Spotify furious that they aren’t getting their cut.
And we’re not concerned that they fund and heavily promote on their services extremist content and disinformation by the truckload?
Concern? You obviously haven’t considered all the money they’re making!
I don’t get the anger or outrage or even mild concern here? Spotify lets people upload their podcasts and music. People abuse that.
Spotify didn’t do anything wrong, the people uploading this crap disguised as podcasts did. Spotify removed them when they found them.
Where’s the issue?
It’s because we’ve seen this so many times and are really tired of this: Everybody knows that you have to moderate user generated content. If you provide a upload function for user generated content and don’t have a clear moderation policy in place and a moderation team, you will allow scammers, child porn, drug dealers and crypto scammers onto your platform. That has happened hundreds or thousands of times. And then some newspaper will do a report and they will remove some of the mentioned content without doing anything.
Spotify has smart employees. Some of them even worked at other companies who ran into the same issues. But they still decided to launch the feature like that, mostly because upper management really doesn’t want to pay the costs of functional moderation. That is how Facebook went on to be used in the genocide in Myanmar. That is how thousands of minors got abused. Moderate your shit. There is no way around and AI won’t help you
I’d imagine that you could even take podcasts and run them through a speech recognition app much like visual voicemail does. This could then parse the text and flag a podcast for manual review by a human to ban an account, could even auto suspend the account until its challenged or reviewed. You don’t even need someone to listen to everything since Podcasts and usually spoke word.
Hell I bet I could build a pipeline to run on a local server in under a week that does this. Download the audio. Parse it into text. Then parse the text for any trigger words or phrases.
I dislike that you can’t block NSFW stuff. My son found NSFW stuff on Spotify… and I had to take it off our Living Room Tv and ban him from using it for now. I think you can block accounts, but there were so many… Go ahead, search tits on Spotify… fucking wild to me it’s not moderated.
We gave the kids access to Spotify Kids, I think it’s ok so far.
Huh, I had never thought to search for tits on Spotify, but now I see I was wrong for not doing so.
You’re saying that Spotify don’t have employee moderators for uploaded podcasts, which they do. In this era of every person thinking they’re an influencer and everyone needs to hear what they say, the issue is that likely no matter how many they have, the number of episodes that get uploaded will always dwarf them, so they rely on their auto-moderators to find the most egregious rule breakers. They can’t catch everything there though. If a customer finds a rule breaker and reports it, they’ll take action - that’s good!
The alternative is that every single episode of every single podcast has to be manually reviewed and approved before it goes live, which is not feasible.
Please take a look into the articles. That really was something that a good moderation team should find and they really didn’t need to listen to every podcast:
The intention of many of these pages is obvious from their names. Podcasts with titles, such as “My Adderall Store” — which has a link in the episode description to a site that purportedly sells Adderall, as well as potentially addictive pain medications like Oxycodone and Vicodin, among other drugs — were listed within the first 50 suggested results, a CNN review this week found. CNN identified dozens of these fake podcasts across Spotify, advertising sales of medications ranging from Methadone to Ambien, in some cases claiming that the drugs can be purchased without a prescription, which is illegal in the United States.
So they realised Spotify hosts Joe Rogan?
At least in the US, I’m absolutely destroyed that people just don’t care. They talk like they care, but they just fucking don’t. I don’t get it at all. They will gripe about how evil and bad something is, then just keep using it. “If everyone else is, so will I” maybe. Group Inertia.
People don’t wish to help fight the war on drugs. Why should they? Are you destroyed by people’s indifference to drug advertising or are you making a general statement not necessarily about this story? Are you okay with legal prescription drugs being advertised? Or is it the illegality that’s a moral issue with you??
Legal drugs should not be advertised either. Drugs or other treatments should be prescribed by a doctor based on a review of the actual symptoms and side effects to the patient. A drug advertisement will generally tell you the key words to tell the doctor and may be missing other factors.
I have symptoms C, L and Q. What treatment plan will be best. Vs. I want drug X because I have symptoms X Y and Z.
That said, I read the OC as a protest to Spotify and their predatory practices in general.
I mean I think there’s nothing wrong with advertising OTC meds, which is also legal here. Might sometimes let you know about a product you didn’t know existed at all, common ones being gas relief drugs and joint pain creams.
Advertising prescription meds is just weird, feels very wrong, and I don’t understand how some countries don’t ban it.
I’m just trying to find out what about this is upsetting for the person I replied to.
I think it’s more that most people just aren’t aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren’t any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what’s the alternative? Sure there’s a few Linux phones out there and that’s almost an alternative but it’s not there yet. You could go with a “dumb” phone, but for most people that’s not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.
If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they’d probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.
What’s an example of an alternative with a really great recommendation algorithm?
Things like recommendation algorithms are difficult for small companies/individuals to provide. Let alone the library of music.
No algorithm but buying physical media again is one path.
A few months ago I got a couple CDs and I’m hoping to rebuild my collection and get off Spotify. It supports artists better, and YouTube is still there to help discover new music.
Buy a CD a month instead of your service. A roll back for technology of course, but worth trying imo
Our musicians are getting fucked with streaming services and I like directly supporting them.
Since you asked, in the US at least I would say Tidal’s is quite good. Not a small company, but an alternative.
Plexamp does a pretty good job with the radio features, granted you will have to torrent stuff you’re not necessarily familiar with first. If you have a few friends who also share their music libraries with you it can really help by including their tracks in your radios.
Wait, PlexAmp allows for multiple libraries?
Settings > playback > radio > include external media
“Consider tracks from shared servers and TiDAL”
Also if you just mean multiple libraries like switching between them, click at the top. I’ve got 4 of my own and 1 from a friend here.
Also, there’s an app called Prologue that adds audiobook support to Plex’s libraries. Or rather, it parses the metadata that Plex refuses to parse.
Basically, Plex doesn’t read audiobook metadata. It just refuses to. It can still play audiobooks, but it treats them like 250 hour long albums. Which is… Well… Not great. Especially when a single chapter can be 10-20 minutes long. But Prologue does parse metadata.
You log into Prologue with Plex, then it uses Plex’s remote access to actually read the audiobook files. Then it does its own metadata parsing directly on your phone. So the Plex server isn’t doing any extra work to serve the file, and no config changes are required on Plex’s end. But on your phone, you get nice pretty chapters, bookmarks, speed controls, etc…
I tried to get Audiobookshelf to work for a day or two. It just refused to read or write anything to my NAS. Everything was configured properly on the surface, and it appeared to work… But then it would lose my added audiobooks every time it restarted. After throwing myself at it for about two days, I gave up and found Prologue.
Thank you, friend. I do have two different personal libraries, but was unaware of the “external” libraries option.
I would welcome sharing libraries with you, if you were into such things.
Why would people here care that much about this? This kind of material exists on any site that allows user submitted content, and the only solution is aggressive automated moderation, which winds up hurting everyday users. Would you prefer that anyone who uploads a song or podcast that names a drug be automatically removed and have to be manually approved?
These are low-effort scams to steal credit card numbers, it doesn’t seem like any of these had an actual avenue to purchase drugs. They should be removed for sure, but this is hardly some wild breach of responsibility.
It’s 2025, and Spotify still doesn’t offer lossless audio. Don’t understand why anyone would keep using it with so many alternatives available.
Really? This is your concern about Spotify?
Seems like a more important concern than some people using Spotify to sell drugs
The number of people with the audio equipment needed to even notice a difference with lossless audio is a rounding error, especially on their phones using their AirPods/galaxy buds.
You don’t need that much special equipment to tell the difference. I have a lil shitty Jelly Star. I can tell the difference between Spotify’s High and a FLAC from bandcamp with it’s speaker, Bluetooth headphones (Sony Link Buds) and my Car speakers.
As audiophile as I am (own very expensive (> 1k) headphones for instance) and additionally I’m musician/producer.
I don’t think you can hear the difference between 320kbit bitrate vs flac in a blindtest (this is important, to avoid biasing yourself). I could notice what was a 128kbit mp3 and flac in a blindtest and already that was minimal (and is likely mostly related to the 16k cut-off of 128kbit mp3), but 320kbit, nope…
If you notice a difference it likely has to do with different mastering/LUFS etc. not the compression artifacts themself.
You really can’t. With Bluetooth earbuds you absolutely can’t. With car speakers you’re not fooling anyone.
You absolutely can. It’s not massive. But Spotify does sound muddy in comparison. And I’m not some crazy audiophile either. But I’ve definitely heard more clarity in some of my favourite songs and noticed certain parts of them that I’ve never noticed before just because I was using a FLAC vs using Spotify where I used to listen to it.
At a certain point, you’re right you’re not going to notice a difference on shitty speakers but there’s something about Spotify’s lossy compression that even at high you’ll notice the difference between the two.
Clearly most people care more about other factors than they do about audio quality that isn’t even discernable through their Bluetooth earbuds.
It’s actually worse than lossless being discernable or not on bluetooth - people cannot reliably tell between high-quality compressed audio and lossless audio generally. This has been studied to oblivion - the jury is out, there’s no more discussion to be had on the subject.
Just the other day I was listening to the new Linkin Park album on Spotify in a car with a friend (no fancy speaker system)
We both thought it sounded kinda low quality so we switched to youtube and the improvement was instantly noticable to us. Spotify just sucks. At least if you are used to HQ audio
Yeah seriously; unless you’re an audiophile who spends extra on quality headphones, your Bluetooth buds are probably using the SBC codec, which cuts off frequencies at 16kHz and thus is hardly better than listening to a 128Kbps MP3. (In Android you can see what codec your headphones are using by going into the developer options.)
And to be honest, if you care enough about sound quality to spend extra on the high res tier in your streaming service of choice, you’re probably using wired headphones. Audiophiles don’t fuck with Bluetooth.
Ldac only for me.
Nah I have a few different ones and aptx adaptive is pretty solid.
It’s funny because it wasn’t until I started producing music and driving samples that I realized 320kbps mp3 IS NOT the same nor is it comparable to lossless audio
As for the whole “audiophile” thing I don’t even know what to make of that.
i dumped spotify because they raised the price so they could include podcasts that i couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about. also the ai bullshit and the refusal to allow me to block artists. spotify can get fucked
Streaming sites not including the option to block content is frustrating.
I remember when Netflix let you hide individual movies so they didn’t clutter up the categories. When it was removed there was a rumor that giving it a low score would hide it but that never worked for me. Don’t even remember the other services offering an option to hide stuff.
Really wish that option was common.
You can still do that on YouTube.
I don’t think of youtube as a streaming site for some reason. Maybe because I only interact with it on a computer and the others through TVs even though everything can go through both.
They also have movies, but I figured “buying” them over there is more expensive than getting DVDs or sometimes even BluRays shipped from UK to Slovakia via Amazon.
Random example: Blade Runner 2049 bought from seller RAREWAVES for €5.64 ($6.30 currently) incl. shipping, the DVD itself being £2.24 ($2.97 currently). It was new, not used.
“Renting” on YouTube for 48 hours within 30 days is $3.99, while “Buying” is $14.99.Seems like I could get it used in “Very Good” condition on BluRay for around €6. Just UHD BluRay is more expensive than YouTube.
Raised the price for podcasts, raised the price for audiobooks. Guys, I just want a music service…
Then as you mentioned…no ability to block artists or songs. I honestly believe that not listening to a particular song by an artist you otherwise like made it show up even more in radio/shuffle play. Can’t you guys clue into the fact that I skip that track EVERY time you start playing it.
People made alternate desktop clients to customize the homepage cause they were unwilling. The mobile app wasn’t so lucky. Again…my home page doesn’t need to be podcasts, audio books and artists I’ve never listened to but are obviously being boosted by paid promotions.
When they started throwing up full page dialog popups recommending the most ridiculous not even close to what I listen to content multiple times a listening session…I was out. Didn’t just cancel premium, deleted the account and uninstalled the apps. I’m not paying you to actively annoy the shit out of me.
Edit: before people mention the ‘hide this song’ feature. That wasn’t always a thing and is fatally flawed. It just blocks the song on that one album/playlist. If it’s a popular song it’s on who knows how many compilation albums, etc. I’m not gonna go block the same song 10+ times. Heaven forbid it has covers I don’t want to hear either…
I never moved from pandora to Spotify and could never find a good reason to.
I realize I’m a decade out of the loop, but what did it do better?
i never used pandora–is it true you can’t make your own playlists? that would be a no go for me. i switched to tidal and have no complaints
Pandora was initially antithetical to playlists, the concept was utilizing the music genome project to play songs that are like songs you’ve liked, intelligent radio.
Playlists probably was the thing Spotify had that pandora didn’t have that made Spotify get big, you can make playlists now.
I only use pandora because it’s music discovery is so good tbh.
In the early years of Spotify I liked that it stored the songs on your sctual device, so you didnt need an active Internet connection to listen to the songs.
Playlists? The reason people use Spotify is you can play the individual song or album that you want and you can’t with Pandora. That’s the key difference. Not playlists lol
I’m not entirely sure how selecting the song or songs you want to listen to differs from a playlist, but ok.
I think the concept of a playlist is exactly what you’re describing.
it’s the social features and the network effect. if you want to make a playlist and share it with your friends the easiest way to get them to listen to it is to host it on spotify. also blends, collaborative playlist, jams, and now listening all provide the illusion of connection through a shared listening experience. and it’s not so much that these things are better than what we used to have for sharing music, it’s that corporations have all killed our ways of sharing music. that’s what they really hated about groove shark. artists made more money in the groove shark era, but umg, sony, and warner didn’t control how we shared on it.
Just switched from iPhone to Android. If your Bluetooth headphones support aptx you can definitely hear the difference
It’s not the artist exploitation or their generally predatory practices, no, it’s the lossless audio that really got your attention lmfao
Not OP, but probably all of those still register, only he was using lossless audio as an example of how it’s not even that good comparing with other platforms who actually do better by the artists they host. As in, a lot of people are willing to turn a blind eye to unethical practices if the product is great, but it’s not even that great, comparing with other existing services. Whether or not people actually do care about lossless audio is a different thing, though.
That’s fair. I was being tongue in cheek but looking back at it it is coming off as a little overly critical of them
The recommendations are hard to beat, but I hate how these moderns streaming platforms make you a passive listener. My most enjoyable music listening days were when I actively managed my music collection.
I haven’t even thought about recommendations - I’ve never used the recommendation system on any music streaming platform. I’m fully hands-on with my music. I actively use the internet to discover new artists and curate my own playlists and library.
I do a bit of both. For awhile I was relying just on algorithms but switching to primarily active management the past few years has really been invigorating. Renewed my excitement for music. When I do use algorithms to discover some new stuff it’s being fed mostly from my own curationnwhich is so much better of getting stuck in a loop where the algorithm recommends something, you select some favorites and then it recommends off those. This starts to really dull and homogonize your library after awhile.
I need to go back to this, never should’ve given it up honestly.
I am interested in alternatives. I stopped paying for Spotify when they were pushing Joe Rogan so hard, and YouTube Music isn’t really doing it for me for a variety of reasons. Any good suggestions?
I use Apple Music, and I’ve also tried Tidal and Deezer. They’re all good. I recommend taking advantage of the one-month free trials each service offers and seeing which one you prefer. At the end of the day, it really comes down to personal preference.
This is a bigger change, but I switched to Bandcamp and listen to music I own. I like the process of finding music I like and saving it to my wishlist, and I mass-purchase whenever Bandcamp Friday comes around so the artist gets the whole paycheck.
It depends how much music you listen to though, and how much variety you need day to day. Realise it’s a bit more involved than algorithm based streaming but I also feel a lot more like I’ve built a library just for me.
I would also recommend Pandora. I’ve had a family plan for years so I don’t know for sure but there used to be a free (ad supported) tier that you could check out. And to reiterate comments from above, custom playlists and song/album play on demand is available (though some tracks are only available in discovery mode).
I use it because it’s free and tolerable when modded (on pc at least), and a lot of my favorite artists drop there. I get to check new releases, and if something isn’t there I’ll check other platforms. I will never pay for spotify on principle though.
I second this.
🌈 Enshittification 🌈 in all its facets. This one’s pretty bad though.
Enshittification is not when Spotify doesn’t immediately notice and purge new uploads with scam content.
Enshittification is when Spotify takes away the free-tier, or makes the ad-free tier have limited ads while raising the price.
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or does something by making features worst than before.
