"We've made it easy to jump ship from this silo to this silo. You will not regret migrating to our silo."
posted by phooky at 1:01 PM on September 18 [21 favorites]

At least their silo provides the option of purchasing DRM-free copies of (most of) the music.
posted by jedicus at 1:08 PM on September 18 [7 favorites]

This solved the remaining issues I was having with switching to Apple Music (which I did years ago): all those playlists I had created from years of using Spotify and was too lazy to recreate on Apple Music. Thank you!
posted by misskaz at 1:14 PM on September 18 [1 favorite]

At least their silo provides the option of purchasing DRM-free copies of (most of) the music.

Still a silo, though. Not a fan of that aspect, nor of algorithmic playlists which just tend to feed you more of what you already like. I'd rather listen to a radio station like KEXP or KRCW or (insert callsign of some obscure quirky independent station here) and find new music that way, personally (one of the reasons I carry a pocket notebook is so I can write down the song title and artist of new-to-me music discovered by radio listening).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:21 PM on September 18 [6 favorites]

KALX
posted by chavenet at 1:24 PM on September 18 [5 favorites]

> "We've made it easy to jump ship from this silo to this silo. You will not regret migrating to our silo."

Streaming services are silos. Every streaming service -- even open-source self-hosted ones -- are silos.

Being able to migrate between silos -- at least in one direction -- is a start. I imagine Spotify and Youtube have heard shots fired and will reply in kind.

I tried and burned out on algorithmic playlists quickly and decided I much prefer discovering music on my own, through friends and via radio. But if you have your collection and wanna listen to it anywhere, your options are toting around a storage device (not necessarily a massive burden, but it's a thing to lose or damage) or subscribing to a streaming service. The streaming service is much less burdensome, the subscription price being your convenience fee.
posted by at by at 1:28 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

I guess I'm just old, but I'm more then happy with my CIFS share of DRM-free MP3s (mostly ripped from CD) which can also be copied to a folder on my mobile devices.
posted by Clever User Name at 1:29 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

It's nice that they're making it a native capability, but users have been able to do this for a long time. There's a great, and cheap, tool available called Soundiiz that will let you import your entire Spotify footprint (tracks, playlists, and all) to pretty much any streaming service. I used it last year when I dropped Spotify and moved to Tidal. Highly recommend it.
posted by jordantwodelta at 1:37 PM on September 18 [5 favorites]

I use Apple Music, and while I¡¯m more than happy with the audio quality, I have never felt so misunderstood by a service as I do by Apple Music. And it¡¯s simple things too - no, I don¡¯t want to listen to high energy music in the morning. No, I don¡¯t want to listen to the nutcracker suite in June. No, I don¡¯t want to listen to John Coltrane¡¯s love supreme directly after listening to a different jazz album. It¡¯s pretty much the equivalent of ¡°hey you brought a toilet seat, would you like a toilet seat, or a toilet seat¡± but with musical streaming.

This has meant that I¡¯ve been intensely researching the music I like. I¡¯ve learned more because Apple Music is terrible (at discovery) than I have from just listening to streams. I hear the cool kids are going back to MP3 players these days, which is going to have much the same effect - you have to work out what you like
posted by The River Ivel at 1:41 PM on September 18 [6 favorites]

Still a silo, but it's a silo that integrates a good bit more smoothly with CarPlay. That's how they getcha!
posted by nicwolff at 1:43 PM on September 18

I¡¯ve been a subscriber for years. The catalogue is very good but the UX is utter shite. I am convinced no one who likes music works on that team.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:51 PM on September 18 [2 favorites]

I'm just waiting for the right moment to start selling my vintage MP3 collection to hipsters.

Some of those files are over 20 years old at this point, many of them hand-encoded using bespoke methods directly from the original CDs at full 320k CBR super extreme settings from the command line as Nyquist himself intended.
posted by loquacious at 1:57 PM on September 18 [29 favorites]

hand-encoded using bespoke methods

If you examine the bits closely, you can still see latency scars caused by their passage through an original Pentium 4 processor.
posted by CynicalKnight at 2:14 PM on September 18 [18 favorites]

Spotify is one of a handful of globally successful European tech companies, so this of course cannot be allowed to continue. It's nationalistic economic warfare.

Sure, Joe Rogan is available on Apple but that shouldn't get in the way of things.

The CEO of Spotify invested in a German weapons manufacturing startup, and so what? There's an existential war going on here and we need that money to fight the fascists. If some wealthy American artists don't like it, that's their choice. They can hand over a gift of gold to their president like Apple's CEO did, if it helps their bottom line. But I'm not supporting that garbage.

/rant
posted by UN at 2:24 PM on September 18 [2 favorites]

What?
posted by jordantwodelta at 2:30 PM on September 18 [4 favorites]

Spotify boycott: Artists leave ¡®garbage hole¡¯ platform after CEO invests in AI weapons

Apple CEO Tim Cook appeals to Trump¡¯s love of gold with a 24-karat base for Apple plaque

The Joe Rogan Experience on Apple

Spotify is European

/Re: What?
posted by UN at 2:39 PM on September 18 [4 favorites]

own your own music, damn
posted by tiny frying pan at 3:06 PM on September 18 [5 favorites]

Further reading on the attempt to crush Spotify in context of the broader economic war currently waged by the US administration and their tech oligarchy:

How Europe Must Respond to Trump¡¯s Economic War. For a European economic deterrence strategy

Trump threatens ¡®substantial¡¯ new tariffs against countries with ¡®discriminatory¡¯ digital rules
The U.S. administration has launched repeated attacks on digital taxes and on the EU¡¯s Digital Services Act. [Trump acting in support of US tech companies ie Apple, Meta, X]

[I do not use Spotify personally. There are better hifi alternatives from Europe, such as Quboz
posted by UN at 3:13 PM on September 18 [1 favorite]

I have to say, I really miss iTunes. I had a significant CD collection (I Am Old) that I uploaded and had organized in iTunes which now exists as an un-navigable mess in youtube music for no good reason and it's so disorganized and inaccessible that I effectively can't and don't use it. This doesn't seem to solve that problem, including because it still seems to want to serve me music from the cloud. Why did I throw out all my physical CDs????
posted by prefpara at 3:23 PM on September 18 [5 favorites]

anyone got the magnet link for the all-music-2024-flac.torrent?
posted by fragmede at 3:44 PM on September 18 [2 favorites]

I had ~450 music CDs that I ripped to iTunes, one by one, on my work desktop computer (so I wouldn't burn out my own CD drive!) back around 2006.

I threw away all the old plastic boxes. Many were broken, and the majority were full of the grime of 20+ years of sitting in various smoky apartments and being moved from place to place. I bought several HUGE CD binders and filled them all up, so I kept the discs (and for the most part, the paper CD inserts). I have these stored somewhere in a cardboard box in place in my lower level that I refer to as The Undercroft.

I kept all my CDs but I haven't even seen them in close to 20 years.

I use Apple Music. I'm not a power user, so I don't have a lot of playlists. I have made them in the past for my in-laws anniversary parties and a few birthday parties. But I'm more of an impulse listener. So I think about something and I listen to it. Apple has some pretty obscure stuff, so it works for me.

I mostly listen to my local community supported, ad-free radio station CHiRP Radio Chicago (https://chirpradio.org) where I am a sustaining member.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:55 PM on September 18 [1 favorite]

I keep a streaming account for the kids, but at this point I'm pretty much entirely buying music on bandcamp/faircamp/LP, mostly because it's hard to be an artist and I want to support the people who make sounds I care about. Streaming services aren't an effective way to do that. I particularly like how you can choose to pay as much as you like on bandcamp, so you can, say, drop ?500 on Jim E Brown's new album (please do not actually do this, his liver will not survive)
posted by phooky at 4:10 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

I used to work in the digital music space, at a company that handled all the licensing and infrastructure behind most of the brand names.

¡°Fun¡± fact about artist payment, if the track is played as part of a ¡°radio¡± station playlist that came from the service, the artist gets about 1/100th of what they get if you search for the same track and press play directly.

This same disparity happens with ¡°make me a station out of this track/artist¡±.
posted by funkaspuck at 4:34 PM on September 18 [5 favorites]

I really miss iTunes. I had a significant CD collection (I Am Old) that I uploaded and had organized in iTunes which now exists as an un-navigable mess in youtube music for no good reason and it's so disorganized and inaccessible that I effectively can't and don't use it.

Do you still have the original files on a drive somewhere? You can import them into the Apple Music app and play them exactly the same way that iTunes worked, without having to subscribe to the Apple Music streaming service.

If you no longer have your music files and they only exist in YouTube Music, you can download all your original files by using Google Takeout. Click ¡®Deselect all¡¯ at the top of the list and then go all the way to the bottom and select ¡®YouTube and YouTube Music¡¯. Then click where it says ¡®All YouTube data included¡¯ and deselect everything except for ¡®music (library and uploads)¡¯ unless you also want to download other stuff you see in that list. The next steps are pretty self-explanatory.
posted by theory at 5:07 PM on September 18 [4 favorites]

On the one hand, Apple Music pays better royalties than basically any other streaming service people have ever heard of. On the other hand, the royalties are still¡­?pretty minuscule overall, really.

Incidentally, the iTunes music store is still around! You can still buy songs and albums and download them (mostly) DRM-free, and you can use the software for local library management. It used to be much less junk-drawer overall back in the day, but it still functions well enough, all things considered.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:08 PM on September 18

Still around? I didn¡¯t know there was any other way to buy music these days!
posted by nickmark at 5:54 PM on September 18

I'd rather listen to a radio station like KEXP or KRCW or (insert callsign of some obscure quirky independent station here) and find new music that way, personally (one of the reasons I carry a pocket notebook is so I can write down the song title and artist of new-to-me music discovered by radio listening).

not all of us have your commitment to analog terrestrial indie snobbery--thought are you using streaming radio????--i admire your stamina
posted by sickos haha yes dot jpg at 6:16 PM on September 18 [3 favorites]

I use iTunes Match to hold the hundreds of albums I've bought. It¡¯s the convenience of streaming but without lock-in and it works great with all of the weird outlier albums which aren¡¯t in streaming catalogs.
posted by adamsc at 6:33 PM on September 18 [1 favorite]

Tidal is great, and I'm not a huge fan of the Apple ecosystem, but I love anything that takes people away from Spotify, which is a horrible, horrible company.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 6:36 PM on September 18 [1 favorite]

yeah like Apple is evil but mostly just in the by-default sense for a company that size, while Spotify is like¡­ maybe not quite Facebook level, but definitely at least Epic level "actually evil" in their policies and goals
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:53 PM on September 18

(What I thought of when I read the title: https://youtu.be/HmRofx_suTg?t=146 ) Right there with you, Clever User Name... Also feeling old and also happy with my digital library that exists on my own server.
posted by rjd at 8:37 PM on September 18

Strange I thought of this for the title
posted by billsaysthis at 9:42 PM on September 18

not all of us have your commitment to analog terrestrial indie snobbery--thought are you using streaming radio????--i admire your stamina

Actually quite a few stations "left of the dial" (including the ones mentioned above) not only have live streaming but also have their shows archived for two weeks or so. So if you initially miss a show or hear about an interview happening after the fact, you can go back and stream it (assuming you're still within the two-week window of course).
posted by gtrwolf at 9:56 PM on September 18 [2 favorites]

Perhaps better on the thread that apparently inspired this one (thanks for the shout out, btw!), Massive Attack have not only removed their music from Spotify but have signed up to No Music for Genocide which seeks to encourage and assist artists to geoblock Israel at the distro portal level. Artists not signed to Sony, Warner or Universal record labels should be able to do this relatively easily; for the Big Three, they suggest getting in touch for further assistance.

As No Music for Genocide note:

"Within a few months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, every major label either unilaterally removed their entire catalogue from Russia or closed operations entirely, implicitly or explicitly condemning Putin's actions while donating to Ukraine. No such measures have been taken against Israel, or in support of Palestine, after decades of illegal occupation and 23 months into Israel's accelerated genocide."

And:

"No Music For Genocide is a cultural boycott of Israel. Over 400 initial artists and labels have geo-blocked and removed their music from that territory in response to Israel's genocide in Gaza; ethnic cleansing of the Occupied West Bank; apartheid within Israel / '48; political repression of Pro-Palestine efforts wherever we live; and the music industry's own ties to weapons and crimes against humanity.

This tangible act is just one step toward honoring Palestinian demands to isolate and delegitimize Israel as it kills without consequence on the world stage. The successful cultural boycotts against apartheid South Africa prove that our creative work grants us agency and power. When we wield it together, we add unified pressure to a growing, global, interdependent movement, from Hollywood to the docks of Morocco."
posted by deeker at 12:42 AM on September 19 [4 favorites]

The Joe Rogan podcast is available on Apple Podcasts but so is literally anything else with an RSS feed.

Spotify paid him $250m for it.

There's a difference.
posted by parm at 3:17 AM on September 19 [9 favorites]

I think this is great, because Apple is totally a company that has never done anything bad and that we should all feel great about giving our money to, lol. No problems with these folks!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:20 AM on September 19 [1 favorite]

wae geurae?
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:00 AM on September 19

kittens for breakfast: no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc. etc. but if you want to make a difference you generally want to offer alternatives people actually use. Apple is far from perfect but they¡¯re not actively contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to elevate right-wing provocateurs or creating AI slop to undercut human creativity the way Spotify does and that means we¡¯re better off with people using them instead, just as how the planet would still be much better off if people who aren¡¯t going vegan switched their beef consumption to chicken and pork.
posted by adamsc at 5:37 AM on September 19 [2 favorites]

Count me among those who were quite happy to see that Winamp exists on Android, still plays the mp3s I got at lan parties in the 90s, works just fine if there's no cell signal, doesn't make me pay a subscription, always plays exactly what I want, and has zero issues with the music I buy and download from whatever drm-free store the artist has chosen.

I feel like this whole thing was a solved problem back when I was in high school, then Spotify came along and tried to forcibly un-solve it.
posted by mrgoat at 5:46 AM on September 19

I kinda think Apple itself isn't doing the whole "generate music with an AI that sounds just like this other music so we don't have to pay royalties" thing (atlthough they may not have worked out how to defend against people uploading their own AI-generated music.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 4:07 PM on September 19

wae geurae?

???
posted by HearHere at 3:15 AM on September 20

I use Spotify mostly in protest to Apple Music ruining how I managed music with my iTunes library. But I didn't know about the Rogan contract and that is definitely making me think about how to jump ship. Silos suck, but seem unavoidable, and at least Apple isn't a Nazi silo funding Nazis.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:58 AM on September 20

Apple is far from perfect

They run sweatshops. It's basically impossible to abstain from buying all products associated with Apple or sister corporations, and I wouldn't bother even trying to boycott them; on a practical level, it cannot be done. But I'm also not going to point to them as the lesser of two evils. I think they're the cooler of two evils, which is not the same thing.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:35 AM on September 20

kittens: my point was simply that they¡¯re not actively funding the right the same way Spotify does, and lesser matters even if it¡¯s not perfect. It¡¯s like the decision between buying a Prius or Ram truck even if you¡¯d really prefer to bike to work.
posted by adamsc at 10:41 AM on September 20

They run sweatshops

Folks, hate to break it to ya, but they all run sweatshops. Be that as it may, Apple isn't run by or funding Nazis. Sorry you hate this one company that much but facts are what they are.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:13 PM on September 20 [1 favorite]

I don't really see a significant difference between a nazi and someone who runs a sweatshop. I don't hate this one company that much, but I don't love them more than another company either. If you like what Apple makes more than what Spotify makes, that's great. But it's not a moral victory to pay for Apple Music over Spotify. Trying to make it into one is empty posturing, no offense.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:38 PM on September 20 [2 favorites]

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