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It's Not Just You: Music Streaming Is Broken Now (www.youtube.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Welcome to the era of only Spotify Plays matter - let's take a look at the underbelly of streaming scams affecting independent artists.

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[–] 134 points 1 year ago (26 children)

A long time ago, you could go to a special store and trade government paper for music disks and tape that you got to keep forever.

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  • [–] 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).

    Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.

    I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don't know if it's harder right now or not.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The contracts that steal music from artists haven't changed one iota. Unless you've got juice like Paul McCarty, Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, and even then it can be a fight that takes years.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I have a feeling it's easier to put your music out there as an independant artists. There's always someone taking a cut but the contacts are optional and there isn't much gate keeping like before.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    It's like every other media industry. The monoculture is dying. Everyone's who's "about it" is into niche subcultures and micro-celebrities you'll probably never hear of.

    There was a weird period of time from the mid-20th through the early 21st century where radio and TV had very strongly concentrated media production which made up most people's media consumption.
    For the last 15 years or so the tools of professional-looking media production for mass consumption have been available to anyone with a few hundred bucks to spare.

    In some ways it's a communist utopia. The means of production have been commodified so much virtually anyone can afford them. However capitalists have moved on from owning the means of production to owning the means of distribution (the platforms).

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    They want fuckin 40 bucks for a vinyl these days and they don't even throw in a digital download for that price, and the radio is owned by like three companies unless you live near a college station.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Where do you buy them from?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Qobuz. And sometimes bandcamp

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mostly buy from Bandcamp. Do you have the special Qibuz subscription to get discounts on purchases, and is it worth it ?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Nah. I don't bother with that. I can't listen to unlimited amounts of music anyway, and buying fewer albums I care more about makes me listen to them more instead, I'd say. I already have a massive music catalog going back to the early 2000s when I bought CDs, pirated a lot and just kept all of it on my NAS.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm starting (a little late) to build my music library this way too. I self host jellyfin , for which there are some nice music players. But, I still have my Spotify account currently while I gradually build my personal library. I'll admit tho, I will miss the algorithm and artist suggestions

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    It was kind of easy for me, as I already used Plex for video, but Plexamp has been such an amazing experience for rediscovering my own music. The radios, sonic matching and DJ algorithms are fantastic. I'm sure there's other similar solutions, but it's really worth investing in, imho. There's currently a lot to be desired with the library management, but the player experience is worth the downsides for me.

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  • [–] 98 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart's content.

    Spotify was always for chumps.

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