I understand the criticism that it's hard for you to get an audience to notice you. But once somebody has listened to a tune of yours and then doesn't actively seek out more of it ... could it be that they just prefer to listen to something else instead? Competition is toughand it may feel easy to blame it on big tech, but sometimes peoples taste is just not something you can legislate..

If always playing songs from the same artists is what people wanted (e.g. lead to more overall listening time), Spotify would 100% do that. You can't pick what a radio station plays next after starting one of your songs, likewise Spotify gets to pick what their users prefer (visibly: not always songs from the exact same artist).

There's a huge element of luck too, who happens to hear you, whether or not you strike some chord with the public in some way. But mainly, it's just hard work. Many artists took a very long time, playing shows in small venues for years, building up local fanbases... and then eventually saw some small measure of success. Many more saw nothing.

I'm hesitant to blame the internet for this. Sure there are some artists who seemed to get plucked from nowhere, and were catapulted to international success overnight. But most, most just worked hard, and got there eventually.

To be entirely fair at least for me in lot of cases I end up adding maybe 2 songs of an artist total to my playlist. Assuming random passerby is going to like rest of your stuff just because they liked one song is a stretch.

If the problem is serious enough, the capitalist solution would be to develop a platform that solves the problem for independent artists. However, as others have pointed out, the real customers for Spotify are not indie artists but rather paying users, and established artists.

While it is tempting to blame platforms for commercial failure. One has two recognize the truth of the business: making music follows a long-tailed distribution, and ultimately the listeners decide who rips those benefits.

When Spotify was young they were extremely developer and ecosystem friendly. It gets progressively worse and worse over time.

The biggest change I personally suffered from is when they pulled out of their integration with Djay, a DJ app. This integration was amazing for bedroom DJs like myself, being able to use Spotify to organize DJ music and DJ directly from it. Then they sunset the entire integration.

Now Djay and even bigger apps like Pioneer Rekordbox integrate with Tidal... Do the labels prefer Tidal over Spotify for some reason? Or did Spotify decide to get out of this game for reasons of their own?

Remember when Netflix first started they had amazing API's and all kinds of cool things where built off them, then one day they got big enough and shut them all down, of course they claim it was the "evil industry" that made them do it, but I simply do not believe them, nor do I believe spotify.

This pattern has been repeated over and over since the dawn of the internet, Early Platform is open, and dev focused to bring people in, then over time they wall off the garden to only their apps...

Google, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, and countless others all follow this pattern.

Roon will index either or both of them with your local mp3 library. It decorates with third-party metadata services, and will stream hi-res to almost any hardware device you can throw at it.

The problem is that middleman owns near-everything your users want.

They hold all the cards, they can just say "hey, either you do X or you don't get our music library" and now your customers don't have ~95% music library they wanted.

I'd wager Spotify's reluctance to "just let you listen to fucking music" might be related to that, if it was just API you could integrate with any player you could make indie-only Spotify equivalent that just... uses Spotify API to play whatever is not on it.

But for a developer building a custom listening experience it needs to be completely optional.

Right now you literally can't build an experience that plays just one song and stops after because "radio" automatically kicks in. You need to do crazy hacks to pause the current song before it ends or enqueue a silent track and intercept that, if you don't want to occasionally hear a small bit of an unwanted radio song before correcting.

Librespot is the a level playback client that reverse engineered what the native Spotify desktop apps do to get, decode and play a music stream as a connected device.

RSpotify is a high level client that uses the Spotify Web API which can control what is playing on any connected device.

Neither of which should be confused with the Spotify Web Playback SDK which turns your browser into a connected device provided it supports the right DRM bits.

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-playback-sdk...

What's wrong with using GH community features?

It's a side / passion project so no time or budget to build any support or community stuff. I considered GitHub, Reddit and Discord and all have pros/cons.

Owntone on your local network gives a nice persisten connection to whichever speakers you decided to switch on. The music signal is not being relayed from your phone to the speakers so it doesn't degrade as you move about doing your thing.

You control owntone and tell owntone, enable the speakers in the bedroom, livingroom and deck setting each volume separately and play this m3u playlist of your music, or this album, or this spotify playlist or podcast or whatever to all of them at the same time, synchronized.

Owntone does the job of the apple music/itunes software on a mac (ie the software that ships with a mac laptop to play mp3 files), which does multiroom to airplay 1 speakers. Iphones don't do this and don't do it with spotify. I mean not even an iphone to an appleTV plugged into an amp does spotify reliably. Apple's phone controlling an appleTV box requires constant reboots to function which is enough to stop anybody from using spotify with that setup. Is that intentional? Spotify clearly think so. Doesn't look good but I don't have deeper evidence than these observations of what works and what does not.

Owntone development isn't being controlled by apple for their business interests, eg it does spotify, lastfm and works like apple doesn't in my experience of it with the stuff the devs wanted to work (get involved and hack it to your needs if you have more?) - whatever you think is the reason the apple software not working, it clearly doesn't and owntone does. It works controlled from android, or your laptop, or your desktop, or tablet with the music you want not what apple "allows" or "cares enough to not have be broken" or insert some other excuse (maybe there's a convincing one but I can't think of it).

Eg plug the pi into power and the amp, plug the amp into power and the speakers. No other wires.

They all synchronise perfectly over wifi or ethernet, which is the point of shairport-sync. They identify themselves on your network as AirPlay 1 speakers. Note that they actually work with the spotify app directly in a reliable way just like AppleTV doesn't - your AppleTV will require a reboot every time you want it to be the output of spotify. So either I'm a better engineer with off the shelf parts and open source software than apple's full time paid professional engineers or maybe Spotify has a point when complaining about Apple non-competitive behaviour? I wish it were the former but somehow doubt it.

I rip my own songs, but I want something that's better than Spotify to listen to it. Then again, I listen to music on my Alexa too, so I think it would be hard for something to interface with that.

I think there's an unofficial understanding that if someone puts out a way to access Spotify Free that removes or bypasses the limitations and constraints that Spotify imposes on free accounts, they would summon the lawyers.

And now they've also "improved" their default interface with ultra-skinny fonts. Granted, I have a ridiculously bad 1080p laptop screen, but the font is so skinny that I only see colored pixels instead of white.

Definitely no plans for saving tracks.

I hope not. Sounds like a great way to provoke Spotify into a breaking API change.

[1] https://github.com/Spotifyd/spotifyd/pull/602

Aye, aye.

> Then I need to spend time on other web sites for music discovery?

One cost of cultivating tastes, as opposed to being fed by a recommendation algorithm, is the risk of possibly hearing music you might not like, as well as the time required spent doing so.

There are open-source music recommendation algorithms but having survived radio payola I consider that approach a step backward.

> This would work if you almost never venture outside of your existing music catalog.

I favor bulk music downloads (more than I could ever listen to) and randomized playlists, but then, I may have a higher tolerance for my tastes not being pandered to.

> I can't even contemplate pirating all these songs,

Seems to me that you are doing precisely that.

> since I find that morally wrong because the paid services (for music) are decently affordable and provide good value.

Wait, you find it morally wrong to infringe copyright (a specious proposition in any case) because the paid services are affordable? What is the price point that makes piracy moral, then?

They can't, major record labels and major artists are working with Spotify to fuck everyone else.

If you consume music then surely, you want the artists and musicians you support to be paid fairly for their work.