Musicians have long criticized the streaming service’s paltry payouts, but a new wave of boycotts is emerging
I started using Qobuz a couple weeks ago. Haven’t cancelled my Spotify subscription just yet but I think I will.
It has every band and song I’ve searched for so far. Missing some features from Spotify (like “Start a jam”), but overall I’m happy to not be supporting them anymore.
Always on the lookout for a streaming service that can actually distinguish between different subsets of metal.
Spotify and all the popular alternatives, I’ll seed a playlist with some symphonic metal, and within like 5 songs it sounds like a troop of howler monkeys having an orgy ontop of a pile of guitars and drums. Not quite my cup of tea. I want it to sound like band and orchestra nerds having an orgy ontop of a pile of guitars and drums… is that too much to ask?!
Opposite experience for me on Qobuz. Start it off on some Dillinger Escape Plan, it’ll be playing Judas Priest within about five songs. No no, I’m here for the screaming.
Assigning a genre to a band is fine for those that ‘stay in their lanes’, but for bands that are a bit borderline genre, experiment a bit or get more (or less) hardcore over time, one label maybe isn’t appropriate. I’d like to see something more like “Steam community tagging”, where us users can put appropriate tags against each song / album / artist, and then be able to search based on tags. Takes some work to set up, but once it’s going it should be relatively low effort for the platform, and lets the metalheads argue amongst themselves who belongs in exactly which genre.
Provide an alternative with a better user experience, or users won’t switch.
Quobuz, Tidal, et al need to rapidly improve their feature set to match Spotify (primarily group / jam sessions, recommendation engine, and device / app support) or this proposal has less hope than convincing everyone to go back to pirating.
recommendation engine
I’ve been a Spotify subscriber since 2009 (you cannot shame me more than I’ve shamed myself), and their recommendation engine (algorithm, as I prefer to call it) is fucked. First of all, it will recommend music where they pay the artists the least, so they can take more money themselves. And it’s the same fucking songs over and over again, basically no matter the playlist “made for you”. It’s literally the same 200 songs.
They changed their genre classification tags behind the scenes in 2023, around the time they fired the guy who ran “Every Noise at Once” and ruined almost all value the service had.
Couldn’t care less about most “features” these services have, my issue is the fact that Spotify is the only one that has a decent catalogue of more obscure stuff I listen to.
I tried Qobuz and the very first artist I searched for, it didn’t have. Liking quite a lot of obscure artists is a curse.
That’s the main reason I dropped Spotify and streaming in general. It just really bummed me out when making playlists and not finding my favorite songs to fill it.
convincing everyone to go back to pirating
Nothing wrong here. Btw many artists already claim that streaming is like piracy.
steve albini told fans to pirate his music because he didnt want sony getting even a penny 😂
Navidrome and piracy.
I support this movement by never having had a Spotify account.
You guys heard of Subvert?
No but sell me
Well, it’s an artist co-op. Artists own part of the platform, so they can control how it works and what decisions are made.
Instead of being at the whims of some profit-brained tech CEO, the artists vote on what the platform does – it’s a democratic way to control the future of the internet, or, in this particular case, of music streaming, sales, and merch for artists on the internet.
I think it’s pretty cool, but it’s not a thing quite yet. They’re aiming to open this year, though. We’ll see.
The nice thing about this model (band camp, subvert etc) is that they don’t have network effects:
Just because artists I like are on bandcamp there is no extra ‘cost’ for me to get that one artist from subvert. That means that artists are not locked into the biggest platform.
