EDIT: The only reason why I still had it at this point was because I could use it with other apps. However, now that my Spotify Subscription is cancelled, it doesn’t work with anything. It’s mildly infuriating because today, I can’t still use it with other apps like I was able to yesterday.

Please don’t make the same mistake I made. No one should buy this.

      • uis@lemmy.world
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        Sadly he is always right. I wish he was wrong all the time.

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            Thank Faust there are times he is wrong! At least I know we live in not the worst world imaginable.

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                Oh even without the controversies, the eating of miscellaneous foot attachments is wrong enough on its own.

                Edit: I do btw fully agree with rms being a crude piece of failed excrement

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                  I didn’t mention that? I don’t write on Wikipedia.

                  But don’t you think his views on pedophilia are unacceptable? He says he has changed his mind and that’s great but doesn’t excuse what he said.

                  I usually agree with his views on software but the rest is often questionable

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      “Just find another job place to live head unit”

      -deliberately obtuse bootlickers

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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      Something tells me they just didn’t realize someone would buy a Spotify car play without already having a subscription.

      I mean really, you’re too cheap for 9.99/m but you’ll drop 100 bucks for something your phone already does?

      Seems like OP is just in a very unique situation that Spotify didn’t expect anyone to be in.

      • RanchOnPancakes@lemmy.world
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        They say never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence. But with a corporations I’m pretty sure its the other way around.

        • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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          I’d usually agree but this product seems exclusively intended for someone who’s heavily into Spotify, and the marketing clearly states you need a subscription.

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              Knew what? That people buying the device already have one?

              You still have it backwards. They didn’t sell you the device to get you on the subscription, they assumed only people with money to spend on a subscription would WASTE A HUNDRED BUCKS ON SOME DUMB SHIT LIKE THIS.

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                Am I missing something, or would basically any old smartphone work in place of this? I have a Pixel which sits in a cradle and takes care of anything I’d use this for. I guess a physical button or dial might be nice, but I have a volume dial on the car dash.

                Seems plainly obvious that it’ll require a sub. It’s a Spotify box.

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                  You’re correct, I have a five or six year old kindle fire i got for like 60 bucks that I rooted and installed stock android on, it’s just a really cheap tablet now. Works perfectly for stuff like this.

                  My last smartphone would also have worked.

                  This whole thread is just a bunch of moron-consumer apologists. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate corporations and their practices, but this is just a bad purchase and buyers remorse packaged as big corpos fault.

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          I mean, on all the purchase advertisements they said you must have Spotify premium to use this.

          They subsidized the price the device based on the expected return from convincing people to keep their subscriptions. Since it supports other clients they probably also have to manage software updates.

          Spotify is a bag of dicks for a lot of other reasons but this really doesn’t seem to be one of them.

      • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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        9.99/m is 119.88/y and it doesn’t stop. Maybe OP thought that the purchase was a one time purchase, and I don’t really blame him, since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?

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          I don’t really blame him

          He bought a piece of convenience tech designed for a specific piece of software, when said convenience tech is totally unnecessary to the function of that software, then got mad that he needed the software

          I am shocked that everyone in this thread isn’t roasting this dude nonstop. He’s an idiot.

          • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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            They just don’t consider personal responsibility to even exist. It’s the corporation’s fault they spent a hundred bucks on a thing your old phone and a 15 dollar magnetic mount could have done for you, because said device needs a subscription service.

            I had a guy tell me in this thread that I had “privilege” for saying Spotify didnt expect people without a paid subscription to be spending money on such an overpriced device. OP is throwing hundo’s away on stupid shit but it HAS to be the corpos fault somehow, people will toss logic right out the window to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay.

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          Doesn’t stop? You sign on the dotted line for a lifetime of payments? You can’t cancel your subscription?

          since why would the thing exist if phones with a subscription can already do that it does?

          That’s the exact logic that would lead someone with an ounce of intelligence to go “oh yeah, this product is a completely stupid piece of shit that’s marketed toward people with more money than brain cells.”

          Did it say anywhere on the package that it gets you a lifetime subscription to Spotify? No. Does OP understand that Spotify works on a subscription model? Probably, Saas isnt fucking new.

          This is the kind of boy-who-cried-wolf bullshit that keeps corporations from actually being held accountable, because people who want better worker’s rights and taxes on corporations look like idiots when lumped in with children like you who consider personal responsibility and thinking for yourself to be too scawy.

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    I cancelled my paid Spotify account because I can’t get them to stop fucking recommending Joe Rogan to me.

    • Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.ee
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      I’m moments away from canceling. Splash screens of some bullshit podcast or something I don’t want to see. Getting fed up.

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          Search for Github SpotDL And Navidrome

          No need to sail them seas, but maybe still use a vpn, just on case. Fun fact i heard from a friend of a friend: Youtube starts rate limiting after 50,000 audio-only video downloads, until you have a new IP.

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              Im not audiophile so I scrape audio with newpipe. Downloaded and stream quality are indistinguishably satisfactory.

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              I’ve also noticed that sometimes it downloads the wrong versions of songs. While my Spotify playlist has the album version of a song, it might sometimes download a live performance audio or a reprise version.

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              It’s free. You’re getting “free” quality. Actual quality anything costs money or requires theft.

        • dingus@lemmy.world
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          I have hundreds upon hundreds of songs in my Spotify music library. Downloading them one by one sounds like hell. And then I wouldn’t be discovering new music either.

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            If you want to move them elsewhere(or even just get a csv export of them) there are apps for that.

            https://freeyourmusic.com will let you pay a one time fee to do it to as many services as you want, it’s a bit slow but it’ll get there eventually.

        • Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.ee
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          ive donated to slsk. I like the song radio and album radio features of spotify, found one of my favorite bands that way

      • histic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        leave em sail the seas or tidal for the same price you get better audio so win win in my book either way

    • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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      Allegedly, YouTube Music is about to shove podcasts in our faces with a soon to come update.

      I’m leaving YTM if they do that. I’ll go back to ☠️⚓⛵ and using locally available music.

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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      I’ve been pretty happy with YouTube music. I got legacied in due to Google Music shutting down and thought I would hate it, but I’ve had zero complaints. Plus, it comes with free YouTube Premium, so I haven’t seen an ad in years.

      • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
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        I would say the same myself. They don’t do the worst job for music discovery either which is important to me. Amazon Music drove me nuts constantly recommending Cage the Elephant and other well-known (profitable) artists instead of obscure music similar to my tastes.

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        Same. Honestly, I expected YTM to make things worse. That’s usually how those kinda things go. But it actually did get better for me. I jumped to Google Play Music because it had better selection than Spotify (at least back then). YTM kept that, but fixed the issues I was having with the desktop browser player sometimes getting stuck. And the more recent support for lyrics that are synced to the music is great.

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        Their queueing system sucks. All I want to do is queue up some songs but instead YTM fills my queue with tons of crap I’ve never listened to before because that’s how they make money. They put my manually queued songs at the END of the queue so I have to move them up 20+ spaces. There’s literally no way to do it other than creating a custom playlist every time I listen to music, and they intentionally made that take more clicks/taps than queuing. I don’t get how people are ok with the YTM app, it’s terrible.

        I hate YTM and I hate that I can’t cancel it because they bundle it with YouTube premium, which my partner uses every day. Screw Google and they anti-consumer manipulative bs.

        • nudny ekscentryk@szmer.info
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          Their queueing system sucks. All I want to do is queue up some songs but instead YTM fills my queue with tons of crap I’ve never listened to before because that’s how they make money. They put my manually queued songs at the END of the queue so I have to move them up 20+ spaces. There’s literally no way to do it other than creating a custom playlist every time I listen to music, and they intentionally made that take more clicks/taps than queuing. I don’t get how people are ok with the YTM app, it’s terrible.

          wrong.

          1. you can disable automatic queuing by hitting the ‘auto-play’ switch in UP NEXT
          2. you can queue songs by long-pressing and hitting ‘play next’ (which will put it in front of the queue) or ‘add to queue’ (which will put it in my the end
          • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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            No, I’m not wrong. Option 1 does not exist on my phone. There is no switch.

            And the “play next” feature also sucks. I don’t want to “play next”. I want to build a queue like literally any other music app and that isn’t what “play next” does.

            Edit: I don’t see that “auto-play” switch on the web app in Safari either.

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              yes you are, it must be there unless you’re using an obsolete release of the app. Below is a screenshot how it looks like

              yes, you can build a queue by “adding to queue”.

              • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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                So I finally figured it out. this is how that toggle works:

                • it only appears when you manually search for a song or select a song from certain groups on the home page.
                • it does not appear to appear if you select a song from “listen again” or “quick picks” in which case the app forces you to listen to whatever is in their queue unless you manually clear the queue.

                So no matter what it’s still a bad experience.

                • nudny ekscentryk@szmer.info
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                  oh yeah, you are right-ish. it doesn’t show up if you launch a “radio”, which innately is a automatic, end-less playlist of similar music. I do agree though that this should be more visible in the UI

              • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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                No. I’m not wrong, and I don’t appreciate you repeatedly telling me I am when you obviously have no clue what I’m looking at.

                It isn’t there. I’m on Android 13 with the latest version of the app. There is no “auto-play” toggle anywhere. I’d upload screenshots to prove it but lemmy is throwing exceptions. I’ve checked every tab and settings page as well.

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      There’s literally a feature on Spotify where you can hide an artist and never see it, fyi

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    That’s really dissapointing, did Spotify seriously release a hardware device that expensive, and mandates a subscription to operate?

    It’s a shame because it looks quite nice too, and is sadly guaranteed to be e-waste at some point

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      Are you kidding me? It’s been par for the course as far as car assessors go. Sirus radio was like 100 and still required a subscription. A lot of GPS were that price and most had subscriptions.

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        Don’t know why you’re being downvoted - enshittification as a viable consumer business model was pretty much proven in the auto space.

        Just like they want to charge you to use the heated seats you’re paying the gas to lug around anyway

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          Just like they want to charge you to use the heated seats you’re paying the gas to lug around anyway

          That’s not the same thing at all. As bad as e.g. Sirius or GPS subscription might be, at least with those the subscription is for ongoing access to new data being transmitted to you. In contrast, a subscription purely for the use of hardware already included in the car is literally theft.

      • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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        Just because it’s percieved as normal doesn’t mean it’s something we should put up with though.

        With GPS subscriptions (the ones I’m aware of anyway) they will still navigate you from A to B when you stop paying the subscription, you usually just miss out on traffic updates, map updates and other localized enhancements. If there are any that deny you navigation outside the subscription that’s plain scummy IMO.

        I’m not familiar with Sirius Radio but from what I can see online, it’s a satellite radio subscription service that seems to bring new things to the table (like starting a radio station at the beginning of a last song etc). The hardware appears to actually serve a purpose, i.e. it’s the satellite receiver for the radio service subscription. I believe we could compare this to buying a Starlink dish for internet access, and paying the monthly subscription. The spotify device shown here is not a standalone device and is only fitted with bluetooth IIRC, requiring a phone for operation.

        In comparison to Spotify, Sirius does not appear to have ever had a free plan - whereas Spotify does… I see is no reason why Spotify could not make their free plan usable on this device.

        Edit: fix typo

        • Hyperi0n@lemmy.film
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          The device is free to premium users. It’s a marketing device for the premium subscription.

          The box clearly states that a premium subscription is required.

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        Those I don’t fault. Sirius has satellites to maintain and they don’t get ad revenue.

        GPS makers, well making maps on that scale is very expensive. Not everyone can be google and give it away to end consumers by harvesting user data and selling ads to businessplaces.

        Spotify though, fair enough to charge for the hardware but once bought should work with the ad-supported version of their product…

        • Hyperi0n@lemmy.film
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          The hardware is free for subscribers…

          If you buy it outright it tells you that you need a subscription.

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        I think I got an Echo Auto for $25 (during the public tests). It doesn’t need any kind of a subscription to use as far as I’m aware. It only does streaming still, but there are Alexa skills that let you stream from your Plex or Jellyfin server.

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      I mean, it’s basically a cheap smartphone or computer tablet, with a lower resolution, but nice quality screen, and a giant volume spinner. $100 does not get you much at all in the phone and tablet space. I don’t think there’s much of any profit margin, if at all for it.

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        Poor-poor multibillion company has to nickle and dime you earn sometging to eat

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      I considered getting one of these a couple years ago and saw Spotify was discounting them heavily and even giving them away for free in some cases. I didn’t wind up getting one but do wish they would release a simple player + speaker like this for home use.

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    Why would you even buy this? Literally just buy a phone mount and use your phone. This thing was a textbook example of a useless product.

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      Seriously, what does this do that a phone doesn’t? Am I missing something? Even early Android/iOS devices could run Spotify in their time (although not always anymore). What does this do?

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        Whenever I’m driving, my phone is almost permanently mounted as a GPS. I also own the car thingy, it has very intuitive hardware buttons and a dial on top of being touch screen. This way I can leave my phone on the GPS screen and adjust Spotify controls on the car thingy without taking attention of the road.

        The only real shitty thing I would argue is that you NEED Spotify premium not just to control your Spotify, but also to control youtube/mp3 player/ any other media that you would want to play through your phone.

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    They named their device “Car Thing?” Just looked it up. Why not just buy a phone mount and play through your phone?

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    Deception followed by coersion is an excellent way to increase shareholder returns.

    Why do you hate capitalism?

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        You’re quoting capitalism’s sales pitch of capitalism.

        Go to your local tent city in every city if you want to see what “voluntary” looks like, dying of exposure and police capital defense force harassment while serving as capitalism scarecrows to keep the working poor scared shitless into “voluntarily” showing up to be exploited for already wealthy people’s further profit for their unquenchable greed.

        Capitalists aren’t even willing to admit being greedy, only acting on “rational self-interest.” If you want to believe what capitalism claims to be, you do you. If you want to see what capitalism is, use your senses and your critical thinking skills.

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    I have a car thing, I use it at my desk for media controls. It is pretty great.

    But the product description was pretty clear that you needed premium to use it. The same goes for using any third party Spotify client. Shouldn’t have expected otherwise.

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    What is this device? I’m confused as to why it even exists.

    Edit: I discovered it is literally called “Car Thing”.

    • Candybar121@lemmy.world
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      I’ve never heard of it before, it looks like a smartphone that doesn’t do anything other than have the spotify app? Like is there any mapping or calling built in? And to lock hardware like this behind their premium subscription is wildly, not mildly infuriating.

      • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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        Man we’ve hit the point where people don’t even know about Sirius or XM radio do they? You paid to listen and you had to pay for the receiver, oh and likely an adapter to get it to work on the vehicle too.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          I got a SiriusXM antenna thing and they paid me for it lol

          My car radio (a Pioneer one I installed many years ago) supports SiriusXM; I just had to get the right receiver for it. SiriusXM were having a sale where you’d pay $70 for the receiver but they’d give you a $70 rebate, making it free. During the rebate period, Crutchfield had a sale where they reduced the price of the receiver to $30. I bought it for $30, filled in the $70 rebate form, and they gave me the whole $70 rebate.

          I’ve been on a $5/month promotional plan for a few years. Whenever the price goes up, I complain to them and they reduce it back down. It’s a pretty good service for $5/month, since you get both satellite and streaming included. Satellite is good since it works all over the USA - good for road trips.

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            Oh jeez that’s not a bad deal at all, and that’s almost what I was doing. I would just let the subscription/deal lapse and they would call and ask why I didn’t renew. Told them I’m not paying $15 a month and than they offer the $60 for a year or 2 years.

            At the time they didn’t even have dedicated car units, you had to have one of their portable units, and an am/fm adapter or tape adapter.

      • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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        All it provides is a simplified ui and voice control, the same voice control as the Spotify app. It doesn’t even play the audio, it is a remote for the app on your phone which is doing the real work.

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    I have the hobby of cracking stuff like that (but mainly windows apps to tell you the truth) and there are many-ish people out there with the same hobby. search around a bit and google stuff like “Spotify Car Thing github” or “Spotify Thing bypass” or jailbreak. Heavily rely on github and russian forums. Also random small blogs

    If you’re so determined though and nobody else has done it and you’re fine not using it for 3+ months, there’s a very slim chance that I could find the time to bypass it

    EDIT: Yeap it’s cracked and it’s easy too

  • atomicfox@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    And? Their site clearly states that a premium subscription is required.

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t have expected them to do it any other way. The only reason why Spotify is still around is because every bit of competition is even more incompetent and greedy than they are

    • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      As a consumer, Spotify competes for my money with Bandcamp, who gave their cut to artists throughout covid.

      Owning things is always a better model than renting them (edit: exceptions exist, none of which I need to be @ed about)

    • N1cknamed@feddit.nl
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      Spotify is the only subscription service in my life where I’d happily pay twice of what I am paying currently. I can miss all the other nonsense but not Spotify. It’s probably my most used piece of software. Just to throw another opinion in the mix here.

      People suggest downloading and maintaining an MP3 library as an alternative, but my god, no thank you. I remember those days, it was awful. On average I’m adding like 10 new songs to my library per week, I’d dread having to scour piracy sites for those. Then you have to keep it all synchronized between your phone, laptop and pc. Some obscure stuff will inevitably be unfindable, which means you have to resort to youtube mp3 downloading. Half the time you’ll be forced to manually add tags and album art to your files.

      Alternatively you could pay for each album individually. I’d estimate my entire library would set me back €2000 at least. And then you’re still missing out on the social features, music discovery and cross-device functionality, all of which I use frequently.

      For me Spotify is an incredible product that is well worth the money it costs. I am a very happy customer.

      • 🍔🍔🍔@toast.ooo
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        1 year ago

        totally agree. and plus i kind of want to be charged money here. i want the musicians i listen to to get paid and be able to continue making music. i don’t know if the amount they get paid vs spotify’s cut is fair, but honestly if I wasn’t paying my monthly subscription id probably be paying $0 and listening to less music.

      • dingus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I have hundreds upon hundreds of songs in my Spotify music collection. The people telling me to just pirate my library are absolutely wild. I can’t even imagine how long it would take me to find and download every single song. And then I wouldn’t have a simple way to discover new music. Spotify is the one and only subscription service I find to be useful.

      • deur@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        Its crazy seeing people go apeshit just because spotify costs money. One of the least fucked up subscription services and yet they are mad because it isnt free. Come on guys :(

      • PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I tried Tidal back when “Amazon Music HD” launched and I was on a hunt for the best lossless streaming. My only issue with tidal is their catalogue. It is laughably deficient. In the end I found zero good lossless streaming options and went back to ripping my own CDs.

        • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Compared to when I first tried them a few years ago their catalogue has gotten significantly better

          About 6 months ago I took my 750ish songs from Spotify over and only the FFXIV game tracks didn’t get imported in the move

          Compared to like 60 or so percent when I last tried I’d say it’s come a long way

        • dinckel@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Same exact issue here. Lossless content is great, but their library is miserably poor in comparison

    • nocturne213@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      even more incompetent and greedy

      even more incompetent ****or greedy

      Napster pays artists more, costs less… but the service was garbage.

    • usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I still buy CDs and rip them. All the music I want on my phone ready to play from headphones or the car

      • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I just bought a CD player a few weeks ago. It’s not very good (it’s a combination CD player/alarm clock, and the speakers are crap) but it’s nice being able to just put a disc in and press “play” instead of booting up one of my game consoles or plugging in my USB optical drive. I’ve started hitting up second-hand stores for CDs to play with it.

        • wieson@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I think Spotify is 12€ p month. Let’s say 10€. A new album costs about 10€ digital or 15-20€ as a CD.

          So you could buy a new album every month and build up a catalogue.

          I buy them used for about 2,50€ an album.

          • lud@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I don’t always want an album though. Sometimes I just like one song on an album.

            Spotify is just so convenient. I have over 5000 liked songs on there.

            • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              I just download from youtube with yt-dlp or using blackhole app to import spotify playlist or using some telegram bot to download songs from spptify links.

              Convenience is because you have been using it and made your liked playlist there. I download the songs I like and play it locally because that is even more convenient to turn of mobile data or put airplane mode on and play song with much longer battery life and no other app notifications. Also you can play it on any device with the added benefit of not getting tracked and getting advertisements

              • lud@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                You can also have offline mode on Spotify, my desktop has downloaded all 5000+ songs.

                Also yt-dlp is just piracy with extra steps. Might as well pirate the music to get it in good quality.

                • mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 year ago

                  Offline mode on spotify is local media with extra steps. Offline mode is premium only. Also you still get tracked with the proprietary app. Spotify songs cannot be played in your favourite music player, device or whatever. I can copy some songs into sdcard to play it on an old speaker set.

                  Pirated music gets more convenient than what you paid for. Moreover, restricting saving and sharing media is kinda dumb and does not actually hurt artists or their revenue

        • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, I love streaming for music. About $10 a month and I get seemingly every song I’ve ever looked up. Streaming video has a lot of problems with fragmentation, but music doesn’t seem to have nearly as bad of an issue. I use YTM and have never not found what I wanted to listen to. $10 is like the price of a single CD (or was – it’s been well over a decade since I’ve even looked at the price of CDs).

          I’ve also listened to a lot of full albums on streaming (it’s often what I do when I discover a new artist that I like) and there’s never an album that I’d want to buy every song from. My music tastes are also very diverse. My liked songs are full of tons of songs that may as well be one hit wonders to me. That doesn’t translate well to buying CDs.

    • Acters@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I stopped listening to music, radio or nothing. I’m tired of being constantly stimulated, I desire peace and quiet

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      I actually really love the idea of spotify, but their execution is fucked. Joe Rogan’s getting billions and musicians who make up the overwhelming majority of the plays get microscopic returns per play. That’s bullshit.

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    1 year ago

    I mean to be fair, Spotify as a company clearly would rather give millions to right-wing shitheads than ~anything else.