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by fuzzy2 2056 days ago
> it provides music I want to listen to at a price that is completely reasonable.

Until it doesn't

I use Spotify a lot. Maybe too much. And disappearing music is a real plague. Now it's there, now it's not. Why? Licensing perhaps, who knows.

5 comments

I had entire multi-hundred track playlists disappear on me. I keep paying for spotify, but in honesty I really shouldn't at this point, I'm barely using it. Bandcamp sells me what I want, and when they don't I listen to something else or find it somewhere else. I've even been buying (and ripping into my local collection) some 2nd hand CDs.
Yes I agree with you, I have had some songs I like disappear too. But with a subscription model, I can stop paying them when the value isnt there anymore.

A good example is that I cancelled Amazon prime this year because with add-on items and ineligible items it stopped providing any value over just meeting the minimum order $ for free shipping.

Spotify reached that threshold for me two years ago. I started seeing 1 in every 20 or so liked tracks go away.
You make that sound as if spotify is the problem.

This is about labels and sometimes artist not wanting to have their songs on spotify anymore.

This is about Tidal or whathername wanting more money from a dying market.

It might not be Spotify's fault, but it is certainly their problem. Their business survival depends on being able to fix it before a rival does, because consumers don't want to keep paying for a service that sucks for them, 'because it isn't their fault'.
... they come back after a while in my experience. The licenses for those tracks seem to rotate between services.
Also there's still no official way to listen on AArch64 Linux, which an increasing number of my computers run.
I don't understand. You're saying you can't listen to spotify on the web?
Yep, browsers ship with native libraries for DRM, which are closed source and aren't available compiled for aarch64. Pinebook, raspberry pi etc can't use Spotify (or Netflix) out of the box. There are some workarounds, which are all quite inconvenient and perform poorly.
Spotify web uses DRM which only runs on x86
this is the main reason I'm making moves to go back to having a local library. its really annoying having songs disappear.

I used to tell myself I couldn't afford all the music I listen to but looking at all the money I have given spotify over the last decade im thinking maybe I could have bought a good chuck of my favourite music by now. so that is what I'm going to do at some point, and maybe just keep spotify for discovering new music every now and again

Every time music that I like disappears from Spotify I just buy the Vinyl. I bought at least 10 Albums last Year because Spotify dropped them, it really sucks.
Is it Spotify dropping them, or the artist / label / licensing authority pulling the music from Spotify?