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Comment on Advice on moving my Spotify library to Navidrome

thericofactor@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

If artists would actually get paid fairly by Spotify that would be a good model.

Until about 100 years ago music artists would get paid for playing live only. Then music reproduction became possible, and lo and behold, companies started making a profit off of popular musicians by reproducing their music and taking a share, just because they could afford the technology.

Then, reproduction came into the hands of regular people, and you could reproduce music at home, bypassing the companies that profit off of the musicians. So copyright laws were drafted to protect mostly the companies making a profit off of musicians.

Now we’re going back to the situation of 100 years ago: musicians need to play live to get paid. But reproduction does still make them famous without them having to travel. So that’s a plus.

And you can argue Spotify has to.pay for infrastructure and app development, but that technology is in the hands of individuals as well nowadays. So what do they actually offer, on top of the work of creative people making music? Not much. Yet they become more expensive every year. And the only people getting richer are their shareholders.

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paequ2@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

So what do they actually offer, on top of the work of creative people making music? Not much.

OK, so I left Spotify for Navidrome a while back BUT. What Spotify sells isn’t music. Spotify sells curation and recommendations. Most people aren’t music lovers that want to hunt for cool new music. They just want a pre-generated list of songs that they’ll more or less like. That’s actually kinda huge.

A recommendation engine is something I wish fediverse or open source would tackle. I’m on Navidrome now, but I’m definitely listening to way less music now—access isn’t an issue—I just haven’t had time to hunt around for new music. Investigating new bands takes time. On Spotify, you do it without even really thinking about it.

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- Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Listenbrainz is trying to tackle open source recommendations. Its not to bad.
  
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- enemenemu@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  listenbrainz.org has an open source recommendation engine
  
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- damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  I reckon the problem with that is… what’s the source for the recommendations and then what’s the sink?
  
  Like, first, how do you get all that information about music, type of music, musicians, year of release etc?
  
  Then where do you store it? Then you come to the problem of building a robust recommendation engine. Sure that’s one step that seems solvable with open source. Not easy. Solvable.
  
  Then, what does a person do with the recommendations? So you have to build ways to export to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, FOSS music solutions. Perhaps plugins are the way to solve this.
  
  Not saying it’s not doable. Just difficult.
  
  Though I also believe someone would have tried to tackle it in their capacity in the FOSS world. Don’t know how Fedi plays into this. Maybe an online radio station?
  
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dabe@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I think you may have shifted the argument a bit.

We’re not “back to where we were 100 years ago”. Bandcamp exists and pays artists for song purchases. It’s not perfect, and the selection of Bandcamp and the few other services like it are sometimes limited, but there ARE ways to buy digital music and have a non-negligible amount of the money go directly to the artist.

I think you’re trying to make an argument for just pirating digital format music. I would say, don’t just throw up your hands and go straight there by default, try to buy the music first, and then if you can’t or really can’t afford it, then by all means download the music in other ways.

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