Qobuz also does purchaseable music, not just streaming.
Same with Apple Music.
Edit: this is slightly misleading. When I used “Apple Music” in this sense, it included the “iTunes Store”, which most people do not realize is a separate store where you can buy individual songs or albums. Both Apple Music and iTunes Store purchases show up in the same iTunes library.
Is Apple Music the same as iTunes?
Apple Music is the streaming subscription service. iTunes Store is where you go to buy individual songs or albums. They both show up in the same iTunes library.
Yeah until they remove the albums and you don’t keep them anymore afaik
This can happen to any store unfortunately. If a publisher withdraws, you’d no longer be able to download it. Qobuz has this too. Some publishers are quite scummy with this and upload a slightly different version, which no longer qualifies as the album you’ve purchased. You need to download it asap after buying.
You are complaining about something that is not specific to Apple Music. It can happen, and it sucks, but Apple is no different from any other online music purchasing store in this regard.
iTunes Store purchases are free from DRM and can be backed up just like any other libre digital purchases.
All songs offered by the iTunes Store come without Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection. These DRM-free songs, called iTunes Plus, have no usage restrictions and feature high-quality, 256 kbps AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) encoding.
https://support.apple.com/guide/music/intro-to-the-itunes-store-mus3e2346c2/mac
This graphic seems to put Spotify in a “less shit” category than the other big players based on national origin or something.
From a quality and fairness perspective Spotify is just as bad. A large list of credible musicians and content creators have detailed the poor compensation, shift towards fake artists and AI filler tracks, and other moves Spotify has made that harm the artists and provide a worse listener experience.
If you want to fairly compensate artists, you’d be better off pirating 100% of your streams using alternate frontends for YT music, then making a list of your top 10-20 artists and buying an album or T-shirt from each of their official websites. They will make a lot better margin on that and its better for their career than any amount of streams you can give as one individual. (Also go to shows when available locally)
Some of the categories for this infographic are arbitrary within the context of the music streaming market. Spotify is literally a more “incumbent” “monopoly” than the “big tech incumbents” if you only consider the segment of those companies’ operations related to music streaming. Spotify is probably the worst choice of all, both using the ethos provided by the infographic and by other metrics too. Tech companies with 150B capitalisation are big tech regardless of how much bigger others are.
Just a shot in the dark, but something tells me Spotify being an EU company made OP think they were better simply because they weren’t based in the US. Yea, US sucks, but don’t let that rage blind us to other monsters who might get off easy being from one of the “good” countries.
Especially now, 5 months later, Spotify is advertising ICE recruitment videos in Chicago. IMO Spotify is the worst of the bunch.
US = bad, EU = good seems like a very tokenistic approach to the movement. As though its founding principle is nationalism lol
Naspers is a South African multinational internet, technology and multimedia holding company headquartered in Cape Town… did you mean Napster…? Did you generate this with AI or something?
Why would the largest music streaming service in the world be in the “other” category and not the “Big Tech Incumbents”.
Yeh and the blurb for splotifry reads like an ad, with not a negative word to say about this exploitative monster.
This figure mentions Spotify on a side note. You must be joking.
Indeed. It should be at the top as the defacto music streaming platform based on popularity.
i decided to self host my library in as high of a res I could using Navidrome/subsonic.
I had a FiiO X3 anyway so i already had a FLAC capable player.
in the end, even if i know it’s not for everyone. selfhosting is the only way to never lose what u love. so many of my lesser known tracks are just gone on spotify.
I switched from Spotify to tidal then deezer and finally landed on qobuz. While the app still has some problems and the music selection is not as massive as on Spotify (but mainly in super niche content), the higher artist pay and amazing soundquality are definitely worth it
Spotify to tidal then deezer and finally landed on qobuz
Steps out of Time Machine from 15 years ago
WTF
I really wish Qobuz would let me bookmark individual songs in my browser. That’s the real sticking point for me (I use it).
If something’s not on Qobuz I can just listen on Soundcloud.
Tidal is owned by Block, the owners of Square, which is the biggest POS vendor in the US. If that’s not big tech I don’t know what is.
Part of the reason I just shifted to a fully self-hosted setup.
Left Spotify because of all the bullshit they pull, tried out Tidal because of the higher quality and higher artist pay, but even if it is a substantially better platform, its ownership is questionable to say the least.
I dusted off bandcamp and learned to use slskd to build a full local high quality library powered by a Navidrome instance.
I tend to wear a special hat that allows me to consume music in any format or device I like.
and then go donate to, or purchase music directly from the artists that I like.
I’ve been happy with Bandcamp. They got sold recently so their future is uncertain, but I downloaded all the music I bought.
They don’t really have an algorithm, but you can see who else purchased something, and they do blog posts about like “what’s new in [genre]” that’s worth reading. So far as I can tell it’s written by real people.
