So you pay Spotify money each month. Do you really think that they are paying artists more than you pay them? Doubt it.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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There might also be advertisements, in which case they're getting more out of playing than they lose.
Jokes on you. They just dilute the royalty payment among all the artists you've streamed, so Spotify's cut isn't really bring affected.
Fun right?
Even worse still: you're supporting joe fuckin rogan and the payments music get from spotify are pitiful. you'd have done much better by the artist by cancelling spotify and buying an album or shirt or ticket.
Worse, they start injecting AI generated songs when you're not paying attention and can keep more of the royalties for themselves
IIRC this is already happening, some people are reporting getting AI music in their auto playlists.
Just install YouTube music from revanced. No ads
Delightfully devilish, Seymour!
I use Tidal instead of Spoofie
Same price, higher quality audio, and imo a better recommendation feed
I use tidal as well, just wish there was mobile/desktop sync
Why even use Spotify at all? Isn't it like the worst option in terms of actually paying creators? Even YouTube Music is much better option imho, although the app is unresponsive and a UX nightmare.
Youtube is owned by google, who suck dick and are taking an active role in devolving democracy.
Spotify just sucks dick. Also support EU...everyone should move to deezer maybe.
Spotify supports rogan with those $$$$s. fuck that guy
Yeah the US sucks. The spotify app is getting worse and worse. I contacted them to disable the podcast autoplay video on the homescreen, after giving all my details and reasoning they untoggled and told.me to wipe and reinstall...no difference.
I am in the process of getting the family over to Deezer.
I dispise animated or live features on a homescreen.
I think one of the allures of Spotify is a good algorithm which often recommends niche and small artists according to your taste Edit: after reading my comment it sounds like a fucking ad bot haha
Really. For a long time it’s kept giving me songs which I’ve heard a thousand times. I can’t seem to find anything new
I on the other hand find spotify recomendation to be fantastic generaly speaking. I for example dont see a world where braveride( small band from grece(?) with a few hundreds views per song at best , not without the reason. Audio quality is shit in their songs ,only the newest album actually was made in proper recording studio apparently , very cool nontheless ) would ever show up naturaly anywhere. Also its fairly varied so while it generaly tries to keep to your taste it sometimes does the same thing as youtube and throws something weird out of nothing. I like that. But yes as usual with algorithms it needs training so you will probably get garbage for a while( i got way too much rap for a while despite me barerly considering this as a music in the first place ), similar situation with new YouTube account. Im speaking only about discover weekly recomendations tho. I dont use anything else for recomendations in spotify.
While that's definitely true it's not like there are any streaming platforms paying artists what they actually deserve. Other streaming services do payout slightly more per stream but they also don't have the number of paying users Spotify has. So you're likely going to make more off of spotify than any other service even if they do payout less per stream.
Not defending spotify though. Them and the record labels are absolute scum. Just making the point that if you want artists to benefit from you listening to their music just buy their music outright. Or go see them live if you can. Don't stream it. Because streaming pays basically nothing no matter where you stream it from.
Spotify is worse not really beacuse it pays less but due to the way it pays the artist where all streams are pooled together. That incetivizes bot farms way too much and is the main reason i even tried anything else( tidal but i really didint like it so i got back ) . It really should have a model where your money goes to the artists you listened. In defence of spotify tho changing it is likely pain in the arse. Well not technicaly but i imagine they have countless contracts where the way of profit sahring is stated and would violate the agreement.
I use deezer, way easier to use downloaders to pirate music off of it, then deactivate my account when I'm not.
The YouTube music app has always been very snappy and responsive on my phone. I think the ui is slick although not always optimal to navigate while driving.
Excess ain't rebellion.
You're drinking what they're selling.
Your self-destruction doesn't hurt them.
Your chaos won't convert them.
They're so happy to rebuild it.
You'll never really kill it.
Yeah, excess ain't rebellion.
You're drinking what they're selling.
Excess ain't rebellion.
You're drinking,
You're drinking,
You're drinking what they're selling.
Spotify loves you for this. And the artists can't perceive it.
I get the thrust of the song, but I have a question for you and/or anyone else who has insight:
I make small aggressions, like OP, where I assume I'm costing a corpo and giving to an artist through it, even if minuscule.
Examples:
Similar to OP, I have a streaming service 'downloaded' playlist of songs I like. I tend to leave my PC playing them in shuffle/repeat during my workday. I might have my volume on or off depending on my level of focus, but I can't see how that "engagement" doesn't benefit the artist without costing me anything -- maybe a smidge more electricity.
Since I saw The Spiffing Brit's runtime video, I no longer close a youtube tab if I decide I want something else. I mute the tab, set the speed to .25 and ignore it for a while. Costs me electricity, not that much bandwidth, and presumably pays the channel more than usual. Maybe fucks with analytics per-video, but probably not enough to bother the creator, and if it fucks with 'the algorithm' and pushes people to channels I already like, then that's a google problem.
I also have an Epic Games account, where I "buy" every single free game. I assume these have either already paid the developer a fixed fee for supporting development, or are paying based on sales volume. Either way, they presumably paid money to be able to offer these as a loss-leader. Most are games I would not have bought anyway, so I'm not costing the developer a potential sale and I will never buy anything through Epic games, so it should be just a loss. I actually want insight on this one, in case there are devs/publishers here. If this costs you when I buy your free game, there might be others like me who just need to know we're not helping.
Aside from the fact that my engagement with these platforms could be used as leverage (' we have X million active users...'), I can't see any negative to my attacks on them. It's possible the artists can't perceive it, but if the corpos love it, they wouldn't make me pass a CAPTCHA to buy a game.
The question, then, is: Am I hurting the artists, or helping them?
It's a rigged game. It's like you're at a casino. It doesn't matter HOW you play the game, the casino wins. The way to beat them is not to engage with them at all. Established capital exploits the artist and the audience alike. You have to work outside the system of coercive control to have a meaningful effect that doesn't just get turned back against you. Giving the artist more incentive to stay in an abusive situation ultimately helps the platform more than the artist, as compared to spending the same money through a direct channel.
Why not just stop using spotify? You cant possibly stream enough to cost them more then they earn in a month from you using it. Even on mute they can still count you as an active user when it comes to selling ads and promiting themselves.
If you really want to hurt spotify, use one of the services like Soundiiz that lets you export your lists and library, grab a 2 month trial of tidal for $2 and point tidal-dl to download it all for offline use. Get yourself a nice dedicated music player like a classic ipod running rockbox. If space is an issue convert from flac to opus.
If you really, really, want to hurt spotify do what i did and take the above instructions and then also spin up your own FunkWhale pod so everyone can also enjoy that music without giving corporations like spotify a dime.
We arent going beat corporations by using their products "too much", the way to beat them is to replace them with self hosted alternatives.
Is tidal-dl working well? It seems to be abandoned. I was trying to get or make something to automatically download songs that I favourite but kinda dropped it after looking at some options.
It's not about using or not using Spotify. It's about getting the artists more money.
Getting the artists more money is ALL about not using Spotify.
Well if thats your goal buy their music or merch, or just send them cash directly, most artists are on bandcamp, smaller artists will at least have a venmo or cashapp you can send to.
Artists arent making their rent money on whatever pittance spotify pays them, you would do more good for the actual artist if you just promoted their work and gave them a few bucks directly.
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IIRC, Spotify watches the system volume and doesn’t pay for streams playing when it’s muted. Physically unplugging your speakers should work, though.
If you have a desktop and not a laptop, it's always a great idea to get a separate sound controller. Either a dac/amp for nice headphones, volume controls on a wireless headset, or even buy a sound mixer like the rodecaster duo so you can assign independent applications to each physical slider on the mixer. I do that last one and it's such a quality of life improvement if you use your PC a lot.
All of these options can't be seen from Spotify.
I don't think a site can view your system volume. They can however see if a tab is specifically muted https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/tabs/MutedInfo
afaik Spotify(or any site) Cannot see if a tab is muted. The method you're referring to is part of the tabs API, which can only be used by extensions that have been given permission to the tabs api
I think the Spotify application may be able to, I assume this is what OP was talking about.
They might also be talking about muting volume in spotify app but im not really sure who does that in the first place
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Interesting, I actually just adjust the volume knob on my desktop speakers so I didn't think of this when I wrote the meme.
But now I kinda wanna see if I can hijack this monitoring it does and fake 100% volume to the application at all times...hmm welp to the mile long project list it goes!
Cut the jack off a crappy earbuds, then stick the unconnected jack into your headphone port
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AFAIK this fucks with artists, not Spotify.
Spotify doesn't pay artists a flat amount per stream. Instead, Spotify's profits are split between artists based on their streams. A single user heavily streaming is imperceptibly lowering 'revenue per stream' by increasing overall streams but only paying for one subscription.
By playing a bunch of songs, all you do is give those artists slightly more, and other artists slightly less – at least in theory. In practice you're probably not steaming enough to change overall percentages.
So if anything, you are moving profit to support the artists that Spotify is promoting by putting in your 'radio'. Which likely means instead of going to small undiscovered musicians, it goes towards popular established ones that Spotify assumes you'll like.
But since this is probably not enough to move those percentages, you're only messing up your own algorithm.
Yep, plus a bunch of AI generated music (or music they bought from producers for cheap onetime fees) that Spotify throws in there so they don't have to pay actual artists.
What is a "spotify"?
/s
It's an e-commerce platform.
/s
Who... who are the corpos paying to?
Like $0.001 to some random artists, it seems.
RIAA assholes paying more to Spotify and some of that going to the artists isn't the radical act of rebellion it's painted to be, but still acceptable.
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