alt Hacker NewsThere are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
[1] Qobuz has the highest per-stream pay rate in the industry by like 40%. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/discover
[2] Tidal is the widely-available service with the second-highest pay rate. https://tidal.com/
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Well obviously you could just pirate it instead right? Like piracy or not, spending more money or listening to less music are not the only options. Hell you could not pirate it and just listen on youtube - that's another option.
The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.
I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible as is discovery and they suffer the same problem the others do with their supplied catalog being flooded in fake songs attached to real artists as “ft.).
Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.
That probably depends on how you listen to music. I still have a qobuz family subscription but barely use it. Mostly I listen to new albums on Bandcamp, and if I like them enough, I buy them.
I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.
One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.
> ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
Certainly not. As to how, I don't believe I need to provide instructions.
The main issue with streaming is that you own nothing, and also get snooped on.
If you really want to "stream" NewPipe is as good as any streaming service.
There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.
If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.
Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.
It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).