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  • A while back I realized my phone has 256GB of internal storage and since I don't take pictures or put anything else on it, I was running around with 256GB of free storage wherever I went.

    And that's pretty much when it clicked for me that I was paying Spotify for access to music I already have from the pre-spotify days for a convenience that no longer is valid.

    I dove into my box of CD's and DVDs and put the 30 something gigs of music I collected since the mid 90's on my phone and haven't used spotify since.

    EDIT: and, yeah, I've re-instanced my music, movie and series downloaders and went back to sailing the high seas.

    I switched to Netflix/Spotify, because of the convenience and timing of release they provided, they were also more reliable in terms of quality ("free" versions labeled ass 1080p often aren't actually 1080p, etc).

    But the sheer cost of Spotify, Paramount+, Disney+, Netflix, etc, etc, etc to listen to and watch what I want, has made the convenience/cost calculation move from being acceptable to being even more than what it used to be buying CD's and DVD's.

    On top of that the audio and video quality have deteriorated over the years, availability has become spotty, at best (like certain services removing movies and shows, even some removing movies and shows you paid extra for), we're also dealing with these services pushing ads on top of us already paying subscriptions and fragmenting their market to the extent everything has become entirely unaffordable.

    I used to buy maybe 2-3 CD's in a year and a boxset of a show and a movie once a year.

    Now simply subscribing to every service that has something I want for just 1 month costs more than what I spent per year previously.

    Gabe Newels words are still right on the money.

    Piracy is a service problem and the service provided these days makes Piracy the better option, again.

  • Ugh, spotify soot again?

    At least according to spotify (it would probably be illegal for them to lie anyways), Spotify pays almost 70% of revenue to rights-holders (whoever distributes the thing, e.g. record labels), which means they take about the same cut as Steam. Good luck complaining about that.

    You often see people citing the $.003 per stream for rights-holders figure for Spotify. That's not exactly what Spotify decides! Spotify pays rights-holders share of the 70% of the revenue based on how much they were streamed. TL;DR: Spotify pays rights-holders slices of pie based on how much their artists help bake. So, if artists aren't getting payed enough, Spotify simply isn't getting enough revenue despite reinventing radio for its free tier!

    Not to mention how certain rights-holders (fortunately not DistroKid) gobble royalties away from artists. And, the author's solution to (insert @Nougat's comment here)?

    (On a side note: I hate Tidal free, because it "doesn't" have ads! Every single interruption I've encountered so far is the generic Tidal announcer telling me to subscribe to premium. Sometimes I even get a freaking video "ad" on cellular data telling me the same thing, and there are only 4 "ads" in total! There's no variety! It's just repeating! Aaaaaaaaa (dw just yelling me name

  • How do you deal with discovery?

    That's the hard part for me, the only way I find new music is by it ending up on a continuous playlist or something similar.

    I have broad tastes, which makes it difficult to not be boxed into a recommendations genre on many platforms (Spotify included).

159 comments