And we’re not concerned that they fund and heavily promote on their services extremist content and disinformation by the truckload?
So they realised Spotify hosts Joe Rogan?
At least in the US, I’m absolutely destroyed that people just don’t care. They talk like they care, but they just fucking don’t. I don’t get it at all. They will gripe about how evil and bad something is, then just keep using it. “If everyone else is, so will I” maybe. Group Inertia.
People don’t wish to help fight the war on drugs. Why should they? Are you destroyed by people’s indifference to drug advertising or are you making a general statement not necessarily about this story? Are you okay with legal prescription drugs being advertised? Or is it the illegality that’s a moral issue with you??
Legal drugs should not be advertised either. Drugs or other treatments should be prescribed by a doctor based on a review of the actual symptoms and side effects to the patient. A drug advertisement will generally tell you the key words to tell the doctor and may be missing other factors.
I have symptoms C, L and Q. What treatment plan will be best. Vs. I want drug X because I have symptoms X Y and Z.
That said, I read the OC as a protest to Spotify and their predatory practices in general.
I’m just trying to find out what about this is upsetting for the person I replied to.
I mean I think there’s nothing wrong with advertising OTC meds, which is also legal here. Might sometimes let you know about a product you didn’t know existed at all, common ones being gas relief drugs and joint pain creams.
Advertising prescription meds is just weird, feels very wrong, and I don’t understand how some countries don’t ban it.
I think it’s more that most people just aren’t aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren’t any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what’s the alternative? Sure there’s a few Linux phones out there and that’s almost an alternative but it’s not there yet. You could go with a “dumb” phone, but for most people that’s not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.
If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they’d probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.
What’s an example of an alternative with a really great recommendation algorithm?
Things like recommendation algorithms are difficult for small companies/individuals to provide. Let alone the library of music.
No algorithm but buying physical media again is one path.
A few months ago I got a couple CDs and I’m hoping to rebuild my collection and get off Spotify. It supports artists better, and YouTube is still there to help discover new music.
Buy a CD a month instead of your service. A roll back for technology of course, but worth trying imo
Our musicians are getting fucked with streaming services and I like directly supporting them.
Since you asked, in the US at least I would say Tidal’s is quite good. Not a small company, but an alternative.
Plexamp does a pretty good job with the radio features, granted you will have to torrent stuff you’re not necessarily familiar with first. If you have a few friends who also share their music libraries with you it can really help by including their tracks in your radios.
Wait, PlexAmp allows for multiple libraries?
Settings > playback > radio > include external media
“Consider tracks from shared servers and TiDAL”
Also if you just mean multiple libraries like switching between them, click at the top. I’ve got 4 of my own and 1 from a friend here.
Also, there’s an app called Prologue that adds audiobook support to Plex’s libraries. Or rather, it parses the metadata that Plex refuses to parse.
Basically, Plex doesn’t read audiobook metadata. It just refuses to. It can still play audiobooks, but it treats them like 250 hour long albums. Which is… Well… Not great. Especially when a single chapter can be 10-20 minutes long. But Prologue does parse metadata.
You log into Prologue with Plex, then it uses Plex’s remote access to actually read the audiobook files. Then it does its own metadata parsing directly on your phone. So the Plex server isn’t doing any extra work to serve the file, and no config changes are required on Plex’s end. But on your phone, you get nice pretty chapters, bookmarks, speed controls, etc…
I tried to get Audiobookshelf to work for a day or two. It just refused to read or write anything to my NAS. Everything was configured properly on the surface, and it appeared to work… But then it would lose my added audiobooks every time it restarted. After throwing myself at it for about two days, I gave up and found Prologue.
Thank you, friend. I do have two different personal libraries, but was unaware of the “external” libraries option.
I would welcome sharing libraries with you, if you were into such things.
It’s 2025, and Spotify still doesn’t offer lossless audio. Don’t understand why anyone would keep using it with so many alternatives available.
Really? This is your concern about Spotify?
Seems like a more important concern than some people using Spotify to sell drugs
Clearly most people care more about other factors than they do about audio quality that isn’t even discernable through their Bluetooth earbuds.
It’s actually worse than lossless being discernable or not on bluetooth - people cannot reliably tell between high-quality compressed audio and lossless audio generally. This has been studied to oblivion - the jury is out, there’s no more discussion to be had on the subject.
Just the other day I was listening to the new Linkin Park album on Spotify in a car with a friend (no fancy speaker system)
We both thought it sounded kinda low quality so we switched to youtube and the improvement was instantly noticable to us. Spotify just sucks. At least if you are used to HQ audio
Yeah seriously; unless you’re an audiophile who spends extra on quality headphones, your Bluetooth buds are probably using the SBC codec, which cuts off frequencies at 16kHz and thus is hardly better than listening to a 128Kbps MP3. (In Android you can see what codec your headphones are using by going into the developer options.)
And to be honest, if you care enough about sound quality to spend extra on the high res tier in your streaming service of choice, you’re probably using wired headphones. Audiophiles don’t fuck with Bluetooth.
Ldac only for me.
Nah I have a few different ones and aptx adaptive is pretty solid.
It’s funny because it wasn’t until I started producing music and driving samples that I realized 320kbps mp3 IS NOT the same nor is it comparable to lossless audio
As for the whole “audiophile” thing I don’t even know what to make of that.
it’s the social features and the network effect. if you want to make a playlist and share it with your friends the easiest way to get them to listen to it is to host it on spotify. also blends, collaborative playlist, jams, and now listening all provide the illusion of connection through a shared listening experience. and it’s not so much that these things are better than what we used to have for sharing music, it’s that corporations have all killed our ways of sharing music. that’s what they really hated about groove shark. artists made more money in the groove shark era, but umg, sony, and warner didn’t control how we shared on it.
Just switched from iPhone to Android. If your Bluetooth headphones support aptx you can definitely hear the difference
The recommendations are hard to beat, but I hate how these moderns streaming platforms make you a passive listener. My most enjoyable music listening days were when I actively managed my music collection.
I haven’t even thought about recommendations - I’ve never used the recommendation system on any music streaming platform. I’m fully hands-on with my music. I actively use the internet to discover new artists and curate my own playlists and library.
I do a bit of both. For awhile I was relying just on algorithms but switching to primarily active management the past few years has really been invigorating. Renewed my excitement for music. When I do use algorithms to discover some new stuff it’s being fed mostly from my own curationnwhich is so much better of getting stuck in a loop where the algorithm recommends something, you select some favorites and then it recommends off those. This starts to really dull and homogonize your library after awhile.
I need to go back to this, never should’ve given it up honestly.
I am interested in alternatives. I stopped paying for Spotify when they were pushing Joe Rogan so hard, and YouTube Music isn’t really doing it for me for a variety of reasons. Any good suggestions?
I use Apple Music, and I’ve also tried Tidal and Deezer. They’re all good. I recommend taking advantage of the one-month free trials each service offers and seeing which one you prefer. At the end of the day, it really comes down to personal preference.
This is a bigger change, but I switched to Bandcamp and listen to music I own. I like the process of finding music I like and saving it to my wishlist, and I mass-purchase whenever Bandcamp Friday comes around so the artist gets the whole paycheck.
It depends how much music you listen to though, and how much variety you need day to day. Realise it’s a bit more involved than algorithm based streaming but I also feel a lot more like I’ve built a library just for me.
I would also recommend Pandora. I’ve had a family plan for years so I don’t know for sure but there used to be a free (ad supported) tier that you could check out. And to reiterate comments from above, custom playlists and song/album play on demand is available (though some tracks are only available in discovery mode).
I use it because it’s free and tolerable when modded (on pc at least), and a lot of my favorite artists drop there. I get to check new releases, and if something isn’t there I’ll check other platforms. I will never pay for spotify on principle though.
I second this.
