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by LelouBil 951 days ago
Even though I would like Spotify to pay artists decently, I'll keep paying for it mainly for their recommendations and discovery features.

If you only listen to music you already know you like, then sure Bandcamp or whatever is amazing for the artist.

But personally, I just launch my "liked" playlist and use their enrich feature to fill in titles. Or use their thematic playlist generations that use a genre but take into account what I already liked of this genre.

Though if someone showed me an alternative with discovery features that work as good as this and pays artists decently I'd switch instantly.
2 comments
antoine-unity 950 days ago
It doesn’t come cheap, but I can recommend Roon[1] because it allows your music collection to blend between streaming providers (Tidal or Qobuz) and local files.

Their very good recommendation algorithm can expand your horizon and you can buy the music you really like while using the same playback experience (would be nice if they allowed you to buy and download music directly though).

[1] https://roon.app/en/

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lucb1e 950 days ago
> I would like Spotify to pay artists decently

Using which funds? Afaik they pay out quite a lot of the income, they could try to cut costs (the most meaningful thing there probably being to lay off staff) in order to maximize payouts but the only alternative pushes people to competing services that are cheaper and can't pay artists better for the same reason.

One thing they could reasonably do is to offer for people to pay more for their Spotify subscription, where the surplus (anything you pay above the base subscription) goes 100% to the artists, proportionally to the ones you listen to. One can speculate how much that would help the problem. I just find it weird to see people always saying (look up any Spotify-related thread) that Spotify pays so poorly and that people should cancel their subscription altogether instead.

Edit: got curious and looked it up

> within the pie chart detailing the total revenue that Spotify generates through music streaming, “roughly 70% of it is going to rights holders ---https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-...

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