- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...
- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...
They recently did the annual “Wrapped” release. It took over the iOS Home Screen widget I use for playing/pausing recent playlists. The widget was unusable until you (1) watched the wrapped video in full on that device (didn’t matter that I had watched it on other devices before) and (2) you had to listen to the playlist they generated of your most played songs.
- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves
- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change
[1] https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla...
1. Spotify made a playlist that's "Chill Jazz To Study To" that's really popular.
2. They realize that listeners don't actually care about the specific artists in the playlist since it's background noise.
3. There are companies who specialize in making "b-roll" music for background noise and have a huge library of it just sitting around.
4. Spotify realizes they can license them on the cheap.
5. Profit?
Seems like a win for everyone involved including the listener who gets fresh tracks in their study playlists basically forever.
Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.
>Engineered to suit you, building cheaper thrills
>Music of rebellion makes you wanna rage
>But it's made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age
The Sound of Muzak by Porcupine Tree (2002)
Its only use case seems to be algorithm playlist. It’s an atrocious music player any other way.
Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.
"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?
The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.
> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote
1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own
2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).
And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.
Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).
As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".
And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".
Performative outrage is performative.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.
> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform
Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.
So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).
Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.
... 1000 plays in a year?
We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.
If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?
- the chief executive invests money into AI weaponry https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-12/spotify-boycott-danie...
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
My Apple Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2mvmybjr225
My Youtube Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m5ms6fxsrs27
The other thing is I actually do get a lot out of the suggestions and daylist of Spotify. I guess there are some 3rd party recommendation systems out there now (pulling in data from last.fm scrobbles) but I'm not aware of something that would be as easy and have such an integrated result.
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own. 2. There are no advertisements in the paid service. 3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
They have an impressively large amount of music available. In addition, they price songs at $0.16 USD/song —- or cheaper if you deposit more money onto the platform and.
This isn’t piracy (money is flowing to artists) and you get to own at a fraction of the cost of iTune, Qobuz, or other platforms that charge around $0.99/song
https://law.stackexchange.com/q/499, https://archive.is/EZ2U3
I did the math once for my Spotify liked songs list [1] and it came to $52k for the last 15 years, or $288/month, if I were to self host, without piracy.
We have been doing double blind test in HydrogenAudio.org for a while, and it shows most people won't notice (at certain levels of encoding).
[1] https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-10/lossless-listening-a...
I wanted a nice native client for Linux instead of using the web app so I wrote one in Rust. Shameless plug: https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
Or if you follow any contemporary artists who will drop a new single on any given day (which is usually not available for purchase), I much prefer being able to just go into my streaming app and press a button to start listening as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
Apple Music and YouTube Music also let you upload your own files to a cloud locker and stream them from any device, so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself. Best option IMO
Sure it is. Music discovery via algorithmic services is not the only way. There's radio, talking to people who have similar interests, reading interviews with musicians who talk about other music they like, browsing selections at the library, reading books about music or musicians, even just reading the liner notes for an album, noticing some players you like and finding other things they've worked on, and on and on and on. It doesn't have to be high effort, it's not instant, but it works great.
I tend to listen to albums in full, as the artist sequenced them. I get recommendations from friends and niche communities, then follow specific artists. When I start listening for the day I'll pick a known artist or set of albums, queue them up and go on with my day.
As with almost all arguments against exercising privacy, this is merely a failure of imagination on your part. Spotify doesn't give a shit about your taste.
Next time you listen to music, think about all the possible data that could be observed simply from you pressing play. What time of day is it? What day of the week? Which device are you using? Where is that device? Is this an unusual genre for you at 8pm? And so on. "You listen to indie rock" is harmless data. "We know the all your emotional states from the past 10 years and also those of your whole family" is at least a little scarier, right?
Combining large amounts of data about how you use a single app can tell a lot about your life. You may say this is overblown, but if you do want to hold a true belief instead of a convenient one, start by acknowledging the enormous amounts of data Spotify actually has about who you are and how you live.
They don't care much about your music taste, that's not the valuable data they're collecting and reselling. They're tracking your location, habits, address, email, passwords, billing info, extensions/other apps, locations, etc etc and storing it insecurely to be easily acquired by people with arguably even less scruples than the corporation they're taking it from because the cost to store this shit securely is higher than the fines/consequences from a data breach, so why bother? All of that (meta)data is for more valuable to them and the numerous "bad actors" that data-harvest them on the regular.
> as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
This can be automated, which can also be a form of curated music discovery.
> so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself.
With what? All that music you yourself assert you aren't acquiring "manually"? Sounds like self-hosting with a couple of extra steps to me.
> I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
I can't tell if this is ignorance or arrogance, but it's laughably out of touch either way, especially in this day and age. You can just say you're too lazy to fuck with it, don't know how to do it, or don't socialize with people that share your music tastes. It's fine.
There's numerous examples in this comment section of how to do music discovery without subsidizing a company that takes advantage of both the artists that users listen to, and the users themselves, and self-hosting is in no way a barrier to that.
It doesn't stop there. The business model of cloud and streaming services is to charge the customer, and then sell the customer's interactions with the service to third parties (data brokers), who cross-correlate the information obtained with other sources to build very detailed individual profiles.
You would have to go lengths (throwaway identity, email, payment with gift cards, VPN, etc.) with each streaming service to effectively prevent this sort of tracking. And after that, you will still own nothing. Worse, the streaming company may even ban you for using a VPN, or refuse to play the content on free devices because DRM can't be enforced. It's complete madness.
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/
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).
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.
Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.
I did not find this to be the case. Someone gave me a few months trial on them recently and I found the interface to be the only one out of the streaming services to give a shit about customers that prefer listening to albums. None of the other major streaming services I've tried do. (not Apple, Spotify, nor Tidal). My only real knock on them has been their catalog seems to be the smallest of the majors.
Spotify was always trying to push some unrelated garbage when I had them like podcasts which I would never want to listen to and especially not the types they kept pushing (wasn't even popular ones like Rogan, it was stuff like male erection help and jesus podcasts lol). They also tried to weasel in audiobooks, which again isn't something I'd ever want in a music app. I think they even tried to do tv shows for a brief period of time. All these things pushed me away from it.
Besides all the other reasons Spotify is a terrible shit company it just sucks for discovering albums. No way to turn off playlist and single recommendations. It prioritizes recommending new stuff that's in genres I don't listen to. The only nice thing it does do is support last.fm (which Qobuz and plexamp also does) so I can scrobble there and get actually accurate recommendations through that.
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.
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.
Radio Paradise [1] and Radio Swiss Pop/Jazz/Classic [2] are two great ad-free ways to discover new music. There are probably tons of others out there.
[1] https://www.radioparadise.com/ [2] https://www.radioswisspop.ch/en
There is also Troi[1], a tool provided by ListenBrainz to generate playlists and radios from your local music collection.
There's also a recommendation engine via YouTube Music.
I primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.
Still doing the modern version of mix tapes.
Haven't lost anything, and is with a smile I observe kids today being responsible for the revival of portable tape and CD players.
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
[0] - https://www.navidrome.org/
[1] - https://musicbrainz.org/
[2] - https://github.com/LAION-AI/CLAP
have a service running here if you're into electronic music and want to poke around https://cosine.club/
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
For iOS I ended up building a small app for my own setup that streams files straight from the NAS (SFTP/FTP) over WireGuard/Tailscale so no media server in between. TestFlight if anyone wants to try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM
I haven't tried it, but there is a program called Finamp that is specifically for music streaming from Jellyfin and supports both iOS and Android.
I left Spotify during one of the many scandals they've had but I think this was in 2019ish based on where I was living and I just can't remember what it was. Possibly not paying the artists enough? This was pre-Rogan. Can't say their actions over the last few years have made me regret the decision.
I ran Navidrome and then Jellyfin alongside TIDAL and then Apple Music for a while, but the UX is just so much better with my own stuff and finding things to add is fun. I wish I'd spent all the money I spent on music streaming services over the past 15 years on buying music instead. Vinyl is more expensive now (I buy it anyway), but used CDs are dirt cheap and ripping them is fun.
1. How do you deal with various devices (Roku, Smart TVs, ...), as most don't seem to have VPN apps for them?
2. How do you deal with airplay? My ipad can VPN to my home network and access jellyfin when I am away, but Airplay doesn't work, as the stream isn't available to the device I am streaming to.
My jellyfin (and navidrome) on my home server has me very happy with the basic set up. Both are internal only, as the only service I expose is wireguard. But I haven't solved the two issues above, which also keeps me from being able to share my jellyfin with my family.
Airplay and Chromecast are a different story. Maybe someone else here knows different, but while it's not literally impossible it doesn't really work because of mDNS. A layer2 VPN might, but not so much on Tailscale/Wireguard.
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)
- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent
- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns
I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.
However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.
Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.
I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!
It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)
If we assume an artist gets 1¢ per stream of a song, and that album is 10 songs long, you need to listen to it 100x for the artist to get the same as just buying a $10 CD from Bandcamp.
I understand this example is missing the cuts given to other parties (label, etc) but it is still more to the artist than streaming unless you obsessively stream the same albums repeatedly.
Spotify is cheaper because your favorite local indie band makes far less from it.
Additionally, thrift stores have loads of CDs you can rip for extremely cheap.
For movies specifically, you should consider paying substantially more than you would on streaming if you watch any substantial amount of movies. It is very hard to fund good movies with only streaming revenue.
It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
It's not as independent but if you're already paying for YouTube Premium it seems reasonable if you don't want to host your own media server.
TIL they somewhat resurrected Google Music and raised the limit (I think it was 20k on that). I used Google Music for years because it seemed like only Spotify and them figured out reliable caching on mobile, other services when I'd lose signal they'd give up trying to stream... even noticing recently apple music is not super reliable with that.
The UX isn’t perfect (still see a ‘download’ option for things already downloaded, for example) but it’s not terrible.
I still miss my iPod from time to time, though.
You can play uploaded songs in the background, ad-free and offline—even if you are not currently a YouTube Music Premium subscriber.
Did not expect that.
Even from official retail channels like Best Buy and Amazon a 1 year Spotify activation code in the US is $99, so 8.25/mo. But you can get cards from gray markets like G2A and it's only like $26 a year.
Edit: and of course bandcamp exists but I wouldn't call their collection extensive.
FWIW I both rip, losslessly and verifiably, my own CDs to FLAC (lossless but compressed), I run Plex (tried JellyFin and going to switch) and yet I still pay for Qobuz (I don't see why I'd pay for Spotify when lossless streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz do exist: additionally Qobuz allows to buy DRM-free song individually).
Now, and that is not a snark: I both rent dedicated servers since decades now and run Proxmox at home.
I thought "self-hosting" meant hosting on your very own hardware, at your place (e.g. from your home).
If hosting on a rented virtual server is "self-hosting", then I take it hosting on a rented dedicated server is self-hosting too? But then what's the difference between a company renting servers and deploying its apps there? That one is registered as, say, a LLC and that the other is an individual?
So "self-hosting" depends on whether you're an individual or a company?
Sounds like a weird definition of "self-hosting" to me.
It’s a co-op of artists.
Streamers eventually own the song outright if they listen to it enough.
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
Sure, there are plenty of people who get their kicks from record stores and soundcloud, but to properly make it, you need to be where the ears are.
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I do not like them now.
.. could have purchased a few 512GB microSD cards (assuming it is not iPhone, iPad). I have all my data offline. I can also use a uPnP on android to share it across all of my WiFi network be it TV or another persons phone.
- Commercial subscription services are getting worse
- Self hosted solutions are becoming better
Jellyfin is a really nice piece of software & Navidrome looks really cool as well! And in some (not all!) aspects the open source alternatives are even better than their subscription equivalents.
€11 - €6.49 = €4.51 profit per month
The author is angry that his Spotify subscription becomes slightly more expensive, now running at EUR 12 per month instead of 11. So his solution is to instead rent a EUR 6.50 per month Hetzner server plus a storage space that starts at EUR 3.20 per month (next bigger tier is 10.90). Which means he is now paying at least EUR 9.70 per month for infrastructure, and he has invested a whole bunch of time, and he doesn't even have any actual music, because that would cost extra.
- Subscription services getting worse
- Open source / self hosted solutions becoming better
Self hosting is also a learning experience / hobby.
And I'm still subscribed to other streaming services! However I get more and more annoyed of getting worse overall products for higher prices.
