Comment on Spotify’s 3rd price hike in 2.5 years hints at potential new normal
irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Radio only plays a few dozen songs or only “classic” stuff, so I never get to hear new stuff. Having streaming audio was always my way to find new music. That said, Spotify has started doing the same, just playing the sponsored songs and the themes they have generally only play stuff I’ve heard a million times. Rarely “b-sides” or new stuff based on my actual interests.
I miss the days of the original Pandora service with its database of music elements, and it would go across genres to find things with similar elements and didn’t have any influence from the recording industry sponsoring songs because they were actively destroying their own industry fighting to kill off streaming, instead. I found a bunch of new stuff I never would have heard otherwise. It totally changed my listening habits.
So with the streaming services consolidating and raising prices as a result, I likely won’t stick with it anymore. My music library is too large to store locally on my phone and I like variety rather than making playlists. I’m thinking of setting up my own streaming server, but music discovery is still an issue I need to solve.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 days ago
I’ve got nearly 2,000 tracks and a few dozen albums that take up 25GB on my phone. Too large to store locally suggests a lot of ballast you never listen to.
irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I have around 3500 liked songs on Spotify alone just from the last 5 years or so and just stuff that Spotify chooses to plat for me. I have about 9,000 tracks in my primary collection from old ripped CDs and purchased MP3s/FLACs. This is without stuff that I dont really like that much anymore or stuff that I would only listen to in specific circumstances, like Mozart or something. It’s over 100GB. There is definitely some overlap there, but definitely less than 1/3 of the Spotify likes I also own. So probably I’d end up somewhere in the 125-150GB range. If phones still had SD card slots I could do it, but that’s not that common anymore since they want you to buy streaming and backup services.
I could probably pare it down even more without missing out too much, but it would take a lot of time and it would be removing stuff I like to listen to. And I wouldn’t have room to add new stuff.
I listen to a pretty wide variety of genres and I listen on my phone often, pretty much anytime I’m driving or on a bus/train, and I dont like hearing the same songs repeated too much unless I’m just getting to know the song. I’ve thought about writing a script that automatically randomly replaces files when I’m on my home network to take a smaller set with me, but that’s a lot of work. The other alternative is creating playlists of a few hundred songs each and switching them out when I’m home, but again, lots of work.
Streaming just covers it well for my use case, if it was reasonably priced and did it’s job well to help discover new music, but seems that’s not what they’re selling anymore. I also don’t have a data cap anymore, or at least it’s a soft cap and not ridiculously low, but not sure how long that will be the case either.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 day ago
Oh, FLAC will boost your file sizes. I’m content with 320 mp3s.