So now that Tidal has moved its Hi-Fi tier price down to match Apple’s wtf is Spotify doing? Charging more than the competition, paying artists less, and not even offering lossless?
Spotify is less vulnerable to customer churn compared to TV/movie streaming services, as users are less likely to switch music streaming providers due to the hassle of rebuilding playlists and losing personalized recommendations.
There are services for transferring playlists
yes but often there are some mixups… which is a PITA for those of us with ~10K+ songs
I hope people just switch to something else or start self-hosting their own music.
AOL profited for over a decade on people who signed up for the service and simply lost track of it, paying month after month for something they’d forgotten they even had.
Crazy that these services can just raise premiums whenever they please without even reaffirming that the customer still wants the service. I guarantee that if you needed to re-verify your account on a price increase, firms with big client pools would never raise their rates again.
Apple Music pays multiple times more to artists than Spotify.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
You can influence things with your wallet.
Tidal pays multiple times more than Apple.
On paper. But in practice…
On February 27, 2016, Yesh Music, LLC and John Emanuele from the band The American Dollar launched a $5 million class-action lawsuit that claimed Tidal had to compensate the band for any of the royalty payments accrued from the streaming of the band’s 116 copyrighted songs. The suit also accused Tidal of using faulty numbers to payout artists while also having undercut these same individuals by 35%. A response from Tidal stated that they were indeed fully up to date on all royalties for the group and had removed said intellectual property from their servers.
Hollywood accounting and pirate profiteering undercut what artists would normally be paid.
You can influence things with your wallet.
You can influence how you feel about your consumer habits, but capitalists are still going to capitalize.
Here’s a few things that are cheaper!
- Soulseek/Nicotine+
- Usenet Groups
- Libraries (only if your local one has CDs, and often is popular music and no indie stuff) And if you want some album art: MusicBrainz Picard
If you want it on your phone, SD cards are cheaper than ever for big space. Unless you’re on iPhone.
Unfortunately most android phones are slowly phasing away the SD card slot. The only flagship that still supports it is Sony with their Xperia. I don’t know of any major mid-rangers models that still support it. The only low end phones now. But the overall experience is painful.
My Xiaomi phone for $400 supports up to 1 TB SD cards, so that’s pretty sweet.