Spotify relies on monopolizing your listening data. You should avoid it on the same premise. Delivering music is easy; their unique offering is the recommendation engine. There's no competition because there's no open listening data. If we could make it open, then you could have actual competition in the space (coincidentlly Spotify recommendations aren't great at the moment).

>There's no competition because there's no open listening data.

https://listenbrainz.org/

The Music Genome Project came up recently. Thread references code and sample data

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25523729

Ironically, the page doesn't seem to load for me, but then loads after a delay of 5-10 seconds.

This reminds me I need to find an open source scrobbler compatible with Lastfm's API.

>There's no competition because there's no open listening data

I wonder why last.fm hasn't managed to leverage their data more, if that was really the biggest value of Spotify. Or perhaps they do and sell it to streaming services? Idc

Does any other service deliver music and podcasts at a much lower price then?

Plenty of alternatives exist - YouTube Premium ( which also gets you YouTube with no adds, on top of YouTube Music), Amazon Music, Apple Music, and iirc pandora, SoundCloud? I haven't compared prices.

So, your suggested alternative to avoid data monopolization is to use a FAANG (with a worse product)? I accept that those are alternatives, but no thanks.

Pandora has been geo-blocked and IIRC only serves the USA since 2007, and SoundCloud appears to me to be offering a different service.

Can't really suggest YT as an alternative to a monopoly

Is either company a monopoly in "music streaming" if they're both viable alternatives?

People way overuse "monopoly" these days.

In the country I live in none of those are available other than Apple Music. So the choices are Spotify and Apple Music.

Apple is much less likely to sell off your data

That is true but their app on Android was terrible (I used it for two years before Spotify was available here). Probably the worst Android app I used on a regular basis.

Likely it is better on Apple devices but I don't use those.

Shoutcast/Icecast are alive and well, there are thousands of independent radio stations online; one of the most well known (SomaFM) is alive and well, ad free listener supported. Big Sonic Heaven is still online, both of these are like 20 years and running.

Lots of podcasts are free from their source, Spotify doesn't even offer one of favorite ones (a weekly DJ mix, 500+ episodes strong) all you need is an app like AntennaPod (Android).

In that vein, I'd suggest Radio Paradise. Also add free, listener supported, and has been streaming amazing mixes for over 20 years.

https://radioparadise.com/

Likewise, you might enjoy:

CHIRP Radio (Chicago): https://chirpradio.org 4ZZZ (Brisbane): https://www.4zzzfm.org.au

Both are ad-free, other than local community orgs and the occasional local independent business plug, and funded by listener donations. Big bonus: huge variety in their playlists, with the DJs playing whatever they feel like.

I didn't forget you guys, thanks these are all great and added to my combined playlist of radios. I didn't get around to CHIRP until this morning and was greeted with some Sisters of Mercy love as soon as I tuned in, that's a win right there. :) Much appreciated for pointers.

Thank you for the reverse share! Much appreciated, ill give it a listen here in a bit (6am here :) ). In return, my podcast mentioned above is Resident - Hernan Cattaneo, podcast.hernancattaneo.com - weekly new progressive house music mixes.

> all you need is an app like AntennaPod

To listen to a podcast? A podcast is an audio file you download like any other file and play like any other audio file. Why do you need a dedicated app?

On many podcasts now, this is increasingly obfuscated or hidden:

- There is no dedicated podcast homepage, only a set of service links (Spotify, Itunes, etc.).

- RSS itself may not be provided.

- Audio is hidden inside Javascript requests.

I do listen to many podcasts by going to a page and finding the single-episode download link,and playing that directly via mpv or other CLI tools. Success rate is falling, seems to be ~75% or so anecdotally. Often I'll curl the page, explode elements to one per line, and grep for '\.mp3' references. Even that fails often.

And yes, I use dedicated podcast apps to subscribe specifically, but I don't want or need to subscribe to every last podcast just to listen to a single episode.

Open standards promote interoperability. Profit comes by building walls and moats.

Profit seems to be winning.

One can browse the web by telnet and issuing HTTP requests directly or sending emails with `mail`, but its usually a bit smoother of an experience using a web browser or email client.

I use a podcast app to favorite the RSS feeds of podcasts and other content. It then keeps track of which entries are new, can automatically download those new ones, and keep track of what I've already listened to. It makes it a lot easier than manually looking at the RSS feeds and downloading the files by hand.

There lots of apps that are great at helping you find and organize them, pretty much automatically, compared to manually tracking all that.

As all the successful technology, convenience.

What SSLy said. For the same reason I have a single app which plays all my shoutcast streams with one button click, the same reason I don't type SMTP/IMAP commands manually or read RSS feed xml with in vim. These are not "Dedicated apps", they are generically useful software applications. Spotify is a Dedicated App.

I believe the price is similar, but Deezer[0] has a decent music library plus podcasts. Its recommendation engine also works a little differently. The "Flow" engine lets you listen as a radio station with known and unknown tracks thrown in with actually decent recommendations.

Much better than Spotify, which only ever "recommended" artists I've already listened to, or artists I didn't like, or genres I didn't. If you listen to a wide variety of music, it doesn't know how to handle this apparently.

[0]: https://www.deezer.com/us/

Yeah Deezer isn't too bad. Dealbreaker for Spotify:Linux Client and Years of Play lists.

> I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and I'm glad I did.

Yeah, their data breach exposing mine and 18 million other's accounts made it the last time I used them.

I try not to say what might embarrass myself later, but I did use my email to create a disqus account to talk politics, which is always touchy. I got banned for a couple weeks once for telling someone to eff off after they said they looked forward to seeing liberals, gays and Jews shot in the street. Go figure.

If you want a serious paid alternative, there is graphcomment.com, the design is very neat, the team is very responsive to their user base. It’s still a human sized company. (Disclaimer: have been working for that company in the past)

In my opinion, having to shell out small bits of money every time you hit a paywall on the Internet is just as bad as having your data sold. I wish there was a viable pay-once-for-all alternative to microservices for the Web, possibly even integrated with your Internet service provider bill.

Ah yes, let's go back to the cable paradigm, where I pay for four different versions of ESPN just because I want to watch Comedy Central.

We’ve been saying that for years, but nothing gets done.

My team and I went ahead to describe how it will work, and will be releasing it in 2022 after building it openly on GitHub:

https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONT...

But watch the silent downvotes for this comment... and this is part of the reason why it won’t happen unless someone braves ridicule even of the very technologists who are supposedly for it.

There are many reasons to be skeptical, the biggest of which is that ads pay more (for now) than micropayments for digital content. But that’s not why stuff like this gets downvoted. It’s because the economics of capitalism make it so that you either have to be a big company with a huge fund behind the push for some micropayment standard, or you are not taken seriously.

Your whitepaper promises an all-in-one utopian decentralization panacea for the Internet. On top of that you are piggybacking off of unsubstantiated crypto hype, even though cryptocurrencies have many problems (including lack of trust/recourse between parties due to decentralization). That might contribute to the reason you are finding no traction for your idea.

On this site, at least, you will have fewer downvotes if you don't speculate about downvote motivation.