Wait, free users of Spotify could not pick which track they listen to???
Well, on PC or tablet you always could, but on mobile it was always album random shuffle… and if you created an album of less than N songs, in mobile they added related tracks in the reproduction (radio-spotify like) so it remained not possible to control what you listen…
EDIT: I updated the verb tenses to the fact that now you can in the mobile app chose the song to play
This is why I never even gave Spotify a chance. It didn’t make sense to me.
No, you could tap shuffle on an album-by-album basis, or on a Playlist with like 10+ tracks or something.
cool, my “music” folder filled with mp3s could always do that
I’m so confused. Couldn’t you always pick what track you wanted to play?
Nope. At some point spotify forced FREE users to shuffle play playlists. You couldn’t pick which specific song you’ll hear first. And with ads, obviously.
Damn, when I joined way back when, you could pick the track you wanted you just couldn’t skip and had to hear ads. Being able to pick a track is the whole reason I moved away from Pandora.
I’ve recently moved away from Spotify and to Pandora, ironically.
Pandora premium let’s you play whichever track you want, they are not longer exclusively stations, but their station algorithm is the reason I decided on them over other spotify alternatives
pandora was the shit like 10-15 years ago.
me too …
I like tidal a lot. They pay their artists the highest percentage last i checked, and they have sound quality as their main selling point. The station algorithm is a little bunk though.
I am slowly rebuilding my mp3 library after switching to streaming 15 years ago when it was the hot new thing. Hopefully i can ditch them all together soon.
Right now, it’s Qobuz that pays the most, and they also sport lossless audio formats as well. Tidal’s still a good pick, as far as music streamers go, though.
Neat, are they available in the US and as affordable as tidal?
I think it depends on whether you used the web interface or mobile app. Mobile app was more restrictive.
Currently, for free users, only PC or tablet allows to control what you listen (caveat occasional ads) but mobile constraints to a shuffle reproduction of albums, and if you dare to do a short album they spice it with additional related tracks, so you are never in control of what is likely to play…
EDIT: well, apparently I can do that also on my mobile app, I remember in the past some glitched occasions bit it seems is real now…
Easier to let users play music for free when you don’t pay the artists I guess
None of you were. Y’all were stealing it for years.
Lol, I’m a vinyl nerd, I’ve probably given more money to the music industry than to anything else except food
Rent?
Touché. Gotta admit I didn’t think it through properly, there’s probably a bunch of other things as well. Point is I think I’ve provided the music industry with more money than it strictly deserves.
Especially with the price of concerts these days. Jesus.
Talk about projection
is spotify being desperate, or there is an ulterior motive?
YouTube Music allows this, maybe they’re losing ad money on the people that weren’t going to get premium anyway.
Spotify being nice? Absolutely not. There certainly is a hidden agenda behind this.
Probably ads. It’s always ads.
I don’t mind ads, probably because I never see them. :)
My theory is, since they’re releasing lossless audio for premium users, they had to make the free version more appealing to the casual user.
I love product updates as part of my technology feed…
I miss old technology feeds in the classic internet days. That actually posted and listed out cool stuff with technology
RSS is still going strong. I’m in the process of shifting my screen time from lemmy to RSS. Just articles, no comments. Makes me realize how addicted I’ve been to comment drama, I say as I post a comment.
Winamp with a cool custom skin and downloaded mp3s was better than Spotify imo.
I know it’s cool to shit on spotify and streaming services on Lemmy, but personally I disagree. I loved Winamp and had tens of thousands of songs back in the day, downloaded on my zippy 56k dial up connection. But being able to search for and play virtually any song available instantly and share collaborative playlists, no matter where you are, is so much better.
Why would I decide what I like to listen to when am algorithm can do it for me?
I fully jumped on the Spotify bandwagon hoping the algorithm would decide what i listen to, I’d become stuck in a rut and hadn’t really listened to anything new for a good 15 years.
Well… After letting it figure my music tastes out, every single automatically generated playlist on there starts off with crap I just immediately skip before devolving into the same 5-10 songs I listened to pre-Spotify. So i guess it knows my taste well? But it has turned out to be useless for this too!
I dropped my Spotify account after last price hike.
me too. I pirate instead now.
wow the music app finally lets users select music! I’m sad that this is actually something to look forward to.
Be happy it was free and ads could probably be blocked.
Would you appreciate it more if they blocked the view of the library like the videostreamers like Netflix or D+ do?Idk I haven’t used the free tier of Spotify in a decade. I think add supported listening is enough and all features should be available to the free user except offline listening.
And I think that’s sufficient enough for free.
Though non-random playback is a nice addition :)
Too late, already got sick of their shit and went back to downloading everything myself. I have to have two media player apps on my phone to account for podcasts and music but it’s still better than using spotify. Probably a better way to do that too but haven’t been bothered enough to look into it.
I still let spotify to discover me things from time to time… but regularly I download/obtain those that I like, I never abandoned my offline library, I am old enough to know that nothing online perdures…
Call me a hardcore Spotify fan boy: I paid for Spotify for 15 years, I loved it, I even applied to worked for them. The product was great and unmatched so as I didn’t care about the problems, so many problems. things were getting progressively more problematic but in the end, King Gizzard convinced me to quit. I don’t regret it a single minute. Fuck Spotify.
I had an account day 1 when Spotify launched in my country. It was such a big deal to me, a person who spent their teens and 20s hoarding music. One service and it was most of the music I wanted. I could sideload my own music and shuffle it all together.
I miss that little app store on the desktop client. You could join shared radio stations and vote on the next track while people wrote to each other in a chat.
Spotify is trash anyways.
I’ve not seen anyone recommend an alternative like Qobuz in these “fuck spotify” discussions - I think it’s a good honest alternative?
I use Musify on Android. (From the F-Droid store) It pulls the music off of YouTube and works pretty well. Save playlists,download individual songs, it has recommendations but u didn’t know how they work.
I was looking to try Qobuz, but they didn’t like my email domain, so skipped it.
I have a custom domain and they accepted it a couple months ago - maybe give it another shot if it was a while back?
I switched to Qobuz, it’s great!
I recommend <your jellyfin instance>.
Jokes aside, the only reason I use Spotify is for discovery and the vast catalog (primarily the JP music market).
And I havent seen Qobuz be mentioned in any capacity by japanese artists.Ah this is an interesting point. I think Qoboz are active in expanding their libraries and they do take requests on site. Do you have any JP recommendations - its not a region I’ve ever really listened to?
Japanese are difficult to deal with.
It sure was a process to get them to release on Spotify. Before that they tended to stay on Apple Music.Examples of artists I liked:
Tokyo Health Club - J-Rap but a bit more lo-fi
-> One of my favs: https://youtu.be/GSRfeUHZZN8
-> Honorable mention: https://youtu.be/ErLSUsqERm8- Crazy Beats (Touhou - Eurobeat Remixes)
-> Just open any of their songs and listen ;) - Akatsuki Records (Tohou Remix - All kinds of genre)
-> Same here - Hololive (A group of vTubers that also release music of all kinds of genre)
-> https://youtu.be/twUFbqyul_M
-> https://youtu.be/WGgEFoI9MhE - Ado (Also very diverse voice and genre selection. But usually more towards pop and pop-rock-like releases)
Thank you! I’m going to have a listen through these this week - you may have just broadened my horizons!
My pleasure :)
- Crazy Beats (Touhou - Eurobeat Remixes)
Seen the recommendation plenty of times.
Is it better than TIDAL? I’m interested in switching to either of those, perhaps.
I only used Tidal a while back during a free trial, so can’t comment too much. I think Tidal might have more wide spread functuonality adoption than Qoboz - but they do seem to be pushing out updates to meet feature parity.
Qoboz has been great to use though. I actually find I get a wider spectrum of recommendations than Spotify. Spotify seemed to type cast my current listening habits agressively, and it would take a while to break out of that loop each time.
Cool, thank you!
Any experience with using it in a car system?
Like a caveman, I just plug in and use my phone to control it!
At home I do use an amp thay supports direct play, there’s a few companies that support Qobuz in thay way - and self hosted options too. To make use of the fidelity.
I haven’t used Spotify, until recently, since it was first released. Its big value over Pandora was that it let you choose what to listen to…when did that change?
I’m using spotx on Linux so I don’t get ads, can search individual songs, etc. I thought the free tier was just ad supported, I didn’t realize that they didn’t let you pick what you wanted to listen to.
only premium subscribers could pick individual tracks previously
What a ripoff.
Oh, there’s a Spotx for Windows too. There ya go, anybody using Spotify free who doesn’t want to buy into the tiering enshittification go patch your Spotify client. No ads, pick your own tracks, like Spotify used to be when it was a new and a good value for the service.
I’m just too lazy to find a music private tracker and setup Lidarr, I’ll do that eventually and then just stream through Jellyfin like one of the cool kids.
The desktop application (both Windows and Linux) allows free users to pick tracks. The mobile application does not.
That makes sense, thanks.
I use a laptop for a mobile device so I haven’t bothered with the mobile apps yet. It seems like the same kind of client patch could be done with revanced.
