• binom@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    the german tv channel ARD actually published a three-part investigation into Spotify and Eventim middle of 2023 where they spotlighted this issue as well. it’s a great watch if you understand german!

    it’s called Dirty Little Secrets

    EDIT: here’s episode two, the relevant one where they investigate what they call “ghost musicians”

  • perestroika@lemm.ee
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    3 hours ago

    For ease of reading, the investigation he refers to:

    https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

    In short: fake artists with stock music (changing labels and other camouflage applied). Likely goal: to depreciate streaming counts for actual artists and increase profit margins.

    What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

    • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Can I import my history from Last? I’ve had my lfm account for like… almost 20 years, and I really don’t want to have to start off blank…

      • e$tGyr#J2pqM8v@feddit.nl
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        3 hours ago

        yes, you can connect them and you can import from last.fm. I was in the same situation as you, first I had both simultaneously running for some time, because I needed to get comfortable with the idea of removing last.fm. I also have data since 2008 so I felt a bit insecure ‘risking’ that. But after a while I concluded there was really no need for me to keep last.fm so I removed it. Haven’t had any regrets. ListenBrainz isn’t perfect but, despite it’s small development team, it’s sgnificantly improving every year.

        https://listenbrainz.org/settings/music-services/details/ Here you can “Connect to your Last.FM account to import your entire listening history and automatically add your new scrobbles to ListenBrainz.”

  • Sakychu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 hours ago

    “Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians.”

    Oh yeah that worked great with movie and television streaming. I really like to pay the same price for just a tenth of the selection…

  • Pregnenolone@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I have always been surprised that Spotify was so popular. I used them a while back and was abhorred with how shit the experience was. Stopped and never touched it again.

    • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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      17 minutes ago

      Yeah. Didn’t work on Librewolf (only stock FF), the UI was slow, the recommendations (the reason I wanted to try) were pretty bad, the ads couldn’t be blocked properly and left a few seconds of silence in their place (the only site I encountered that behaved like this!), and logged me out repeatedly (sometimes mid-session), presumably due to me using a proxy.

  • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    That it all-around sucks? That I’ve been telling people this since it’s creation? That nobody fucking listens to me? Or that this preview picture looks like ET and Titanic had a mash-up. Or all of the above.

    It’s all of the above, duh.

    • Linedotdatdot@lemmynsfw.com
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      4 hours ago

      I agree with most of this, but how have you never come across Munch’s “The Scream” before? (Have to admit, I lol’d at your description of it tho)

  • geography082@lemm.ee
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    4 hours ago

    So happy I switched to Tidal long ago because the pathetic music stream quality it has. I made me had headaches , literally. For the ones who don’t know Best quality audio streaming are Tidal and Apple music . YouTube music is pure crap quality as Spotify.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre). How was that even possible?

    LOL a couple obvious reasons are that Spotify listeners don’t get to vote for grammy awards - only a few thousand people do - and to be eligible for a grammy an album has to be released in the United States. The awards are more heavily influenced by album sales than subjective judgements of musical quality. Jimi Hendrix never won a grammy. Neither did Bob Marley or Diana Ross. There’s a lot already wrong with the grammys.

    The fake musicians and possibly AI-generated songs are more interesting. If the music industry is trying to eliminate musicians it wouldn’t be to avoid paying them - they’ve already figured out lots of ways to do that - it would be to have complete control over the music.

  • Meltrax@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Anyone use Deezer? How does the feature set compare? How does it compare to Tidal? I’d love to get off Spotify, just need a good replacement for all the music I listen to.

    • StinkyRedMan@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Stopped using it when they arbitrarily removed songs from a rapper cause french prime minister had an issue with his lyrics.

        • StinkyRedMan@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Not about the removal of said songs. But basically it’s a rapper known to use lot of controversial metaphors often using lot of etnic stereotypes in his lyrics about pretty much every communities including his own. Some anti antisemitic association compiled lyrics they took issue with on a video they published on twitter and it reached the prime minister. He then tweeted about starting an investigation on said rapper for terrorist and nazi apology in his texts. It went nowhere cause there is simply no such things in those lyrics but apparently deezer didn’t need a conviction to decide some songs had to go. If you want to search for more details rapper name is freeze corleone, be warned tho, he like to play with controversy so a lot of his lyrics contain conplotist bullshit and dictator/terrorist namedroping. But it’s never about their ideology that’s why talking about apology is stupid imo.

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      I was recommended RiMusic from Lemmy, using the YouTube music selection.

      It has a radio function but it makes wierd presumptions: say I radio off a synthwavey film soundtrack song, it’ll favor more show music that has little in common with the original selection. Maybe it’s just me.

    • helmet91@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      I’ve been using Deezer for almost a year now.

      Things I like:

      • Duo subscription is suitable for long distance couples (this was the main reason I subscribed to Deezer and not Spotify).
      • Wide range of songs, even some pretty rare gems are available there.

      Things I (we) don’t like:

      • As others mentioned, discovering unknown songs is not really a thing on Deezer. Spotify was so good at giving me other songs than what I used to listen, and it aced it. Deezer cannot do that. It only has predefined lists with songs that everyone knows (“hits” in other word).
      • My girlfriend sometimes experiences lags, so probably in Asia they don’t have servers.
    • onoki@reddthat.com
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      7 hours ago

      I have now used Deezer for a bit over half a year after Spotify.

      The song selection is pretty equal. The playlists can even automatically be imported/exported with TuneMyMusic.

      I think Deezer’s best feature is the song radio which finds songs of similar genre, and it really does find songs and artists I have favorited after hearing them. I always found that feature in Spotify to work pretty poorly.

      However, if you don’t have an exact song in mind, finding music by theme is terrible in Deezer. There are few set categories, but the amount of user-created playlists is very small, compared to Spotify.

      I’d recommend giving it a try, but I wouldn’t say its better or worse than Spotify. Just different.

    • Manalith@midwest.social
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      8 hours ago

      I’ve been using Deezer since Tidal dropped Plex support. So far the library seems to be the same as Spotify, at least I wasn’t missing too many songs when transferring my Spotify playlists in.

      I like the built-in song identifier and radio station support. The song quizes are a little gimmicky, but kinda fun. I probably haven’t used it enough for recommendations to get me down, but so far nothing crazy has popped up there.

      I’m not sure if it’s just my phone, but every couple days when I first launch the app, I need to close and reopen it to get it to load, my desktop app constantly throws up a banner saying the app is offline, but it doesn’t actually effect functionality, so it’s just annoying more than anything.

  • BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I dumped Spooterfy over a year ago now, moved all my liked song library to Tidal. I moved to AntennaPod for podcasts too. I never really make playlists, Tidals mixes are usually pretty good. The daily discovery is leagues above Spotify’s weekly shit that would constantly play songs from artists I had blocked. No Spotify, I do not want to be ear raped by 100 Gecs I told you this!

    They pay artists better and it’s been a much better experience. My only issue was I couldn’t easily like songs from the notification bar, but that was added a while ago in an update. It has started playing the same songs frequently lately, but thats not the worst I guess.

    Obviously if you care about supporting your artists, buy thier CDs, vinyls (if you’re into that) or buy them digitally on Bandcamp, streaming doesn’t pay as much as direct support.

    This reads as an ad but I’m genuinely just a satisfied user. Fuck Spotify.

    As someone else here mentioned, Pandora is still a viable option too, hell my mom uses Pandora.

  • crank0271@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    From the article:

    "…journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.

    "Now she writes:

    ‘What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.’

    In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels."

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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      16 hours ago

      Once they get maket shared they start extracting…

      To normal people this is called enshitification

      • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        This should theoretically at least be illegal, as they abuse the power of the platform to favor certain tracks unfairly.

            • Brewchin@lemmy.world
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              12 hours ago

              Spotify is AFAIK Swedish

              It was started in Sweden where its operations are still based, but it’s headquartered in Luxembourg and it chose to IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

              Luxembourg screams “tax efficiency” to me, so their list of pre-IPO investors must be quite the thing.

              • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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                15 hours ago

                I disagree, I live in Scandinavia in one of the best democracies in the world.
                EU is mostly OK IMO. Democracy can never be perfect, because it’s about compromises. But without the compromises you’ll have a real dystopia.
                But here is just about as good as it gets at our current level of development.
                So get real why don’t you?

                • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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                  15 hours ago

                  Sweden has regressing with the rest of the west.

                  Sure they have it better than most of oecd but the corporate take over is underway, they botched the immigration policy which resulted with serious crime rates…

                  A tiny foil wearing person would think that this was done on purpose to undo Swedish strong socio economic policy

                  Time will tell but the trend for Sweden is not looking good same way as other countries…

    • verstra@programming.dev
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      16 hours ago

      Can someone explain why this is bad? It seems like normal behaviour of corporations.

      Or has spotify previously committed to being a fair market?

      • yesman@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        This is like a soup joint that’s trying to see how much they can piss in the broth before customers notice.

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          15 hours ago

          That would be a health hazard, so it’s not really comparable.

          It seems more like a soup joint using cheaper ingredients in their dishes, which is just… normal? I don’t get what the big deal is.

          • jonathan@lemmy.zip
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            15 hours ago

            It’s normal if you accept it. You do not have to accept it. There’s also a good chance that it’s illegal in Spotify’s case, if not in the US then likely in Europe.

              • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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                13 hours ago

                Likely antitrust.

                That said if you’ve gone down the path of reasoning that says things that aren’t illegal are okay, then I don’t know what to tell you.

                • catloaf@lemm.ee
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                  11 hours ago

                  I suppose you could argue that Spotify can abuse its position in the same way that Walmart bullies its suppliers and Microsoft freezes out competition, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening here. Like I said, it sounds like they’re just preferring cheaper sources.

              • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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                13 hours ago

                This is behavior is anti competitive under both US and EU and member states’ law.

                Issue is the regulatory capture along with strong corporate lobbying on these issues.

                If you are with it, that’s cool. But behavior has historical precedent and it requires the state to set boundaries on the extraction practices

      • CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee
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        15 hours ago

        IANAL but it seems akin to the antitrust case against Microsoft for bundling their own web browser in with Windows or movie studios also owning theaters and giving preferential treatment to their own films.

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    There’s a reason why artists have to sell 50$ t-shirts at shows. Back in the days, the label would leech you dry, and now it’s Spotify, on top of your label

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        11 hours ago

        Yeah, but that’s probably partially due to their existing fame.

        • satanmat@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          Well, yeah.

          They make more money from OF than from Spotify… and they are not doing porn.

    • thejml@lemm.ee
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      16 hours ago

      Ngl, I canceled them and haven’t gone back since. Don’t really miss it much, I try to use the same cost as my subscription to buy music every month on CD when I can.

      • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
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        11 hours ago

        I cancelled it the second I found out how easy it was to get it for free.

        I still buy FLAC releases individually from artists I like, I just use Shittify for discovery. Fuck 'em.

      • Bonesince1997@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        I have recently discovered Qobuz (French company). You can purchase digital music. They aren’t cheap, but they have selection and hi-res music (sometimes 24 bit).

        But good on you for the CDs, too!

            • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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              12 hours ago

              I’ve used them plenty but…

              They recently got acquired by a turd company and if I remember correctly, already issued a round of layoffs.

              Don’t recall the details. Check.

      • Zier@fedia.io
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        14 hours ago

        I just want to remind people that you may still have a used CD store in your city, also 2nd hand stores for CDs. They tend to be quite cheap these days.

    • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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      12 hours ago

      Insulting the artists too. Just like when Daniel Ek said that the “content” on Spotify was “basically free” to make.