Why YSK: Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it. It’s better to find a free alternative, both for your wallet and for your peace of mind.
Introducing: ViMusic
Downloads: https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic
- Free and open source
- No ads/trackers
- Song lyrics
- Music from both YouTube Music and YouTube
- Weights 2MB or so
- Beautiful UI and amazing UX
Cons: no high kbps streaming support
DO NOT TRY TO DOWNLOAD THE APP FROM ANY SOURCE OTHER THAN THE ONES LISTED IN THEIR GITHUB PAGE. They are malware.
Potential bias: I’m a developer at Spotify.
“Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it.”
I don’t think the company forces you to do anything. It is their business model, how they can provide copyrighted music to you and have a share of the pie too.
I’d say the very idea that Spotify is forcing you to pay with time and attention or money so you can have music conveniently streamed to your devices is a testament to the company’s success. It created this business model and fulfilled an apparently basic need to the point you think that charging for it is unfair.
But “forcing” is too much. You can always buy discs, digital downloads and so.
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I’d also add that I wish Spotify paid the musicians better. Even relative to other platforms Spotify is pretty bad about that. Of course if you want to support the musician it’s always better to buy merch and music and stuff directly from them, but that isn’t really an excuse for streaming platforms to pay them so poorly. And I’m not suggesting that Spotify should just give the musician everything of course. They should get their cut too. But perhaps something even slightly more reasonable would be appreciated.
I like Bandcamp because of this, and their app has really improved over the last year with the addition of ques and playlists.
2FA and ad free links for podcasts. I already pay for an ad free experience on Spotify, and sometimes I’ll pay to support someone on Patreon, but I can’t use their link to even just remove the ads the podcast itself issues. I’m not sure where the ads come from every time but it feels like I’m being had.
But ad free music is worth the price, which I was buying before they even hosted pods so it’s hard to complain too much.
I love Spotify and am not considering ditching it, but I also wish it supported higher fidelity playback like Tidal, or even higher bitrate like Apple Music
I mean the streamers have to get paid too, you might hear artists complain about how much money Spotify takes but as someone who has released lots of music on Spotify they do pay you, pretty decently too! Lots of artists are making hundreds of thousands a year from just Spotify and the business itself is profitable, which allows pretty much anyone to upload their music and try their dream.
That is valuable in it of itself, without services like Spotify many of the artists I listen too would probably have given up on music for a boring IT job, like I did.
Thanks to you and/or other Spotify devs for the linux desktop app that I understand you develop in your free time
Spotify took an existing thing and made it convenient and worse at the same time. How long before we are just listening to AI music? Since their cost is the artists…it’s only a matter of time.
I think the important thing is to keep Spotify from being the only way you can stream music. While I agree you can buy discs or digital downloads, these are fundamentally different methods of consumption from streaming.
Stopping Spotify purchasing the exclusive rights to stream prevents a monopoly where, if you want to stream, you are ‘forced’ to use Spotify and pay/listen to ads there. Keeping artists’ options open allows the most customer-friendly streaming service to win out as consumers choose which streaming service gives them the best product to listen to who they want
When has Spotify been buying exclusive rights to music?
Of course they don’t force you to use spotify, but it’s one of those “soft monopolies” many other companies have. It’s not the only option, but they basically are, because everyone thinks so: it’s like whatsapp, if you catch my drift (everyone use it because everyone’s on it)
And when a company realizes they’re in that position, they will prey down on their users without fail, and I’m talking about:
Privacy invasive app: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.spotify.music/latest/
Investing in military AI: https://mixmag.net/read/spotify-daniel-ek-ai-defence-investment-criticism-news
Patents for extremely invasive technologies: https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/spotify-tech-emotion-manipulation/
Allowing disinformation during covid, not paying properly the artists and many other things I’m not going over for sake of brevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Criticism
What I don’t like about spotify and all the companies who are in a similar position in the market is that, as usual, their share of the pie it’s unfairly big, which is why I try to drive people away from them. Not saying YouTube is better, but at least with vimusic you don’t have to listen to ads (which I think heavily harm people’s mental health, among other things)
Of course music can be bought, but people only buy what they like nowdays, and use online services to discover new music. Few have the money to buy music and listen to it for the first time afterwards. Many people don’t even have the money to meet their basic needs, let alone buy music
Spotify really isn’t a “Soft monopoly” though. There are a lot of competitors in the music streaming business. Youtube music, Apple music, and Pandora, just to name a few. Sure, Spotify is perhaps the most commonly used, but it’s also unfair to punish a company because they’re successful.
Not to argue against any of the points against Spotify, but YT Music (and it’s parent, Google) are much worse; leaving only Apple Music with a much smaller library as a realistic alternative to streaming music.
I do miss the old days of Google Play Music though - it is a shame what Google did to a neat app with a standalone subscription.
Oh my God yes Google Play Music was the best. And whoever convinced them to give up that glorious branding (Play Music, Play Movies, Play Store) in favor of ‘YouTube Music’ should be drawn and quartered.
Play Music’s uncanny ability to let me know who was actually playing near me, meaning within my usual territory, and with music I would like, was unmatched. It was par with Spotify for playlists based on the sound of a song. YouTube music doesn’t do playing near you, Spotify seems to think 1000 miles away is nearby, and neither are as good as Play Music was at finding good match for my location and time of day. It was perfect in name and function and they gave it up.
I’ve been mostly using newpipe for the same purpose but this one looks great too. Thanks!
Just pay for Spotify… £10 for access to almost every song ever published. People need to appreciate how good they have it.
Adverts like this post shouldn’t be a think in “YSK”. It makes no sense.
This app is literally just music piracy in a fancy shell anyways. Since there’s no YouTube ads displayed, artists get nothing. Think Spotify is bad at paying artists? Try… piracy…?
That’s fair, but I am curious how much of streaming revenue go towards the artists and how much goes towards the labels.
That isn’t up to Spotify, all money goes to the labels and then the labels and artists negotiate their share. They’ve got a good site actually: https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/
But did you know that when Spotify negotiated streaming rights from the labels, the labels only agreed if they could take an ownership stake in Spotify. Then the labels insisted on LOWER streaming fees for themselves. This shifts their income to come from their Spotify stake, which they don’t have to pay to artists.
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How long is this likely to stay online? It sounds like it’s circumventing paid services (YouTube Music, specifically) - I can’t see Google being too happy about people skipping out on paying for their service.
(I’m not saying this is a bad idea, I’m openly wondering about the longevity of the app and slightly nervous about the dev’s wallet when it might come to a lawsuit. I don’t know if that’s a thing that would happen.)
Musi (app on iOS for listening to YouTube without ads and allows background listening) has been working for several years at this point. So I don’t see Google doing much about it.
Google is making moves in this department on YouTube. Could be months, years, or never when these apps can’t keep ahead in the cat and mouse game anymore.
As long as you can acess an youtube music from the web, it should be safe to keep working (as long as google doesn’t rewrite something on their end) there are a gazillion of projects that are able to stream/download from youtube (youtube-dl, newpipe come to mind now)
Savor it. Google is about to shut those down. They recently figured out how to tell if a user is watching the ads or not an interrupt the streams to them.
I’ve seen two separate methods so far one where they just block the stream when it gets to the add point, and another where they completely blocked all my clients except the official YouTube. I’m sure we have a lot of cat and mouse left in us, but in the end, if they solve this on the server side there’s probably not a lot we can do about it
It’s just like any DRM - fundamentally impossible. It’s not possible for YouTube to truly verify that a stream is legitimate on a device they don’t control. It’s impossible. But they can make it very annoying and time consuming to circumvent their system, and that’s what they might do. It might be enough to deter a decent portion of people watching with adblockers and using third party programs. That’d be a success in the DRM world. So yeah, this can’t be solved by YouTube sever side, but their defences might still be annoying enough to work.
Thank you so much for showing me this. I’m sick and tired of Spotify and YT Music locking crucial features behind paywalls on mobile (playing with without shuffle on Spotify and background playing on YT Music).
I feel you. Enjoy your free music!
Ok, so I was skeptical, but this is rad. And it finds anything, including my own tiny band’s releases. I’m impressed.
https://i.imgur.com/wImzPNR.png
F-Droid is a viable installation source in addition to GitHub.
