I find the suggestions in Spotify very repeatable. Same songs, same artists over and over. Daily mixes same same every week. Playlists rarely updated.
How do you use Spotify to find new artists/albums?
In Tidal this feels much more fresh. Maybe it’s due to having different taste in music?
Tapping Home button brings up Recently Played. Scrolling down brings multiple Similar To… pages. I have discovered hundreds of new artists this way. Some I actually like !
Recently played I had before but it is removed in latest update (MacOS) probably because it was a bug in there in that it got stuck and never updated… Below it there’s only different playlists which never either updates with new tracks. No album recommendations.
Strange how features vary on different devices - I use my IPhone . Today there are well over 100 Similar To … suggestions.
Presumably artists get paid per track played, so would one way around Spotify’s minimal payments be to keep playing Spotify 24x7, with the volume off when you dont want it
Or you could do the same, but using a service that pays out more.
Presumably artists get paid per track played,
That’s the problem @GadgetMan. They don’t.
You get paid according to your share of the total pie at the time the track gets played. So, you might get played 20,000 times today; but tomorrow, you also get played 20,000 times, but there are new/much anticipated albums released by Drake and Taylor Swift. So your market share plummets, and your payment for the same number of plays similarly falls off a cliff.
with the volume off when you dont want it
Also, Spotify doesn’t pay out when the volume on the app OR the device it’s playing on are muted/turned off.
Good points raised there. The problem is that Spotify have a much larger range of music. So perhaps you do need two subscriptions, eg tidal for 90% of playing then Spotify for the final 10%, or buy the last 10%
Good interface, poor sq, and I’d happily take a Pepsi taste taste back to back with qubuz, and really really bad for musicians. I was with it back in the free days and it was great forusic discovery but I wouldn’t use it for critical listening
I bought a Nova yesterday, perhaps you could answer a really important question for me
“which streaming service is best for the artist and for sound”
I have always avoided streaming but the amount of physical material I have amassed is gently nudging me in that way, I do appreciate that not all artists are multi millionaires .
Best wishes
There’s three popular services on this forum, Tidal, Spotify & Qobuz.
Of these I think the consensus is that Spotify has the worst SQ. I’ve never used Qobuz myself, but from reading people either find Qobuz better than Tidal, or both on par.
Most of the overviews that show how much artists are payed shows that Spotify also pays very little, and Tidal is much better. Qobuz is normally not featured in those lists (don’t know why), but I’ve read they pay even more, but that’s anecdotal.
I have both Spotify and Tidal, but use Tidal exclusively. The reason I didn’t try Qobuz is simply the smaller catalogue.
Many thanks
Ian
I use Qobuz for same reasons but I suspect the money for artists is still not great. I don’t buy vinyl,CD or downloads as I only stream. So I pay a monthly subscription to the Musicians Benevolent Fund (now called Help Musicians UK) as I feel strongly that artists ( of whichever medium) should be payed for their work
There are also minimum payout levels. So obscure artists don’t get paid at all.
This is setup to suit the record companies that want to reduce their library sizes and the number of releases they spend marketing on.
You could divide the money by user. So if I pay 10 euro every month and I this month only played two tracks by Träd, Gräs och Stenar then that band will be getting all my money this month. Unlike now where they probably fall below minimum and get nothing and my money is divided between the top-240 which I never listen to. And this is how the big record companies want it - reduce libraries, reduce SKU:s to reduce marketing cost.
Classical music (or any music that demand attention) is not played on playlists like top-240 and will be in trouble. When you bought an album/download you paid no matter how many times you listened. A relatively small number of fans could finance an artists album by simply buying it, this direct connection is broken now. The current streaming business model is not based on the independent artist but rather on a big record company with a library of recordings.
@Ian2001 – It is very difficult to find out how much Quboz pays artists (which makes me slightly suspicious), but Tidal definitely pays more than Spotify. In fact, Tidal pays better than every other streaming service apart from Napster (which only has a very small user base, sadly). After Tidal, Apple Music is the best payer, then Deezer. YouTube is by far the worst, followed by Pandora, Spotify and Amazon.
In terms of SQ, I haven’t tried Quboz, but I find that Tidal Masters and Tidal Hi-Fi are both excellent, and work very well with Bluesound streamers and the BluOS app.
Thanks, given your connections to the music industry , I guessed you might have some feedback from artists
I want to explore new music, but I also want the artist to be paid. You wouldn’t want to underpay/overpay any tradesman , so why an artist ?
Hadn’t heard of that, thank you.
Cheers
Mark
Tidal pays more to get the rights to stream CD/MQA files. So it is likely Qobuz pay a premium also.
This world is also full of crooks. A few years back Google discovered that by claiming they didn’t know how to pay an artist they could just file a Notice of intent (NOI) with the US Copyright Office and wait for their answer.
The US Copyright Office is just a few clerks and during the last six months of 2016 Google, Amazon and Pandora filed over 20 million NOI’s. Since then others, like Spotify, also started using this method to avoid payment. And we are not talking long tail artists - Google & Co claimed they have been unable to contact or get payment information for Sia, Beach Boys, Sting … you get the picture.
I thought I better fact check. And the streaming companies has now (february 11-12 this year) paid 424 million dollar into a Black Box for these NOI:s. The Black Box is still under the control of an organisation controlled by the streaming companies - so no artists have been paid yet.
On February 23rd the UK Parliament will hold a hearing on the economics of music streaming with Spotify, Apple and Amazon (responsible for 82% of those 424 million dollar).
Looking through the backbox data Tidal paid almost 7 million dollars and Qobuz paid 107.000 dollar. But how long has Qobuz been active in the USA?
Apple paid 167 million and Spotify 152 million.
The reason that these last movements got started is apparently a lawsuit against Spotify by Eminem. The streaming companies don’t want their names in the headlines - so they formed a common entity.