replies
53m

What's your take on audio systems that deliver vibrations. I have a nuraphone and a subpac. Great for listening to trap music or iranian experimental.

hunter2_
0 replies
36m

A reduction in soundstage/width is likely due to using "joint stereo" or "intensity stereo" encoder modes, which do things such as mid-side (M-S) conversion (which isn't itself the culprit) in order to give more bits to M (which results in better quality for sounds with high L-R correlation, like vocals) and fewer bits to S (which results in less quality for sounds with low L-R correlation, like a drum kit stereo miked).

If using plain old "stereo" mode instead, this problem doesn't occur, but you need a higher overall bitrate for correlated sounds to come through at the same quality, so it's rarely used at modest bitrates and instead tends to be reserved for only the highest bitrates.

Thus, comparing mp3@192 with mp3@320 often actually means comparing mp3@192joint with mp3@320stereo and therefore the listener will find very little if any improvement in the quality of mono-miked center-panned sounds (vocals, etc.) but a decent improvement in the quality of wide sounds (cymbals, reverb, string sections, etc.) since the 320 will have only a few more bits for "mid" but way more bits for "side" so to speak, relative to the 192.

anotheryou
0 replies
5h39m

Yes, at least for my setup it makes a difference, but for me not in quality.

mtlmtlmtlmtl
2 replies
3h8m

Even disregarding which codec Youtube uses, there's also the question of what codec was uploaded(unless it's an official upload), which in many cases was probably a lossy codec in the first place. So often you're listening to some lossy codec, reencoded to another lossy codec.

thaumasiotes
1 replies
2h35m

Even disregarding which codec Youtube uses, there's also the question of what codec was uploaded(unless it's an official upload)

Hm? What codec was uploaded if it's an official upload?

mtlmtlmtlmtl
0 replies
1h1m

Presumably a lossless one.

As opposed to some mp3 ripped off a scratched CD in some guy's drawer.

Thorrez
1 replies
5h41m

I don't think that imgur link is a good example. The only opus 128 there is heavily optimized for low latency (5ms frame size). If you remove that optimization, and instead optimize for quality, opus does better than mp3 at the same bitrate.

https://www.opus-codec.org/static/comparison/quality.svg

anotheryou
0 replies
5h38m

too bad that diagram stops at 128, as I want to compare to 320 mp3

no question opus is the more efficient codec

redcobra762
0 replies
1h19m

He says as he plays his music over Bluetooth… :)

nunez
5 replies
6h10m

Okay, THAT is Hacker News worthy.

denysvitali
3 replies
5h15m

To be fair it would be more HN worthy if they managed to reverse engineer the DRM of Spotify to create a custom client without the Spotify library (which only works for Premium users)

hirako2000
1 replies
1h12m

Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the README, we only get to see a take down notice from Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure what.

JadeNB
0 replies
48m

Would be far less worthy if, by the time we get to the README, we only get to see a take down notice from Github. Instigated by Spotify for breach of not sure what.

Circumventing DRM, no matter how trivial, is a violation of the DMCA.

yellow_lead
0 replies
3h55m

There are bypass methods here for almost all platforms: https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/14rszaw/v3_the_ulti...

hackernewds
0 replies
1h43m

anything related to free for paid content is HN worthy /s

tills13
1 replies
1h7m

Not really suggesting Spotify pays their artists well but surely YouTube is worse, right?

judge2020
0 replies
48m

Supposedly "between $0.001 and $0.003" from [0], but then this site[1] claims:

Plays on YouTube Music will gain on average $0.008.

Although neither have sources. I imagine YouTube Premium plays match or beat Spotify on average.

Of course, for anything, if you block ads AND refuse to pay for the premium subscription, the artist makes $0 from your listening. Hopefully you can support them off-platform via merch or even purchasing their albums (e.g. iTunes which provides DRM-free versions), but then you're still not paying for the platform if you continue to use one with an ad blocker.

0: https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/

1: https://routenote.com/blog/how-much-music-streaming-services... Although this doesn't take into account

hackernewds
1 replies
1h40m

Watch Spotify revoke their public API key or reduce access to the public API because of this

bayindirh
0 replies
1h38m

This is something between the app developer and Spotify. I'm neither.

BTW, If you need an API key for public API access, you may need to enroll yourself to use that API. I don't ship public API keys with my apps.

dang
0 replies
6m

Ok, we've put that in the title now, along with the project name. (Submitted title was "Open source Spotify client that doesn't require Premium nor uses Electron")

monsieurbanana
20 replies
7h43m

For something that puts "not using electron" so prominently I didn't expect it using flutter. I admit I don't really have much experience with it, I thought it was like react-native (but better?), still far from truly native apps.

Im here to being told I'm wrong. I would love to, specially since we can transpile clojure to dart

rubymamis
8 replies
6h39m

Yep. This app uses 230mb of RAM on my machine compared to Spotify that uses 208mb. But it's definitely more performant than my hideously slow Electron Spotify client. I'm really done with Electron. I hope this shaming of Electron apps continue because I can't stand this degradation of software. The only Electron app of recent that had good performance is Notion Calendar (used to be Cron). Although, Notion itself is painfully slow. This is why I'm building a Notion alternative in Qt C++ and QML[1].

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

EDIT: Is the app down? It doesn't load the "Browse" content for me.

olah_1
1 replies
1h11m

Plume looks nice! How does the sync work? Local first rocks, but I do want some redundancy as well. Are there plans for multiplayer or sharing?

rubymamis
0 replies
1h6m

Thanks! One of the next features we'll on work will be support for arbitrary folders (basically all notes will be plaintext inside folders, currently they are all plaintexts but inside a local database), so you could sync your notes with any cloud provider (e.g., Dropbox). We'll also provide our own built-in sync option. There are plans for sharing notes, but not quite for real-time collaboration, if that's what you mean by "multiplayer". There are plans for collaboration in the future, but not real-time - I just don't think real-time collaboration is good for text-based formats.

jhatemyjob
1 replies
26m

Coming from AppKit/UIKit I tried to learn Qt and it was just awful. I hated how tightly coupled with C++ it was. Everything was based around subclassing and overriding methods, there was no way to just have a dumb UIView and set its frame and add a bunch of subviews to it. There was also no clean way to expose a C ABI to use a scripting language (with an FFI) to configure the UI easily

All of the Qt apps I know about (Ripcord, Dolphin) are fast but the aesthetics of the UI was just terrible. So I gave up on learning Qt. But this thing you made, Plume, actually looks good. If there isn't a monstrosity of hacks and boilerplate underneath this UI I might give Qt another shot. Otherwise I think I might just build my own thing from scratch on top of OpenGL or something....

rubymamis
0 replies
8m

I feel ya! I thought the same, until I discovered the world of combining Qt C++ and QML. QML is extremely easy to learn (I studied all the basics in one day using this Udemy course[1] (not affiliated, just love his work). BTW, he has many free awesome YouTube videos for Qt C++. Creating an aesthetically pleasing app in any framework takes a lot of effort (it's mostly about being focused on what necessary and then creating a lot of white space around it, haha). It's so easy to create beautiful, fluid UI with QML. I've created a short video that demonstrate what I'm working on currently[2] - a Kanban view inside my block editor (kinda buggy now, still WIP). Hopefully, this does inspire you that it's possible.

And it's actually pretty easy to write the C++ code. I don't really use custom sub-classing much. I use Qt's QtObject which allows me to create C++ object that work beautifully with QML. Bryan's course doesn't delve deeper as that, I had to do a lot of searching to figure it out. I hope to open source some of Plume's components to inspire others to do the same. Another point regarding aesthetics, it really takes effort, but Qt can be extended using community libraries. For example, if you want your app to look native on macOS and Windows with a sexy frameless border with a transparent window, then you could use the awesome qwindowkit[3]. Another example, I wanted to position the window buttons on macOS (the traffic light buttons) differently, but couldn't figure it out, and obviously this can't be done using Qt alone, so I looked at Electron's source code and saw how they do it there in Objective-C and incorporated it in my app (ChatGPT-4 wasn't very helpful at that). Now I really want to have these buttons' fill color transparent like Things 3 does, so I'm looking at how to achieve that haha. I already got some ideas. If you need any further help, let me know![4][5].

EDIT: A cool feature of combining Qt C++ with QML is that you get the performance of a compiled language like C++ with the reactivity, ease-of-use, fluid and easy animations (and more) of QML. You can see on Plume's website that it's 4x faster than the fastest comparable native app on macOS.

[1] https://www.udemy.com/course/qml-for-beginners/

[2] https://www.loom.com/share/b40009316f6b420b9ece15a1f99e987c

[3] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit

[4] https://twitter.com/mamistvalove

[5] ruby AT mamistvalove DOT gmail

icy
1 replies
5h54m

Plume looks so sick. Looking forward to it. A Vim-like modal editing mode would be so cool, I think.

rubymamis
0 replies
5h40m

Thanks! I heard many requests for this, so I'll consider it, but if I do get to that it will be at a later stage.

subtra3t
0 replies
5h45m

Weird, it takes up ~150MB while having a 500+ song playlist loaded.

prg318
0 replies
2h23m

To respond to your edit, yes - it seems like the app is down - nothing seems to load at all on the Browse tab or anywhere else...

devjab
6 replies
6h54m

I’m sort of surprised it’s considered a good thing. Some of my favourite programs use electron, like visual studio code. I haven’t used Spotify though, so maybe that is one of the many electron apps that suck?

I was very unimpressed by flutter when we PoC it at work, but that was years ago, so maybe it’s gotten better since.

amomchilov
2 replies
3h53m

VSCode couldn't support multiple windows until just recently, entirely because of a limitation from the early days of Electron.

When "multiple windows" is a feature to be announced (as if weren't trivial on any native stack), you know it's a sad state is affairs.

diggan
0 replies
1h20m

VSCode couldn't support multiple windows until just recently, entirely because of a limitation from the early days of Electron.

That sounds like Microsoft deflecting blame. You've been able to do multiple windows for a very long time in Electron, I remember being able to do so in 2019 at the very least, and the book "Electron in Action" (https://www.manning.com/books/electron-in-action) even have a chapter dedicated to it, a book which was released in 2018.

badgersnake
0 replies
4m

Don’t understand all the fuss about VSCode. I’m sticking with neovim.

NekkoDroid
1 replies
5h28m

Spotify Desktop also doesn't exactly use Electron, but 1 layer below: CEF

diggan
0 replies
1h19m

Also, they've used CEF since before Electron was even a thing (before Atom even).

piva00
0 replies
6h36m

Spotify's desktop app has been pretty snappy for me, and it's been like that for many years across different machines.

denysvitali
1 replies
5h7m

Flutter, from experience, works really well on Android. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the web (see for example [1]).

I think that if these performance issues were to be solved, Flutter would see a bigger adoption. In any case IMHO Flutter >>>>> Electron

[1]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/56257

jwells89
0 replies
4h7m

Last I knew it had significant performance issues on iOS (framerate drops/stutters), which dampens its cross platform appeal somewhat and is part of why I’ve heard of apps using Flutter for the Android port of their app, but nowhere else.

kevincox
0 replies
7h24m

Flutter is pretty native as far as resource usage goes. The language does use a VM and GC but it's performant enough. There isn't native look and feel though. (They can emulate it a bit, but it isn't perfect)

Alifatisk
0 replies
4m

I tried Flutter on my previous project, it’s good, like really good. Dart has its weird parts but other than that, I enjoy it a lot.

shunyaekam
6 replies
1h29m

As an aside, I think YouTube Music is superior to Spotify in terms of music catalog.

You get "everything on Spotify" (high quality audio) plus the YouTube videos (eg mixes that are put up) in a battery-friendy player (possibility to go audio only on these videos). Of course minimizable with YT Premium.

I believe that the discoverability algo is much better with YouTube Music as well, which is important to me...

I pay ~$15/month (in my local currency) for YouTube Premium which also gives me the ad-free experience on YouTube.

squid_fm
1 replies
1h21m

Fully agree, it is the most underrated platform.

Ultimately, it comes down to the catalog. Anything even slightly more obscure (older house music, rare b-sides, unreleased tracks) just isn’t found on Spotify. Pretty much everything is on YouTube though.

smt88
0 replies
1h19m

Unfortunately YT Music pays the least to artists.

AlecSchueler
1 replies
1h18m

YouTube is also better if you're looking for original mixes and not the remaster, as well as for anything out of print.

mattmaroon
0 replies
1h9m

And live stuff. Bands that allow fans to patch into the audio board, or stream, their concerts live on SiriusXM, get them all uploaded to YouTube.

Also, covers by random people. Some of my favorite music is basically just a dude doing an acoustic guitar cover of a great song.

https://youtu.be/2rFpZL6BiCs?si=5qFHjGQLHTfDB1zG

mrtksn
0 replies
1h15m

I actually like YouTube itself for casual listening, it has everything. My only problem with it is that on autoplay will put 2 hour long albums as a single video instead of picking the most relevant next song.

artninja1988
0 replies
1h17m

The only thing Spotify has over YouTube are the playlists and recommendation engine imo. The ai dj feature is also neat

iamsaitam
6 replies
7h34m

"It is still recommended to support the creators by watching/liking/subscribing to the artists' YouTube channels or liking their tracks on Spotify (or purchasing a Spotify Premium subscription too)."

I hope musicians can pay bills with likes, since ponying up €10.99 is a huge ask.

PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point.

westhanover
2 replies
6h4m

It is the musician’s job to figure out how to pay his bills not mine.

KoftaBob
1 replies
3h36m

and it's your job to figure out how to entertain yourself, you're not entitled to get that entertainment from music for free.

InCityDreams
0 replies
3h12m

Radio is free. And I change station when the ads come on.

WilTimSon
1 replies
7h27m

PS: not that many musicians are able to pay bills with their spotify checks, but that's not the point.

What IS the point, though? You seem to be criticising people who don't purchase a Spotify Premium while also admitting Spotify barely pays them anything. Yes, this client gives nothing to the artist, Spotify gives next to nothing, both are bad in different ways.

If anyone genuinely wants to support musicians - buy their merch, go to their concerts, buy their albums on Bandcamp or physical media. No streaming platform pays them their dues.

iamsaitam
0 replies
2h19m

The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route and not pay anything at all.

KoftaBob
0 replies
3h37m

ponying up €10.99 is a huge ask.

I guess that would depend on how much music you listen to. If you listen very occasionally, then yeah €10.99 for unlimited streaming isn't worth it. In that case, you can just buy songs individually.

If the price for individual songs is also a "big ask" for you, then you simply don't think music is worth paying for.

This isn't a "pay what you want" model where someone creates a product and asks you to pay whatever you feel is appropriate, they're creating a product and setting an explicit price for it.

accrual
6 replies
7h41m

[removed]

bananapub
5 replies
7h40m

are you sure you read the link to understand what it does?

accrual
4 replies
7h39m

[removed]

bananapub
2 replies
7h35m

even by HN standards, this is an extremely low quality reply, amazing

subtra3t
1 replies
7h8m

What did they say?

dotancohen
0 replies
6h45m

The Holy Grail is found in the Castle of Aggghhhh....

bayindirh
0 replies
7h38m

It doesn't get the music from Spotify via bypassing some safeguards. It searches the music on YouTube and streams its audio.

It fuses two free services together.

Edit: I pay for premium, too.

linsomniac
4 replies
2h16m

Somewhat related: A month ago I migrated from Spotify to YTMusic (Youtube), and published the scripts I used to do it. People have kind of come out of the woodwork: reporting issues, starring the repo, asking questions, last night I found someone has written a GUI for it.

https://github.com/linsomniac/spotify_to_ytmusic

The biggest reason I ditched Spotify is that their shuffle play of playlists is laughably bad. I like listening to just a shuffle of my favorite music, but their player seems to "stick" on just a few of them. I ask it to shuffle a few thousand "liked" songs, during my shower every day, and I'll hear the same song 3 times in a week, for example.

There was a "bug" open in their support forum since 2017 that they replied "maybe we'll look at it eventually". It has hundreds of pages of replies. And they just laid off a significant portion of their workforce, so I figured it'd never get resolved. And for a company doing music playback, it just seems like they can't get one of the basics right.

Since going to YTMusic, I've been hearing songs from my playlists that I haven't heard in years.

mkobit
1 replies
2h2m

They wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their algorithm works (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their approach has changed or that it does not perform well under certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.

linsomniac
0 replies
1h39m

I agree with you that it seems to work fine on playlists of less than 50 or 100 songs.

The problem seems to be that on larger playlists they will only use 50-100 of the tracks to shuffle through. Most times I'm listening to music I just want to put on a shuffle of all my favorites and listen. It's been that way since I got my first CD changer. Maybe that's a super unusual use case, but it's my primary one, and I get really tired of hearing the same songs repeatedly over a week. YMMV, my wife for example likes listening to the same songs every day.

As I mentioned above: I copied my Spotify playlists to YTMusic and am doing the same "shuffle my liked songs" and I'm literally hearing songs Spotify hasn't played for me in years. Usually the algorithm complaint in music players is that they are using random rather than shuffle, but even in that case I'd think that 2K songs over 2-3 years, I'd be hearing SOME of those songs that YTMusic is playing but Spotify is not. The cynic in me figured that they were prioritizing the songs by the ones that made them the most money, or from artists that paid for placement. But something about their shuffle is just totally off.

fermentation
0 replies
1h3m

I wanted to like ytmusic, but their ios client is somehow worse that spotify. Main daily gripes are toasts (stop doing toasts on ios, never do toasts) hiding ui elements I want to touch and the app forgetting my queue every day or two

CatDaaaady
0 replies
1h17m

Oh my! I thought this weird behavior was just something _I_ experienced on Spotify. I'm always asking myself, "didn't I just hear this song?"

twerkmonsta
3 replies
1h45m

Started downloading FLAC music after discovering how bad Spotify compression is even at the highest quality. I still subscribe to Spotify for discovery and convenience, but almost never use it.

hackernewds
1 replies
1h42m

use TIDAL HIFI

e44858
0 replies
13m

Tidal's "HiFi" format was actually the lossy MQA. Seems they recently started to convert their catalog to the truly lossless FLAC: https://www.techhive.com/article/1974696/tidal-flac-preferre...

deltaburnt
0 replies
16m

Apple Music supports lossless music and uploading your own songs, that's part of why I prefer them over Spotify. Though I'm not sure if they support lossless uploads now or not.

sergiotapia
2 replies
2h43m

Reason #1,000,000 why I'm glad I'm on Android. Can't even install this thing on iphone. Works great btw, using this app on my desktop and pixel thank you!

znpy
1 replies
2h11m

Reason #1,000,001 i’m glad i’m european: soon thanks to the digital markets act I’ll be able to side load this app onto my iPhone.

sergiotapia
0 replies
1h54m

That sounds excellent, hopefully it's hard for Apple to maintain both set ups and just go global, like they did for their chargers.

pipeline_peak
2 replies
2h35m

This is definitely the sort of thing that forces “evil” companies to close their API’s

3abiton
1 replies
2h25m

I don't think companies need more excuses to do it. Look at reddit, X, etc ... I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify made their API a "paid" service.

pipeline_peak
0 replies
1h54m

I’m surprised it’s open to begin with.

Their recommendation component is one of the few reasons I pay. Everything I ever wanted to hear is on YouTube.

nsteel
2 replies
2h8m

I don't get it at all.

No ads, thanks to the use of public & free Spotify and YT Music APIs¹

There's zero permission to use Spotify's APIs in this way. So what does "thanks" mean in this context?

I don't like projects like this that potentially ruin it for the rest of us.

thfuran
0 replies
7m
dvngnt_
0 replies
46m

there are easier ways to get Spotify for free that requires more bandwidth

jbverschoor
2 replies
7h10m

Very cool mixup.. I have yt premium, and I boycotted Spotify a long time ago. However, Spotify is probably still the best service for playlists.

piva00
1 replies
6h34m

YouTube Music pays less than Spotify per stream, if you're boycotting Spotify for that reason I think it's good to be aware of it.

jbverschoor
0 replies
6h20m

I'm boycotting them because of many things.

Although youtube music is in the plan, I don't use it, because the UI is not that great and there's this weird entanglement with youtube videos.

I generally use (video) youtube and soundcloud for music. They're the easiest way to find the stuff I like to listen to.

atentaten
2 replies
7h38m

Looks interesting, but I only got placeholder images on the homepage using the universal mac version.

EasyMark
1 replies
6h44m

you have to log in with setting bottom left "gear" to access your spotify data.

atentaten
0 replies
5h22m

Got it. Thanks

DotaFan
2 replies
5h6m

App is very buggy on windows.

user_7832
1 replies
3h9m

Yeah, I just get a white screen on launching. It needs to be force closed via task manager for me.

DotaFan
0 replies
1h19m

I couldn't open artist details, songs stop playing after a while, couldn't uninstall it properly.

Just a few after using it for 30 min.

porridgeraisin
1 replies
7h8m

Just when rhythm got banned in discord few years ago, I made a discord bot that did something similar. I supported various sources of playlists/urls, and I'll then go get the metadata from the platform, get the song name and few other details, search it on youtube and stream from there. It was intended to be self-hosted for your own server. Was fun to use until the replacement bots started supporting youtube again and it got made redundant, a whole bunch of them paused youtube support around the time rhythm got the C&D notice.

npstr
0 replies
7h1m

I don't know if I was the first to come up with the idea or implementation, but my contribution certainly ended up in the largest open source music streaming bot at the time: https://github.com/freyacodes/archived-bot/pull/90

Was quite a similar idea: load Playlist from Spotify but play the actual music from YouTube. Still proud of that one, good times when Discord was wild territory.

felixbraun
1 replies
2h26m

Worked on an open source cloud player 10y ago: idea was to have one place to curate playlists and your music library in general -- basically an access and authentication platform where the underlying providers can change over the years without impacting your collection.

Still feel this is the right way to think about collecting and curating music going forward…

seemack
0 replies
1h1m

I had a similar thought a few years ago when trying to think of "useful" uses of NFTs. It could be great if I could buy music, etc and then play it on any streaming service via some sort of proof-of-right-to-play mechanism.

bentt
1 replies
6h45m

Anything that helps shake up the system is good for artists at this point.

It would be cool if this app helped you gauge how much to pay your favorite artists… If it logged the artists you listened to and then gave you something like a bill, periodically. The bill would show how minutes listened to for each artist over the past month and then would find links to buy their music directly. Even better this app would let you listen to that source music if you owned it.

ojagodzinski
0 replies
3h45m

Please explain how is the app that plays music clips from YouTube and hides the ads is "shaking up the system"?

alwayslikethis
1 replies
7h4m

For something that uses this approach (metadata from spotify, music from yt) but with downloads, take a look at spotdl[1]. Very useful for mpd. Disclaimer: not my project, but I've had some success with it.

1. https://github.com/spotDL/spotify-downloader

carlosjobim
0 replies
5h29m

I've been relying for years on Mediahuman's downloader: https://www.mediahuman.com/youtube-to-mp3/31/

It will download any Spotify playlist or YouTube playlist as a bunch of individual MP3s, and do it fast. You can also paste individual song links to download them. Great quality and UI.

RobotToaster
1 replies
7h30m

Since this is using youtube to play the music, other than being open source, what advantage does this have over just using youtube music revanced?

Faceless1230
0 replies
6h59m

It has access to your Spotify liked songs collection/Playlists and also all the curated Spotify Playlists

wiseowise
0 replies
2h50m

nor uses Electron

Flutter

tiku
0 replies
7h21m

Tried it for a while but it just isn't working for me. Hangs a lot while using it in my car. Also can't use it with my Android Auto head unit.

saos
0 replies
1h26m

Spotify about to kill off their API

polski-g
0 replies
2h31m

I just want a spotify client that works behind an HTTP proxy.

mderazon
0 replies
1h46m

Wow this is really well made and polished, congrats for the creators for this acheivement.

One thing I notice, and that's not an issue of the app but rather that of the youtube sources is that the sound quality between songs is not consistent and overall worse than Spotify

mderazon
0 replies
1h47m

Wow this is really well made

icar
0 replies
2h29m

Worth mentioning that Spotify doesn't use Electron, but CEF.

fHr
0 replies
38m

If I have to hear at one more interview that they now use scrum and spotifys agile model with tribe/squad/guilds/chapters I'm gonna end myself.

dbg31415
0 replies
32m

Yeah, OK but Spotify premium family plans are like 16 bucks a month for 6 people...

$35 a year or so per seat? Meh. Hardly worth pirating is it? It seems like a pretty fair price for literally all the music ever made available on demand. Ha.

I always think how much money I wasted on CDs when I was in high school... and then how much time wasted on MP3s in college - downloading, organizing, sharing, syncing... at one point I had 200 GB of audio media files that had to be perpetually curated and stored on an expensive NAS. Insane.

(Not that I didn’t enjoy it a bit... especially finding new tools to help me automate downloads and deduplicate and organize all the files. I had another 16 TB of video files on the NAS shared via Plex server with friends... 2012 or so. It just took so much time!)

So for me, Spotify is a just a better system.

Maybe make a “find a Spotify account friend” matching service. =P

darrenBaldwin03
0 replies
2h17m

No Electron? Sign me up!

costco
0 replies
1h24m

Protip: librespot doesn't actually require premium

Just modify the authentication code in https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot-golang/blob/maste... to look something like this:

        packet := &Spotify.ClientResponseEncrypted{
                LoginCredentials: &Spotify.LoginCredentials{
                        Username: proto.String(username),
                        Typ:      authType,
                        AuthData: authData,
                },
                AccountCreation: Spotify.AccountCreation_ACCOUNT_CREATION_ALWAYS_PROMPT.Enum(),
                SystemInfo: &Spotify.SystemInfo{
                        CpuFamily: Spotify.CpuFamily_CPU_X86_64.Enum(),
                        CpuSubtype:              proto.Uint32(0),
                        Brand: Spotify.Brand_BRAND_UNBRANDED.Enum(),
                        BrandFlags:              proto.Uint32(0),
                        Os:                      Spotify.Os_OS_LINUX.Enum(),
                        OsVersion:               proto.Uint32(0),
                        OsExt:                   proto.Uint32(0),
                        SystemInformationString: proto.String("Linux [x86-64 0]"),
                        DeviceId:                proto.String("libspotify"),
                },
                PlatformModel: proto.String("PC desktop"),
                VersionString: ...,
                ClientInfo: &Spotify.ClientInfo{
                        Limited:  proto.Bool(false),
                        Language: proto.String("en"),
                },
        }

In the go version of the library they set some boolean in the request that makes it not work with free accounts but if you change it to this it will work. You can also use this Wireshark dissector to read Spotify protobuf messages directly: https://github.com/plietar/spotify-analyze/blob/master/disse...

Then you can make the authentication packet look exactly like the desktop client (though this is not required because Spotify has lax validation).

carlosjobim
0 replies
5h10m

Congratulations! This is the best performing client I've ever used on MacOS, and with a decent GUI as well. YouTube Music is so slow and laggy as to be unusable on my powerful computer, the official Spotify client is just on the limit of being unusable because of extreme sluggishness.

If users could log in with their YouTube account as well, then us folks that pay for Premium could also support the artists we listen to, win-win.

Playlist management could be improved. It took me a while to figure out that you have to hold on a song to select it. It would be more reasonable to select a track and delete it with the delete key or from a right-click menu. Right now the "Remove from playlist" option does not work.

breadsniffer
0 replies
1h12m

Spotify is one of those subscriptions that is 100% worth it. Rather listen to HQ audio than youtube vids made in iMovie

audidude
0 replies
9m

Linux version doesn't have aarch64 builds in case you try Flatpak and it doesn't work.

ape4
0 replies
3h8m

Isn't Spotify going to shut this down quickly

SubiculumCode
0 replies
2h12m

Spotify premium user here; I'd like a better interface please.

Its the only reason I clicked, and I am disappointed that this is more about piracy than sane gui.

ObscureMind
0 replies
1h21m

protip: if you use freemium spotify in the browser with an adblock you won't be bugged with ads

CrypticShift
0 replies
5h44m

In a way, this reminds me of the (much more ambitious) system of resolvers [1] of the (now defunct) tomahawk player [0]

The idea was you just give it the metadata and it "resolves" it into any service. I really like this idea. it kind of lives on in "playlist converters" like tunemymusic or soundiiz. but it is not the same as it being built into the player itself (like spotube albeit with a different more straightforward aim here)

[0] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk

[1] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk-resolvers

Bayart
0 replies
1h47m

Quite smart idea, it does completely fill the huge gaps in the Spotify catalogue and trying it out it seems to get the right tracks even with insanely niche stuff.