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“We Don’t Want Our Music Killing People”: Indie Rock Band Quit Spotify Over AI Battle
(web.archive.org)
Deerhoof is the band fyi.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Let's all go see them on their next tour. We should support them for this. I mean, they're a great band regardless so see you all there!
Wow - I had no idea - FTA: "Daniel Ek [Spotify's founder] uses $700 million of his Spotify fortune to become chairman of AI battle tech company” was not a headline we enjoyed reading this week. We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech."
Yep, he also contributed to Trump's inauguration and has enriched his own wealth while paying artists dogshit for royalties.
Streaming music is damaging musicians ability to remain musicians. Spotify are the worst but none of them are great. You can buy (and therefore download, own and control) a bands music from Bandcamp, Ampwall etc. You can also usually get merch there too. The only people who make good money from music streaming are music streaming executives.
any good alternatives out there? or better to start hosting music on my media server?
I use Bandcamp, is great for discovering new artist, some bands let you download full albums to your device for free and best of all, you can use it without an account.
You can also access it with Newpipe.
How about Bandwagon? It's federated!
I use this program called "qBittorrent" to get music. Then when I find stuff I like, I find other means to get money to the makers of it (like merch or the like).
If I could actually put money into Bandcamp I'd go with that one for actually getting money to them, but they don't accept any currency or payment scheme I can offer.
Buy and rip CDs, buy music from Bandcamp and Mirlo, and if your preferred music is not there you could buy merch or something and get the album from soulseek/torrent. If the artist has a patreon or similar drop a couple bucks.
I use jellyfin as my media server, super easy to setup. You can use tailscale to access jellyfin from any device without having to put it on the internet.
I like deezer personally.
Huh, I really thought you meant deezer nuts, but it’s real.
Guess I should add a link next time. My bad 🤭
No worries, you didn’t choose the name :)
Tidal or Qobuz, Tidal is better than Spotify anyway and offers lossless for the same price as Spotify's lossy garbage.
Another for Deezer. In the last couple months, I've tried Tidal, Qobuz and Deezer. Qobuz seems the best if you're into music and building your own playlists. They pay the best royalties and do a bunch of human curating, including a weekly zine for current releases. They don't have an automatic playlist that I could find. Deezer has the best recommendation engine of the three, at least for the genres I listen to.
Are these things free and privacy friendly? Never heard of any of them
I've been on Qobuz for a while now. It's not quite as good as Spotify when it comes to catalogue or community playlists. Other than that, I haven't seen any AI slop or ghost musicians, and the suggestions are very human. I believe they pay about 4x royalties that Spotify does.
None of them are free, but they all have a month free trial. After that they're all $10-15 a month. Not sure about privacy, it wasn't a priority when I went looking. I hadn't heard of any of them before I went looking for alternative music services.
I’m pretty content with Apple Music