this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Can't even seek through songs.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This is literally just commercial radio.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Spotify is losing money, they gain nothing by having free users, if they convert some people to paying customers it's worth it for them. You can't expect to listen to music for free when license holders charge ridiculous fees.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yet they can bring in the fear factor blockhead and other hot garbage for how many hundreds of millions of dollars?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's funny, Rogan lost me as a listener right around the time he made the Spotify deal.

At the time I actually had Spotify premium too, I just wasn't interested in the conspiracy right wing shit.

Then I pretty quickly got fed up with Spotify and dropped my sub altogether.

YARRRRR.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean there are ads.. does the ad revenue not counteract the licensing fees?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How many people use ad blockers?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's not like when an ad is served and seen by the user, the user always buys the advertised product...

They should come up with ad blockers, that block the ad on the user side, but did the system behind it, the ad is still being served and no one loses anything.

I guess, this is, what the ones are doing, that still work.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's like the big awakening of licence holders. Like someone finally explained to them what the internet is, how it works, etc. All around, things are starting to get re-structured in the way it worked in irl before. The same charges and middlemen.

The gates to the open internet are being closed and the registers are being set up.

We're also not a consumer anymore, but a subscriber. A subscriber can be traced, bound to your product for a lifetime.

I only hope that, unlike movies and series, big labels don't get the idea of starting their own music streaming services and end the licensing to all existing music streamers.

For now it's like Netflix in the old days. All streamers have about the same catalog in music.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can’t expect to listen to music for free when license holders charge ridiculous fees.

Except I can - there are amazing artists out there releasing their music for free.

Spotify is losing money

Then why are they still in business? Oh, that's right - because that's bullshit. The make-believe capital of the company may not be increasing, but I'll bet you the owners are lining their pockets.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They are a public company that was $4B negative free cash flow last year. The employees get paid, but I’d love for you to describe the mechanism where a board member derives value when the stock has tanked over the past two years unless you are saying that they are shorting it, which would be public information and get them kicked off the board typically.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

... Except they gather your data and use it to try and make profit.

Say least radio required them to give genuine value to you. Radio had to give away shit and run contests to get caller info to figure out how many listeners they had, to get advertisers etc. It was a real business.

Spotify just buys the music catalogue and then forces you into their ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Data gathered: you listened to the music we selected for you. Not the best data

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your search data and history.

Listening profiles: what tastes do you have, and what other things do you like? If you like Ray Lamontagne and Taylor Swift what else might keep you on the platform?

What % of people like X? What sorts of trends are happening in music? Chord preferences, rhythms, bpm, etc

All of this aggregate data can be sold to different companies, record labels, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Search data no

Because you never choose

History no

Because you never choose

Listening profile no

Because you never choose

What you like no

Because you never choose

None of this can be sold if they never chose what to listen to. It's data suicide

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You pick songs, they squeeze ads and other songs in between (IIRC) and can gather data from how you interact with all of that.

You're understanding the value of big data.

It's why I reject all of these services. CDs, baby!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ahhh okay. Yeah cds rock xD

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Except it seems like you can still skip forward. That's not something you can do with radio.

In addition, radio has those incredibly annoying station identification bullshit announcements like "You're listening to JFRH, the cooooolest FM station in the greater Grumug metro area!", often with annoying sound effects like lasers and so on. Even worse, they often interrupt the music to have an ad for the station, in which the station-ad claims that this is another hour of ad-free music.

It's shitty, but it's not as shitty as radio.