Spotify to raise prices in September
I have got to admit I canned Spotify subs years ago - but how are they managing to grow their subscriber base whn it is now going to be £11.99 in the UK? That is way, way too high for what it offers...
Well my decision to cancel Spotify last month is already paying off.
Will they be raising their rates in India? Because that's where Spotify thinks I live now.
Just saying; cancelling Spotify and changing to Qobuz takes five minutes. Sound quality is amazingly better, the curated recommendations are done by human beings that love music, and 'just works' with everything that Spotify does. (For us, anyway.) It's French, rather than Norwegian-American like Tidal is, if you're trying to stop spending money on everything US at the moment, too.
For those using spofity connect: tidal has "tidal connect" as well, which is identical and exactly as supported. Qobuz unfortunately lacks this feature, to my knowledge.
I personally also prefer the tidal algo to Spotify and qobuz, but that is a matter of preference.
It's quite easy to download Tidal content on any device w/o the app as well—for educational purposes, of course.
For some, Tidal may be a better alternative. I've been quite happy with it. Others may prefer Qobuz.
I also just switched to Qobuz. I like to listen to albums and playlists. The UI is more minimal than Spotify which I enjoy. I like the fact it's not constantly trying to push new things like podcasts, concerts etc. on me. I just want to listen to music and pay the artists for it!
I'm on Tidal right now and currently considering the switch to Qobuz. There's no official (or unofficial) Linux client which is kind of a bummer. Tidal at least has a half-decent unofficial one...
Yeah, I could just use the web player or strawberry but I just prefer having a dedicated app.
Yeah, the web client works just fine on Linux. A good native client would be better, of course, but I'd rather use the web one than a half-assed native one.
They don't have any other recommendations apart from those human made ones though? Couldn't find what I wanted.
The UI is awful and their artist pages are normally blank for indy artists.
The migration is pretty seamless though, and they apparently pay their artists way better.
They have the human made ones, they have the "artist radio" function that plays songs similar to a band you like, they have a weekly top 30 based on stuff you've been listening to. The headline 'albums of the week' are based on what they like, which I don't think is unfair - I've really enjoyed some of them.
I listen to a lot of metal and electronic, and I've always found the descriptions excellent - usually several paragraphs even for the most obscure of bands. Was well impressed that they had Lambrini Girls as one of their 'albums of the week', and their album at studio quality. Not that that's essential for punk. Admittedly I don't listen to a lot of indy, but they've always had what I've wanted to listen to.
My main complaint about the UX is that it's nearly identical to Spotify, but I suppose there's not much else you can do. Something particular about it that you dislike?
Do they have an API? I use a lot of third party recommendation services, to avoid Spotifys and would love to make sure I can create playlists into it
Im 90% sure they have an API, I've seen github projects that mention using it
Let's say it together: Enshittification
It's been long underway for Spotify; raising prices is just the lastest step.
My main beef with spotify is their attempt to privatize and monopolize podcasting.
Spotify offers audio hosting and a large userbase, but does not provide rss. A few people I like are trapped in this, and I have no way to listen to their shows apart from using spotify. They refuse to understand that this is an issue, just like youtubers are ok with lock-in.
Podcasting infrastructure is not monopolized yet, like video is. It is even bigger problem for me than underpayid artists.
So boycotting, and if you undersrand that, you should too.
I'm quite unhappy with spotify. I don't care about the price, but it keeps repeating the same and same music again, and the percentage of crappy AI music is increasing. You can clearly hear it. Their client isn't open source, and it's just a wrapped website. It sucks.
Bandcamp is not banned in the UK yet. But i think the government has strong intelligence that they are a terrorist organisation.
Also Daniel Ek is investing in AI war company:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html
So glad he didn't get his grubby hands on Arsenal FC in the end.
And Trump!
Man, music is one of those things where file sizes, quality and performance all conspire to make both offline media and self-hosting so viable. I never understood Spotify's role.
I mean, you can like physical media and understand why Netflix was more convenient than digging through enormous TV DVD boxsets. But who the hell didn't have a MP3 dump of hudreds of CDs by the time Spotify started being a thing?
Like a million songs come out every week. Can't keep up when it's mostly digital now, no cd to get. But you can rip Spotify!
You could just be young. By the time I was old enough to start pirating Spotify had already existed for years and it's just significantly easier than getting into a tracker. My wife has yearly playlists she's been making since she was a teen and doesn't want to loose those.
“Youngins” dont understand that when Spotify came on the scene people had already stopped playing music on CDs and MP3s largely. It was when the ipod and iphones already existed and people were getting ripped off by apple for $1.29 per song that they wanted to listen to.
I vividly remember at the time trying to tell people to try Spotify instead of paying for literally every song they wanted to listen to, and people were skeeved by it because it sounded too good to be true
Yea it is a bit of a pain, but also I haven't found a reliable setup like rrsuite for music.
Ideally it should allow for noticing a song on Spotify and transfer direct to the server
That is fascinating to me as well:
Movies > Big filesizes > many public trackers and seeders Music > smaller and easier to store/play > less public trackers, only slsk is really viable Books > even smaller > there are some websites like anna and a lot of small ones But then: Sheet music > even smaller files > almost impossible to pirate
It is fascinating to me that there isnt one clear spectum along filesize.
I guess it has to do with the target audience and demand.
There are a lot of reasons for this but mostly because music streaming has been so popular that it wiped out the market for music. Its also a huge pain in the ass to sort and organize music when nobody follows a standard when they rip music so it makes automating things a lot harder as well.
I have several thousand songs I've downloaded over the last 25 years but even with modern tools like MusicBrainz Picard or Lidarr, there's no good way to organize your collection. You wind up with a bunch of singles or oddball songs from a compilation album, from a sampler, or you download an album and half of the songs come from the US version while the other half is from a UK version of the album and the uploader forgot to include a bonus track that comes on that version. Its just a huge mess that you dont see with movies and TV because apart from things like a "Director's Cut" or "Extended Version," you know what you're getting when you download them.
Additionally, playback isnt easy either. Are you going to manually transfer hundreds of files to your phone? Stream from your home media server to your phone and use a bunch of bandwidth? You're getting tired of 30% of your songs so are you going to go through your collection one by one and erase them?
There's a huge convenience factor for services like Spotify. With movies and TV the convenience factor definitely favors the self-hosted side of things.
A big part of it that finally made me pay for spotify is it helping me to find new music. Its not perfect, but when the app actually works correctly it will queue up music similar to the song or playlist you searched and it can help you find new bands or other songs by the artists you like. When i was just listening to my downloaded music I'd get stuck in a rut of the same few albums or artists.
I really like Bandcamps suggestions and weekly newsletter for music suggestions, might be worth checking out. I always felt like Spotify was pushing me towards the mainstream, whereas Bandcamp almost does the opposite. Ultimately, I greatly prefer it.
I wouldn’t have subbed to Spotify on my own. I’m inherited into my wife’s family plan. For me the biggest benefit is just discovering new music. I used to have a big MP3 library, but after a couple computer upgrades, they’ve kind of disappeared over the years. Having Spotify there has been really convenient for just listening toto old stuff I’ve lost as well. This said, if my FiL cancels, I probably wouldn’t sub for myself anyway.
I obviously do understand why people use Spotify.
But you are correct; my phone has 128GB internal storage, my hard drive music collection is smaller than that. There has been solutions for syncing (a curated list of) music to mobile devices for a long time. There are many - and frankly much better - ways to discover new music outside of Spotify. There are some really cool music only internet radio stations out there.
And I'm not even talking about self-hosting, which simply cannot be recommended to everyone.
People defending Spotify always come back to convenience, and always dismiss the disdvantages of generated playlists, and downplay the suckness of AI content. And never acknowledge that alternatives exist, right down to NOT using a music streaming service.
I was like 9 when Spotify was incorporated
Your parents failed you by not having an MP3 dump of hundreds of CDs to give to you.
Dummy
I actually know plenty who still hold onto them...
Lazy doormat Spotify users: "Okay... but this is the LAST, LAST, LAST TIME FOR REAL. Do it again and there'll be a hashtag and a series of Tiktok memes!"
You guys are paying for Spotify?
Firefox & ublock and there are no publicities.
My 'ol android apk doesn't work any more thoug... and can't find a new one (Hint hint, blink blink)
I've been using a cracked yt music since the Spotify crackdown. I miss my playlists often :^(
Same with pi-hole.
I guess some people are, as long as it’s a good balance of convenience and price. Ages ago, Napster, Kazaa and DC++ were considered more convenient than buying music. I guess torrents are used for that these days.
There's a P2P app from the same era as KaZaA, originally released the same year (2001), that's still in active use today: Soulseek. It's a great way to find obscure music, some of which isn't on streaming services and is extremely difficult to obtain otherwise.
Usenet is good for less popular stuff too. Torrents die once the last seed is gone, but some Usenet providers have over 10 years retention, and you always get full speeds over an encrypted connection with no uploading required.
Edit: Support artists where possible, but sometimes there's music that's impossible to find, and that's when these services come in handy.
We have the duo plan, for me and my wife. Kids don't need one yet.
I don't no. But as they keep removing features from the free account, and here in the UK you at least need an account now to play anything people do
I switched to Tidal when I realised their stream quality was, at the minimum, double Spotify, and cheaper. Then all the controversial shit about Spotty came out and I was just shaking my head disapprovingly from Tidal's porch
Hell yeah tidal friend. Same here. The only annoying thing is its memory for where I was in a song/playlist. Seems like I can click away and it forgets where I was. That’s the one thing Spotify has over tidal
It's cheaper if you have 5 friends and take the family plan. I'm paying ~€2 a month for the last couple of years.
of course there are ways round it, but that's not my point. Getting expensive
Getting expensive would be the wrong wording. The price of subscription is simply following inflation. Otherwise as long as the price stays the same while people get raises, you could say it's getting cheaper.
But it could becoming increasingly not worth it. Depends how much % of your pay is spent on the subscription long term, as both of them go up. If the % is growing, then it's bad, if it's mostly the same or going down, thats good.
I can't even imagine paying for it to begin with.
I bought one of those $5 for the entire year accounts off some shady website.
It lasted for 5 years.
There are ways you can use a Spotify account registered in another country and you basically pay about £2 a month. I'm mainly into 80s and 90s music and used Spotify to discover music, and once I come across a song I like I add the album name to a list (i.e. note it down) and find the CD from a second hand shop or failing which obtain the FLAC files some other way. This way I now have an offline library that has most of the songs that I love. Spotify will be there as long as I can just pay £2-ish but the moment they try the age verification or raise prices, its bye-bye for them.
They age verify in the UK already...
\
For most people though they won't be hacking things to use Spotify. I agree £2 a month is OK but for me the issue is they charge a fortune yet pay artists a pittance
True. For me it hasn't come up so far, possibly because my account is registered in a different country. It's going to be a bit inconvenient but probably time to give them the finger and look elsewhere.
I'm paying £20/m for a lossless family plan from Deezer... That's how they get you 😭. Now I'd have to apologize to my family members if I took away their subscription. Used to be around £17 when I started a few years back.
I do not recommend getting a family plan.
Ditched Spotify and bought myself a galleon and a tricorner hat instead. Haven't looked back.
Lidarr + Navidrome + Feishin + Metube
Mullvad for acquiring, TailScale and Symfonium for listening while away from home
This sounds like a lot of setup but probably took a few hours in total to set up the various docker images and get them working together.
I spend my saved money on vinyls, official merch, and SoundCloud or BandCamp purchases for my local library.
Out of curiosity, what is your experience/usage like with this? Spotify is very easy to justify if you heavily use some of their features because there's not a way (that I know of) to replicate them. For example:
From my usage, sacrificing a majority of those is a non-starter because my Spotify usage has become more than mp3 hosting and organization.
A few hours, when you know what you're doing. A few month when you have to figure it out, and maybe even then, it won't work, or you'll have lost a lot of money trying.
This should be a lot easier to do, than it is
Fair, I should clarify: the few hours is for the music parts only. The homelab set up could easily stretch to months ... And I'd still recommend doing it to most, it's great fun setting it up!
Still no lossless?
Dropped it for Tidal years ago, never looked back.
I've started collecting CDs and building my own Jellyfin library so I don't depend on streaming services.
On Qobuz here. I just buy vinyl then rip it directly from Qobuz generally.
not as far as I know!
You can rip MP3 files by using a Youtube-to-MP3 converter.
Just stop using Spotify entirely.
And once you have them ripped (however you choose to do that), host them via a media server so you can access them from whatever device you like.
https://github.com/justin025/onthespot
Way better. My personal library is reaching 375k songs.
Is there any music on spotify that isn't also on youtube? Youtube has practically everything, it has always seemed to me. I've never been tempted by spotify.
I don’t see why people hate Spotify so much. I used to go out and pay £10 for an album decades ago, multiple times a month sometimes. Now I can basically listen to anything for the price of an album a month. Plus, you can play Spotify on just about any device, even all the open source solutions that Netflix blocked like 15 years ago. On top of that it’s Swedish rather than American.
Lots of reasons.
In short, if you care at all about music and the people who make it then streaming in general is not a good model for their future and Spotify is poison.
If I'm renting music, at least give me FLAC level quality.
No, 320 kbps won't do.
When you bought an album you owned it for life. With spotify you are borrowing the music and if you stop paying you get nothing left
For most people, that's an acceptable trade, because they don't want to maintain a library. And with Spotify, you get access to a much larger library than you could ever possibly keep.
Swedish or american- they’re still exploiting artists. Capitalists gonna capitalist.
My frustration with Spotify is based not in price but that they're choosing to shaft indie artists and new young artists.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetization-eligibility/
The 0.5% of royalties that they redirect to those with more plays is often 100% of the royalties for the little guy being stolen from.
The artificial tracks they wanna combat? I imagine they will surf by pleasantly with 1000-3000 plays over the last 12 months with a wider variety of bot accounts listening to ensure they reach enough unique listeners.
While it is essentially nothing (in monetary value) they still rob the teenage punk band that sounds awful of their first royalty dollar.
Yeah I have been top member for over a decade. It is convenient, there are some things pushing me away though.
The offline features on Spotify are abysmal. Half my downloaded albums don't even work. It's the primary reason I'm looking for an alternative. How can an app with such a high market share be this shitty?
There are probably many individual reasons people have for hating Spotify, but here are some of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pHbS6bgmqE
Spotify was an amazing service. I've used it for years but its getting worse. More and more things that are intrusive are being added, prices are going up. It just sucks i wish they would have just split it into different tiers so i dont have to pay for all this extra shit.
I don't hate it per se, but would rather it paid the artists better.... quite simple really
When I got tired of Spotify's shitty practices, I looked into other streaming services that could compare, and honestly I didn't like any other offerings. So I said fuck it, I'll just download everything and play it locally.
What made the jump easy was a service called Spotidown, I even paid for the ad free version it was so convenient. You literally copy the spotify link for songs and playlists and it let's you download it. There's a couple different services like this, that will make the switch easier.