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…

https://www.gbnews.com/tech/spotify-price-rise

  • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    102·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • PieMePlenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      I’ll weigh in since I started hosting my own subsonic server.

      I dropped lidar because, like you said, its full album based and doesn’t play well with partial collections. I dont want to collect music albums, I want to listen to music. I’ve not found a good solution for it yet, but I don’t even think I even need it. Once I get music, I tag the files with a desktop app which uses musicbrains for data and then drop the files on a SMB share. Navidrome picks them up and makes them available for streaming in 2 seconds.

      Bandwidth is free and file storage space is cheap. Any convenience I gained from spotify is lost when music gets removed from it. Most recently it was king gizzard who removed half their library from spotify and I actually purchased some of their albums from bandcamp before. I own the mp3s already, but used spotify for convenience. Now I host them myself. Now I’m in control.

      Obviously though, I’m the odd man out. Not everyone will be able to do this. But if I can, I will. And since I can, I do.

    • lavendertea@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      24 hours ago

      Re: Transferring, I bought a 1TB sd-card for my phone and use Syncthing to transfer music from desktop to phone.

      • A_norny_mousse@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        Nowadays people say it’s advanced stuff for powerusers, but just a decade ago this was the way for everybody: download audio to your computer, sync some of it to mobile devices, listen on the go. Everybody did it, OSs had dedicated software that got activated as soon as you plugged the device in etc.

        I hate the “convenience factor” or “non-technical user” arguments.

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      22 hours ago

      Since I already had a jellyfish server for TV/Films, I’ve been testing it for music recently. And the Finamp app is pretty great. I can create playlists and download them for offline listening.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        20 hours ago

        That’s definitely a nice feature for sure but getting Jellyfin to even recognize the album/songs means they all need to be properly labeled and filed correctly and that some database somewhere needs to have that album’s metadata available which can be real hit or miss. SoulSeek seems to be decent for labeling and allows you to choose who you’re downloading from but its still a clunky mess at the end of the day.

        I’m all for self hosting as much as possible but for me personally its just much more convenient to use a streaming service for music, and these days I find myself listening to podcasts the most which aren’t going to be available on the high seas (nor would I bother if they were because I’m not going to listen to them again).