Spotify will now let free users pick and play tracks

Spotify being nice? Absolutely not. There certainly is a hidden agenda behind this.

Probably ads. It’s always ads.

is spotify being desperate, or there is an ulterior motive?

YouTube Music allows this, maybe they're losing ad money to them on the people that weren't going to get premium anyway.

I dropped my Spotify account after last price hike.

me too. I pirate instead now.

Spotify is trash anyways.

Wait, free users of Spotify could not pick which track they listen to???

Well, on PC or tablet you always could, but on mobile it was always album random shuffle... and if you created an album of less than N songs, in mobile they added related tracks in the reproduction (radio-spotify like) so it remained not possible to control what you listen...
EDIT: I updated the verb tenses to the fact that now you can in the mobile app chose the song to play
This is why I never even gave Spotify a chance. It didn’t make sense to me.
No, you could tap shuffle on an album-by-album basis, or on a Playlist with like 10+ tracks or something.

Winamp with a cool custom skin and downloaded mp3s was better than Spotify imo.

I know it's cool to shit on spotify and streaming services on Lemmy, but personally I disagree. I loved Winamp and had tens of thousands of songs back in the day, downloaded on my zippy 56k dial up connection. But being able to search for and play virtually any song available instantly and share collaborative playlists, no matter where you are, is so much better.
Why would I decide what I like to listen to when am algorithm can do it for me?
- I fully jumped on the Spotify bandwagon hoping the algorithm would decide what i listen to, I'd become stuck in a rut and hadn't really listened to anything new for a good 15 years.
  Well... After letting it figure my music tastes out, every single automatically generated playlist on there starts off with crap I just immediately skip before devolving into the same 5-10 songs I listened to pre-Spotify. So i guess it knows my taste well? But it has turned out to be useless for this too!

Too late, already got sick of their shit and went back to downloading everything myself. I have to have two media player apps on my phone to account for podcasts and music but it's still better than using spotify. Probably a better way to do that too but haven't been bothered enough to look into it.

I still let spotify to discover me things from time to time... but regularly I download/obtain those that I like, I never abandoned my offline library, I am old enough to know that nothing online perdures...

cool, my "music" folder filled with mp3s could always do that

I'm so confused. Couldn't you always pick what track you wanted to play?

Currently, for free users, only PC or tablet allows to control what you listen (caveat occasional ads) but mobile constraints to a shuffle reproduction of albums, and if you dare to do a short album they spice it with additional related tracks, so you are never in control of what is likely to play...
EDIT: well, apparently I can do that also on my mobile app, I remember in the past some glitched occasions bit it seems is real now...
Nope. At some point spotify forced FREE users to shuffle play playlists. You couldn't pick which specific song you'll hear first. And with ads, obviously.
- Damn, when I joined way back when, you could pick the track you wanted you just couldn't skip and had to hear ads. Being able to pick a track is the whole reason I moved away from Pandora.
I think it depends on whether you used the web interface or mobile app. Mobile app was more restrictive.

I love product updates as part of my technology feed....

I miss old technology feeds in the classic internet days. That actually posted and listed out cool stuff with technology

RSS is still going strong. I'm in the process of shifting my screen time from lemmy to RSS. Just articles, no comments. Makes me realize how addicted I've been to comment drama, I say as I post a comment.

You guys use spotify ?

Mostly for random song discovery considering my previously liked songs, I regularly download/obtain those songs I like for offline reproduction and preservation... online stuff has short lifes
It's probably the most popular music streaming service at the moment.
- Sure, for the morally bankrupt
hell no
- Sailing the high seas ,is the way ,yep
Plexamp.
Yeah. Just started my self hosting journey a few months ago, looking to replace Spotify at some point. I got a NAS with Jellyfin set up, my next step is replacing Google photos with Immich probably.
I do appreciate Spotify will be adding lossless music soon, but they have so many other issues.
YouTube, but yes it's insanely popular and an excellent value.

Is this the onion? They add the basic feature of a media player where you can listen the title you clicked and not random stuff? If I understood correctly, this is not a feature, it's just a restriction being removed

The mobile application has always had this restriction for free users (as far as I know), but the desktop application has not.
- I don't think it was always that way but it has been for years now.

Easier to let users play music for free when you don't pay the artists I guess

None of you were. Y'all were stealing it for years.
- Talk about projection
- Lol, I'm a vinyl nerd, I've probably given more money to the music industry than to anything else except food

Call me a hardcore Spotify fan boy: I paid for Spotify for 15 years, I loved it, I even applied to worked for them. The product was great and unmatched so as I didn't care about the problems, so many problems. things were getting progressively more problematic but in the end, King Gizzard convinced me to quit. I don't regret it a single minute. Fuck Spotify.

I had an account day 1 when Spotify launched in my country. It was such a big deal to me, a person who spent their teens and 20s hoarding music. One service and it was most of the music I wanted. I could sideload my own music and shuffle it all together.
I miss that little app store on the desktop client. You could join shared radio stations and vote on the next track while people wrote to each other in a chat.

wow the music app finally lets users select music! I'm sad that this is actually something to look forward to.

Be happy it was free and ads could probably be blocked.
Would you appreciate it more if they blocked the view of the library like the videostreamers like Netflix or D+ do?
- Idk I haven't used the free tier of Spotify in a decade. I think add supported listening is enough and all features should be available to the free user except offline listening.

I haven’t used Spotify, until recently, since it was first released. Its big value over Pandora was that it let you choose what to listen to…when did that change?

I’m using spotx on Linux so I don’t get ads, can search individual songs, etc. I thought the free tier was just ad supported, I didn’t realize that they didn’t let you pick what you wanted to listen to.

The desktop application (both Windows and Linux) allows free users to pick tracks. The mobile application does not.
- That makes sense, thanks.
  I use a laptop for a mobile device so I haven’t bothered with the mobile apps yet. It seems like the same kind of client patch could be done with revanced.
only premium subscribers could pick individual tracks previously
- What a ripoff.
  Oh, there's a Spotx for Windows too. There ya go, anybody using Spotify free who doesn't want to buy into the tiering enshittification go patch your Spotify client. No ads, pick your own tracks, like Spotify used to be when it was a new and a good value for the service.
  I'm just too lazy to find a music private tracker and setup Lidarr, I'll do that eventually and then just stream through Jellyfin like one of the cool kids.

I've not seen anyone recommend an alternative like Qobuz in these "fuck spotify" discussions - I think it's a good honest alternative?

I use Musify on Android. (From the F-Droid store) It pulls the music off of YouTube and works pretty well. Save playlists,download individual songs, it has recommendations but u didn't know how they work.
Seen the recommendation plenty of times.
Is it better than TIDAL? I'm interested in switching to either of those, perhaps.
- I only used Tidal a while back during a free trial, so can't comment too much. I think Tidal might have more wide spread functuonality adoption than Qoboz - but they do seem to be pushing out updates to meet feature parity.
  Qoboz has been great to use though. I actually find I get a wider spectrum of recommendations than Spotify. Spotify seemed to type cast my current listening habits agressively, and it would take a while to break out of that loop each time.
I was looking to try Qobuz, but they didn't like my email domain, so skipped it.
- I have a custom domain and they accepted it a couple months ago - maybe give it another shot if it was a while back?
I switched to Qobuz, it's great!
I recommend
<your jellyfin instance>
.
Jokes aside, the only reason I use Spotify is for discovery and the vast catalog (primarily the JP music market).
And I havent seen Qobuz be mentioned in any capacity by japanese artists.
- Ah this is an interesting point. I think Qoboz are active in expanding their libraries and they do take requests on site. Do you have any JP recommendations - its not a region I've ever really listened to?

K. Still waiting on the lossless that supposedly dropped

Keep waiting then lol

Move to Qobuz which is more ethical

Qobuz vs TIDAL, go! (Curious to know more, if someone is willing to do a comparison that has experience with both, or either.)
- I trialed Tidal and thought it was fine. Just Fine. I’m trying Qobuz right now. It seems like all the things I like from Bandcamp but there’s also a paid streaming service. The audio sounds great on Qobuz and I like the option of buying HiRes albums for my local media server. I’m an iOS loser, and they just updated Apple Music with finally some good crossfade. I’m a simpleton and that appeals a lot to me. I can’t find crossfade setting on Qobuz for iOS. I feel like I would pick Qobuz over Tidal just for the ease of downloading my music to my Zune/iPod/subsonic/jellyfin.
- Easy comparison. Tidal is not ethical. With investors like Black rocks ...they're devil financing wars and genocide.

I'm glad I avoided the spotify bug ever since I saw it.

When I was making money, I'd buy albums from bands I liked. Built up a nice library.

I'd love to buy the entire discographies of all the hundreds of artists I follow on Spotify. 💀 Simply not feasible.

Or you've been using spotube and been doing this all along

Spotube doesn't actually use the Spotify API. They used to use the Spotify API for their music database, but they stopped when they received a cease and desist.
- They've updated the app and you can again! You just need to select an external metadata provider. If you use Sonic Liberation, you can log into spotify again just like before. https://spotube.krtirtho.dev/downloads/
  https://github.com/sonic-liberation/spotube-plugin-spotify

Move to Qobuz which is more ethical

Arrrr

That's why I originally went Google music. I thought Spotify was garbage and didn't have that shit I wanted, still true today 🤣