[maicro]

I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Spotify - for the most part it's great, and I'm happy to be paying for a service that provides so much value (and it's a great example of how having a reasonably priced option defeats piracy, for uh, people I know). That being said, being advertised podcasts and audiobooks is super annoying (and yes, I consider "being presented with" as "being advertised" if I can't hide them) as it wastes a large area of the home screen.

The discovery algorithm in general has never been as good as say Pandora, but I guess I agree that it's felt worse recently.

Most annoying to me recently is how there seem to be three different ways to indicate I like a song, depending on which device I'm listening on (desktop app on my laptop or desktop, or mobile app on my Android phone) - I swear I've seen hearts, plus signs and thumbs-up symbols, without any clear indication of any differences. I know a sibling comment mentioned this change, but they made it sound recent - I _feel_ like I've had that point of confusion for over a year...

[Yodel0914]

I'm in the same boat - have been very happily paying for Spotify family for many years, love the access to music, but hate the way they push crap I don't care about. And their recommendation algorithm has never really worked for me.

In part out of frustration with Spotify, and in part to hedge against streaming disappearing one day, I'm in the process of ripping my exiting CD collection to FLAC, and buying either digital or physical copies of my favourite albums.

I've found it pretty refreshing to open my music app (Finamp) and only see exactly what I want to.

[lacrimacida]

It’s nice to be in control for once. I am getting more and more into offline consumption, and to me if quality of the media isn’t the highest but decent Im okay. My attention though is extremely valuable to me to let companies services try to mess with it.

[Nullabillity]

> In part out of frustration with Spotify, and in part to hedge against streaming disappearing one day, I'm in the process of ripping my exiting CD collection to FLAC, and buying either digital or physical copies of my favourite albums.

This is bizarre to me. So to punish the record industry for ruining Spotify you're... giving them even more money?

[mingus88]

In 2024 you can buy directly from the artists in many ways that are more beneficial to them than a streaming subscription.

I make it a point to buy a couple of albums a month from Bandcamp. The artists get a much larger cut than whatever I have been streaming of theirs, and in exchange I can listen as much as I want, completely offline, without any surveillance of my listening habits.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

[Yodel0914]

Yep, I buy from bandcamp where I can. Where I can't (usually bigger artists) I can usually buy from qobuz.

[Yodel0914]

Who said I wanted to punish the record industry?

I'm not sure any of my issues with Spotify (pushing podcasts and audiobooks, nonsense UI changes etc) have anything to do with the record industry.

[Nullabillity]

The record industry are major shareholders in Spotify. They are effectively one and the same.