[aeturnum]

There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.

To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.

If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.

[1] Qobuz has the highest per-stream pay rate in the industry by like 40%. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/discover

[2] Tidal is the widely-available service with the second-highest pay rate. https://tidal.com/

[Freak_NL]

There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.

If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.

Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.

It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).

[nonethewiser]

Well obviously you could just pirate it instead right? Like piracy or not, spending more money or listening to less music are not the only options. Hell you could not pirate it and just listen on youtube - that's another option.

The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.

[aeturnum]

Sure - but as you can see here the focus on "ditching spotify" is often ethical. You can absolutely use services that have an artist pay-rate of $0 per stream, but I don't think people typically advocate for that - and indeed this author does not seem to either (otherwise they would have no collection size issues).

[Freak_NL]

The piracy route can even be ethical. Compare:

* Have a Spotify subscription, listen to all 10 albums of some artist.

* Pirate everything, but buy a T-shirt from that artist.

* Buy one album digitally (their latest), and pirate the rest.

What is the artist earning from your contributions in these three cases?

[troupo]

They will likely get the most money from the T-shirt because the percentage that the artist gets is much higher than any percentage they get from the distributors they distribute through (in case of both Spotify and digital albums they are likely to be the same distributor: Warner Music, Sony, Universal or some such)

[amatecha]

Yeah or even better I buy the album on Bandcamp, then they get either 85% of the price, or 100% on "Bandcamp Friday".

[nsteel]

I think Bandcamp could do with a simple way to just pay artists money. There is that "name your price" thing but it's a bodge.

[nonethewiser]

I expect many people think: "fuck spotify" and "i dont think piracy is bad" at the same time. I don't think leaving spotify on an ethical basis implies any specific opinion on piracy.

[dawnerd]

I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible as is discovery and they suffer the same problem the others do with their supplied catalog being flooded in fake songs attached to real artists as “ft.).

Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.

[joecool1029]

> I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible

I did not find this to be the case. Someone gave me a few months trial on them recently and I found the interface to be the only one out of the streaming services to give a shit about customers that prefer listening to albums. None of the other major streaming services I've tried do. (not Apple, Spotify, nor Tidal). My only real knock on them has been their catalog seems to be the smallest of the majors.

Spotify was always trying to push some unrelated garbage when I had them like podcasts which I would never want to listen to and especially not the types they kept pushing (wasn't even popular ones like Rogan, it was stuff like male erection help and jesus podcasts lol). They also tried to weasel in audiobooks, which again isn't something I'd ever want in a music app. I think they even tried to do tv shows for a brief period of time. All these things pushed me away from it.

Besides all the other reasons Spotify is a terrible shit company it just sucks for discovering albums. No way to turn off playlist and single recommendations. It prioritizes recommending new stuff that's in genres I don't listen to. The only nice thing it does do is support last.fm (which Qobuz and plexamp also does) so I can scrobble there and get actually accurate recommendations through that.

[TacticalCoder]

UX is okay but the search functionality, which is definitely part of the UX, sucks fat balls on Qobuz.

But Qobuz is still king. I gladly pay their monthly subscription even though their programmers can't even be bothered to code a proper search functionality (that is: unless you enter precisely, with every single character being correct, the name of what you're looking for, Qobuz won't find it... And then weird, just plain weird non-matching matches do show up).

But I don't despair: I take it that at some point they'll find the time to figure out how to implement a better song/artist/track search functionality.

[dawnerd]

Playback is actually nice I will give them that, it’s just everything else I’m not a fan of. Although to be fair they’re pretty much the only ones that let you search by label which is nice. Just a shame the rest of the ux isn’t very good. The infinite scrolling, items being duplicated, no indication which version an album is…

[Yodel0914]

That probably depends on how you listen to music. I still have a qobuz family subscription but barely use it. Mostly I listen to new albums on Bandcamp, and if I like them enough, I buy them.

I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.

One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.

[drnick1]

> ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.

Certainly not. As to how, I don't believe I need to provide instructions.

The main issue with streaming is that you own nothing, and also get snooped on.

If you really want to "stream" NewPipe is as good as any streaming service.