I really appreciate full albums but sometimes I like to listen at random. Cue Spotify Popular.
I know Spotify is the devil but it’s also an angel, so I turn a blind eye. Oh well. Happy to hear why I shouldn’t though, so fire away.
ANYWAYS, OMG KGLW makes it tough to listen to anything but an album straight through because the tracks are always cut in weird spots! So nothing pieces together well. I actually deeply appreciate this. They really want you to have the full album experience, and the way the songs flow together on a lot of the albums is fantastic. Listening at random is a butchered experience. Witchcraft.
since it sounds like you are looking for reasons to ditch Spotify lets see (a) they pay artists amoung the lowest, while overpaying certain podcasters, (b) they still haven’t delivered lossless while promising for years and that others have added at no extra cost and (c) no Joni Mitchell, perhaps the greatest songwriter of the 20th century, and no Neil either.
Amazon music has lossless for no extra charge, so I think its like $9 a month with Amazon Prime and maybe $13 if you don’t have Prime. I’m sure their are downsides, like I don’t think their player allows you to upload your own files like Spotify does. So far I’ve found the catalog to be comparable as I don’t see why an artist would keep music off Amazon Music when it pays a bit more to artists than Spotify. I know Apple lossless is very popular as well, but I don’t really use Apple products.
regarding your original question, while I do love the album format as the intention of the artist, I’m also a fan of playlists, maybe ever since a good friend had Killing in the Name by Rage Against The Machine > Closer to Fine by Indigo Girls, back on a mixed tape on a post high school road trip to Florida back in 1994. Sometimes the jarring element of random playlists are fun, like getting a section of Altered Beast suite squeezed between Carpet Crawlers by Genesis and Fat Old Sun by Pink Floyd on a prog rock/psychedelic rock mixed playlist.
Thanks for this breakdown! I will look into these things. I don’t upload my own tracks anyway so I don’t need that. feature. I just love how much music I have “discovered” because of Spotify, and the ease of use. Regarding the above mentioned Gizz track issue, that would be the same no matter the platform. I don’t mind a weirdly cut Gizz track when mixed in with other artists, that’s just how it goes, and most other artists end their songs at the end with a fade or a break, not part way into the next song or whatever. But when mixing up pure Gizz, it can become tedious! I then go back to listening to full albums, which is great on my laptop because it will play one and then the next one. But on the app the albums aren’t cued that way so I can only play one and then it jumps to Gizz radio. Fine, but not always what I want. Gah, golden age problems.
Speaking strictly in terms of ethics, I’d put Spotify neck-and-neck if not ahead of Amazon due to the latter’s horrendous working conditions. Either way, it doesn’t really matter; all streaming services are run by shitty corporations that grossly underpay artists. Until there’s some kind of paradigm shift on how we consume music, that’s not going to change. If I want to support the tiny struggling indie bands, I’ll go their show and buy a shirt or record at the merch table, which is worth way more than streaming them on a slightly better-paying service.
I use Spotify, but their only real advantage over any other service for me is Discover Weekly, which remains a vital way for me to find new music. I have my lossless needs more than covered with my Plex library on the go and vinyl when I’m at home, so audio quality just isn’t a big factor for me.
I also don’t use them for podcasts due to their lack of support for RSS feeds; I use Overcast.
I don’t know a ton about them, but in general, a company trading hands from one corporate parent to another so quickly isn’t good news; Bandcamp has a really unique ecosystem and a decent profit split that’s actually good for artists and labels, and it just don’t seem like that culture, especially stuff like Bandcamp Fridays, would bode well under a big corporate structure that tends to pursue short-term profits above all else.
There’s a lot of great companies that have been bought up by bigger players and either shut down or hollowed out over the years. EA Games, Google, Twitter (RIP Vine) and a few others are somewhat infamous for this practice. Epic thankfully left Bandcamp alone for the most part, but also fought their unionization effort in a pretty shitty and aggressive way, so it remains to be seen how they’ll be treated under Songtradr. It’ll be a big loss if they get mangled because they’re one of very few places bands can distribute their music, sell merch etc. and get paid fairly for it.
I am an engineer at Spotify. I don’t work on the shuffle (or the app at all) but I’ve looked into this. Here’s an article that explains how shuffle works:
Seems like also you can make the shuffle more random by turning off this option in your app
You know Bandcamp was the best streaming model because it hasn’t triumphed financially.
I was kind of over Spotify (and never been into algorithmic playlist) and so have just switched to YouTube Music. Couple of hitches and basic things missing, but I also think it’s bad to have the interface of Spotify define the way I consume music, so it’s all part of shaking that off.
