Spotify has raised prices for the second time in a year, with no new benefits, after its CEO sparked outrage by claiming the cost of creating 'content' is 'close to zero' : technology

[-] owatnext@lemmy.world 199 points 5 months ago

innovate its product features

What. It's meant to stream music. Tf do you mean?

[-] NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world 190 points 5 months ago

The bad Ai dj. The car thing they rolled back. The new logo that's the same as the old one, but now border. The cache that causes you to hear the same ten songs multiple times in a week.

[-] noodlejetski@lemm.ee 119 points 5 months ago

the playlist saved for offline playback that will still try to connect to the internet for like 30 seconds when you open it while actually offline. the Discover Weekly playlist that will serve you the song that you've marked as "not interested" over and over and over and

[-] serpineslair@lemmy.world 62 points 5 months ago

The UI that gets progressively worse with each update, ruining what was perfectly fine before. The attempts to create the audio focused equivalent of TikTok.

[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 43 points 5 months ago

The way shuffle constantly shuts itself off even when set within the settings to be the default. The shitty Smart Shuffle that adds in songs that break up my playlists terribly. The way it plays the same song again the first time you enable shuffle and hit next.

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[-] b3an@lemmy.world 29 points 5 months ago

The cache part pisses me off. I'm fucking paying you to stream me music. Not the same fucking shit over and over and over again.

[-] doctordevice@lemmy.ca 14 points 5 months ago

I really don't get it. Users have been begging for a true random shuffle for years. It's not a hard thing to implement.

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[-] dinckelman@lemmy.world 45 points 5 months ago

If anything, they've taken features away from people lately. The quality is still shit. Lossless is still nowhere to be seen. Free users are losing options too. Yet they're making record profits, and jacking up the price

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 15 points 5 months ago

Spotify actually doesn't make that much profit, if any.

But the record labels are major shareholders and definitely influence the pricing structure. Spotify is essentially a marketing frontend for the record industry.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 17 points 5 months ago

I am literally looking at their financial report for 2024 Q1 and it shows a profit.

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[-] can@sh.itjust.works 113 points 5 months ago

So now that Tidal has moved its Hi-Fi tier price down to match Apple's wtf is Spotify doing? Charging more than the competition, paying artists less, and not even offering lossless?

[-] Infynis@midwest.social 48 points 5 months ago

Spotify is less vulnerable to customer churn compared to TV/movie streaming services, as users are less likely to switch music streaming providers due to the hassle of rebuilding playlists and losing personalized recommendations.

[-] can@sh.itjust.works 33 points 5 months ago

There are services for transferring playlists

[-] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 18 points 5 months ago

yes but often there are some mixups... which is a PITA for those of us with ~10K+ songs

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[-] dmtalon@infosec.pub 21 points 5 months ago

And as long as people keep subscribing to them, they'll March right along collecting that sweet money.

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[-] Ganbat@lemmyonline.com 98 points 5 months ago

Remember: Stealing from big, evil corporations is morally correct.

[-] moon@lemmy.ml 67 points 5 months ago

The average person: Spotify sucks and is making me hate them even more

Shareholders seeing layoffs followed by AI replacements for those workers and then repeated price hikes: 🤑

[-] jorp@lemmy.world 37 points 5 months ago

The myth of capitalism is that it improves things for the consumer. It's very obvious that it only improves, at best, the next quarter's returns for the investor. Once that husk of a company stops "line going up," the money goes elsewhere and we repeat.

If the line can't go up through creation it'll go up through destruction.

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[-] mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world 53 points 5 months ago

Spotify Premium in practice has new benefits!

More specifically: Lyrics that they took away from regular users some time ago.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 16 points 5 months ago

They fucked it up for premium users too, though, since they've done that. Half the songs that I knew to have lyrics either no longer have them, or they constantly "fail to load."

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[+] ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world 52 points 5 months ago

[deleted]

[-] bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone 24 points 5 months ago

IIRC this means the family plan costs more than 3 individual plans did like 3 years ago. If not more than it saves you like $.50 in comparison. I would try and look it up but Google search has also turned to shit so I don’t feel like dealing with it.

The Internet just isn’t fun anymore.

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[-] lepinkainen@lemmy.world 38 points 5 months ago

Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.

Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.

You can influence things with your wallet.

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[+] ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago

[deleted]

[-] bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 5 months ago

Honestly €56 million in profit seems small for an operation as massive as Spotify that has so throughly saturated the market. That does not make it excusable at all. I’m just surprised to see that number.

[-] Infynis@midwest.social 19 points 5 months ago

I'm sure there's tons they've made that their accountants have managed to classify as something other than "profit," so they don't have to pay taxes on it

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[-] Fedizen@lemmy.world 32 points 5 months ago

A "subscriber consent to renew on price increase" law would go a long way

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[-] AshMan85@lemmy.world 27 points 5 months ago

So what is their excuses for older musicians that paid for expensive studio time before the day of home studios? Cause they still pay them like shit too

[-] Got_Bent@lemmy.world 27 points 5 months ago

The only reason I keep Spotify anymore is that I've got a family plan with something like six accounts. I gave those to random acquaintances back in the Facebook days - people who are really into music.

If I cancel Spotify, there are five people out there who are suddenly and without warning going to find themselves without music.

I really don't even remember who they are, but I feel like continuing the subscription is my community service

[-] icedterminal@lemmy.world 32 points 5 months ago

Pretty sure you can see their email address. This should give you the opportunity to message them stating you'll be canceling the subscription. They'll still be able to subscribe on their own.

[-] Bad_Engineering@fedia.io 22 points 5 months ago

I would suggest anyone bothered by this to look into xManager.

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[-] Suavevillain@lemmy.world 22 points 5 months ago

I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 23 points 5 months ago

AOL profited for over a decade on people who signed up for the service and simply lost track of it, paying month after month for something they'd forgotten they even had.

Crazy that these services can just raise premiums whenever they please without even reaffirming that the customer still wants the service. I guarantee that if you needed to re-verify your account on a price increase, firms with big client pools would never raise their rates again.

[-] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that's somehow legal.

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[-] TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world 21 points 5 months ago

Round #451 of telling people to stop using Spotify and consider one of the many, better alternatives.

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[-] Kevnyon@lemmy.world 21 points 5 months ago

For anyone out there, I recommend giving Tidal a shot and for podcasts, I recommend a FOSS app called AntennaPod. This is the combo I use myself, I've been using Tidal for a bit over two years now and just recently switched to AntennaPod.

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[-] PsyDoctah9Jah@lemmy.world 21 points 5 months ago

I'm so grateful, I have thousands of songs and just hit shuffle and made my own playlists. I always thought internet radio was overpriced 😅

[-] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 17 points 5 months ago

Meanwhile every update makes the app worse

[-] chordsphere1@sh.itjust.works 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I just download to actually have the songs. No DRM, No Ads, No song getting removed from streaming service... I have 500+ songs downloaded in opus format and it only takes 2.5Gb with many of them being longer than 5 minutes. I don't know why people keep using these services while they keep saying they hate it because there are so many ads or why they keep paying for DRM (aka. not owning anything)...

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[-] spare_muppets@lemmy.ca 16 points 5 months ago

Just for funzies, my Spotify family plan in Canada is $17.84 CAD, which works out to $13.05 USD at current exchange rate.

Usually Canadians are screwed harder on, well pretty much everything, so I'm surprised that Americans are paying more for this. Guess it's "what the market will bear" or similar nonsense. Please discuss.

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[-] antler@feddit.rocks 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

PSA:

Innertune

Vi Music

Spotiflier

Edit: Maybe check out Ri Music, Vi Music's Successor

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[-] Zip2@feddit.uk 16 points 5 months ago

I upgraded to a decent set of headphones with a dedicated DAC, then realised just how terrible Spotify’s sound quality is, even on maximum. I hung on a while for the empty promise of lossless audio then ditched them.

I’m now increasingly glad that I’m giving money to their competitors.

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[-] NutWrench@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago

Another clueless CEO who doesn't know what makes his company's very existence possible.

[-] queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 5 months ago

Here's a few things that are cheaper!

Soulseek/Nicotine+
Usenet Groups
Libraries (only if your local one has CDs, and often is popular music and no indie stuff) And if you want some album art: MusicBrainz Picard

If you want it on your phone, SD cards are cheaper than ever for big space. Unless you're on iPhone.

[-] Welp_im_damned@lemdro.id 23 points 5 months ago

Unfortunately most android phones are slowly phasing away the SD card slot. The only flagship that still supports it is Sony with their Xperia. I don't know of any major mid-rangers models that still support it. The only low end phones now. But the overall experience is painful.

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