News @lemmy.world

2mo ago

Massive Attack to take all songs off Spotify

www.bristolpost.co.uk Massive Attack to take all songs off Spotify

Spotify says the reasons why are 'misinformation'

206 comments

Boycott spotify +1
- Spotify: the company that continues to find ways to make YouTube play music not a horrible choice.
  Like... How the fuck.
  
  I mean yeah, I have a Revanced yt music app so I don't have to worry about ads or anything. It works damn near identical to Spotify too.
- I'm out of the loop. Why is there a Spotify boycott?
  
  They’ve been changing their terms of service over the past year with some shady stuff and have continuously screwed over creators. I’m planning on yanking my music out of there too.
  This explains a bit more
  
  The issue for me is that AI generated music has ruined my experience with Spotify. It started recommending lofi beats (easy to generate with AI) and I didn’t want to spend weeks pushing the algorithm to not have it recommend me that crap.
  Other users have complained about the downturn in quality of the weekly recommendations, which is what kept me there in the first place.
  SoundCloud appears to have better recommendations for the type of music I like.
  https://community.spotify.com/t5/Music-Discussion/Half-of-the-weekly-playlists-are-filled-with-AI-generated/td-p/6288755
  https://mashable.com/article/spotify-ai-generated-songs-dead-artists-pages
  
  I'm not sure if you'd call this a "boycott", but many people have also just never used Spotify because they care more about supporting musicians than convenience.
  
  Likely because of that old military investment drama where a company making drones for Ukraine and EU defence did an investment round and spotify joined, which prompted every russian bot farm to attack spotify because of it. As an European, I feel like paying them even if I don't use spotify.

Ohhhh that’s a band’s name
- Great band.
  
  Mezzanine is a masterpiece. It could've been released yesterday. The sound is timeless.
  
  I only know the House M.D. intro song, but I do like it. Mezzanine, I think?
- If not for the improper title capitalization in the headline, it hella reads like a hacker or group of hackers attempting to delete every song on the service. 🤣

I develop kew (a terminal music player), so I'm biased, but I started kew because I rejected Spotify many years ago.
I think that kew (or other private/offline music players) together with flacs from Qobuz are actually a great alternative to Spotify. Throw in some Bandcamp albums in there for great justice. Once you have a decent collection, you will feel liberated.
I especially think that Qobuz needs more exposure.
https://codeberg.org/ravachol/kew
https://www.qobuz.com/
- I LOVE KEW, THANKS FOR MAKING IT! ive used it for years with my CD collection and it beats out everything in comparison.
  
  Hey, thanks, appreciate it.
- I love Lemmy so much cause there's people that make me feel dumb, and no one that makes me feel smart. It pretty fucking refreshing!
  Also thanks so much for your hard work. I got you on a small donation.
  Edit: super git ignorant, guessing code berg doesn't have that button. You got a "buy me a coffee" type thing set up?
  
  Yes I do : https://ko-fi.com/ravachol. Thank you so much!
  
  I love Lemmy so much cause there's people that make me feel dumb, and no one that makes me feel smart. It pretty fucking refreshing!
  Just don't read comments on political posts
- Not to be stupid (I'm new to trying to get my shit offline and go back to physical media / owning digital copies of all my media) what is a "terminal music player"? I love finding these sorts of projects in my quest to take back my time and money!
  
  It's a music player for POSIX terminals that you can find on Linux, macOS and FreeBSD.
  It looks like this:
- Oooh nice, it's even in Debian repositories 👍 Trying it out now.

I've been using bandcamp for years, and I feel pretty good about it. I'd spend about $10/month and get 1-2 albums, and now I have a pretty big collection. I've been unemployed so I haven't bought new music, but my library is still here and ad-free.
Bandcamp might enshittify, since it's privately owned, so make sure you download the drm-free copy of anything you buy.
- Bandcamp is better than Spotify - Ampwall is better than Bandcamp. It's artist owned (developed by Chris from the non-fash Black Metal band Woe). The fees are much, much lower than Bandcamp.
  
  Bandcamp has "Bandcamp Fridays" when 100% of the sales go to the artists. The next ones are on October 3rd and December 5th.
  
  Problem is ampwall basically has a non viable business model beyond it's current scale. So it's likely to never really replace other options. It's good to have around tho.
  
  In the Ampwall business model the artists pay to upload their music but listening is free.
  Sounds fine for hobby musicians, but not for anyone professional.
  
  Interesting. Haven't heard of this one but from their FAQ and writing it sounds interesting.
  Not sure if a subscription fee for artists will work. Bigger ones can certainly afford it.
  The main problem as I see it now is what any new platform has: getting people to use it.
- Bandcamp was sold to Epic Games who then sold it on.
  The outlook isn't great for Bandcamp, but I can't see any better alternative that supports new artists to the same degree.
  
  I've been waiting for that shoe to drop, but it's been like 2 years with no changes (knock on wood).
  BTW check out the little Bandcamp instance we have here~ Post your favorite album!
- Which is great and all, but Massive Attack aren't on that either.
- Bonus points for purchasing on bandcamp fridays (more money goes to the artists). Two left in 2025: Oct 3 and Dec 5.
- We post a lot of Bandcamp links on !gothindustrial@lemmy.world because the free song streaming is great and a lot of bands are on there. Eventually they'll enshittify and get rid of the free streaming or require a signin at which point I'll move on to something else (dunno what?!)

Boy, this band's name sure made this headline confusing.
- I didn't realize this was band related until your post
  
  I'm only vaguely aware of them because one of their songs was used as the House theme, and I still thought the article was describing an upcoming cyber attack on Spotify.

As soon as I need to subscribe to multiple services to find my music I'm going back to piracy. Fuck that anti consumer shit.
- You should already be going back to piracy. Spotify is scamming you and artists.
  
  fun fact:
  Jellyfin works for music (and audio books) just as well as it does for movies and TV shows!
  And being open source, there are apps specific to certain use cases. Like on ios there's Finamp for music and Plappa for audio books.
  It also streams in FLAC quality!
  
  The piracy service still sucks compared to Spotify.
  
  Because piracy is way better for artists
  
  Probably I should develop other habits, but I find hard to improve the amount of good discoveries I got through Spotify with barely no effort... I do the effort to "obtain" those I like from time to time, yet still the effort is low, efficient and worth of it
- tbh you can get by with skipping whole pirate thing and just listen to local and internet radio there's still a lot of good things out there

Good on them, fuck Spotify
- First band on my playlists that is actually removing their music. I'll probably need to look at an alternate service now. Or build my own service.
  
  Bandcamp is probably the best for the artists. If you want something more similar to spotify, Deezer and Tidal both pay artists better than Spotify if I remember correctly. And neither of them have done anything like platforming Joe fucking Rogan. Though it's possible that they have done something terrible that I missed. At least a good place to start looking.
  
  Yeah, usually it's some old hippy like Neil Young that I've never listened to anyway.

evicting JOE rogan would be goodstart from spotify
- Simple maths. How many customers does it cost us to platform assholes, conspiracy nuts and nazis, and how many customers does it get us?
  Adding to that how much they pay the idiot, I feel the balance is tipping towards firing him.
  
  if spotify is getting too much people dropping the service, because of him, they would terminate his role on the MUSIC PLATFORM.
- The damage is done. Even if they declined to renew his contract (they wont because the fascists will threaten them) it is just too late. Unfortunately most music is owned by production companies and the individual artists do not have distribution rights to wield against Spotify.

Spotify must die

Totally just bought a Massive Attack shirt from their website. Their "Ceasefire Now" shirts with the Doctors Without Borders quote are amazing.
https://store.massiveattack.com/
- Merch is usually a better way to support them than buying their music even (they get a bigger share of the sale).
- Those shirts are indeed awesome, but $42 (American)?!? That’s insane for a t-shirt. Or maybe I’m just being a curmudgeonly old man.
  
  I see you haven't bought a band T-shirt in awhile! (also they use materials that have all sorts of fair trade, organic, and social justice certifications) (also I chose one of the $35 ones)
  
  I'm ok with paying premium for band shirts even though they're just basic tees with a print. It's my way of supporting the artist aside from attending live shows, because streaming their music doesn't really do anything, and buying physical CDs/vinyl isn't practical for me.
  
  Band merchandise is basically a donation with a reward, it's not meant to compete on price with store-bought clothing.
- I don't quite understand how is protesting the investments into EU drone companies that also supply Ukraine with drones would lead to a ceasefire, but I'm not a mathematician

Have you guys read the article ? Spotify is denying the claim of massive attack and other platforms as misinformation, they are claiming that the firm the CEO invested in is only working towards military defense of Ukraine against Russia's invasion. I don't know what is true and don't have the time to check, but it looks to me like a decent response if true.
Not saying Spotify isn't problematic, but that might be overblown misinformation.
Then again, if you want to cancel Spotify, good, I'm all for it, I don't like the enshitification they are undergoing. But this reason might not be the one you should put on the resignation form, it might not send the right message to Spotify.
- The company, Helsing, pledges to only sell towards democratic governments. I think it's a very slippery slope. In my opinion, once you've taken a step towards the military industrial complex, you are the military industrial complex.
  I'm not sure how much funding came from the profits of Spotify. It could have come from other investments. Ultimately, you have Spotify leadership involved in a defence company that makes drones. Ethically, I don't like my money going towards someone who invests in this.
  
  Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and our best ally ever, and really good at licking rocks in the desert too.
- Spotify has been shitty from inception IMO. I've tried it a couple times at different points and first off, just didn't like the UX at all.
  The "free" tier is unusable if you're an active listener and not the type to just have something, anything, playing as background noise.
  My biggest pet peeve with Spotify and most of the other big modern streamers: There's a tenuous connection between the listed artist and a "real" artist, so there's no way to tell if you're listening to something intentionally created that can be found elsewhere, or just procedurally generated slop uploaded by some rando. Google is just as bad if not worse with this since merging Google Play Music with YouTube. Apple seems to get this part right, but I have no other reason to switch.
  Anyway, that's not even touching any political/ethics/business aspects of Spotify. It's hard to imagine it becoming any shittier, and I've always wondered how they have the market share they do. At some point I realized that it's kind of just the default option for the more casual listener who isn't already slotted into Apple or Google for everything. Plus it has official, polished integrations with a lot of other apps/ecosystems (e.g. Discord, Xbox).
  I'd sooner bring lossless versions of all my stuff local and tag every track by hand than give them any amount of money, but it's clearly not made for me so that doesn't mean much.
  I've been driven more to web radio stations, even terrestrial radio (streamed or actual FM). there are some great free/non-commercial choices out there still with human DJs. (Shout-out to kexp). Human-curated radio is still viable for discovery and going out of your comfort zone musically, and human "taste-makers" still have a place, which is reassuring. There are a few newish low power FM stations around me which are actually good, which is an interesting and unexpected development.
- You can put one of the other reasons, such as: a) they pay some podcasters a LOT of money and have one of the worst payouts to artists out of the streaming services b) they donated to the inauguration of a cheeto, c) they are just getting lossless audio, but at a lower quality than some other services
- Can’t speak for anyone else, but I read it and also don’t know what’s true beyond the headline which, in my mind, was the key takeaway regardless of the bands motives.
- I was a reasonably happy Rhapsody/Napster user until crypto bros bought it and turned it into fucking garbage. They literally broke the damn app (not phone, entire web app) for weeks after some weird change where they put crypto crap into it. It was entirely unusable.
  After that I gave up. Spotify has far more support and integrations. I don't care for Spotify and how little they pay their artists, but it works and support is far wider.
  I'd go back to Napster if they weren't ass as they did actually pay their artists better. Their app footprint is tiny and support is weak. I integrate a lot of stuff with my home assistant and other things; trying to do it with Napster would likely be a frustrating dead end.
  
  Give Qobuz a try. I did the free trials on a few services and found it to be the most feature complete

I had friends try to get me into Spotify, never liked it.
I use antennaPod for podcasts, highly recommend
- Fellow AntennaPod user. All my podcasts I listened to elsewhere, no adds, no political bullshit, all good.
- Yeah an amazing podcast app

Qobuz crew reporting in
- Does qobuz pay artists more?
- Seconded!

I wish more bands I like were on bandcamp

I appreciate the move, bold for them and the fanbase.
Nowadays probably Dua Lipa, Bruno Mars, Drake and Taylor Swift together could make an impact if they decide to leave (spoiler: no way)

Tidal HiFi is really good, better sound quality, has most music.
- They also pay the artists better.
  
  Its also cheaper, somehow.
- my only complaint with tidal is they suck at properly assigning music to the correct artists. i've opened tickets by contacting their twitter and they sometimes fix the issue but only until the next release of a song

TBH if you're an artist you'll probably make more money by NOT being on streaming platforms and having people buy your music directly - spotify in particular pays fuck all, you might as well have your music on The Pirate Bay. Hell, putting your own music on pirating platforms is probably better for discovery, and people who like your music will buy the albums.

that's so fucking sick, i'm gonna buy their shirts or something

I love it. The streaming services deserve to die, for their shady practices towards artists...
- Because the record labels were so much better...
  We are in need of a good alternative, where the money we give the service goes to the artists based on how much we've listened to that artist personally, not on some amalgamated metrics. I want to be able to open my account and see I've given £2 this month for bandwidth and management costs, £1.20 to Taylor Swift, £1.50 to Massive Attack, £1 to Portishead, etc.
  If at any point you can make money by buying accounts and playing your own tracks over and over, then the service has fucked up.
  
  The worst part is every little bit gets chopped up before it ever makes it a musician.
  Have to pay a label/publisher, then you have to pay a Metadata distributor, and Spotify, plus any other royalties for samples if they're used.
  Fun times.
  
  I wonder if something could be built based on fediverse technology. Artists could host their own instance of some music library software, and have granular control over how it's monetized - pay per stream, buy a digital copy of a specific song/album, have monthly fees for different tiers of access, you could maybe even sell merch or concert tickets on it - kind of like Patreon, except the instance owner has full control over what's offered and how it's monetized. And then in the client for this new thing, you could have a list of all the instances and choose which ones you want to give money to, and if it spoke ActivityPub, you could integrate some sort of feed into Lemmy/Mastodon/etc clients.
  
  This is true. All of the points, and especially the transparency on who gets our money... We are in need of good alternatives, but I don't think, that transparency is a good business model unfortunately :(
  I'm waiting to see how this all will unfold.
  
  Afaik that's the system youtube uses for videos/streams with youtube premium (and twitch as well with turbo). You can't see where your money went as the viewet, but supposedly (don't have sources rn so feel free to correct mr, but I've heard multiple creators say this) it's just the same revenue split as other purchases, applied to the price of your membership and distributed based on what you watch.
  
  Agreed. fwiw Bandcamp is currently kinda like that for their digital tracks tho it was bought out a couple years ago so will begin enshittifying any day now...
  
  Since at least the late 80s record labels sucked, not the streaming services suck. Time to just get rid of copyright on music and audio recordings.

I feel like i am seeing this more and more. I wonder when the tipping point will begin and we start seeing people leave in droves.

This news finally made me get off my fat lazy arse and do what I've been telling myself to do for far too long...
Hello Qobuz

Good. Streaming is for cowards

Because fuck'em, that's why!

Protection

good

Shit. This is honestly the thing that's going to make me cancel Spotify.
What's the alternative? Spotify has almost all the music I want to hear. I don't think the competitors do, and there's no easy way to check.
Any new service I sign up for will need to have my favorite obscure band of all time: Splashdown. I don't own a computer, so piracy is not an option. Where do I go?
- I've been using Tidal for over a year now. I've been digging the FLAC streams. $17 a month for my family plan. Up to 6, including yourself. And yes, Splashdown is on Tidal.
  
  That's most likely what I'll switch to then. Thanks for checking.
  
  Can the family members be outside a single house? Or it does weird stuff like Netflix?
- Purchase the music. Spend what you'd spend on a monthly fee to buy the albums. Then you have them regardless of what the service chooses to do in the future.
  
  I own the CDs. I can't stream CDs to my sound bar or play them on my phone.
- Qobuz is what i have my eyes on.
  Only reason I haven't switched over yet is me and my friends share a lot of music together so I've been working on a personal discord bot to share the different links, and I've yet to get it working 100% yet (it failed when testing with a rick Astley album of all things)
- FWIW Apple Music has two Splashdown albums. Not really recommended per se, but it’s the service I have access to and was able to look it up for you. I think they have a 1 month free trial available?
  
  Thanks for checking. I don't have any Apple products, but it's good to know it's an option.
- I'm a huge splashdown fan. I was able to mail CVB records back in the day and get all manner of stuff.
  Wonderful publisher to send me free content. Love those guys.
  
  I ordered the CDs they had for sale, and they sent me a copy of Blueshift. They were never allowed to formally release it, but they were allowed to give it away!
  Apparently they recorded two new songs a couple years ago. I haven't listened to them yet. I'm saving it.
- You can pirate on your phone just fine, there's libretorrent on f-droid, new pipe can stream and download stuff from youtube and youtube music, you can also download from deezer on telegram with @linemusicbot and @deezload2bot.
  (Rimusic and kreator also exist but are buggy)
  
  Uh huh. And don't I need a PC to root my phone to install f-droid?
- Youtube Music has two different bands called Splashdown, and each has two albums.
  It's definitely a step in the wrong direction as far as not supporting giant evil corporations, but the music is there.
- Not having a computer doesn't mean you can't pirate, you could easily rent a seedbox for like €5/month (eg. https://ultra.cc/) and control torrents on it from your phone eg with transdrone or other apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.transdroid.lite
  
  You can just torrent shit on your phone if you have Android lol

OK but why would anyone drink a microphone?
- It has lots of vitamins
  
  micro-vitamins

The article is behind a paywall/cookie wall. Coukd you provide an another source or an archive link?
- Here you go: https://archive.ph/1XWrP
  For reference, the way you do it is:
  Copy the article's link
  Go to archive.ph and paste link in the second text field to search for an already-archived version
  If nothing comes up, paste the link in the first text field to archive the article (will take a few moments)

Fuck music!
- No, fuck music. Don't forget to use protection (non-YT link).
- Massive attack is very good music to have on while making love, yes.
  
  En ex of mine unused to always play Kings Of Leon when we fucked. Now I get a boner when I hear Sex On Fire.

206 comments