- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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I still download my music. Two pros: I have control over where, when and how I listen to it. And I only download music I actually want to listen to.
One con: Finding new music is harder (I imagine).
One con: Finding new music is harder (I imagine).
That’s what radio helps with, there was also Pandora, but I didn’t know if it is still alive after Sirius XM bought them.
Find an online radio station you like and you don’t need Pandora any more.
That’s not SomaFM
Shoutcast is still running strong! Also super easy to setup your own server https://directory.shoutcast.com/
And there’s also Icecast! https://dir.xiph.org/genres
I have found a ton of new music through KEXP’s YouTube channel.
Found the Seattleite. Can’t believe I didn’t notice your name all this time and connect the dots.
I listen to C89.5! Website and app both work flawlessly.
ListenBrainz is the solution for discovery
Finding new music is harder (I imagine)
In my opinion, it’s harder, but not even necessarily because it’s harder to do it in the end. More because it’s just harder to get started.
For example, I find way more music I enjoy listening to through Bandcamp than I ever did on Spotify, but that requires having existing artists that I follow and can see their recommendations for, having a feel for which genres I actually like instead of a vague mental concept of what I like to listen to that I can then keyword search by in Bandcamp’s search/discover section, and hoping that the human curators on Bandcamp’s newsletter pick artists I like. Bandcamp doesn’t really have algorithms, so those are my only real options.
It’s more effort, but it’s infinitely more rewarding.
On Bandcamp you can go on your feed page which shows albums based on the genres and artists you follow, and what fans you follow have bought.
One con: Finding new music is harder (I imagine).
You actually should actually try to listen to web radio. Still have a subscription with Qobuz but been listening to bytefm a lot and they have some great djs (they have different shows at different time.). I personally found there more new and great artist or songs than any personalized algorithm ever did.
One con: you’re too busy writing down the songs and you cannot really do anything while listening as you also too scared of missing something. /hj
Do they not have a recently played? Can always go back through and shouldn’t be too hard to figure out the songs. Just note the time maybe atleast.
Wasn’t totally serious about my con. They do have a recently played and even an archive where you can re-listen certain shows you have missed (if you are paying member of their association).
Fair, some people may just not know about it, and some places just don’t, so spreading some knowledge, cheers.
…are people really paying for a music subscription service to listen to the same music on repeat? I pay a service because I listen to like at least 4 new albums every week, minimum.
I pay for Apple Music (well, technically I get it as part of Apple One) for one reason: the library matching function. I have half a gig of mp3s on my home computer, many of which are not on any streaming service, and apple makes them all available to every device I own.
For me, thats worth the monthly price.
Wait…that’s a peak feature, rare apple W
You can host it yourself without paying apple.
You’d literally be paying yourself back after not much time at all.
I like Plex amp but there are quite a few options.
It took me 10 listens to get into Jimi Hendrix. You are consuming quantity but quality requires effort.
or self inducing yourself into liking by listening to it so much
I don’t this works with all music.
The first few listens I thought it was garbage. But I decided it must be me who is wrong, not everyone else.
Or, that taste is subjective and that there is no right and wrong. You are allowed to not like something others do.
This is true, but you should really give something a good few listens before you come to a conclusion. Good things can turn bad just as much as bad things turn good.
I truly wonder where in my post I implied that I am drawing significant conclusions without giving something a good few listens. Again, I think you are making assumptions of my listening habits based on severly limited information presented to you.
Because if I listened to a minimum of 4 new albums a week then I wouldn’t have the time to repeat any.
It was applying your statistics to my habits.
No, I think you’re absolutely right and it’s comforting to know there are others who do this too. I have a kind of 3-5-7 trial period for getting into new music. If it’s crap but I want to give it a chance, I’ll do 3-5 album plays; if it’s ok but has potential I might not see, 5-7 plays. Anything challenging but enjoyable gets minimum 10 plays.
About the self inducement, that is making me question myself a little. There are things that I’ve tried over and over to get into that I just cannot no matter what, but I’m seriously questioning if it really is possible to “make” yourself like something through type of, I guess familiarity?
I think the counter argument to self inducement is that I can really go off something that I hear too many times (usually on the radio). Even if the first listen wasn’t too bad.
This is making some significant assumptions, don’t you think? That I sample the buffet does not mean that I don’t also cherish and return to familiar recipes.
I’m assuming you have a similar amount of free time as me and are not able to fit in enough listens to become familiar.
I have no kids, no pets, and a job where I can listen to music the entirety of my shifts while working. I have music on in some capacity probably an average of 12 hours a day. 4 albums a week, even when listening to them each 6 six times, is a fraction of my listening.
Music listening is my primary “hobby” and interest.
In that case, what are your top 5 undiscovered gems that need 5+ listens to appreciate.
What are the modern Captain Beefhearts?
Dunno if I go actively searching for difficult music, so I may not have the best answer for that specifically, but here are 5 albums I consider hidden gems or underappreciated:
Horse Bitch - RIP Pistachio
Tattle Tale - Sew True
Gaytheist - The Mustache Stays
Codefendants - This Is Crime Wave
Irist - Gloria (actually an EP, if you’ll allow it).
These probably won’t take you 5+ listens to appreciate, but I do think they’re smaller releases worthy of greater attention. Hopefully that’s close enough for you. ✌️
Never heard of any of them, so a perfect response. Thanks!
Me too. However I recognize that many people are content to listen to the same things they enjoyed in high school forever. In which case they definitely do not need streaming
this post is just to placate a group of people. i prefer streaming for new music friday. i also don’t want another crate or hard drive of shit i lost interest in.
You idiots don’t have a 6 cd changer in your car? Pathetic!
I do it the old fashioned way. Giant binder of discs I get my passenger to flip through and swap in and out
Damn a 100 cd changer then, mad respect
Only one binder?
Also makes since since music has not changed at all since 2003
No, but I have a USB stick with over 100 albums on it, so I can listen to the same 5 albums all the time.
precisely
No man, my usb works perfectly
My car doesn’t even have a CD slot :(
A couple of years ago, I had a Napster subscription (the reborn, legal variant of it). At first, I was happy to have unlimited access to music, then after 2 years I realised that I was paying 120 EUR a year for music I’ll never own, so I cancelled the subscription and put my yearly budget for music to exactly that amount. It yields more than enough given I buy used CDs, and then digitalise them. That way I own the physical media as backup AND am able to transfer the digital, PCM-quality tracks unfettered across my devices AND with no need for DRM or shitty proprietary applications.
You gotta put in the effort, which most people are too lazy to do
Is it laziness or a lack of motivation?
I’ve been a Spotify member for 13 years and it gives me exactly what I want. Owning music is good and all, but ripping the CDs and setting it up so my family and I have access to it where ever we go is going to cost me way more than the subscription does a month, in both time and money.
deleted by creator
Right, but you would own the music…
You don’t “own” the music on physical media. You just purchased a license to listen to that music for the lifetime of the media it comes on. If your CD, record, or cassette is destroyed, you don’t get another one for free because you “own the music”. You’re still not allowed to copy it for distribution, use it for commercial purposes, or any of the other happy horseshit their lawyers put in the fine print.
I miss the era of physical media, too, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking it was some golden age of consumer rights.
I don’t need to “copy it for distribution” to back it up for personal use.
I run Navidrome off a free small form factor PC recycled from work. My whole family accesses it via whatever app they like that supports Subsonic API (there’s dozens), and for security it’s only accessible via Tailscale, so they need Tailscale installed and connected.
Initial cost: $0. Plus cost of the apps, which is like $5 each user. Tailscale is free for up to 100 devices. Time to set up: 1 day. Ongoing cost: the very little electricity an energy-efficient SFF PC uses - way overestimating would be $2/month. Plus whatever music we buy on Bandcamp, physical etc that we own forever.
So it’s not way more expensive in my experience, and at the end of the day I give artists I enjoy much more money than Spotify streams ever would, and I’m not supporting a piece of shit CEO pouring a billion dollars into military spending.
I did return to my old flac and mp3 collection. Got Foobar working again, found a nice skin and I’m rediscovering music that I that skipped over. I buy second-hand CDs when I find them. I’ve managed to get a digital copy of all my favourite albums and tracks.
I will keep Spotify though. A long time ago, I got friends to share their Discovery and Release Radar playlists. With my own, I have a nice spread of recommendations.
I need regular new music. Call it a search for unexpected dopamine. Spotify still picks new tracks that I really like. I also like Spotify Connect and the easily shared collaborative playlists.
The UK has less alternatives for music discovery. I don’t like Radio, way too much talking and ads.
I’ve got rid of Netflix, Prime. I’m getting Disney+ for free at the moment. Back to physical for film and TV.
For now, Spotify recommendations is worth the cost of entry.
This would be right if not for the fact that Spotify will regularly introduce you to music that you might like and otherwise might not have heard of. That can be worth paying for.
We had scrobbling services before Spotify and we will have them afterwards.
See Last.fm and ListenBrainz.org
I signed up for this about 2 months ago because someone on here recommended it. It’s absolutely garbage unless you only listen to radio music. I listen to industrial hardcore and uptempo about 90% of the time, the remaining 10% are a pretty even split between hard rock and radio music. It only recommends me radio music, not a single hardcore track.
I have subscriptions for Spotify, Tidal and SoundCloud, and all 3 of them have vastly better recommendations of you listen to less popular genres
industrial hardcore
What are some of your favourites in this category? Spotify hasn’t been giving me any good recommendations on this front either.
It’s true, some genres are better represented than others. The user base on listenbrainz is relatively small. I hope you do keep scrobbling your listens to listenbrainz because it can still help improve the recommendations for other users after you who listen to somethings you do but know a lot less than you in the genres you listen.
I would argue that this is the entire value proposition of Spotify. I may not own the music, but I have all the artist and song names. I can always re-acquire them at any time.
Except that as part of its enshittification Spotify has intentionally changed its algo to push people into more and more homogenous “beige”, nothing music. It has become so prolific that Spotifycore has become a term to describe what happens when you let Spotify autoplay.
With the rise of AI, Spotify is now producing and recommending beige music that is produced on an industrial scale, at the expense of actual artists.
Mood Machine go brrr
Mood Machine by Liz Pelly review – a savage indictment of Spotify | Music books | The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/05/mood-machine-by-liz-pelly-review-a-savage-indictment-of-spotify
This is 100% true, and the reason I left Spotify. Back to buying records and CDs online and in niche record stores (I live in a metropolis, so that works even for obscure music). I also got a tidal subscription, and I like the recommendations from there much more. Bandcamp & SoundCloud newsletters are also great for suggestions.
But now, since collecting records and CDs, I find myself spending much more time with individual albums and critical listening, and relying less on playlists and suggestions. Anyway, Spotify is just garbage now…
This is why I use Spotify and why it’s gotten so much worse over the last year.
My blocked artists list used to be empty, but now it feels like I’m blocking every third new artist for being AI.
There’s a reason music piracy is still niche compared to games or movies/tv.
Spotify is still a good deal to me. I’ll gladly pay $12 a month to not have to go through the hassle of torrenting and organizing music.
I love starting out with one song and just letting the algorithm do it’s thing. It comes up with new shit for me all the time.
This is why I download all the music I want. I still listen to it primarily on youtube, but it is a ‘just in case’. I also never paid for music.
Artists love you, I’m sure.
I doubt they notice. Most artists either get income directly from fans at concerts, via merch, or through explicit patronage (Bandcamp, Patreon, etc).
The money they get from streaming isn’t remotely enough to support a professional career. Streaming is more about promotion - to get you in the door at the next concert or promote a product with a real revenue stream - than actual income.
Sure. But getting more is better than getting less, no?
Do artists benefit more from ad-dense, algorithm gamed, corporate controlled media outlets kicking them a few bucks every month?
Or is a guerilla campaign of populist free-at-download distribution better for long term concert attendance and merch sales?
Do artists benefit more from ad-dense, algorithm gamed, corporate controlled media outlets kicking them a few bucks every month?
No idea, I don’t use those.
The service I use pays (for the 2023-2024 fiscal year) around US$0.01873 per stream in royalties to labels and publishers. Spotify (as of 2025) does $0.003-$0.005 per stream, so it actually improved massively - it’s only 6 times less than Qobuz (used to be 12 times less).
Or is a guerilla campaign of populist free-at-download distribution better for long term concert attendance and merch sales?
Doesn’t work for small acts that don’t do massive, world-wide tours. Nor for fully independent artists who just don’t have the budget to do larger concerts.
The actual difference is that if you are pirating or file-sharing, you’re about 30% likelier to actually buy music
Cool. Apparently I’m not “average person”, because that doesn’t apply to me.
I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of
Dont worry guys my CD collection is increasing (i extract it onto hard drives too). I’ll open a free music museum when all goes to shit.
I mean… you own or have nothing when your Wow sub ends also.
Level 20 baby!
Some of us aren’t privileged enough to buy hundreds of hours of music.
Buy? 🤨
So what you can indefinitely subscribe though? Try thrift shops, used CD stores, etc if you want to buy.
Try thrift shops, used CD stores, etc if you want to buy.
If you’re buying secondhand, that also does nothing for the artists. You might as well just pirate at that point, unless you’re deeply into the vinyl scene or something
Yarrr 🏴☠️
Over time the streaming options are almost certainly more expensive.
Personally I am an advocate for piracy, an economic system that requires the enforcement of artificial scarcity is not one I consent to bind me. We need a system that rewards artists without locking culture and art behind a paywall.
The only reason it works the way it does now is that music used to come from physical totems. The internet requires a new and progressive approach to intellectual products.
Okay, but I can access my full library from anywhere at full quality from multiple devices, I have several 5,000 plus song playlists with little to no overlap between a few of them and I have had CDs lost or stolen and had drive failures delete digital libraries. But sure.
5000 song playlist
That sounds like digital hoarding. Why do you need a 2 week long playlist?
Shuffle
I don’t do it personally, but from what I understand, it’s really pretty easy to set up your own self-hosted music server to stream from.
I have jellyfin for movies/tv because there isn’t a more convenient option available. I am not going to VPN from my phone or anywhere to home to play music when Tidal is available.
I pay for the discovery features. Then I get my music locally.
Isn’t the discovery free? Lol
You kinda need to listen to stuff to prime the discovery algorithms lol
Not for the real discovery (👁 ͜ʖ👁)
Really hard to get normies to see this. They’re sucked into how easy it is and soon they’ll be fed nothing but ai slop music so corps dont havr to pay artists a cent. Yay future?
Ill hold onto my records and cds, thanks.
What’s really hard for me personally is understanding why people see streaming services as some sort of antithesis of purchasing physical albums.
You know you can do both, right?
I listen to tonnes of music, expand my tastes via a streaming service, but when I find a band that I become a fan of I purchase their albums.
I replaced radio, not albums, with streaming services.
Oh yeah I understand that. The problem is streaming commoditized music even worse than it already was, making it even more worthless. And now 99% of the population wont even buy a cd, and the artist gets even less money than before.
Back in the day, you had to get the record or cd to hear what you wanted. And to me thats what made the strong bond between artist and listener. Its no wonder a large majority of young people have no strong feelings toward music. Also, im not some old man, im pretty young, but I can see the changes.
Also, why would you replace radio with streaming services when literally thousands of internet radio stations (many donations ran only) exist all over the place?
I think people are quick to latch onto streaming because they saw ads for it and thought it was the next Big thing they had to be a part of. We have had internet radio for 15+ years.
The problem is streaming commoditized music even worse than it already was, making it even more worthless. And now 99% of the population wont even buy a cd, and the artist gets even less money than before.
All the more reason to promote services like Qobuz, which pay the artists much more than Spotify. Last I checked it was around 12 times more per track.
And I don’t know if income from streaming doesn’t balance out what artists used to lose to piracy.
Back in the day, you had to get the record or cd to hear what you wanted
Where I grew up there used to be a music store in the city centre. You could walk in, grab an album and listen to it for a bit in special listening stations. If you decided you liked it, you could buy it… or give the clerk an empty tape (or later CD), and they’d copy it for you for a quarter of the price.
By the time those kind of services died out, Internet was good enough that people would download music and burn it on CDs themselves.
Yeah, you had to get the CD, but it’s not like every single person listening to a CD meant any money went to the artists.
Also, why would you replace radio with streaming services when literally thousands of internet radio stations (many donations ran only) exist all over the place?
Because I’d need to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours to check if I enjoy the particular brand of radio. And what if their program didn’t line up with my daily commute to work? Nah, I prefer firing up “artist radio” on the train and, if I hit something I like, just quickly drop it into a playlist of things “to check out later”, then grab the whole album where the song was and listen to it.
I would never buy an album after hearing a single. Twelve Foot Ninja had an amazing song, one I really, really enjoyed, but the album was - to me - completely trash. It was literally like a diamond in a pile of shit situation. Can’t verify that listening to the radio.
I think people are quick to latch onto streaming because they saw ads for it and thought it was the next Big thing they had to be a part of. We have had internet radio for 15+ years.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad for Spotify in my entire life. Maybe because I browse with an ad block…
I latched on to streaming because it gave me exactly what I needed - the entirety of my discography at my fingertips and then some, no ads, no talking, and the potential to discover excellent new music - all of that while actually giving the artists something for the trouble.
My favourite thing to do is use shit like Spotify and google and stores I hate to FIND the thing I want, then I go get it in a different, nicer store lol. For example I often use a place called Emag to find all sorts of products then use compari.ro and pricy.ro to find the best prices for that item.
I just don’t use Spotify. I pay for Qobuz which pays something around 12x more to artists than Spotify does.
For some reason pirating music libraries is really hard. Probably bc everyone uses Spotify
Get a library card! My local small town library has access to a surprising number of nearby libraries, and if I’m willing to wait a week or two for the item to be available and get transferred, I’ve been able to get some decently non-mainstream stuff for free. For more obscure stuff, bandcamp is pretty awesome.
https://1337x.to/ has been my piracy go-to for years and they’ve rarely missed.
Hint: Discography is what you’re looking for if you want everything the artist made.
Try Usenet
I do have a Qobuz subscription, I just rip whatever I want to listen and stream from my home server.
You can also do a free trial for a month and just use a disposable e-mail to redo it every month, if you don’t want to pay anything.
Man, Spotify were the ones who did it. Like they made the service so significantly better and more convenient than pirating that most of those pirating actually switched.
Not a fan of the platform anymore since the heavy push for sponsored content, removal of audiobooks and the whole Joe Rogan thing, but still credit where it’s due.
The built a thing by burning investor money to artificially lower the price and sell out high on stock IPOs is still going strong I see.
And by massively underpaying the actual artists that create the content that fills the platform.
