At this point Spotify offers less than competitors with Spotify hi-fi being a bunch of imaginary bullshit. I only subscribe to spotify when they offer me 3 months for the price of one.
What competitors do you recommend?
I use soundcloud and have used Bandcamp but Bandcamp got sold to Epic.
I have also heard of Faircamp which looks promising.
well, i am an audiophile myself and i do think having lossless out of principle is pretty reasonable, even if you can’t tell the difference. especially with how fast the internet has gotten, we don’t need to compress anymore. and with serious sets of headphones (even with DT770 pros) i can definetely tell a difference between an internal DAC and a 20€ external DAC. the better the components, the more expensive the product (plus audiophile tax).
edit: i read up on it and it turns out a properly compressed file is basically indistiguishable from an uncompressed one. (emphasis on “properly”)
so you may have a point, but if the people want FLACs, why not let them have them?
and if you spend little money on audio equipment, good for you if you like it that way, but people are allowed to spend money on stuff.
I switched to a TIDAL subscription a couple of months ago. The whole experience, apart from sound quality, is a downgrade from Spotify Premium. I still recommend it to people because supposedly they pay a better cut per stream to artists. The sound quality upgrade is quite noticable if you have good sound gear.
I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn’t so god damned difficult to upload my own music. I have an eclectic collection of music and though, to be fair, I haven’t listened to a lot of it in a while, I would still like the option. Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn’t worked for me. So right now I use YouTube Music because it’s so easy. I may switch to Plex now that I have a decent internet connection.
They can’t exactly afford to go higher than the round 10 we have a month. It will cost them a lot of customers just from the sheer inconvenience caused by the change in gift cards.
This effect would happen even at just 1 cent above the convenient pricing. That means if they increase the price, they have to make up for the immediate loss of “convenience users” which means higher price again which leads to an exponential spiral.
We are more likely to see ads being forced into Spotify premium.
A higher price I can stand but ads in a paid service? If they do that, I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t just use ublock origin with Spotify on the web or a modded APK instead.
Mark my words, a Disney style price raise is in the cards, probably before summer 2024
At this point Spotify offers less than competitors with Spotify hi-fi being a bunch of imaginary bullshit. I only subscribe to spotify when they offer me 3 months for the price of one.
Raising prices would be absurd.
What competitors do you recommend?
I use soundcloud and have used Bandcamp but Bandcamp got sold to Epic.
I have also heard of Faircamp which looks promising.
one of my friends uses deezer, there is actual lossless audio there.
tidal is also supposed to be good, but i heard horrible things about the app.
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well, i am an audiophile myself and i do think having lossless out of principle is pretty reasonable, even if you can’t tell the difference. especially with how fast the internet has gotten, we don’t need to compress anymore. and with serious sets of headphones (even with DT770 pros) i can definetely tell a difference between an internal DAC and a 20€ external DAC. the better the components, the more expensive the product (plus audiophile tax).
edit: i read up on it and it turns out a properly compressed file is basically indistiguishable from an uncompressed one. (emphasis on “properly”) so you may have a point, but if the people want FLACs, why not let them have them? and if you spend little money on audio equipment, good for you if you like it that way, but people are allowed to spend money on stuff.
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Tidal brought FLAC this year, so this MQA critique doesn’t really apply anymore.
I switched to a TIDAL subscription a couple of months ago. The whole experience, apart from sound quality, is a downgrade from Spotify Premium. I still recommend it to people because supposedly they pay a better cut per stream to artists. The sound quality upgrade is quite noticable if you have good sound gear.
Nice I will give Deezer a try.
Epic already sold off Bandcamp to another company (songtradr) and it’s probably not an improvement.
Apple Music is also very good. Lossless at no extra cost.
I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn’t so god damned difficult to upload my own music. I have an eclectic collection of music and though, to be fair, I haven’t listened to a lot of it in a while, I would still like the option. Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn’t worked for me. So right now I use YouTube Music because it’s so easy. I may switch to Plex now that I have a decent internet connection.
It’s easy enough, just add your music to the Music app on macOS.
The Windows version of iTunes is terrible anyway. The Music app on macOS is much better. Can’t you hackintosh it?
They can’t exactly afford to go higher than the round 10 we have a month. It will cost them a lot of customers just from the sheer inconvenience caused by the change in gift cards.
This effect would happen even at just 1 cent above the convenient pricing. That means if they increase the price, they have to make up for the immediate loss of “convenience users” which means higher price again which leads to an exponential spiral.
We are more likely to see ads being forced into Spotify premium.
Given the recent successes of other streaming platforms integrating ads into previously ad free levels, I think you’re right.
A higher price I can stand but ads in a paid service? If they do that, I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t just use ublock origin with Spotify on the web or a modded APK instead.