This is the problem with public listed companies that need to "maximize shareholder values" and look for infinite growth.
I just want Spotify for music (playlist, recommendation, lossless audio). I don't need their podcast, audiobook, ChatGPT, concert tickets etc. This just makes their app bloated for features I will never use.
jmuguy 16 minutes ago [-]
Another reason to use Bandcamp and just buy music. Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc. I dunno, Spotify certainly isn't going to get better at this point. Best we can hope is that they die and something better takes their place.
galleywest200 1 minutes ago [-]
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it
No you do not. Just use an external drive and an MP3 player like some kind of caveman. There are plenty of high quality models out there. Additionally smart phones will let you store music on them to listen to using the player app of your choice (VLC or something).
pavel_lishin 5 minutes ago [-]
> Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.
I have avoided building my own stack by uploading everything into Youtube Music (which used to be Google Music, which ... whatever.)
It gets a little worse every day, and one day it'll get bad enough where the pain of sysadmining something new will be preferable to them.
Semaphor 13 minutes ago [-]
My impression from the selfhosted sub is that most people looking to replace spotify are not into albums, and want a lot of popular music not available on BC.
electronsoup 20 minutes ago [-]
You may need to move on to other services like Apple Music
crooked-v 26 minutes ago [-]
It's the newest version of Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
dominotw 24 minutes ago [-]
music listening has been falling for a while now. no company public or not will choose to commit suicide out of purity principle
skeeter2020 16 minutes ago [-]
Spotify is welcome to go into all those other businesses, but why do they have to destroy their one valuable resource in an attempt to leverage it for all this other garbage? Doing one thing really good - so good that people will pay you for it - is not a "purity principle". It used to be the fundamental reason for existence for many companies.
827a 31 minutes ago [-]
For those against this: I'm curious to hear your take on how you'd stop/mitigate scalping.
inkcapmushroom 2 minutes ago [-]
Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.
317070 28 minutes ago [-]
Named tickets, like airplane seats?
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
alt227 23 minutes ago [-]
This is the answer, Ive seen it in practice. You just have to show id at the door when your ticket/QR gets scanned as normal, and the names have to match. Obviously only works for over 18 events though, unless you purposely sell under and over 18 tickets seperately.
ZeWaka 24 minutes ago [-]
Still have the issue of transferring tickets to friends or such if you can't make it. Axios and some providers handle this.
alt227 22 minutes ago [-]
Would need to provide a decent refund system alongside named tickets, offering quick and easy refunds for maybe 10% cancellation fee.
ch4s3 7 minutes ago [-]
This is ultimately a supply and demand problem. If tickets sell out on the secondary market for 10 or 100x the face value, then that's the fair market price. Either artists should charge more, or perform more shows.
lbreakjai 10 minutes ago [-]
What should anything be done? If people are willing to pay five times face value for a ticket, then it signals that tickets are priced too low. Let the market price itself.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
skeeter2020 11 minutes ago [-]
so they're partnering with Live Nation, the same company that's part of the vertically integrated monopoly on ticketing, venues, and resale. Nobody is buying these tickets for cash from a scalper outside of the venue. My 2-min tought: tie use of the ticket to the payment method or id of the purchaser; allow limited transfers. If LN/TM actually cared they'd provide for risk-free transfer without charging ridiculous mark-up. Since they sell the orginial ticket 95% of the time they have almost complete control over the pricing and consumer's id.
badgersnake 29 minutes ago [-]
Make it illegal to sell tickets above face value.
KingFelix 23 minutes ago [-]
I was a big fan of what the Cure did, they played our town and they did not allow any tickets to be resold for anything above what they originally went for.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
gtm1260 15 minutes ago [-]
How does this not just bias who gets ticket to those with more time preference.
dangus 18 minutes ago [-]
I’m against it from these angles:
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
ai-x 15 minutes ago [-]
You are just being punished for your poor judgement for not backing the winner. Not sure why you should be rewarded.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
dangus 5 minutes ago [-]
So your view is “accept a monopoly and become their bitch?”
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now, they can have fun with that trying silly schemes like this.
kgwxd 14 minutes ago [-]
Why is scalping a problem?
arnvald 8 minutes ago [-]
Fewer people go to concerts, fans can’t afford the tickets, less connection with the artists, less interest in music overall.
Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.
Aboutplants 39 minutes ago [-]
So scalpers will use bots to generate listens and shares, boosting listens for Spotify, in order to gain access to premium tickets. They are just adding a “barrier” that only inflates their listen counts while probably making it worse on actual valid ticket purchasers.
I don’t see how this works out as planned
827a 36 minutes ago [-]
Spotify is actively incentivized to mitigate that, because they're forced to pay royalties on every stream. This is, at least, a better situation than with Ticketmaster, who is actively incentivized to get scalpers as many tickets as they can.
just_once 7 minutes ago [-]
They'll trade off the inflated numbers for the royalties.
27 minutes ago [-]
Aunche 17 minutes ago [-]
They'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.
boringg 40 minutes ago [-]
the next ticketmaster... I really loathe what spotify has become
whycome 28 minutes ago [-]
Competition in that space would be kinda good
maheenaslam 30 minutes ago [-]
Streams and share won't be fair metric
dominotw 22 minutes ago [-]
i think its totally fair.
Rendered at 19:12:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I just want Spotify for music (playlist, recommendation, lossless audio). I don't need their podcast, audiobook, ChatGPT, concert tickets etc. This just makes their app bloated for features I will never use.
No you do not. Just use an external drive and an MP3 player like some kind of caveman. There are plenty of high quality models out there. Additionally smart phones will let you store music on them to listen to using the player app of your choice (VLC or something).
I have avoided building my own stack by uploading everything into Youtube Music (which used to be Google Music, which ... whatever.)
It gets a little worse every day, and one day it'll get bad enough where the pain of sysadmining something new will be preferable to them.
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Sorry, I only thought about this for 5 seconds, but there are markets where scalping doesn't cause issues. We could look at those.
Harry Styles is playing in my city, he's apparently very popular, but there's still plenty of tickets available for as low as 47€ for tomorrow.
Non-transferable I think? But you could resell them via ticketmaster maybe for facevalue?
It was amazing, we sat on the ticketmaster page, refreshed over the course of a day and we got 8th row for I believe $75 - it was an amazing concert, and being able to pay a reasonable price for tickets like that was amazing.
1. I like live concerts but I don’t spend my days listening to a lot of music. I would be considered “not a fan” by these metrics.
2 The monopolistic aspect. I subscribe to a much smaller Spotify competitor, now I’m at a disadvantage.
3. I don’t consider scalping a problem. The market price is determined by demand. It’s also been a problem that has been solved by artist presales and fan club gates.
I also think that as a recognized monopoly Ticketmaster should have more limitations on its business model. For example, their compassion on resale tickets should be limited. At present, they are encouraged to double dip on fees by finding ways to send more tickets to the secondary market.
It's the same logic for de-googlers. You can't De-Google yourself and then bitch about some Google products work better on Google products.
If you are a proud edge-lord/hipster with your obscure choices, you should also learn to deal with consequences.
Scale brings advantages. You can't have it both ways
I use a competitor to Spotify because I like the other product better overall. It’s a better value and better suited to my needs. I never said I’m using something else just to stick it to Spotify or become an edgelord.
I’m perfectly happy to be “punished” by missing some concerts. Many artists are struggling to fill seats right now, they can have fun with that trying silly schemes like this.
Artists lose, even if they get paid and all the tickets technically are sold out. Fans lose. The only people who win are scalpers who just abuse the system.