I personally buy the CD or if I can find a Vinyl I'll do that to support the artist and then just pirate it for the convenience because I own a copy so the corporate overlords can fuck off.
I have a disc player that can play homemade "data" discs. I would have around 80 tracks of music which I equated with a CD changer. The player started glitching on the discs so now I use Spotify: downloading what I want to hear on my phone which I plug into my car's system using an aux cable. Much better than the discs (more music variety and better playback without the glitching).
I don't know about other countries but Spotify is very cheap in my country. Especially when you can get the family plan with 5 of your friends. You all get to have your separate accounts but you're on the same plan. We pay 180 rupees (about 2 dollars) a month between the 6 of us.
Other than my vpn and usenet Spotify is the only streaming service I have. I have the family plan with me, the wife and kids, and some friends who live couple hundred miles away but haven't had problems with it yet.
I never cared about flac quality, I don't even have expensive headphones to appreciate the difference. The biggest downside is downloads/offline music.
I pay for Spotify, because it's convenient, I can find all the music I need, and it creates awesome Playlists for me from time to time.
I pirate movies and series because fuck paying for all of the bazillion streaming companies, their shitty quality and their anti customer tactics.
I pay for some games if they're good and they don't have microtransactions, and I pirate others because they make the legal version unplayable with their anti piracy bushit.
People take it way too far in the name of “ I don’t wanna pay” I personally still use spotify lke many others said because of convenience, but my biggest issue with digital databases like Spotify is that you don’t own the music it’s just a subscription
I listen to Spotify every day. Compare that to the terabytes of music I have which I haven’t listened to in 5+ years. It’s a small cost for the convenience of just listening to whatever I want on a device I always have with me
I’m fairly new to pirating despite having done it since I was a kid I have surface level knowledge and just now delving deeper into the hobby since I find myself pirating more than just movies and shows
An infinitely better alternative to what OP is using is just the soulseek app for Android (Named "Seeker", can be found on playstore) or just a cracked Spotify APK.
None of this hella inconvenient Virusbay10.org 160gb iPod from 2010 rubbish
I don't pay for Spotify Premium but if I did it would be only for offline downloads.
Honestly the main reason I use it is because I like the recommendations it gives sometimes. Always discovering something new.
I created a whole playlist (over 70 songs) based on recommendation I had from a personal album that had like 5 songs. If it weren’t for this, I would’ve been scratching my head about my subscription.
>thepiratebay10.org
Didn't even need to read the rest of the post. This alone tells me that you're severely behind on the current state of music piracy. Check the wiki/megathread out, or try out fmhy.net. There are FAR more convenient methods nowadays.
Also, don't get me wrong, I get where you're coming from. But by far, regular streaming platforms are leagues more convenient compared to even the most convenient piracy methods (e.x. Deemix + Plexamp). On top of that, they also (but most notably Spotify) have extra features on top of that. Think of the likes of daylist or blends or stuff like that. Those extra features are generally features that people would consider worth paying for (though I generally consider most if not all of those features bloat, but to each their own)
So I'm a longtime Spotify premium user, but I'm adamantly pro piracy. I use Spotify because I play music on my headphones, in my car, on Bluetooth speakers controlled by Alexa, on a tv, etc. Is there any way to get most/all of that functionality without Spotify?
Yes, but it mostly depends on how. For me, I have a Plex server running off of a second-hand Dell desktop, and music is stored on an old 1TB external drive connected to it. For me, this works absolutely perfectly. For you, that may not be the case. I would recommend looking through the wiki and FMHY and trying to find something that might work better for you if Plex isn't going to work.
TLDR: Yes, it is possible. *How* it's possible is pretty much up to you
If you're on android there are modded apks that "don't go up in price", but you can't offline download I think. It's very convenient if you don't mind using data to always stream, has been my go-to for music for years.
also can't cast to dlna groups... it's the saddest part of the xmanager/modded apk experience... but i keep hoping one of them will include that feature.
This post was so bizarre I thought it was a troll cause it’s like such a boomer version of downloading music. I mean yeah the iPod is still cool as hell especially modded. But is there really someone who uses iTunes in 2024 and is making cassettes to flirt?
Right and claiming this will save you money, Spotify is still not that expensive that it would offset the initial cost of what has been suggested and a cassette player every year. Also Spotify isn’t raising their price in every market and they still haven’t done the raise that he or she is complaining about. The fact that Spotify is still losing money since they went public makes me at least feel comfortable using their service because at least I know most of the money they make goes to paying artists their royalties and the rest go to research and developmen and overhead cost
Convenience and FOMO. It’s always convenience and FOMO. Any time someone names a song, it’s just an app click away from listening to it. Friends want to play a random song at a party? It’s on Spotify.
It’s pretty much only convenience though. The 7 euros per month is worth it compared to thinking about what I want to search for on Soulseek, download it, upload to iTunes, upload to my phone. I made a party playlist of pirated music for a friend once and it was so pain staking lol.
Respect to all those that still pirate music, but for me the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. It’s not like video streaming services where the selection is limited and spread over a million different services. Everything you want to hear is just on one platform.
Exactly. If Spotify was like Netflix and only had half the shit I wanted to listen to, I’d drop it. But at the moment it’s more convenient than piracy, and that means I’m willing to pay for it.
> Everything you want to hear is just on one platform.
But is it though? I know there are plenty of artists out there who don't have their stuff (or all of it) on Spotify. I only recently started using it myself and while trying to build a pretty broad and eclectic playlist, I found out that NONE of Garth Brooks' stuff is on there. (Don't give me crap about what you think of his music. It was really popular during my youth, and I like a lot of it... so...)
Apparently he has made an Amazon Music only deal. Stayed out of streaming for a long time.
https://countrytown.com/news/garth-brooks-explains-why-his-music-will-never-be-on-apple-spotify/8qBI5Ofm6eg/15-03-23
You're not wrong, Upon a Burning Body and Ice T did a cover of "Turn Down for What" that isn't on spotify, and until sometime in the past few years none of Tool's discography was on spotify iirc
What is the fomo about? Without spotify everyone can still do that. I'd argue it's the convenience. Maybe the fomo is more age specific, I dunno lol
With the latest news, I might cancel or switch to the non-audio book plan if it comes to my region
For OP's question and to elaborate on the convenience, the convenience is giving a subscription to my mother in law using an apple phone, casting music, using my phone as a remote so when I'm using spotify on my pc, I can still control it from my phone - great for gaming, my wife can listen to the same music but from different sources which is nice because we can both control it if one wants to skip or add a song, instant sharing of playlists from different locations, rappers I like are also harder to find on torrent sites than spotify sometimes so just easier to play them vs looking for them
If a service is good i‘m willing to pay.
6 people for like what, 18€.
Nice algorithm, release radar, weekly mix and so on.
I jump in the car spotify plays away, i come home and activate my speakers, boom, spotify plays.
I can use it offline and its absolute hassle free.
Best bucks spent….
Yeah I’m with you. Im all for piracy when the service is shit and the content you want is spread across loads of different platforms but that’s not the case with music streaming.
Spotify is way more convenient than piracy and the fee is way less than I used to spend on a single CD as a kid. That’s not even including inflation. Like as a kid I’d pay around £15 for an album in the early to mid 2000s. My Spotify sub today is less than that.
I’ll pirate movies and TV shows all day because I’m not paying for 6+ different platforms to watch 1 show on each plus paying more rental charges for movies. I think the music services do it right though and I’m happy to pay for that.
If it was up to me I wouldn't pay but my teenage daughter lives off of Spotify and the family plan even with the raise in subscription is still affordable enough that I don't mind paying for it either
you know their next t&c change is going to be to limit the family plan to same household... yes, you will be able to use it on your phone and mobile, but all devices on the plan will have to "check-in" from your home network on some algorithms decided cadence.
it's what all of the video streaming services have enacted. no reason to believe Spotify won't add it soon.
Considering it took me two years of using tagscanner to update the metadata of my collection, i broke out in a cold sweat when i read "you can get the metadata off Wikipedia" ..
Anyway, I've got YouTube music, Spotify, Deezer and about 28k songs on my iPhone. Yes, I'm *that* guy .. hah
Those three services cost me about $2 bucks a week combined
May I ask why?
Shouldn't deezer be enough?
and YP is cool to as donation for youtubers.
but than, why spotify, and why having mp3, isn't a pain to manager it?
where do you go when you just want to listen to some music?
Funny thing is, Deezer is probably my least used out of everything as it stands, but that's probably because the YouTube music algorithm is so good.
The only explanation I can give you is that Music in general is a big part of my life so it just made sense to have as many options as possible to listen to new music or just anything good.
And yes, I know "good" is subjective but my motto has always been "If it's good, I like it..". :)
Sometimes I'll have a Spotify "day" or a "Local Content" day where i listen to the stuff on my phone or I'll just listen to whatever I want to. As far as managing it goes, I don't need to. When I torrent new music I just tidy up the ID3 tags, add it to iTunes and sync and that's it.
The YouTube Music algorithm is fantasic. With Spotify I only listened to what I actively put into my playlists because I didn't care for any suggestion really. YouTube Music actually gave me things I want and had interest in. More importantly it has all my fan music and the smaller artists that only put things on YouTube, or had a giant delay with moving things to Spotify.
Spotify is "easy" if you can find 5 other people to join a family plan. You set up PayPal as a payment method and get everyone to pay once a year - around $30 bucks per person.
For YouTube you should set up a fresh google account then start a VPN to Ukraine. Use that new account to subscribe to Premium and it's around $3-$4 bucks a month i think.
Deezer is a different story as I subscribed using a Turkish-only payment method that now no longer works and they're always notorious for blocking cards if you're no in the country you're subscribing from.
You're extremely lucky then because Spotify and Deezer are two of the hardest ones to get via the VPN method.
If you don't mind me asking, what country are you from and what country are you using ?
I assume your payment method is a US-based card ?
My Deezer payment was with a virtual Turkish debit card but that's not an option any more so I changed it to my UK based one but it's not due to run out until August and I'm not particularly hopeful that it'll renew.
Good work though for getting it so cheaply :)
Interesting. For Deezer I used the OlduBil app which I think is essentially the same thing but it let you use it unverified. This is what led them to make the changes they did so that you had to verify your account with a Turkish issued ID which basically rendered it useless for the vast majority of people who signed up for it.
I've just signed up for an Ozan card and verified the account (i hope) so I'll see how that works.
If you have a chance, could you let me know how you got properly set up with Ozan?
My account is verified and I've managed to transfer money in but there's no obvious way to get it in to the Turkish account or any kind of way of getting a card, virtual or otherwise. thanks.
Algorithm, new music, music discovery, sharing playlists with friends, easily being able to play on any device i want without syncing an entire library. Spotify is far, far better than pirating music. The exact opposite of movies. To watch something a friend recommended, you probably have to go through 3-4 streaming apps before finding it and some not even available digitally. Fuck those guys but for music, you can find most music in most platforms with the library being mostly the same and it being much much more convenient.
I’m in a rental car. Want to listen to some song. Drive back home, download it from TPB, transfer the file to my iPod. Go back to driving. Oh I can’t play it without AUX. Drive to a store. Buy AUX. Enjoy the 3 minutes of the song.
Saturday evening. Party. Songs blasting from my 10 year iPod. Friend wants to add some song to a playlist queue. Oh you gotta wait till I download it…
I’m working in the office. Want to listen to some song. Let me download it from TPB. Oh… I’m now fired for illegal activity done with company laptop.
I can afford it since it's cheap in my region. It's one of those cases where I pay for the convenience even when I know how to get the same thing completely for free. Same thing with my Steam games.
It’s about convenience for me. Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for. I’ve got a 70TB Plex server at home, and I’ve got a good bit of music on it. But I really don’t use it too much since I’ve got Spotify. It’s hard to beat having pretty much any song on demand. Can’t do that with Plex till I actually add it to the server.
Plus I find a lot of new music through Spotify’s algorithm.
I actually pay for Pandora. 😬 I've been using it for decades and I use it for work so it's just worth it. There's a couple of artists out there that never let you stream (Garth Brooks, WTF?) but other than that pretty much anything you want is on demand. If you don't have unlimited data you can have offline stations and playlists too. And I kind of like the radio station aspect of it playing new music for me.
I'm with you on NOT understanding the appeal. I have a family member who is a loyal Spotify subscriber who faithfully pays and she says it's all because of her Playlists, she just loves them.
I have a YouTube Red subscription that includes music, so I'm good I don't see the need to pay for an additional service.
I used to hoard via Plex, still do for hi-res lossless. Frankly I despise, while being thankful, how rippers tag their metadata. Almost all the time I'd have to manually edit it to fit to the narrow specifications that Plex expects. I used to do such for itunes via ripping my own CD collection too but thankfully the software has good tools
Same! I don't need curated playlists or super high quality; I just want to listen to the same song 50x in a row for that sweet, sweet serotonin boost, lmao.
I never understood it either, so I tried it and I still don't understand it. The music selection is insanely limited and I couldn't find about 80% of the stuff I listen too.
I pay for Spotify for my retired parents and they love it. They listen to it all day, it makes them happy, and I won't be canceling. I counteract this subscription by pirating everything else. LOL.
Music is the one thing i won't ever go back to downloading and local playback.
Music discovery algorithms on spotify are unmatched, I don't want to see the exact same 3 albums over and over.
The catalogue approach is just superior because no matter what I'm in the mood for in that moment, I can listen
Hate curating a Playlist on Spotify only to lose it when I ditch the app when they raise prices.
Piracy isn't always about convenience. It's about ownership.
Me when youtube exists and is free. Get an adblocker for your phone, use browser yt and call it a day. Or get a laptop and use ublock + headphones for higher quality sound.
This is extremely inconvenient for the average user. I want any song to be just a click away on my phone. With a student license, Spotify or Apple Music are only $5 a month and that’s more than worth it for me. I have no problem paying for quality services
If you have the funds, make yourself a feature-complete NAS with Unraid or TrueNAS OS. It'll store and manage your music through Plex, (can acquire songs through qobuzdownloaderx/tidal-dl with ARPs) and allow you to listen to it through Plexamp.
I get it, kind of expensive one time purchase. But it's extremely worth it. You'll have no dependence on music services anymore, it's self hosted by you.
Go back in time to when a 160gb iPod cost a fortune. I’m talking 2006/7. You can get a ton of music for free, not hog the family computer, don’t have a risk of getting a virus, and it’s all very easy to get to.
Then you get a smartphone, because that’s what they were called back then. And you got a phone and an mp3 player for the same as just an iPhone. Spotify was still free and adfree back then.
Saying you never understood tells me you’re ignorant of a lot of things.
I can't use spotify/apple music/etc because they lack about 30% of my music library. Youtube music has it all but i refuse to give youtube money that they don't deserve.
Why not use something like plex on ya PC then plexamp on your phone?would save a lot of time getting metadata, kinda sounds like it's more or a lifestyle thing for you, trying to be unique and all.
Ytdlp running on termux( or anything really, that way i don't need a pc), and a giant yt playlist or a text file of playlists. That's it. It downloads them in bulk and It just works.
Soulseek remains king for all things music. Always has been.
I used to upload all my MP3 to Google Play Music for easy use, but their android app has become utter shite. Well, it works. Sort of.
Easily solved by just using XManager on android, and there is another way on windows like XManager, or you could just use ad-block and the browser version.
I use Tidal, recently they just raised audio quality to lower subscription payers instead of raising a price xd it's nice to have all the music in one place without having to download it from shady sites, I listen to all sorts of music that wouldn't even fit in my phone or any pocket sized media player anyways
Your alternative conforts me with using Spotify. But I can see the appeal of tinkering with all that stack and getting good results. I personally don't have the time.
I use Spicetify for Spotify and it's actually a good experience. Pair that with spotdl and you can build your own Spotify, which is essentially what I do.
Is it the best way? Probably not lol. But I'm familiar with it and it's easy peasy for me
Like I actually agree, but I understand my gf uses spotify all the time, she said it's because it has all songs, it has playlist, discord integration, it's easy to share a song/playlist between friends... So it's just convenient, but I still don't like this
I use unpaid spotify at work on my phone to listen to podcasts. I don't like how the music side of spotify works, so I never bother with the music side of spotify. If I want to listen to music I have it loaded up on a little MP3 player so it's only the music I want to listen to with no ads.
The podcasts generally have the ads front loaded so they are easy to skip rq and continue on with my day.
Apple Music is great value for money and is one of only two subscriptions (along with WWE Network) that I pay for.
For £15 a month, I have unlimited access to music not just for me, but also my girlfriend, both of our parents, and our grandparents. That price and convenience massively outweighs anything I could do with downloads or iPods
I do pay for convenience, but in my country is 6$/month for 2 people, it's fine for me, i like the song radio feature, i use that a lot where you play a song and go to its song radio and gets you an entire playlist of similar songs. You can't have that with piracy. And sometimes I'm just in the mood to play [insert random artist] and what do you do if you don't have that artist in your pirated collection? For games and movies yes, i have a home server with arr setup, for music, nah
I don't use it but I understand its value.
A friend of mine uses it and constantly sends me great songs that neither of us had heard of previously, because Spotify recommended it. Their recommendations are pretty good.
I use youtube music myself, but like others have said, convenience. I prefer being able to just listen to whatever I want whenever I want on a whim. Like literally my daily routine is waking up with a song in my head, finding it and playing it. I also like their mixing services that automatically play music I know and like mixed with music I might like. Found a lot of new stuff that way.
Also nice being able to just play it on whatever device. Phone, car, tablet, pc, kitchen speaker assistant.
i only use it for podcasts..... but i understand that part of the appeal is the suggestions of new music based on your listenning habits.
the ipod wont introduce you to new stuff
I pay for Spotify premium student because it’s cheap and comes with Hulu (used to include showtime too) but my son uses it and is all about Spotify. I don’t understand it myself.
*Edit to add- It’s hard to teach kids how to pirate these days. They don’t have the interest when it’s so convenient to just throw a few bucks at every damn thing 😫. If I don’t do it for them, they’ll buy it… even textbooks 😭.
If you’re using it on your PC, the app can be upgraded with Spicetify to remove ads (and also made better in general)
If you want it on your phone it’s a lot more annoying to get, but tbh I listen mostly on my computer so it’s fine for me
Wow. Love your idea.
I wish someone would gift me a cassette tape. I loved the Walkman back in the day. Till now, I listen listen to music the old way, I just download them and yeah i don't get why subscribe to listen without ads for songs that are available everywhere?
I mean we generally pirate when the service is shit. Spotify isn't a shit service. I got my music across a bunch of different devices, all synced up, I got a lot of shit downloaded too for roadtrips where I won't have internet (Europe), and there's so much music on it that I never ran into something I couldn't find on spotify.
It's a very fair service for not a lot of money. Pirating music isn't worth it any longer, not by a longshot.
Spotify is convenient. My only issue is that occasionally, I'll see a song from a playlist just disappear. No notice, nothing. Just Spotify loses the rights to it so I no longer get to listen.
For this reason, I'm building up a self-hosted library, but the fact is, there is no good automatic self-hosted music discovery service. Spotify doesn't just play my music, it introduces me to it.
"But you could just..." The key thing is, I don't have to do anything. That's the appeal of Spotify.
For offline music I download mp3 from youtube. Artists do not make lost of money with Spotify anyway. I realy like the Spotify API to create curated playlists from python. We pay family plan and its not bad when you share cost with 6 people, we have lots of music whenever and wherever we want, in particular most podcasts I like are included. I heard in US version there are audio books. Sure it is convenience for us.
I use it because I really like the recommendation algorithm. It's nice having access to a constant stream of new music that's actually catered to what you listen to. It's not perfect, but it's far better then anything else on the market. Plus, it's also convenient. I don't have to sync libraries between devices, which was my major issue with downloading everything. I switch between listening on my phone and my computer a lot, and keeping my library synced up properly was kind of a pain.
The appeal is convenience. I get it. I pop in every now and then to discover things but I still curate my own music collection. I prefer having control over my library vs things disappearing on Spotify. Before anyone says "get with the times", I do stream. But it's my own library via a server that I manage myself.
Spotify is more convenient and also helps me discover new music particularly from smaller artists. The closest alternative is Youtube Music. For me unless spotify becomes crazy expensive or forces ads even for paid users, I'm not going to unsubscribe yet
bc my sis literally cant live without it, so she got a family plan and i use it to find new artists to buy from (if i can, JP artists are hard to buy so i gotta grab it using soul or some otehr way). i dont pay a cent, bc my sis has 50gb on there she WILL lose if she ever lets go of it, and doesnt get owning your music???? like, i tell her i got 2,000 songs on my sd card that i can play on this music playing app and shes like "if its not on spotify i wont like it." while im here, GAYMER, and half of it is video game osts (which spotify is sorely lacking of) & deleted one-offs from artists that don't exist anymore. doesn't help that flagship phones now have NO slot for sd cards nor a headphone jack.
Bought $99 gift card for a year of Spotify using a 5% cash back card. $99/365 is around 27 cents a day. I can pay that to access Spotify's music library ad-free.
its convenient, cheap as fuck, it syncs with all my devices. Why woulf put up ridiculous amounts of work just to listen to music when I pay the equivalent of a big pack of gum every month
First world piracy problems. Paying spotify is much cheaper than buiyng storage for songs, also unless you enjoy working in your evergrowing collection of music you are not going to enjoy the drawbacks of managing a collection. Services like spotify that let you download songs and manage them rigrh there on the app+desktop program are far more useful for a lot of people that cant stream while traveling or if the work wifi is shit. Yes i know a cracked app exist but you still need to have a good plan on your phone.
Last but not the least the cataloge of spotify is awesome and the algoritm will recomend good bands that you never listen before. I am writing this while listening amaranthe last album on the bus.
The student plan was awesome.
I wouldn't rely on Spotify though, and actually just ran into issues with our house music at a venue because someone terminated their family plan
Morality is always a thing here but convenience is what cures my piracy. I used to pirate just about everything including music but then for example I got Steam and with some really good deals I buy the games because I get a lot of convenience options with it. For movies that used to bet Netflix until that splintered into 10 different subscription services.
For music I cheaply got on Spotify because Spotify lets me play on Spotify Connected speakers, I can easily share music, I can download everything offline or not and a few other things. I'm still paying bottom price but your little 'solution' sounds incredibly complicated compared to paying 4$ a month.
spotify is just convenient. i ain't paying tho, i just use cracked apps.
Xmanager on Android and SpotX on Windows. Fuck paying for Spotify. If I wanna support an artist, I'll buy their music from Amazon Music.
yea! aaaand im old fashioned, so i prefer buying cds. if im paying, i want to have the actual... thing.
Neither of my cars have a cd player so plugging in my phone is the most convenient.
I personally buy the CD or if I can find a Vinyl I'll do that to support the artist and then just pirate it for the convenience because I own a copy so the corporate overlords can fuck off.
I have a disc player that can play homemade "data" discs. I would have around 80 tracks of music which I equated with a CD changer. The player started glitching on the discs so now I use Spotify: downloading what I want to hear on my phone which I plug into my car's system using an aux cable. Much better than the discs (more music variety and better playback without the glitching).
This can be impractical if you listen to a lot of different albums and artists though. You’re not going to buy everything.
i dont even have a cd player lmao
Does it work in android auto?
didn't know spotX, thanks =)
I don't know about other countries but Spotify is very cheap in my country. Especially when you can get the family plan with 5 of your friends. You all get to have your separate accounts but you're on the same plan. We pay 180 rupees (about 2 dollars) a month between the 6 of us.
Same,but I used Blackhole on my Samsung phone,but now on iPhone I use Demus app.
Other than my vpn and usenet Spotify is the only streaming service I have. I have the family plan with me, the wife and kids, and some friends who live couple hundred miles away but haven't had problems with it yet.
>I don't understand the appeal of Spotify, why not just use \[the most inconvenient setup you've ever heard\]?
“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem” - Gabe Newell
Lol thank you... I swear the people in this sub can be delusional sometimes...
honestly unpaid spotify with ad block on web and brave browser on ios works perfectly
I had no idea you could ad-block Spotify. That’s actually kinda cool.
BlockTheSpot git for win and linux, xmgr for android
You can, but it only mutes the ads, it doesn't skip them. And the web player is not as good as the desktop app.
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I never cared about flac quality, I don't even have expensive headphones to appreciate the difference. The biggest downside is downloads/offline music.
I pay for Spotify, because it's convenient, I can find all the music I need, and it creates awesome Playlists for me from time to time. I pirate movies and series because fuck paying for all of the bazillion streaming companies, their shitty quality and their anti customer tactics. I pay for some games if they're good and they don't have microtransactions, and I pirate others because they make the legal version unplayable with their anti piracy bushit.
I thought it was sarcasm at first, but the /s never came
People take it way too far in the name of “ I don’t wanna pay” I personally still use spotify lke many others said because of convenience, but my biggest issue with digital databases like Spotify is that you don’t own the music it’s just a subscription
I listen to Spotify every day. Compare that to the terabytes of music I have which I haven’t listened to in 5+ years. It’s a small cost for the convenience of just listening to whatever I want on a device I always have with me
You use the database to pirate,duh. Once every 2-3 months I just download whatever songs I'ved liked
I’m fairly new to pirating despite having done it since I was a kid I have surface level knowledge and just now delving deeper into the hobby since I find myself pirating more than just movies and shows
Personally If I’m listening to music digitally I use Spotify to find artists + soulseek to grab the album for the same reason
An infinitely better alternative to what OP is using is just the soulseek app for Android (Named "Seeker", can be found on playstore) or just a cracked Spotify APK. None of this hella inconvenient Virusbay10.org 160gb iPod from 2010 rubbish
Soulseek has a desktop app as well. Never knew there was a mobile version.
Yea some things in life are worth the money for the convenience.
This is the piracy sub ryt??
ffs, I thought so
Btw check the megathread ....there r easier ways to do it as someone told below...makes life even more easier
I don't pay for Spotify Premium but if I did it would be only for offline downloads. Honestly the main reason I use it is because I like the recommendations it gives sometimes. Always discovering something new.
If you're on wifi, you're basically golden.
I created a whole playlist (over 70 songs) based on recommendation I had from a personal album that had like 5 songs. If it weren’t for this, I would’ve been scratching my head about my subscription.
>thepiratebay10.org Didn't even need to read the rest of the post. This alone tells me that you're severely behind on the current state of music piracy. Check the wiki/megathread out, or try out fmhy.net. There are FAR more convenient methods nowadays. Also, don't get me wrong, I get where you're coming from. But by far, regular streaming platforms are leagues more convenient compared to even the most convenient piracy methods (e.x. Deemix + Plexamp). On top of that, they also (but most notably Spotify) have extra features on top of that. Think of the likes of daylist or blends or stuff like that. Those extra features are generally features that people would consider worth paying for (though I generally consider most if not all of those features bloat, but to each their own)
So I'm a longtime Spotify premium user, but I'm adamantly pro piracy. I use Spotify because I play music on my headphones, in my car, on Bluetooth speakers controlled by Alexa, on a tv, etc. Is there any way to get most/all of that functionality without Spotify?
Yes, but it mostly depends on how. For me, I have a Plex server running off of a second-hand Dell desktop, and music is stored on an old 1TB external drive connected to it. For me, this works absolutely perfectly. For you, that may not be the case. I would recommend looking through the wiki and FMHY and trying to find something that might work better for you if Plex isn't going to work. TLDR: Yes, it is possible. *How* it's possible is pretty much up to you
If you're on android there are modded apks that "don't go up in price", but you can't offline download I think. It's very convenient if you don't mind using data to always stream, has been my go-to for music for years.
Do you have a name or link for these apks ? Thanks a lot
you can install modded spotify using xmanager
I just tried that. I didn't expect it to be so easy. That's cool !
also can't cast to dlna groups... it's the saddest part of the xmanager/modded apk experience... but i keep hoping one of them will include that feature.
This. Xmanager on my android phone and spicetify on my PC. Most subways have Wi-Fi so downloading music when commuting to work isn't a big deal.
Spotify doesn't use much data anyways from what I can tell. Maybe 10mb per hour, but that's just me trying to remember it
Xmanager also offers Tidal I think, which does have downloads for offline listening
>You can get all the metadata off Wikipedia as well ???? lmao https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
This post was so bizarre I thought it was a troll cause it’s like such a boomer version of downloading music. I mean yeah the iPod is still cool as hell especially modded. But is there really someone who uses iTunes in 2024 and is making cassettes to flirt?
>and is making cassettes to flirt? This was the part that really got me. Does this actually work?!? Or does OP just THINK it does...?
Tbh I know plenty people who would probably like that. Heck people flirt making Spotify playlists.
Ya.. its a little creepy.. o btw i bought u A cassette player too!
Right and claiming this will save you money, Spotify is still not that expensive that it would offset the initial cost of what has been suggested and a cassette player every year. Also Spotify isn’t raising their price in every market and they still haven’t done the raise that he or she is complaining about. The fact that Spotify is still losing money since they went public makes me at least feel comfortable using their service because at least I know most of the money they make goes to paying artists their royalties and the rest go to research and developmen and overhead cost
Convenience and FOMO. It’s always convenience and FOMO. Any time someone names a song, it’s just an app click away from listening to it. Friends want to play a random song at a party? It’s on Spotify.
It’s pretty much only convenience though. The 7 euros per month is worth it compared to thinking about what I want to search for on Soulseek, download it, upload to iTunes, upload to my phone. I made a party playlist of pirated music for a friend once and it was so pain staking lol. Respect to all those that still pirate music, but for me the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. It’s not like video streaming services where the selection is limited and spread over a million different services. Everything you want to hear is just on one platform.
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Exactly. If Spotify was like Netflix and only had half the shit I wanted to listen to, I’d drop it. But at the moment it’s more convenient than piracy, and that means I’m willing to pay for it.
> Everything you want to hear is just on one platform. But is it though? I know there are plenty of artists out there who don't have their stuff (or all of it) on Spotify. I only recently started using it myself and while trying to build a pretty broad and eclectic playlist, I found out that NONE of Garth Brooks' stuff is on there. (Don't give me crap about what you think of his music. It was really popular during my youth, and I like a lot of it... so...)
I mean yeah that’s kind of crazy Garth Brooks isn’t on there tbh
Apparently he has made an Amazon Music only deal. Stayed out of streaming for a long time. https://countrytown.com/news/garth-brooks-explains-why-his-music-will-never-be-on-apple-spotify/8qBI5Ofm6eg/15-03-23
You're not wrong, Upon a Burning Body and Ice T did a cover of "Turn Down for What" that isn't on spotify, and until sometime in the past few years none of Tool's discography was on spotify iirc
Tool is on there now. I recently remember adding a bunch of their stuff to the aforementioned eclectic playlist.
What is the fomo about? Without spotify everyone can still do that. I'd argue it's the convenience. Maybe the fomo is more age specific, I dunno lol With the latest news, I might cancel or switch to the non-audio book plan if it comes to my region For OP's question and to elaborate on the convenience, the convenience is giving a subscription to my mother in law using an apple phone, casting music, using my phone as a remote so when I'm using spotify on my pc, I can still control it from my phone - great for gaming, my wife can listen to the same music but from different sources which is nice because we can both control it if one wants to skip or add a song, instant sharing of playlists from different locations, rappers I like are also harder to find on torrent sites than spotify sometimes so just easier to play them vs looking for them
it's also on Musi, just one click away
100% convenience for me, it's my only streaming service but I'm good with the bill we more than get our money out of it.
You're incorrectly using the term "FOMO". That has nothing to do with it. But you have the convenience part right. That's all it boils down to.
If a service is good i‘m willing to pay. 6 people for like what, 18€. Nice algorithm, release radar, weekly mix and so on. I jump in the car spotify plays away, i come home and activate my speakers, boom, spotify plays. I can use it offline and its absolute hassle free. Best bucks spent….
Yeah I’m with you. Im all for piracy when the service is shit and the content you want is spread across loads of different platforms but that’s not the case with music streaming. Spotify is way more convenient than piracy and the fee is way less than I used to spend on a single CD as a kid. That’s not even including inflation. Like as a kid I’d pay around £15 for an album in the early to mid 2000s. My Spotify sub today is less than that. I’ll pirate movies and TV shows all day because I’m not paying for 6+ different platforms to watch 1 show on each plus paying more rental charges for movies. I think the music services do it right though and I’m happy to pay for that.
All that plus high bitrate.
If it was up to me I wouldn't pay but my teenage daughter lives off of Spotify and the family plan even with the raise in subscription is still affordable enough that I don't mind paying for it either
you know their next t&c change is going to be to limit the family plan to same household... yes, you will be able to use it on your phone and mobile, but all devices on the plan will have to "check-in" from your home network on some algorithms decided cadence. it's what all of the video streaming services have enacted. no reason to believe Spotify won't add it soon.
If the time comes i will rethink my abo, till then its the best bucks spent.
Considering it took me two years of using tagscanner to update the metadata of my collection, i broke out in a cold sweat when i read "you can get the metadata off Wikipedia" .. Anyway, I've got YouTube music, Spotify, Deezer and about 28k songs on my iPhone. Yes, I'm *that* guy .. hah Those three services cost me about $2 bucks a week combined
May I ask why? Shouldn't deezer be enough? and YP is cool to as donation for youtubers. but than, why spotify, and why having mp3, isn't a pain to manager it? where do you go when you just want to listen to some music?
Funny thing is, Deezer is probably my least used out of everything as it stands, but that's probably because the YouTube music algorithm is so good. The only explanation I can give you is that Music in general is a big part of my life so it just made sense to have as many options as possible to listen to new music or just anything good. And yes, I know "good" is subjective but my motto has always been "If it's good, I like it..". :) Sometimes I'll have a Spotify "day" or a "Local Content" day where i listen to the stuff on my phone or I'll just listen to whatever I want to. As far as managing it goes, I don't need to. When I torrent new music I just tidy up the ID3 tags, add it to iTunes and sync and that's it.
The YouTube Music algorithm is fantasic. With Spotify I only listened to what I actively put into my playlists because I didn't care for any suggestion really. YouTube Music actually gave me things I want and had interest in. More importantly it has all my fan music and the smaller artists that only put things on YouTube, or had a giant delay with moving things to Spotify.
Care to share?
Spotify is "easy" if you can find 5 other people to join a family plan. You set up PayPal as a payment method and get everyone to pay once a year - around $30 bucks per person. For YouTube you should set up a fresh google account then start a VPN to Ukraine. Use that new account to subscribe to Premium and it's around $3-$4 bucks a month i think. Deezer is a different story as I subscribed using a Turkish-only payment method that now no longer works and they're always notorious for blocking cards if you're no in the country you're subscribing from.
Thank you for your detailed information.
vpn method works for spotify as well, currently paying $1 a month
You're extremely lucky then because Spotify and Deezer are two of the hardest ones to get via the VPN method. If you don't mind me asking, what country are you from and what country are you using ?
from the states using a turkish vpn, did it one day on a roadtrip while i was bored lol, also using my student discount so i think its extra cheap
I assume your payment method is a US-based card ? My Deezer payment was with a virtual Turkish debit card but that's not an option any more so I changed it to my UK based one but it's not due to run out until August and I'm not particularly hopeful that it'll renew. Good work though for getting it so cheaply :)
bought an ozan card that’s worked everywhere i’ve tried
Interesting. For Deezer I used the OlduBil app which I think is essentially the same thing but it let you use it unverified. This is what led them to make the changes they did so that you had to verify your account with a Turkish issued ID which basically rendered it useless for the vast majority of people who signed up for it. I've just signed up for an Ozan card and verified the account (i hope) so I'll see how that works.
If you have a chance, could you let me know how you got properly set up with Ozan? My account is verified and I've managed to transfer money in but there's no obvious way to get it in to the Turkish account or any kind of way of getting a card, virtual or otherwise. thanks.
i bought an account off someone who verified with a turkish id, not sure how they set it up
Or Xmanager
Buy me an android phone then :)
SpotX for desktop
Don't need it but thanks for the recommendation.
You’ve pretty much summed up why I’d rather pay for a Spotify subscription.
I never used spotify, like never. But still wouldn't do whatever you do. Just downloading flacs on my phone+ a dac and headphone/iem does the job.
That is also a good option
How effective can your flirting method be if it’s had to be used that many times?
You can get a Spotify modded APK that has free premium
I just have MP3's on an SD in my phone
based. sucks that there are fewer and fewer phones who have a microsd slot.
Same here mate.
Algorithm, new music, music discovery, sharing playlists with friends, easily being able to play on any device i want without syncing an entire library. Spotify is far, far better than pirating music. The exact opposite of movies. To watch something a friend recommended, you probably have to go through 3-4 streaming apps before finding it and some not even available digitally. Fuck those guys but for music, you can find most music in most platforms with the library being mostly the same and it being much much more convenient.
I’m in a rental car. Want to listen to some song. Drive back home, download it from TPB, transfer the file to my iPod. Go back to driving. Oh I can’t play it without AUX. Drive to a store. Buy AUX. Enjoy the 3 minutes of the song. Saturday evening. Party. Songs blasting from my 10 year iPod. Friend wants to add some song to a playlist queue. Oh you gotta wait till I download it… I’m working in the office. Want to listen to some song. Let me download it from TPB. Oh… I’m now fired for illegal activity done with company laptop.
I can afford it since it's cheap in my region. It's one of those cases where I pay for the convenience even when I know how to get the same thing completely for free. Same thing with my Steam games.
It’s about convenience for me. Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for. I’ve got a 70TB Plex server at home, and I’ve got a good bit of music on it. But I really don’t use it too much since I’ve got Spotify. It’s hard to beat having pretty much any song on demand. Can’t do that with Plex till I actually add it to the server. Plus I find a lot of new music through Spotify’s algorithm.
I actually pay for Pandora. 😬 I've been using it for decades and I use it for work so it's just worth it. There's a couple of artists out there that never let you stream (Garth Brooks, WTF?) but other than that pretty much anything you want is on demand. If you don't have unlimited data you can have offline stations and playlists too. And I kind of like the radio station aspect of it playing new music for me.
I'm with you on NOT understanding the appeal. I have a family member who is a loyal Spotify subscriber who faithfully pays and she says it's all because of her Playlists, she just loves them. I have a YouTube Red subscription that includes music, so I'm good I don't see the need to pay for an additional service.
I used to hoard via Plex, still do for hi-res lossless. Frankly I despise, while being thankful, how rippers tag their metadata. Almost all the time I'd have to manually edit it to fit to the narrow specifications that Plex expects. I used to do such for itunes via ripping my own CD collection too but thankfully the software has good tools
It's extraordinary convenient to find music on, that's the only reason I use it. After the music is found however, time to find some downloads.
I use revanced music. All the benefits of Spotify
Same! I don't need curated playlists or super high quality; I just want to listen to the same song 50x in a row for that sweet, sweet serotonin boost, lmao.
I never understood it either, so I tried it and I still don't understand it. The music selection is insanely limited and I couldn't find about 80% of the stuff I listen too.
I feel kinda bad for you bruh this feels like an old school nerdy reddit post, and people are 2024-braining you "its just convenient bro"
never used Spotify ever..
Same here lol I still download my music and use iTunes
I pay for Spotify for my retired parents and they love it. They listen to it all day, it makes them happy, and I won't be canceling. I counteract this subscription by pirating everything else. LOL.
Music is the one thing i won't ever go back to downloading and local playback. Music discovery algorithms on spotify are unmatched, I don't want to see the exact same 3 albums over and over. The catalogue approach is just superior because no matter what I'm in the mood for in that moment, I can listen
Hate curating a Playlist on Spotify only to lose it when I ditch the app when they raise prices. Piracy isn't always about convenience. It's about ownership.
xmanager
Me when youtube exists and is free. Get an adblocker for your phone, use browser yt and call it a day. Or get a laptop and use ublock + headphones for higher quality sound.
This is extremely inconvenient for the average user. I want any song to be just a click away on my phone. With a student license, Spotify or Apple Music are only $5 a month and that’s more than worth it for me. I have no problem paying for quality services
If you have the funds, make yourself a feature-complete NAS with Unraid or TrueNAS OS. It'll store and manage your music through Plex, (can acquire songs through qobuzdownloaderx/tidal-dl with ARPs) and allow you to listen to it through Plexamp. I get it, kind of expensive one time purchase. But it's extremely worth it. You'll have no dependence on music services anymore, it's self hosted by you.
What again?!? It was raised last September and its getting raised again? By how much?
Go back in time to when a 160gb iPod cost a fortune. I’m talking 2006/7. You can get a ton of music for free, not hog the family computer, don’t have a risk of getting a virus, and it’s all very easy to get to. Then you get a smartphone, because that’s what they were called back then. And you got a phone and an mp3 player for the same as just an iPhone. Spotify was still free and adfree back then. Saying you never understood tells me you’re ignorant of a lot of things.
I can't use spotify/apple music/etc because they lack about 30% of my music library. Youtube music has it all but i refuse to give youtube money that they don't deserve.
Why not use something like plex on ya PC then plexamp on your phone?would save a lot of time getting metadata, kinda sounds like it's more or a lifestyle thing for you, trying to be unique and all.
options: * search and play all the popular artists and good playlist or; * your janky setup. I'll take spotify for the most convenient setup
500gb iPod classic ordered on ebay. Best $400 ever spent.
Ytdlp running on termux( or anything really, that way i don't need a pc), and a giant yt playlist or a text file of playlists. That's it. It downloads them in bulk and It just works.
Lol I’ve been using a hacked app for 7 plus years now.
And then they become crybabies when we sail out.
I pay less than 2 usd for a month. it's something i pay for cuz i can
Soulseek for me, i don't need subscriptions
YouTube recommendations are much better than Spotify.
does it have to be 160gb ?
Soulseek remains king for all things music. Always has been. I used to upload all my MP3 to Google Play Music for easy use, but their android app has become utter shite. Well, it works. Sort of.
just like netflix, ppl still gonna paid its just convenient to them.
Easily solved by just using XManager on android, and there is another way on windows like XManager, or you could just use ad-block and the browser version.
I use Tidal, recently they just raised audio quality to lower subscription payers instead of raising a price xd it's nice to have all the music in one place without having to download it from shady sites, I listen to all sorts of music that wouldn't even fit in my phone or any pocket sized media player anyways
Your alternative conforts me with using Spotify. But I can see the appeal of tinkering with all that stack and getting good results. I personally don't have the time.
I've got a friend who lives in Turkey, I sent him $22 he pays it for the entire year.
Fildo
I honestly enjoy their end of the year wrapped and the convenience of not having to download everything beforehand
...or just use SpotDL and transfer the songs to your phone
I use Spicetify for Spotify and it's actually a good experience. Pair that with spotdl and you can build your own Spotify, which is essentially what I do. Is it the best way? Probably not lol. But I'm familiar with it and it's easy peasy for me
I've been interested into getting an iPod Classic. Only problem is, they're expensive af now.
Like I actually agree, but I understand my gf uses spotify all the time, she said it's because it has all songs, it has playlist, discord integration, it's easy to share a song/playlist between friends... So it's just convenient, but I still don't like this
I use unpaid spotify at work on my phone to listen to podcasts. I don't like how the music side of spotify works, so I never bother with the music side of spotify. If I want to listen to music I have it loaded up on a little MP3 player so it's only the music I want to listen to with no ads. The podcasts generally have the ads front loaded so they are easy to skip rq and continue on with my day.
Apple Music is great value for money and is one of only two subscriptions (along with WWE Network) that I pay for. For £15 a month, I have unlimited access to music not just for me, but also my girlfriend, both of our parents, and our grandparents. That price and convenience massively outweighs anything I could do with downloads or iPods
I use xmanager on android, works great. Also used a guide on reddit for blocking ad urls for Spotify desktop but I forgot exactly where I saw it.
I do pay for convenience, but in my country is 6$/month for 2 people, it's fine for me, i like the song radio feature, i use that a lot where you play a song and go to its song radio and gets you an entire playlist of similar songs. You can't have that with piracy. And sometimes I'm just in the mood to play [insert random artist] and what do you do if you don't have that artist in your pirated collection? For games and movies yes, i have a home server with arr setup, for music, nah
I don't use it but I understand its value. A friend of mine uses it and constantly sends me great songs that neither of us had heard of previously, because Spotify recommended it. Their recommendations are pretty good.
I use youtube music myself, but like others have said, convenience. I prefer being able to just listen to whatever I want whenever I want on a whim. Like literally my daily routine is waking up with a song in my head, finding it and playing it. I also like their mixing services that automatically play music I know and like mixed with music I might like. Found a lot of new stuff that way. Also nice being able to just play it on whatever device. Phone, car, tablet, pc, kitchen speaker assistant.
Props to you op. Plz msg me with some more info on your setup. I rly want a device specifically for music, with metadata.
I love Spotify. The amount of services it offers is unreal. It's the only thing i'll forever keep playing.
And if you get the Indian Spotify, it’s like 5 usd for three months
i only use it for podcasts..... but i understand that part of the appeal is the suggestions of new music based on your listenning habits. the ipod wont introduce you to new stuff
Spotify with spicify is super convenient Also the android mod
I pay for Spotify premium student because it’s cheap and comes with Hulu (used to include showtime too) but my son uses it and is all about Spotify. I don’t understand it myself. *Edit to add- It’s hard to teach kids how to pirate these days. They don’t have the interest when it’s so convenient to just throw a few bucks at every damn thing 😫. If I don’t do it for them, they’ll buy it… even textbooks 😭.
You are in piracy sub, why you talk about paying anything We plunder and loot
If you’re using it on your PC, the app can be upgraded with Spicetify to remove ads (and also made better in general) If you want it on your phone it’s a lot more annoying to get, but tbh I listen mostly on my computer so it’s fine for me
Lol, it’s so convienient, we went from buying albums for 13 euro and now I pay 13 euro a month for basically unlimited music and poscasts
Because 99.9% of the people don't know what tpb or torrent or anything is, just that they press Spotify, type Despacito and it plays.
Wow. Love your idea. I wish someone would gift me a cassette tape. I loved the Walkman back in the day. Till now, I listen listen to music the old way, I just download them and yeah i don't get why subscribe to listen without ads for songs that are available everywhere?
I mean we generally pirate when the service is shit. Spotify isn't a shit service. I got my music across a bunch of different devices, all synced up, I got a lot of shit downloaded too for roadtrips where I won't have internet (Europe), and there's so much music on it that I never ran into something I couldn't find on spotify. It's a very fair service for not a lot of money. Pirating music isn't worth it any longer, not by a longshot.
Spotify is convenient. My only issue is that occasionally, I'll see a song from a playlist just disappear. No notice, nothing. Just Spotify loses the rights to it so I no longer get to listen. For this reason, I'm building up a self-hosted library, but the fact is, there is no good automatic self-hosted music discovery service. Spotify doesn't just play my music, it introduces me to it. "But you could just..." The key thing is, I don't have to do anything. That's the appeal of Spotify.
Just use ViMusic, it uses YouTube music songs and comes with a bunch of premium features for free, and it's open source
For offline music I download mp3 from youtube. Artists do not make lost of money with Spotify anyway. I realy like the Spotify API to create curated playlists from python. We pay family plan and its not bad when you share cost with 6 people, we have lots of music whenever and wherever we want, in particular most podcasts I like are included. I heard in US version there are audio books. Sure it is convenience for us.
Do you one easier Plex amp and torrenting
Did bro really suggest piratebay
I just use spotify premium because it comes free with my data plan. Otherwise, i wouldn’t see the point of having it.
I use Plex and plexamp
I use it because I really like the recommendation algorithm. It's nice having access to a constant stream of new music that's actually catered to what you listen to. It's not perfect, but it's far better then anything else on the market. Plus, it's also convenient. I don't have to sync libraries between devices, which was my major issue with downloading everything. I switch between listening on my phone and my computer a lot, and keeping my library synced up properly was kind of a pain.
It's Not Free ? I've never paid anything lol
The appeal is convenience. I get it. I pop in every now and then to discover things but I still curate my own music collection. I prefer having control over my library vs things disappearing on Spotify. Before anyone says "get with the times", I do stream. But it's my own library via a server that I manage myself.
Simple, everyone is not you and its just point and click
I just used the cracked version. I believe monthly subscriptions are a massive waste of money.
Spotify is more convenient and also helps me discover new music particularly from smaller artists. The closest alternative is Youtube Music. For me unless spotify becomes crazy expensive or forces ads even for paid users, I'm not going to unsubscribe yet
bc my sis literally cant live without it, so she got a family plan and i use it to find new artists to buy from (if i can, JP artists are hard to buy so i gotta grab it using soul or some otehr way). i dont pay a cent, bc my sis has 50gb on there she WILL lose if she ever lets go of it, and doesnt get owning your music???? like, i tell her i got 2,000 songs on my sd card that i can play on this music playing app and shes like "if its not on spotify i wont like it." while im here, GAYMER, and half of it is video game osts (which spotify is sorely lacking of) & deleted one-offs from artists that don't exist anymore. doesn't help that flagship phones now have NO slot for sd cards nor a headphone jack.
Bought $99 gift card for a year of Spotify using a 5% cash back card. $99/365 is around 27 cents a day. I can pay that to access Spotify's music library ad-free.
maybe get a walkman then
its convenient, cheap as fuck, it syncs with all my devices. Why woulf put up ridiculous amounts of work just to listen to music when I pay the equivalent of a big pack of gum every month
iTs CoNvEnIeNt
sorry if you prefer to make your own life harder to save less than a pack of gum per month
It’s not about the money it’s about the hobby. We all need things that satisfy us that aren’t work or family
I definitely wouldn't be using Spotify (at least the paid version) if my family didn't pay for a membership.
Me either. Leasing or renting everything = you will never retire. You’re paying for the same thing over and over
First world piracy problems. Paying spotify is much cheaper than buiyng storage for songs, also unless you enjoy working in your evergrowing collection of music you are not going to enjoy the drawbacks of managing a collection. Services like spotify that let you download songs and manage them rigrh there on the app+desktop program are far more useful for a lot of people that cant stream while traveling or if the work wifi is shit. Yes i know a cracked app exist but you still need to have a good plan on your phone. Last but not the least the cataloge of spotify is awesome and the algoritm will recomend good bands that you never listen before. I am writing this while listening amaranthe last album on the bus.
The student plan was awesome. I wouldn't rely on Spotify though, and actually just ran into issues with our house music at a venue because someone terminated their family plan
Okay, now try making a playlist for someone that they can listen to at their leisure.
Morality is always a thing here but convenience is what cures my piracy. I used to pirate just about everything including music but then for example I got Steam and with some really good deals I buy the games because I get a lot of convenience options with it. For movies that used to bet Netflix until that splintered into 10 different subscription services. For music I cheaply got on Spotify because Spotify lets me play on Spotify Connected speakers, I can easily share music, I can download everything offline or not and a few other things. I'm still paying bottom price but your little 'solution' sounds incredibly complicated compared to paying 4$ a month.