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Spotify boycott: Artists leave ‘garbage hole’ platform after CEO invests in AI weapons
(www.latimes.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Is there another music streaming service around, so I can leave? I use it damn near everyday and the accessibility is what I crave.
Tidal pays the highest per play amount to artists, and Apple Music also pays high (second highest for mainstream artists after tidal last I checked), and they have a massive library -but obviously they’re an evil megacorp so use your best judgement.
I personally use Apple Music but then I’m fully ensconced in the Apple ecosystem, so it works for me.
I think this info may be outdated. I've been seeing a lot of people recommending Qobuz. It looks like they may be paying the most per stream now, and they also allow you to buy tracks and supposedly have the best sound quality streams(?).
How is Tidal evil? I've never heard anyone complain about anything but the old mqa standard they have since dropped.
Apple is the one I was calling evil.
I switched to Tidal a couple years ago and I'm happy enough with it. It's cheaper than the comparable membership tier I was paying for with Spotify. The higher fidelity streaming is nice and supposedly it pays artists the most over any other steaming service. Their recommendation algorithm doesn't index so heavily on your favorite tracks like Spotify's does, so I'm discovering new music a lot more.
The UX isn't quite as smooth as Spotify's. I can't cast from the browser app and it doesn't remember what I'm listening to between devices. When I first switched there were a lot more bugs but I haven't noticed as many over the last year.
After Tidal inevitably succumbs to corporate rot, I'll be switching to owning my own collection and self-hosting. But until then, I'm happy with Tidal.
Tidal is owned by Square (the mobile payment app/company), and I think Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder) owns that. So, probably safe to say it's already pretty corporate.
Yes, but it's a million times better than Spotify, Google, and Apple.
That guy sucks.
Why?
This is just the first article I found
https://fortune.com/2024/10/30/jack-dorsey-layoffs-streaming-music-app-tidal-block-leaked-email/
Honestly I respect the way he called musk on his bluff and forced him to pay 40+ Billion for Twitter, but this article cements him as an asshole in my book. Whenever you see a CEO saying "we need to function like a startup" what they really mean is "I have no fucking clue how to run this business, so I'm going to go back to the one thing that worked for me", not realizing that it was mostly luck not startup culture that cemented their early success.
Talking in CEO speak seems pretty mild compared to being on the board of an AI military company. I know there is no perfect billionaire so I'm not going to advocate for Dorsey. But if that is the worse thing about Tidal, I think I'll still support it.
Sure! I was just trying to answer the question. I'd point out that his current attitude is exactly how enshitification starts, so the writing may be on the wall for Tidal. After all, it was started as a passion project by a group of actual musicians and then sold, so the soul of it is likely gone too.
Spotify used to be the good guys, too.
Isnt Tidal responsible for the problems of high quality music formats like .ogg? Making it hard to find and download from them.
Have you tried Qobuz? It's french.
I use Qobuz and I like it.
I jumped on Qobuz from a lemmy thread. Really happy with it. The artist selection is pretty broad and the Playlist are decent. But honestly, I haven't disliked anyone from the recommended home page which says a lot. I was on yt music before and it would always loop the same five artists no matter what radio station I started. It was really weird.
Thank you for the rec. I will check it out, looks like theres even a mobile app.
Honestly thata the issue I ran into. Napster and tidal were both in the running for a minute, both were more expensive, tidal is ran by Jay z and Napster is owned by a tech bro. Honestly, I'm more inclined to go back to cd.
Its such a massive PitA to self-host things. Dont get me wrong I love the idea of it, it works in theory, and then you get an update for one of the multiple services you have to run to make it work ex-prem, or your isp does some funky stuff and drops out. There is such a massive time sink into self hosting that its not a reliable answer for 90% of people.
That's kinda the opposite of what I have found, once I get something to work it usually just works. Although I'm in IT so I'm pretty used to keeping 'in production' servers going. It absolutely is more work, because you aren't paying somebody else to do it, so you really need to decide if that's worth it to you. For many people the trade off in control and privacy aren't worth the extra work and paying somebody else to use their computers instead is far more convenient.
Ive worked in IT before. If things ran as smoothly as you claim, I dont think you would have much of a job. I have had a pi-hole brick itself during an update, routers crash, home PCs just stop working.
You and I have the necessary skills to accomplish what needs to be done, just the basics of reverse proxy or ssh tunnels are damn near magic to most people. Hell, could you imagine walking your tech-illiterate neighbor through the process of it all and then expect them to keep it up without contacting you all time. I can not, which, is one of the reasons why I dont work IT anymore.
For real though, I believe that self-hosting is the only future for most of what are talking about here. I thought it was the most logical next step after everyone had libraries of music and movies at home in the 90s. I had assumed most people would want to keep those and would digitize.
The process to make that happen, and the hardware, are just not accessible to others outside our field. I would like to see a closer to all-in-one-solution become available. A system one could purchase with software ready to go all where you have to do is load it with content. Hell, call it a Spoopify Box or something equally ridiculous and you could VC angel funding in a week in SF.
Be the change you wish to see in the world, I guess. But I don't see a commercial product like that taking off, simply because the MPAA and RIAA will fight it. They will use the media to convince the public that it is a piracy tool. I also don't think it's fair to demand FOSS volunteers to cater to tech illiterates. These projects are a labor of love, not a product. Self hosting means you are taking the responsibility of hosting something, and that comes with pros and cons. I think expecting a black box solution to remain stable and secure in the long run is a hard sell for me, it doesn't line up with my personal and professional experience.
I feel like this opinion is more damaging to the cause than most people realize. Accessibility and usability are just so important, I would never demand that the opensource community do this task as it should be a cost to consumers just not like the SASS model we are currently dealing with.
I think I would like the world to be different, I just dont know how to get there yet.
No doubt that the black box solution is out of reach as of yet, but as technology moves forward the changes become less and less of a delta and it could be possible in the future. I would like to look at this solution like we look at video game consoles, or Roku even.
I use a combination of Bandcamp, Qobuz and Jellyfin atm. It gives me the combination of using their apps or my own self hosted. The chances of everything going down at the same time is pretty slim I figured.
I also have all my purchased music stored in a Nextcloud instance so in a pinch I can play the local flac/mp3 files from my computer.
In your estimate how many hours a month do you need to upkeep all of those services? What about your power bill? Im nitpicking because I am interested in doing something similar. Ive played with these services before but as a hobby PoC thing and not serious usage. Nextcloud I had some issues with dockerized containers, Jellyfin was nice but had its own cons. Plex has been great but I dont want to pay to access my own content on mobile.
I pay flat power bill so I don't really know about the electricity costs. I also live a cold place so for most of the year I need to heat my apartment anyway so I don't really know.
Apart from patching the Ubuntu VMs that run Nextcloud, Jellyfin and my Nginx proxy I haven't had any upkeep on the services themselves after I got them setup, and even then I have automatic security updates on so I only really need to log in and run a feature update and reboot every few months.
Whenever I buy a new album I download it and put the files in their own folder in Nextcloud and everything syncs in a few minutes. I have set up an external folder in Nextcloud for my music that is readable by Jellyfin so everything just works for now, but I've only had this setup for a few months to be fair.
Bandcamp and Qobuz are just apps for me and I download all the music I buy in the apps on my phone and it's virtually no upkeep for those. The only annoying thing is that I can't buy music in the Qobuz app, only on the web site. I assume this is because they refuse to pay the Google tax.
You might have to look into a Wireguard/VPN setup as well if you need that for remoting into home hosting, but I can't really help with that. I got a kinda special deal in regards of hosting.
Your setup sounds like a dream, kinda jealous of your hosting solution, gotta admit. Thanks for all the great info, youre a great person!
Yep, I’ve started buying all my media again, even music. Don’t want my copy of a movie to get censored, don’t want my music to get delisted.
The only exception is games. Damn you, steam, for being so awesome in every way except ownership.
Gonna cry when gaben kicks it, they go public, and become ea 2.0. Its gonna be hell for gamers.
All we can do is fight when the time comes. Hopefully his successor has the same values as him.
I use a Revanced YouTube Music app that doesn't play any ads, and it functions almost exactly like Spotify.
currently i'm doing bandcamp and tidal for my two most least evil options
Do you have money? If so, buy music you like from the artists. Bandcamp is pretty good (though they sold out, and might enshittify).
I've been buying music for years and have a big library now
I use YouTube music because I all ready pay for premium, but YouTube and Google are getting worse everyday though.
Back almost a decade ago I was using Google Fi and it had access to YT Music when that existed. It was easy to use, but the content was limited and I found it very hard to find new music.