2y ago

YSK a free, lightweight alternative to Spotify

Why YSK: Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it. It's better to find a free alternative, both for your wallet and for your peace of mind.

Introducing: ViMusic

Downloads: https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic

Free and open source
No ads/trackers
Song lyrics
Music from both YouTube Music and YouTube
Weights 2MB or so
Beautiful UI and amazing UX

Cons: no high kbps streaming support

DO NOT TRY TO DOWNLOAD THE APP FROM ANY SOURCE OTHER THAN THE ONES LISTED IN THEIR GITHUB PAGE. They are malware.

28 comments

Potential bias: I'm a developer at Spotify.
"Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it."
I don't think the company forces you to do anything. It is their business model, how they can provide copyrighted music to you and have a share of the pie too.
I'd say the very idea that Spotify is forcing you to pay with time and attention or money so you can have music conveniently streamed to your devices is a testament to the company's success. It created this business model and fulfilled an apparently basic need to the point you think that charging for it is unfair.
But "forcing" is too much. You can always buy discs, digital downloads and so.
- I mean the streamers have to get paid too, you might hear artists complain about how much money Spotify takes but as someone who has released lots of music on Spotify they do pay you, pretty decently too! Lots of artists are making hundreds of thousands a year from just Spotify and the business itself is profitable, which allows pretty much anyone to upload their music and try their dream.
  That is valuable in it of itself, without services like Spotify many of the artists I listen too would probably have given up on music for a boring IT job, like I did.
- Of course they don't force you to use spotify, but it's one of those "soft monopolies" many other companies have. It's not the only option, but they basically are, because everyone thinks so: it's like whatsapp, if you catch my drift (everyone use it because everyone's on it)
  And when a company realizes they're in that position, they will prey down on their users without fail, and I'm talking about:
  Privacy invasive app: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.spotify.music/latest/
  Investing in military AI: https://mixmag.net/read/spotify-daniel-ek-ai-defence-investment-criticism-news
  Patents for extremely invasive technologies: https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/spotify-tech-emotion-manipulation/
  Allowing disinformation during covid, not paying properly the artists and many other things I'm not going over for sake of brevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Criticism
  What I don't like about spotify and all the companies who are in a similar position in the market is that, as usual, their share of the pie it's unfairly big, which is why I try to drive people away from them. Not saying YouTube is better, but at least with vimusic you don't have to listen to ads (which I think heavily harm people's mental health, among other things)
  Of course music can be bought, but people only buy what they like nowdays, and use online services to discover new music. Few have the money to buy music and listen to it for the first time afterwards. Many people don't even have the money to meet their basic needs, let alone buy music
  
  Spotify really isn't a "Soft monopoly" though. There are a lot of competitors in the music streaming business. Youtube music, Apple music, and Pandora, just to name a few. Sure, Spotify is perhaps the most commonly used, but it's also unfair to punish a company because they're successful.
  
  Not to argue against any of the points against Spotify, but YT Music (and it's parent, Google) are much worse; leaving only Apple Music with a much smaller library as a realistic alternative to streaming music.
  I do miss the old days of Google Play Music though - it is a shame what Google did to a neat app with a standalone subscription.
- Thanks to you and/or other Spotify devs for the linux desktop app that I understand you develop in your free time
- Spotify took an existing thing and made it convenient and worse at the same time. How long before we are just listening to AI music? Since their cost is the artists...it's only a matter of time.
- I think the important thing is to keep Spotify from being the only way you can stream music. While I agree you can buy discs or digital downloads, these are fundamentally different methods of consumption from streaming.
  Stopping Spotify purchasing the exclusive rights to stream prevents a monopoly where, if you want to stream, you are 'forced' to use Spotify and pay/listen to ads there. Keeping artists' options open allows the most customer-friendly streaming service to win out as consumers choose which streaming service gives them the best product to listen to who they want
  
  When has Spotify been buying exclusive rights to music?

I've been mostly using newpipe for the same purpose but this one looks great too. Thanks!

Adverts like this post shouldn't be a think in "YSK". It makes no sense.
This app is literally just music piracy in a fancy shell anyways. Since there's no YouTube ads displayed, artists get nothing. Think Spotify is bad at paying artists? Try... piracy...?
- That's fair, but I am curious how much of streaming revenue go towards the artists and how much goes towards the labels.
  
  That isn't up to Spotify, all money goes to the labels and then the labels and artists negotiate their share. They've got a good site actually: https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/

Just pay for Spotify... £10 for access to almost every song ever published. People need to appreciate how good they have it.

How long is this likely to stay online? It sounds like it's circumventing paid services (YouTube Music, specifically) - I can't see Google being too happy about people skipping out on paying for their service.
(I'm not saying this is a bad idea, I'm openly wondering about the longevity of the app and slightly nervous about the dev's wallet when it might come to a lawsuit. I don't know if that's a thing that would happen.)
- Musi (app on iOS for listening to YouTube without ads and allows background listening) has been working for several years at this point. So I don’t see Google doing much about it.
  
  Google is making moves in this department on YouTube. Could be months, years, or never when these apps can't keep ahead in the cat and mouse game anymore.
- As long as you can acess an youtube music from the web, it should be safe to keep working (as long as google doesn't rewrite something on their end) there are a gazillion of projects that are able to stream/download from youtube (youtube-dl, newpipe come to mind now)
  
  Savor it. Google is about to shut those down. They recently figured out how to tell if a user is watching the ads or not an interrupt the streams to them.
  I've seen two separate methods so far one where they just block the stream when it gets to the add point, and another where they completely blocked all my clients except the official YouTube. I'm sure we have a lot of cat and mouse left in us, but in the end, if they solve this on the server side there's probably not a lot we can do about it

Thank you so much for showing me this. I'm sick and tired of Spotify and YT Music locking crucial features behind paywalls on mobile (playing with without shuffle on Spotify and background playing on YT Music).
- I feel you. Enjoy your free music!

Ok, so I was skeptical, but this is rad. And it finds anything, including my own tiny band's releases. I'm impressed.
https://i.imgur.com/wImzPNR.png
F-Droid is a viable installation source in addition to GitHub.

28 comments