I killed my Spotify account when they started shoveling millions of dollars at Joe Rogan, and everything they've done since then only confirms I made the right call.
I may have to try that again: at the time I got too many complaints from my kids. Now Spotify hugely increased prices, probably to pay for its attempt to collect Podcasts that I’m not interested in.
Unfortunately I agreed with my kids: other music services just don’t works as well
Tidal has been pretty good for me over the past 5 years. I don't know what your criteria are, but for me it's something like 1) is the catalog big enough to offer 90% of what I'm looking for and 2) no advertising if I'm paying for the service. It ticks those boxes. I imagine it's only a matter of time until they introduce the bullshit tier where you're paying and being advertised to, but for now you get what you pay for.
I can predictably ask for either an artist or “like an artist” and get hours of what I asked for. (Apple just segued into random stuff so I always had to get it back on track. Someone I want listen to specifically someone do if I ask for that I expect to get that)
Only thing I can say on 3 is the interface is pretty not bad. I've never quite liked it, but it has never really gotten in the way. I only recently started trying the track/artist mix. Also can say it's okay. I've actually found a few gems over a few weeks of usage, but at the same time I have found times where it's time to skip to the next track, though this is mostly due to personal taste and not because it's throwing some really out of character into the playlist.
Actually it wasn't easy, they rely on a third party service that charges the customer instead of Tidal footing that bill for you. I thought that was a bit tacky.
This one is actually out of their hands. Lyrics aren't free sadly and they have to pay for API calls. It's fucking stupid but the labels are the ones at fault here.
Unless there's some agreement / licensing thing prohibiting it, and considering that lyrics don't change, they should be able to do some caching for a total of 1 API call per song
It very much is and Spotify would definitely get sued if they weren't paying. I got a cease and desist for an app I made about a decade ago for this very thing
You may get lucky and have a band that doesn't care or won't notice your operation, but Spotify has music from the big labels and they do care and they will notice.
I assume they are not paying for the lyrics, but for the access to the api. The lyrics are also timed to the music and the service they use might do that for them. So, like you say, serving lyrics data costs very little, but that is not what they pay for.
And to add, I don’t really know anything about how this works behind the scenes.
The 1 or 2 kB of lyrics are a few orders of magnitude smaller than the song being streamed.
The album art probably takes up more space than the lyrics.
So, album art should also be a paid feature?
they would have a livable wage if they weren't so fucking bad at business.
They literally outsource the one part of the music industry that makes money publishing
The ONLY source of revenue they have is from subscriptions, and literally all it does is pay the publishers that use spotifys platform. And also VC but that doesn't count since it's VC.
Deafness covers a broad spectrum of hearing difficulty, not just completely deaf. Most people that identify as deaf still have some hearing. I always forget that and had the same question as you until I read a comment further down.
It's likely that the person isn't fully deaf and so can still hear some music, but deaf enough that they can't understand the lyrics. Having the ability to view the lyrics in real time is handy rather than having to search them up all the time. Spotify also shows what lyric is currently being sung in real time, whereas you can't get that with a Google search.
I agree, but unfortunately, there's probably not a good self hosted solution to this specific problem.
I use musicbrainz for music tagging, which is an excellent source for all metadata except lyrics. For better or worse, the only decent sources of lyrics seems to be genius and musixmatch, and neither integrate well with tagging tools like musicbrainz Picard.
If anyone else has found an easier way to do this, I would love to hear it.
When listening locally on my computer I use foobar2000 and the OpenLyrics component - but yeah, it falls short sometimes unfortunately. I've written myself some scrapers that crawl some sites, but that still requires a bit of manual intervention. I'm still looking for a self-hosted app that can help with tags though, and more in a manual manner; I don't really like a script assuming that this album is this specific release when it might not be.
Besides, some files have the lyrics already in the tags - often the case when buying/downloading for free from Bandcamp.
I'm not sure if the application is safe. It may be malicious. Proceed at your own risk.
I saw a GitHub project called 163MusicLyrics that's sources the information from Chinese sources (NetEase and QQ).
The entire software is in Chinese, but the results looked really accurate from the sandbox I ran. It's even actively developed with v6.2 releasing least week. But again, I don't know if it's safe.
I'm not good at code but it looks like it's OSS, so you could verify the code yourself or reverse engineer something with the API calls they use?
Let me know if you come across something though. I'm also looking for a way to get LRC files easily.
EDIT: Also for self hosting, I use Jellyfin with Symfonium, and Tailscale. It works great for me and has been relatively low maintenance.
Coming from the age of ipods and piracy, Spotify was a great alternative to that and reasonably priced for the usage you could get out of it. These days is harder to justify
Meh 6 people, almost every song we could want for less than 20 bucks is ideal.
That said I am gearing up to change streamer just because they annoy me with UI changes, forcing originals, pushing gigs despite disabling that function...and the longest running gripe of all: let me disable censored songs you cunts. I never want the clean version.
I've used Pandora for years. Granted, they don't have all of the features of Spotify. But, I think their algorithm is better and my price has never changed.
I didn't even know they did that, Glad I don't have an account with them. I'm partially deaf, most music I can't understand what someone singing. Those fun things people do of like "most common misheard lyrics" is basically my life. On the plus side I enjoy music from around the world because unintelligible music is unintelligible no matter where it's from. They're very few artists I feel like I can understand, and realistically I'm probably wrong.
In real life, I read lips to help augment my terrible hearing. Fun fact during the mask man dates during COVID, was probably the worst time for me. A lot of people I could hear talking as I could hear noise but I could not make out what it was. Leading to a lot of awkward conversations.
Anyhoo, that's all to say that for music that I do like I do have to see the lyrics. It's what converts the noise into words.
So, fuck you Spotify, My life's difficult enough already, I'm not paying your shitty service so you can charge me for my impairment.
but why does a disability entitle you to a service that’s paid?
why would you limit the ability to use lyrics though? It's the same shit that every big article tabloid is doing "pay us five dollar a month and we will show you our articles, that we think are good" after showing you like three, in four months for free.
Either give people access to the service, or don't, don't play the bullshit of "well actually, here's a free sample"
I would say, it because the lyrics aren't something Spotify made. No one's picking up Spotify because only Spotify has lyrics. Spotify isn't writing the songs. Regardless of what someone might think of Spotify or Spotify free, it's withholding something that they have that they didn't make from people that perhaps need it. It'd be like if broadcast TV or any on demand video service (YouTube, Disney, Netflix, etc.), said hey you didn't pay no more closed captions for you (where a free version is applicable, of course).
If Spotify wants to put stuff behind a paywall it can be features of the platform.
My personal opinion is Spotify sucks, full stop. The CEO is a real piece of work. This just goes on the pile of reason Spotify sucks.
There's plenty of sites to buy mp3 and download them onto your devices, owning them forever. Pirate if you want to pirate, but don't blame others for your behavior.
Being deaf is a spectrum. There are plenty of people who still have some hearing, and are “hard of hearing”. There’s deaf people who can enjoy music through the use of hearing aids as well. There’s also totally deaf people who can enjoy music because of the vibrations. There’s people whose hearing is just bad enough that they don’t understand what anyone is saying without subtitles/lyrics. Deaf in only one ear, etc.
