I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers…
Just leaving this here from the excellent !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world
From that chart Qobuz seems to be the all round best deal. Is there any catch?
I use Qobuz! It works well most the time. And it has a huge library. Some things are not as polished as some of the bigger companies. And there’s a lot of Initial setup to get it working…
That said, I would say it’s a great option. I do wish it had better continuous play options, as sometimes I listen to a playlist, and then it just stops. But that may be part of the learning curve. I’m not really a big “playlists” guy… I’d like to start a radio and have it find similar artists (similar to Pandora 12 years ago) But that doesn’t really seem to be the way companies are going anymore.
I have several Google mini devices (I know, I know. I’m working on it, but that’s a whole other process) and they don’t really seem to get along with qobuz all the time.
Overall, I like it, but it still needs work.
I just switched from Tidal to Qobuz and when using Soundiiz like 1/4 of my songs didn’t transfer, and when I look songs up a lot of them aren’t there at all. The personalized playlist is also disappointing in my experience, so I’m considering switching back.
I have noticed that the search function is very unforgiving. Like, you have to search the exact title, because it will not find a partial name.
That sucks that a lot of songs didn’t come up. I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised with the content. Personally. A lot of my stuff that I thought was pretty niche I’ve been able to find.
Are you noticing any specific genres are more difficult than others?
The ones I’ve noticed so far were somewhere in between metal, hyperpop, and generally chaotic electronic music. Specifically:
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DEATHWISH by poutyface
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MONSTER ENERGY GUN! by KevinKempt
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PIN CUSHION by Siiickbrain
Also:
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Little Game by Benny
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mi tawa lon pimeja ni
There’s a bunch of others that I haven’t looked through yet. I downloaded a list of songs from my Tidal library with soundiiz so I should do the same with Qobuz then do a diff.
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You guys are paying for Spotify?
Yes. Go back to your bubble now.
What bubble?
the modded app chad bubble
Spotify has a become a shit show lately. I don’t like that the CEO is supporting a genocidal state, the platform is full of fake AI artists and playlists. Artists aren’t getting paid enough. the price hikes and the app just feels so bloated with unnecessary bullshit. Because of this, I switched to self hosting my own music server (Navidrome, and Lidarr) and I use the symphonium app on Android. Really happy with that solution
Man, music is one of those things where file sizes, quality and performance all conspire to make both offline media and self-hosting so viable. I never understood Spotify’s role.
I mean, you can like physical media and understand why Netflix was more convenient than digging through enormous TV DVD boxsets. But who the hell didn’t have a MP3 dump of hudreds of CDs by the time Spotify started being a thing?
That is fascinating to me as well:
Movies > Big filesizes > many public trackers and seeders
Music > smaller and easier to store/play > less public trackers, only slsk is really viable
Books > even smaller > there are some websites like anna and a lot of small ones
But then: Sheet music > even smaller files > almost impossible to pirate
It is fascinating to me that there isnt one clear spectum along filesize.
I guess it has to do with the target audience and demand.
There are a lot of reasons for this but mostly because music streaming has been so popular that it wiped out the market for music. Its also a huge pain in the ass to sort and organize music when nobody follows a standard when they rip music so it makes automating things a lot harder as well.
I have several thousand songs I’ve downloaded over the last 25 years but even with modern tools like MusicBrainz Picard or Lidarr, there’s no good way to organize your collection. You wind up with a bunch of singles or oddball songs from a compilation album, from a sampler, or you download an album and half of the songs come from the US version while the other half is from a UK version of the album and the uploader forgot to include a bonus track that comes on that version. Its just a huge mess that you dont see with movies and TV because apart from things like a “Director’s Cut” or “Extended Version,” you know what you’re getting when you download them.
Additionally, playback isnt easy either. Are you going to manually transfer hundreds of files to your phone? Stream from your home media server to your phone and use a bunch of bandwidth? You’re getting tired of 30% of your songs so are you going to go through your collection one by one and erase them?
There’s a huge convenience factor for services like Spotify. With movies and TV the convenience factor definitely favors the self-hosted side of things.
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Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and ‘just works’ with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It’s French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you’re trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
They don’t have any other recommendations apart from those human made ones though? Couldn’t find what I wanted.
The UI is awful and their artist pages are normally blank for indy artists.
The migration is pretty seamless though, and they apparently pay their artists way better.
