fuck that, cancel your spotify subscription forever and buy CDs instead

you can manage your collection with audacious, i hear it is quite serviceable at that task

@ariadne yes its time to fuel ur discogs addition

@ariadne Or buy stuff from bandcamp ...

(CDd?! Really?!)

But yes, no spotify.

@bash2 having physical copies of media mean that they can't be taken away from you

@ariadne @bat mood

if you take the $11/month that spotify costs and put it toward buying physical media (or DRM-free digital downloads, but make sure you have a backup strategy for them), you will eventually have a large collection that nobody can take away from you

@ariadne I might have the weirdest music setup ever. I've never had spotify, of course, but I ripped all my records and cd's and now I ssh into my desktop and play what I want with ogg123 from vorbis-tools, listening to the sound on some small trust active speakers...

It works for me, but I wouldn't recomment it to other people.

(Also, it's no problem that there's no longer a place where I can buy cd's in this town, because I prefer to listen to the same things all the time.)

@ariadne I have so many CDs and I am literally drowning in bandcamp releases

it’s great would recommend

@mi @ariadne 2 am discogs gang?

i think that we have collectively decided to trade the power we retain when we actually own things for rent-seeking convenience (immediate gratification through access to everything as a rental)

@ariadne *Points at his navidrome server* audacious?

@ariadne @bat The random few discogs orders of mine that i can find in my emails were 22:30, 00:30, 19:00, in that chronological order

@ariadne i dont have the energy for physical media, but i have bunch of music, which i either play locally or stream over nextcloud. Its just so nice.

@aks i only suggest physical media because you have a backup forever

@ariadne Since Spotify rarely had the stuff I listened to, I never made the jump and have an enormous local library. 😃

@ariadne yeah, i just cant really find physical media for music i listen to very often. Could perhaps burn my own cd's but effort

I should back up my music on as many drives as possible though.

@ariadne I upgraded from CD to vinyl. CDs are dying, vinyls are the past, present and future.

I /do/ understand people who prefer renting access to someone else's music library ("streaming") because of, primarily, the space needed for actual discs and the playing equipment. But I usually advocate against Spotify (TIDAL is better in most regards) - and against streaming itself. Buy or good luck, that's the dichotomy, sadly.

@tux0r @ariadne Yeah streaming is killing music. Musicians get paid virtually nothing to stream. So buy the music, download, buy vinyl, cd, tape, whatever floats your boat.

I have to get 1000 streams before Spotify pay me anything and then I get around $2 per thousand after that. One sale of an album download is worth more than 2000 streams. A single cassette is over 4000 streams. Tidal is better but not by much.

Streaming pays the rich fuckers at Spotify...

@mi @ariadne ya these r true discogs times

@SamanthaJaneSmith @ariadne The rich fuckers at Spotify have modified their business recently:

1. Sell AI "music".
2. Additionally, let anyone and their dog remix copyrighted music for free.
3. Do *NOT* pay artists as long as you can avoid it.
4. Use much of the money made by being a dick for investing into war machines.

Yuck.

@tux0r @ariadne yeah I dumped em many years ago.

@ariadne I'm enjoying listening to my CD's and purchased downloads with Navidrome and Symfonium :~)

@ariadne @bash2 [banging on the apartment door at 3am] "Vinyl Police! Open up! We have reason to believe you have been hoarding physical media, which is a felony misdemeanor under Executive Order 14359. Come on out with your hands up. We have been authorized to use deadly force if necessary."

@m @bash2 look, nothing, short of vigilant self-defense, protects you from the side effects of a fascist state

@ariadne @aks

CDs are also subject to degradation. In my opinion, it is safer to have digital copies on different media.

@m @ariadne @bash2 I’ve been copying CDs that were Copy Protected (the joke is it’s still not a crime unlike hoarding vinyls)

@ariadne If I may, I recently wrote how I dumped Spotify for my own solution https://stfn.pl/blog/84-self-hosted-music-streaming/

@ariadne @aks CDs won't last forever, so you still need backups

@stfn @ariadne I have to be honest here... the wording raised some expectations the article did not fully deliver upon. ;-)

@ariadne Physical CDs can degrade surprisingly quick, so keeping ripped copies is a good idea anyways.

@ariadne I bought a cd off of bandcamp and recorded it to an audio cassette, it was awesome. No subscription needed

@ariadne #Discogs Marketplace is a great way to get physical media in all formats with a bunch of options.

https://www.discogs.com/sell/list

#Music #CD #Vinyl #Cassette #Tape #PhysicalMedia

@ariadne Absolutely!

I'm not a massive consumer of music, but if ever I hear something I like that I don't already have I just buy it, knowing that I'd have to do that way more often than I do to cost me as much as a spotify subscription over the course of a year.

@ariadne if you take the 11$/month Spotify costs you and instead give it to your local #library you probably have 10 of 12 month each year 11 $ more to save/spend. 🙂

@ariadne Absolutely. I buy about 1 album download a month from #BandCamp. As well as most of the cash going to the artist(s), it's a great place to find new music.

@tux0r @ariadne yeah I can listen to my CDs in the car though ;)

I can afford a CD writer at home too!

@noodlemaz @tux0r @ariadne

@ariadne I just switched to this strategy, like, this month. It is such a good feeling to give money to actual artists again.

@ariadne I do the French service Qobuz. They also sell music both physical media and digital. They sell high-res digital files up to studio master quality. The premium membership gets you up to 60% discounts on music. When you purchase digital they pester you to download the files and back them up. They sell DRM free files. They also pay artists more than any other service but Napster at $0.02 per stream. I'll put my 24bit 192khz or 96khz studio master files up against any CD or vinyl any day.

@DharmaDog the point was not "literally buy CDs" but instead "stop giving rent-seekers money"

@ariadne My point was literally not buy CDs but there are alternatives that support artists and promote purchasing their content and compensate them more fairly than anyone else. In many instances YouTube Music pays $0.00069 per stream which is significantly different than $0.02. Sorry I interjected out of line. Good luck living in isolation and rejection in the 21st century. 🙏

@DharmaDog ok but my point is that if you want to use qobuz, then use qobuz. the point is "don't use streaming services"

@ariadne Congratulations! I'm sure that is very effective and you are able to cojole many others to join you. It might be really helpful though for you to investigate and learn more about how the music business actually works. Oh, the joy to have such simple views.🙏

@ariadne out of curiosity, how do you get recommendations to discover new artists and songs? That’s one of the main reasons why I’m still on these platforms: if I like a song or an artist, I can just play its “radio”, and that’s how I discovered countless of new artists and songs

@ariadne @misty if you go thrifting and to estate sales and do it right you should have a 200–300 CD album collection after a year with that money

@stfn What do you do for discovering new music that you might like?

@schmittlauch @ariadne CD degradation depends on so many factors, I have some CDs pressed in west Germany in great shape, but I've seen discs from the 2000s with a damaged reflective layer!

@ariadne @misty I’m not doing that btw because I would also buy dozens of old computers 🤪

@ariadne
Its been an ages, but aren't CDs still around $11?

Also, get the cd from the library and rip it. As long as you don't damage it, the library doesn't give a shit. We're just happy for the circulation.

@a4pgkr9ir23i0001@social.louis-vallat.dev @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
Bandcamp Daily features are quite interesting IMO, they aren't a proper replacement for "more artists like this", but if you follow some artists on Bandcamp and they get featured in daily digest, you get notified with an email message and there is always something in a similar vein to explore — so in a way they are that too.
I really like these compilations of theirs: they give you some back-story, an opportunity to listen to the music and you can always go to artist's page for more, eventually buy it in DRM-free digital form or order on physical media.

@ariadne Even better if you can use a system to purchase that benefits the artist the most.

@ariadne
$11/month at thrift stores can net you quite a haul if you're willing to dig (and dig).

@ariadne I no longer have a working optical drive.

So I go to Bandcamp, if not there I go to Qobuz, finally if not there I go to Apple Music. That's in descending order of how much money makes it to the artist, as far as I know.

@ariadne @jaybird110127 That depends on how much music you regularly listen to. My subscription cost would get know where near covering a physical collection on that scale.

@ariadne

Or even go one further step and get on the vinyl records journey... if you haven't already

@ariadne If you do it with 100 friends and you all give each other access to your libraries, your collection will be 100x larger.

@Willow @ariadne thanks! You can also get a new phone with an SD card slot like a Fairphone, I have one and I'm happy with it

@ayushnix I don't search for new music as actively as I used to :) I sometimes browse last.fm or Bandcamp

@tfiebig @ariadne what do you mean? :)

@ariadne I think I spend a bit more per month since 2022 and I currently have over a full week of music, all on my phone. Pretty nice when listening i the subway with unreliable internet.

@louis
Bandcamp. Follow people with similar collections and see what they buy. Follow artists you like, and see what they buy.

@ariadne

@stfn I'm unfortunately still reliant on Spotify for music discovery and a lot of music I really like has been suggested by Spotify in the past. In contrast, I've subscribed to weekly emails from Bandcamp and I've rarely liked their suggestions.

@louis @ariadne talk about music with your friends. If you have similar taste, it's a good way to discover new artists. As a bonus: It tends to favour smaller/niche artists, as most people who are into music seem to be more enthusiastic about showing you those than the big ones.

@ariadne

Hear hear!

#BuyArtFromArtists
#FuckSpotify
#FuckYouTube
#FuckApple
#FuckStreaming

@stfn @ariadne Spotify has this download music button. That means content is stored offline/on your disk. It also needs to be somehow readable and this even works on systems without a tpm. However, there is no documentation of what files are what and how to turn that data heap into mp3.That means... that i now totally went on a tangent and have no clue what i wanted to say.

@tfiebig @ariadne oh right, so you assumed that I actually dumped data from Spotify to my local machine, as in doing a database dump.

Ok, that is not that great wording on my part

@stfn @ariadne Ah, it is fine. One may have hopes and dreams. 😱

@lhp @louis basically this

@ariadne in a zine i checked out today:

(courtesy of @sewerspewer)

@stfn @ariadne Alternatively, my solution is Navidrome hosted on rpi with Tailscale to access and MusicBrains Picard for managing tags.

@tfiebig @stfn @ariadne This can be done with Tidal and the command line tool tidal-dl, which solves the DRM problem but does not compensate artists.

If you have money for musicians, Bandcamp and the iTunes Store have all DRM-free music downloads.

@Vorsos I’d add Qobuz to the list, highly recommend
@ariadne @tfiebig @stfn

@Vorsos @tfiebig @stfn @ariadne I buy hi res music from bandcamp (and other sources). I use Roon to listen to it at home and when out mobile.