By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.

I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee.

Now the baddie is Spotify.

Sometimes they didn't begin to see revenue until 2nd or 3rd albums.

Why don’t more artists do that?

But it's not a panacea. An old classmate of mine who's a decently successful Jazz artist now (by Jazz artist standard), had scammers upload her album to Bandcamp without her knowledge. They defrauded a lot of money from her actual fans, probably more than she ever made on Spotify.

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.

If that is the case, the artists can easily sue the labels for violating the terms of the contract. But the fair share is just what the two signing parties agreed to.

It’s easy. 1. Search talent on TikTok. 2. Let them sign shitty contract. 3. Produce them. 4. Market them on Spotify.

5 . Win win. Win win for Spotify not the artist.

I believe Smashing Pumpkins actually beat them to it by several years by releasing Machina II for free online in 2000 after the breakup of the band.

* I know both bands probably could've self-financed those projects by that point in their careers, but would they have? And would their role as investors have changed their artistic decisions?

Pink Floyd’s next album had the cover and best song dedicated to saying how much they hated the record label

Today are studios in abundance. And bands that are good are usually good connected and certainly know a good down mix engineer. Then they can distributed via Bandcamp.

Today it’s much better for artists who want to make music. The big record labels were just gatekeepers.

And then artists still weren't getting paid but an even bigger portion of my income went to them. shrug.

I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them. If they sold their rights at some point in time for money, or pay their tax debts, or whatever, I assume they did so knowing full well what that means. If Spotify is no longer advantageous to them, they would pull their music off and I may search other ways to listen to it.

We have a system to deal with these sorts of things, it's called voluntary exchange and it's the only way things change. If artists pulled their music, Spotify would have to adjust. In the meantime I just don't have the time or energy to track every individual employee grievance

What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future.

For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.

To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in".

I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.

Yes, technically I voluntarily entered into my contract with my ISP, my cell phone carrier, and my employer. But in all cases, it's obvious I'm getting screwed over because of the massive power imbalance. It's a fact of life, but it should at least be acknowledged.

you may think the government plays a role to enforce some of these, and they do to a point...

You can go on in your own head about all the things behind that simple exchange of money for something. If it's a perfectly competitive market sure, that may work but there aren't many if any markets in the US that are that level of competitive.

A personal anecdote for you. My uncle owns an auto parts re-manufacturer, so they rebuild car parts and sell them. I worked there a lot growing up. The normal input is buying "cores" from service stations....your starter motor isn't working and you get a new one, that old one is sold to someone like my uncle who refurbs it.

Often we had people come by with very clearly stolen parts....should we have just exchanged money for those? This ranged from a tweaker who would show up with one part, to full scale organized theft rings with pallets of parts...

So, do we buy those since the price is much, much better? There is a an ethical decision there...

I choose not to focus on that though, whereas the person I replied to apparently does. I was curious how such a person manages to live a just life in the modern world.

It’s nice that we have the luxury to think about these things. But for the most part, I ignore it and discount people who bring it up to other people, unless they genuinely think people aren’t aware of the situation.

Maybe it’s guilt over benefiting from this. Maybe it’s just internet points for demonstrating one’s knowledge and virtue. Beats me, I hope it reduces.

This one has its flaws but it seems to be optimizing for a great variety.

What alternative do you suggest and why would it work better than capitalism?

Hasn't Spotify been losing money for all/most of its existence? Or is there some other top of the pyramid?

Spotify isn't really the problem. Record labels being the gatekeepers and a bunch of byzantine historic laws that they sit on are the problem. Musicians themselves are the problem - those few who've made it big could band together than change things in various ways for all, but that would mean giving up some money so...

Artists don't have a choice. If the only viable marketplace is ripping off sellers, and sellers chose to remain there because it's the only viable marketplace, and the sellers gotta hear their buyer defending the owners of the only viable marketplace ripping them off, they're not gonna keep selling and you're not gonna keep getting new music.

This race to defend the most evil of corporations, ripping people off right and left, is rampant on HN over the last 5 years. It's like all the hacker turned into lackeys or something. What a shame. The first 10 years of this site the people here had backbones but now they're mostly just bootlickers.

If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".

It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested.

Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.

Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.

(And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)

This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.

This is solved (well, not solved, but handled) by not having a direct link between usage data and the user. So you store your data as <usage, proxy_id> which references <proxy_id, user_id> which references <user_id, user PII>. This way you can always easily break the connection to PII (if the user requests deletion) while keeping per user data.

But true, it's not anonymized in this case.

The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.

For fringe metal music? Not likely!

Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)

Often they’re ran by artists under contract with one of those three big labels and their big sublabels, mostly as a perk/favor to those artists. They have a bit more creative freedom and leeway who they sign, but the money is still kicked upward and the marketing and recording budget still comes from upstairs.

No thank you.

So they finally added a way to directly support artists. That's nice, but disappointing they excluded the web app from this feature. Its omission hurts potential donations. Spotify also lowers audio quality on the web app, gee it's almost like they don't want me to use the web app.

There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form.

You don't get exact numbers (because Spotify won't share them!) but there's no question background music is vastly more profitable on Spotify than the kind of music people go to concerts for, and it's at the latter's expense.

However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease.

There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.

> However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

All you have you have to do is buy the music. From either the band’s website, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.

This argument can be used to justify basically any business practice. It's a weak argument. Should I be forced to buy 10 inedible doughnuts to find one editable one in the name of allowing people to practice making doughnuts out of random things they find in their kitchen? Should I have to buy 5 cars before I find one that doesn't break after a a month in the name of supporting the auto industry?

Obviously, this is nonsense.

Music is somewhat functional (does the cd or record play? does it skip at all etc) but then you have to listen to it. Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.

And I've definitely found songs that so-to-speak came along via an album purchase and which I might have initially dismissed, somewhat eventually growing on me after a while. Not saying that this always happens, and I'm not the biggest music listener around, so take that with a pinch of salt, but still…

As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change this is to get consumers to pay drastically more but that's what killed iTunes in the first place.

But doesn’t that even out?

Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica.

If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener.

But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month.

What am I missing here?

Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it.

Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy.

This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discovery functionality is great though

Commodore 64 owners were jealous of us, since this couldn't work with C64 due to different tape recording system.

Hahaha, I did that in Ireland too. I'm pretty sure DJs deliberately talk over the song intros to make illegal recordings unviable.

Interestingly, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ so you could actually do whatever you want and listen to your music the way you want.

The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).

Assuming you meant to write, "Spotify could have been as streaming service _and_ an MP3 shop" ...

No, Spotify didn't have the leverage in negotiations with Big Record Labels to offer streaming plus DRM-free mp3 files for 0.5€.

Apple is more powerful than Spotify and they eventually relented to Big Labels demands and added a more expensive tier of songs at $1.29 instead of all songs being just $0.99 pricing.

Too generalize... to consider the realism of any hypothetical alternative business models for Spotify to have, you also have to consider whether the Big Labels would have even made those ideas possible when Spotify was negotiating the licenses.

It has never been easier to own an easily copiable and backup-able form of the music you want and use it with myriad ways to play it and listen to it.

People just don’t want to pay a dollar or two for their favorite songs.

Takes minutes to load cached playlists. Often stumbles on multidevice playback. It's constantly refreshing and hiding content I was about to click on.

If their recommendations weren't decent is happily yeet them. I guarantee their shit app loses them money.

I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise.

I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?

I was a roadie on my friend's metal band around 2000-ish, they were not in any record company and just sold their CDs through DIY, during live shows, word of mouth, etc. My point is not all bands are in a record company, most are just doing it via DIY. Now, these indie, DIY bands, whatever you call it can now upload and share their music worldwide. That's a huge win.

Do any of the streaming platforms let you direct fans to your own website/Bandcamp to make a purchase?

How do we decide what number is "fair", or what we as a society want? Surely it's not reasonable that every band that's just started out in a garage should be making bank.

I don't think that it's more difficult to be a professional musical artist or musician today than it used to be, although the business model may be different. But even if it is, I think that's a decent compromise for all the benefits the streaming services bring.

I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.

The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.

The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.

Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.

I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.

- licensing could be expired, could change hands, could be removed, could...)

- naming and attribution:

A single song by a single artist will have a gazillion versions (ep, lp, original, re-recorded, re-released, re-mastered, re-re-mastered, best hits, best songs, essential, released for the European market, released for the Japanese market, Christmas special...).

On top of that distributors and rights holders have very shitty metadata that also varies between rights holders.

So if a song changed to a different version, it's quite possible both that the contract for that song changed hands between rights holders and the new rights holder uploaded incorrect/invalid/mangled metadata that Spotify disambiguated in this way.

Or, even simpler: original metadata pointed to the incorrect version, but now points to the correct version. Which is incorrect from your point of view :)

Because all of the above doesn't even begin to deal with things like territorial restrictions, content restrictions, territorial content restrictions, territorial content requirements, take down requests from commercial and government entities, rights disputes, content embargoes...

TIDAL: no API. Soundcloud: API registration disabled. Apple Music: paywalled. Beatport: API registration disabled. Etc etc.

That isn't to say you can get everything via the API (you can't get monthly listeners, only an abstraction of it on a 0-100 scale, or artist's pick you sometimes see on artist pages), but compared to whom they're matched against, kudos to them.

For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life.

KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.

They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular.

In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS.

Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)

I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time.

But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself.

I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me.

Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other.

Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.

First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did not feel sufficiently "mine", like a handmade copy on physical media did, despite being just as unlicensed. Very often, the records I did buy were quite a disappointment at first, before they started growing on me, and some of what I consider the best today would have never made it past that threshold if they happened in the abundance of Spotify or the heyday of unbounded internet piracy.

It's actually quite ironic: all my friends who indulged in Napster et al now have spotify accounts, whereas I have just stopped extending my repository of CD rips.

What do you mean with availability overload? I would say i am an active listener, my mind is rather a bit creative and i would dare to say that 80-90% percent of the time, i know what to listen. Even if it means to discover something new.

I used to like the Spotify recommendations but i disabled them since 2 years at they became like ads network “whoever pays more, gets more recommended”. I discover music now through personal recommendations, magazines (online), forums, references from artists i usually read about, or music produced by a producer i respect. How do you deal with?

But for example, right now i just wanted to listen some salsa/merengue (you can begin to guess where i am from) i always liked and made my own playlist with own songs.

Cheers!

I'm also curious what do you/your generation consider amazing nowadays?

There are people here alive that have used records, 8 tracks, tapes, CDS, mp3s and now Spotify. There is no comparison that Spotify is better for playback and discovery.

Note: I'm not talking about audiophile comparisons, just ease of use for the average listener.

I’m not a musician but it seems to me it’s always been difficult to make a living as an artist. I wonder if it’s easier to find an audience today than it was 50 years ago?

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rel...

There are entire parts of the music industry that no longer exists.

There use to be working musicians in every city that were basically unknown outside the city. NYC or SF had their own entirely unique music scenes.

There use to be entire bars that were goth bars or punk bars in even mid sized cities. Imagine opening a bar in 2024 that only caters to people who like punk music? It doesn't even make sense.

Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media. To just compare the distribution channels misses the plot.

Every city use to have a knock off free paper of the Village Voice that was mostly for promoting live music. Now even the Village Voice itself is basically dead.

Anyone who thinks things are good now, simply can't comprehend what they missed out on.

Music teaching is a good example I think. There use to be all kinds of professional music teachers. If you were a gigging local musician you had the other income stream of teaching. Youtube is great for a music teacher that happens to win the music teaching lottery at the expense of all other music teachers. Of course, if you ask the youtube lottery winner they will say things have never been better. Scale that process across everything to do with music and that is the reality compared to the old reality.

You can't ask the gigging local musician who teaches on the side how things are because they are mostly doing something else now and don't count.

It is like asking the lottery winners if it is worth it to play the lottery. Not surprisingly they all say yes, best thing ever.

I don't think this is the root cause of your findings. I rather think that this development started with the DJ and rap culture which made musicians virtually obsolete. It is and was much cheaper to hire a DJ than a band, and people don't seem to care whether it's just a guy pressing some buttons or a bunch of people with real musical instruments. There is no longer any appreciation for real musicians. The public is satisfied with a few sampled tracks or cheap sequencer arrangements. In consequence fewer and fewer people see a need to learn an instrument. As a result, fewer and fewer music teachers are needed.

My question would have been "But how do artists get paid?" Which is still a murky answer today if you're not touring like crazy and going hard on ancillaries, like merch, ads, etc.

Yet, I miss the undivided attention of that first listening, listening to all tracks in sequence (picking the track sequence was an art in itself, creating an atmosphere across the album). Feeling the difference between Side A and B.

Those 10$ felt like great return. Exchanging tapes with friends, recording mixtapes, listening sit downs.

A lot of this is lost due to streaming in general. When you can get any song in history in a few clicks, it takes away part of the “mystical journey” of finding your new musical beat. More self reinforcing stuff, just like Social Networks.

About Spotify, I agree with the OP. Interface gets worse, price goes up, podcast content is irrelevant for me (but drives price up). I find it grating since I already pay for the Apple bundle which includes Music (which is somehow even worse than Spotify). If Apple had a better interface I could ditch Spotify.

Guess I must try Cider again.

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands.

Before the general population figured out ripping, you could often return things if you did not like the music.

I often went to HMV (333 Yonge, Toronto Canada), bought 6+ CDs, listen them for a week or two, and return the ones that I didn't like (keep 2-3). I would then repeat the process and buy a bunch more.

They stopped this policy in (IIRC) the late-90s or early-00s, as people were just ripping CDs and returning everything they purchase the day before.

except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

and it's $11 every month, forever.

See recently, Crunchyroll Funimation acquisition. People had bought blu-ray copies at extra cost for a digital copy which was honored by CR and retracted after the merger where they promptly deleted the media that these people owned and paid full price for individually.

There's things missing from both platforms, of course.

I can count on one hand the amount of times this has happened to me in the last decade.

Is it fair to say that you have fairly esoteric taste in music? I don't think it's the norm among Spotify users to feel that there is a ton of stuff that's missing from the library.

And if you are among the ones who can't find the vast majority of the music they want to listen to on that platform, then that's fair play - it's probably not for you. You likely have alternatives that suit you better. That doesn't really take away from the experience of the normies for whom it's got everything they want.

I'm sure a sizable portion of tracks I enjoy are on there and agree that for most people it has most of what they want - most people listen to what is marketed to them. This has no bearing on the fact there's huge amounts of music available elsewhere that is not on Spotify/similar.

So the complaint is that not enough money is being paid for music and that it costs too much?

But for me, yes paying $132/yr to not own anything isn't attractive.

and was there but isn't anymore

And a large number of those albums/songs... aren't on Spotify.

And all the songs I've 'discovered' on Spotify will also be gone some day, because they're not from mainstream artists. If I want to listen to them in another 10 years, I'll have to buy them.

A noticeable number of Bob Dylan's live albums are all mutilated in online distribution (streaming and download, everything), because somebody somehow managed to drop the gapless between-tracks transitions. (Those missing bits exactly match the pre-gap on the corresponding CD releases, so it almost feels as Columbia just ripped its own CDs for uploading and somehow mismanaged the process).

The most I can get from Spotify is about 40 songs in a custom Radio playlist that I can't refresh or update.

Comparing a product to what it was like decades ago and declaring it good is not the same as discussing it on merit and as is.

You could use Discogs to find similar music. Then you could use SoulSeek to find this music. Or simply join a metal channel/server on SoulSeek or IRC or DCPP and find other fans of similar music. But even before that you could also just look at a label catalog and travel to a vinyl or CD store (where you can listen before you buy...). Or you could use shortwave radio to catch a pirate station. Yes, this even worked for obscure genres like the one you mentioned. I have a broad taste of music and at times I've been into subgenres of the genre you mentioned.

Have I discovered new music via Spotify? For sure. Did different methods exist before? Yup. Is the Spotify method high signal to noise? Nah, the previously mentioned methods also worked very well. And I have virtually and IRL met tons of people, including people within the core of music subgenres. Thanks to Discogs, DCPP, and SoulSeek.

I do like one feature about Spotify showing shows near me (even though I have passed the age / time of my life where I went to artists as I have only time and money to do things like go to theatre with my kids). However that feature as well as buying merchandise also existed outside of Spotify long ago.

Oh how I enjoyed reading the reviews of the new albums back then! Some journalist were very talented in describing the music in tasty details and I was longing for the moment, when I buy and listen to the long awaited CD.

To be fair you have to push Spotify a little by listening to tiny bands before it starts recommending more of them because the "gravity" of popular music is too strong. Like what do you recommend to someone who listens to mega popular genre defying artists like Taylor Swift? She's so ungodly popular that they could be a diehard metal head and still listen to her. There's no signal. The set of music TSwift fans also listened to is all music.

Older than you, and into hardcore, not metal, but there were definitely ways to discover new songs back then.

First of all, I had friends that were into the same music, so when one of us got a new record, we all got a new record, I would borrow records from friends and if I liked it I would tape it, and friends made me tapes.

Radio did play hardcore, only they were pretty limited in what they could play, since if a band had a name like "The Crucifucks" or something like that, they couldn't even say that name over the air, but they still had hardcore radio shows that came on in college towns around 2 AM in the morning, and people would tape them and they would get passed around. We would go to a different town and drive around at 2 in the morning and tape straight from the car radio to a boombox just to find new music.

Next thing was compilation albums, so the labels would put out an extra cheap LP that was just a song or two from every band on the label, so for hardcore, Blasting Concept by SST, Rat Music for Rat People, American Youth Report, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, the Decline of Western Civilization, the Flipside comps, etc. Some of those you could even get at the mall.

Wasn't played on MTV other than a couple songs that were humorous (TV Party, Institutionalized) but you could find a little bit on Night Flight. Then there were the zines, Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside, later maybe Forced Exposure. If they compared a band you liked to another band, you would try to check them out. And of course going to $5 all ages shows, if you went to see a band you liked, 3 or 4 other bands were playing too.

So there were ways. I've never used Spotify but I know it is way easier now to find exactly what you want at the press of a button. But the search was part of the fun back then. The lack of technology did not stop us.

however i don't think spotify helps with discovery for me any longer. it did play a major role until last couple years, even when my tastes changed drastically. now it is hard to find something new that is closer to what i like and is not pushed by the artists trying to promote their work. even using shuffle on a large playlist results in same set of tracks playing every day.

i think these sorts of sentiments are shared by the others here. from price perspective, i actually started spending on music with spotify premium. i still feel that it is worth the money after entering into a much better economic condition.