Alternatives to Spotify?
 

Now that I'm boycotting the purveyors of Rogancide, can anyone suggest an alternative music streaming platform? I know of Amazon and Tidal. Is there any big difference between the two, and/or are there any other options?

I wouldn't leave just because of Rogan, but for whatever reason that was the straw that should have long broken the camel's back. I hear Apple is good as well, but I use Tidal and it has most of what's on other platforms. If you're about larger file sizes, better pay per stream for artists, and client that doesn't spazz out every time I close my computer, it's pretty decent. It's lastfm compatible of you're still about that.

YouTubeMusic. Everything that Spotify has AND you can upload music from your obscure cd collection not available on any streaming platform. Plus, you can watch all YT vids without ads DESPITE YOUR ADBLOCKER. :rolleyes:

Sampled em all. For my needs none of them beats YTM.

Scrobbling is life. <3

Slsk is the best alternative shhh

Haven't heard of any of those (other than YT Music) so will look into them all. Thanks.

The idea that Amazon should be a moral alternative to Spotify is absurd.

I don't stream, the inconsistent sound quality being one reason why, but I am thinking about it since I have very little space left on my PC right now.

Until I get another external hard drive it will be difficult for me to get into new music otherwise.

There is no moral alternative, you just go with what you can stomach.

I'm thinking about going to YouTube too since you can also see videos that have nothing to do with music. haven't pulled the trigger just yet though.

YouTube doesn't have everything but it has a decent amount of stuff.

Me and some friends have a listening session we do on Watch2Gether every week and it's not too hard to find whatever it is you're looking for, and when it is it has more to do with Watch2Gether's search function being crap than YouTube not having it.

Isn't that just cognitive dissonance where you know there's no meaningful ethical choice to make but you still want to feel like you've made one?

Maybe, but what would you do? Just stop listening to music?

I load up my ext HD/phone SD card through YouTube. If I hear a tune I like, I take a pic of it. Later down the road I'll go back through my phone and DL all the tunes I snapped pics of through YT and an online DL'er. I don't think I've ever come across something that wasn't available, and it's a process that works for me.

Years ago, some things weren't available like anything by Prince, but these days it's all wide open for the most part. I remember being on Napster when there were only a few hundred people. That was tough sifting through all the BS. Then, it all exploded.

https://i.imgur.com/0G3aCJ2.gif?noredirect

If you really want to counter corporate power then join DSA or something I dunno. But spending all your mental energy on pointless individual acts of disorganized protest is a waste. By all means don't pay Spotify $10 a month if you don't want to but this isn't a thing.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism but you can pick less sh*tty options, this isn't hard to understand.

I agree. I don't want to give Bezos another cent, which is why I asked.
There is a moral alternative. You can choose a platform that doesn't make you want to puke at the corporate scum running it. So Amazon and Spotify, both out; neither are getting my money.
Means nothing in the grand scheme of things but it does to me. I'll sleep a little easier knowing that ****er's evil hands are nowhere near my Paypal account. If you adopt that attitude why do anything? Nothing you do will make any real difference, other than burning down buildings (hi, Varg!) or hacking into Spotify and robbing all their profits, or replacing Rogan with a deepfake that gives him tits or orange hair or something. You do what you can live with, that's all you can do.

All I can say is good luck with that.

I just listen to everything on Youtube with an adblocker. If I like what I hear, I buy the stuff (on vinyl usually, through various websites, sometimes independent record shops, sometimes the artist's bandcamp, and yes, sometimes Amazon). Youtube has basically everything I could want (besides Jay-Z's discography, who is militant about disallowing it - but I own all his stuff on CD anyway)

YouTube's recommendation algorithm is broken in a lot of ways but one of the few good things about it is that it has exposed a lot of people to music they never would have been known about otherwise.

It doesn't quite make up for all of the right wing radicalization that is bringing society closer to fascism but hey at least I discovered city pop, thanks YouTube.

YouTube has its place but I couldn’t listen to all of my music from there. It would drive me round the bend.

I’m interested to see what other suggestions come through. I didn’t really like Apple Music or Amazon music when I’ve used them in the past.

Doesn't Youtube just recommend you more of what you like? In any political directions?

E.g. If I watch John Oliver, maybe I'll get recs for Destiny. If I watch Destiny, maybe I'll get recs for Vaush. If I watch Vaush, maybe I'll get recs for Richard Wolff?

If I watch Tucker Carlson, maybe I'll get recs for Dave Rubin, if I watch Dave Rubin, maybe I'll get recs for Ben Shapiro, if I watch Ben Shapiro, maybe I'll get recs for Nick Fuentes?

I dunno...I mostly listen to music and watch independent sports analyst videos on YT these days...but I thought it worked both ways. Gives you more of what you consume, sometimes in a more extreme direction based on whatever neural networks or graph databases it's running its recommender engine on and what the majority of viewers who watch/like/subscribe to videos you watch click on most frequently.

Youtube pushes right wing content like crazy even if you're left wing af there's really no escaping it, say you watch a video criticizing the current administration from a leftist perspective, well that increases the likelihood of you getting recommended videos from the likes of Shapiro and Crowder calling Joe Biden the second coming of Che Guevara.

Search results will also lead you to right wing content more often then not if you search any subject that the right has latched onto, though those channels are already big so the algorithm favors them.

And finally there's the ads, they're not as frequent as they used to be at least for me but Prager U videos were pretty much unavoidable for a while there, it's how Abby Shapiro's channel managed to grow so fast even though she has no actual fans.

These days you get rec'd more stuff from mainstream news channels. Youtube seems to be trying to shove anything advertiser unfriendly into the basement.

YouTube finally pulled ads for Crowder after getting enough blowback, and yet he still has sponsors, it seems like there's nothing he could do that would lose him his sponsors, except maybe put on blackface which is definitely gonna happen soon so we'll just have to wait and see.

I think it's more shocking that he hasn't done blackface yet than if he were to actually do it.

I've heard that spotify customer service reps are having a terrible time with the joe rogan ****. if any of them respond to the allegations they are immediately ****canned.

I really don't care about recommendations. I just ignore them anyway. If they're music ones maybe, but anything else can go chase a greasy piglet down the Atlanta main highway on stilts while whistling the theme from Benny Hill. I just don't care. I know what I want to watch/listen to (mostly it's for reviews/journals anyway) so yeah, keep your recs Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and anyone else trying to push content on to me.

It's the only thing he hasn't done yet. What else is there left for him to do?

The way the right wing troll economy works is you have to keep outdoing yourself to keep your audience engaged, lest they move on to someone even worse.

there is none SPotify is KING !!!

Honestly, just go for library size, and whatever pays the artist most per stream. I pay for soundcloud too, but I listen to a lot of mixes via my phone's bluetooth.

Sorry if I am late, but maybe Bandcamp is better, though you won't find a lot of famous artist on bandcamp, you at least can pay pretty much 100 percent of the price to the musician directly.

Re YouTube Music: were you guys talking about You Tube Premium? Cos those ****ers want 17.99 a month out of me, and they can blow that right out of their arses. ****ed if I'm paying nearly twice what I paid for Spurtify!

Why not Spotify man? It has the best playlists to choose from

(￣^￣)

The Joe Rogan controversy that started the Neil Young boycott. It's kind of a political issue, really.

Did you see my suggestion involving going to Bandcamp?

Oh.. i see

That’s interesting

Because Spotify have proven they're scum who are happy to watch the world descend into Trump/Rogan/QAnon hell as long as they go in clutching as much money as they can fit in their greedy little fists.
Not really; it's a common basic human decency issue for me. I'm not that political.
Yeah I did sorry, but I'm looking for platforms streaming the music I'm familiar with or want to explore more, not unknown (to me) bands, who may be great but I don't have the time to discover them. I have about 7000 albums I've yet to listen to so you know...

It's more, but you also get youtube ad-free. We use youtube quite a lot and if I had to watch ADS on that thing, I'd pulled my hair out a long time ago. Instead of it just falling off naturally, which is what happened instead.

edit:

Btw, you can upload music to youtube premium. It's kept in your personal library / cloud storage. As someone who makes music, that's useful because I put my unfinished stuff up there and listen to it just like I listen to any other music.

Spotify had local file support which is, haha, a joke.

Yeah, I'm still not paying them nearly 20 Euro for basically the same service just without ads. Sod that. They're off the list. I might not even bother with a streaming service; I can get all I want through Soulseek. Problem is, download one album for review and you don't like it, you're stuck with it unless you want to keep deleting albums. Maybe I'll look at Tidal. Basically, around 9.99 a month is what I'm willing to pay. Anything else they'd better be able to let me have dinner with my favourite rock star. On the Moon. In the future. In a killer robot suit. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the robot suit.