So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?
In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.
The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.
I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'
Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?
I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.
probably_wrong · 1m ago
Without giving specific numbers, I think the following situation is inherently unfair:
I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.
0xbadcafebee · 1h ago
> how little money per stream artists make ... What is fair compensation for writing a song?
Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?
The reason compensation isn't a settled thing is it's a very complex thing to answer.
The simplest possible answer is "the artist sets their own price" - assuming they just DIY'd the entire production, advertising, distribution, etc themselves. But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all, not to mention all the non-music skills if they're not paying professionals to do the rest.
If they're not just going to play at the local coffee shop, or bus from city to city barely making enough for gas and beer, they need some way to professionally produce, mass-market, and mass-distribute their songs. It's not feasible for most musicians to do this themselves, so there exists a music industry to do it... which gives them all the cards... letting them set the price, and contract terms... which are often unfair. That's what happens when an industry is given the power to exploit people: they do.
parliament32 · 1h ago
> Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?
Why are any of these the distribution medium's (or better, listener's) problem? The songwriter, recording studio, audio engineer, marketing firm, etc should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed. The artist is the one who should accept this risk. Just like.. basically everything else in the world. The plumber who installed an office sink is not entitled to some fraction of the occupying organization's revenue, right?
> But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all
Which is why labels exist. They take the risk on, and pre-pay for (everything), in exchange for the lion's share of potential revenue. Artists are, of course, welcome to stay unsigned and handle all the risk and rewards themselves, but that typically isn't a good value prop.
IMO everything here is working as designed, including Spotify. The author just doesn't understand that "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" is exactly what should happen.
AdamJacobMuller · 17m ago
> should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed
Because by and large they don't want that. They are creatives who would prefer to be invested in their work: Charge less now, putting more into their work in the hope and belief that it will pay off over time. Sometimes it does.
mingus88 · 1h ago
I’m not sure about this accounting. I know some artists with very successful songs and they made nothing substantial from millions of streams
Could it be that the streaming platform pays 0.005 which then gets divided amongst the whole band, and then the label takes their cut for producing and marketing it?
Whereas before, the label was simply giving 10%?
brentm · 1h ago
I managed a few artists in the past. Usually Spotify paid something like $0.0035 per stream but it ranges based on where the listen took place. One artist owned part of their catalog so earned the 100% on those streams. The rest of their catalog was owned by a major label where they were credited 15% of the streaming take (which was slightly higher than the direct rate) towards their unrecouped major label account.
I'd say overall though, streaming can be good for artists. It helps keep them fresh in fans ears (via auto-generated & editorial playlists) and provides a revenue stream for the older stuff that would never be selling in stores or iTunes now.
jszymborski · 1h ago
The article says they purchase from bandcamp which takes less than 20%, and support them on patreon.
seemaze · 1h ago
I can't say whether the music industry fairly compensates artists or not. I can say that the film industry, for example, has leveraged each subsequent evolution in distribution technology as on opportunity to shift profits towards distributors and away from those involved in production.
al_borland · 1h ago
It is also implied that the author is now pirating their music, so now instead of the artist getting some money from the author, they get none.
jszymborski · 1h ago
The author says they buy the albums.
"Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by:
Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales
Buying physical media from official stores
Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists
Attending concerts and buying merchandise
Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further.
My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."
al_borland · 1h ago
I assumed a lot of that was a disclaimer to try and avoid encouraging illegal activity outright.
Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.
lacy_tinpot · 1h ago
Artists no longer make money from selling music. They make money from live performances, or niche products like vinyl records/merch. But from streaming services? Not really.
Live performances also have the added benefit of shielding artists from AI music.
the_gastropod · 1h ago
I used to work with a former member of a moderately successful rock band (they had a song in Guitar Hero, for example). He'd talk a bit about the royalties he'd received. His royalties from Spotify were negligible. Like single digit dollars per month.
Think about a ~$15/hour job. A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that. Only the top fraction of a percentage of artists on Spotify hit that.
Music has always been a tough business with middle men taking the lion's share of the upside. Streaming services just add another layer of middlemen.
cortesoft · 54m ago
> A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that
How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc.
I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.
dagi3d · 35m ago
how much did their label get?
newsclues · 1h ago
Does the record company make more money than the artist? That’s unfair to me.
The people making the art, should be paid the most.
nomel · 1h ago
> The people making the art, should be paid the most.
Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular.
If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
GuinansEyebrows · 1h ago
> They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
more than zero can still be too little money in exchange for the labor provided and the profit produced.
nomel · 1h ago
If the value that others get from it is not worth the effort that someone puts into making it, then we say it's unsustainable. You can't make people give you money, to cover the cost of something they don't want. And, that goes for the entire chain of human effort that is from the artist to the listener.
There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload.
* maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song.
* creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people.
* creates ads to recommend the service to people.
* ...etc
If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case).
If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort.
We live in a society.
mingus88 · 1h ago
This is often the case where one side is an expert at contracts and business and the other side is an artist.
I went to a show recently and the band was performing old material and they stopped to make a big deal about how they finally won back their music after 10 years. Famously Prince and Taylor Swift also went public with their disputes.
Good for them, but they signed the contract that locked up their rights for a decade. It seems weird to get too upset at the label for what you thought was a good deal at the time.
cortesoft · 1h ago
I don't know a ton of the specifics for music, but I am not sure if I agree your statement is always true. A lot can go into producing and distributing music, and I don't think it is fair to say the artist should always make more than all the other people who work on making the music happen combined. It isn't just a 'company' making that money, it is all the people working behind the scenes, all the investment in equipment and things, etc. I would need a lot more info on cost breakdown before I say the blanket statement of "the artist should make more"
ecshafer · 1h ago
If I buy a machine, then hire a worker to make a widget. And I sell that widget for $20 but pay him $10 is that fair? The machine, shipping, sales, marketing, inventory arent free.
glitchc · 1h ago
In the world we've built, mainstream success isn't defined by ability or quality, but rather polish and marketing reach. Marketing works because the average human is pretty shallow.
Would it be different if we started over? Maybe.
browningstreet · 1h ago
It seems like no one understands what a record deal is. Or an advance. Or publishing rights.
No one needs to sign a record deal. Or take an advance (which is a loan).
It’s like VC money. There are plenty of threads here which recommend not taking VC money and bootstrapping instead.
And yes, some artists self fund, self publish and self-upload. I’m not defending Spotify or streaming rates, just saying platitudes don’t seem sufficiently nuanced or informed.
umanwizard · 1h ago
Why?
saulpw · 1h ago
That's the way they feel. Why do you think it shouldn't be that way?
McAlpine5892 · 28m ago
Recently I gave up on Apple Music. The clients had gotten so bad from a UX perspective that I found it frustrating to use. Especially on desktop. There is also no easy way to cache your _entire_ library to disk. Other services+clients are heaps of Electron that I'd rather avoid.
It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around:
0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known.
1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging for me.
2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS.
3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid.
4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music.
5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5].
All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department.
Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab.
It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.
If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:
If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).
daedric7 · 50m ago
Feishin, used by the author as well, supports Jellyfin.
As for mobile, while Symphonium supports Jellyfin, I prefer Finamp as it maintains the split from multiple music libraries.
noduerme · 1h ago
I recently switched to Jellyfin when Plex started charging for remotely accessing my home server.
For anyone considering it, I found Tailscale + Jellyfin work a charm. There aren't great docs for doing so, and I beat my head against it for a little bit, but all you need to do really is to add both your local IP range and the Tailscale IP range to the allowed ranges for Jellyfin.
With that, any device on your tailnet can access it. I went further and set up a cloud VM with a public web address behind an auth, installed Tailscale on the VM, and set it up to reverse proxy port 443 to the Jellyfin tailscaleIP:port on my tailnet. So now I can get to it through any web browser or Jellyfin app on devices that aren't on my tailnet.
I'm extremely happy with the results, and the nice thing is that unlike Plex this setup is never subject to forced changes in the future.
oceanplexian · 47m ago
The problem is that PlexAmp is literally the killer feature of Plex. Literally no open source software comes close. It would be great if it did, and I would switch, but it’s the only app that even remotely competes with Spotify for me for that reason.
denimnerd42 · 1h ago
I really want to do this but like any hobby it takes too much time. My biggest frustration as a youtube music user is that the app doesn't appreciate that it might not always have a good internet connection and takes forever to fallback to your downloads when loading the library.
If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(
jerf · 1h ago
If you just want independence, just start collecting MP3s or CDs or whatever. I've been collecting physical music since the mid 90s and my whole MP3 collection is still under 128GBs, so I just copy it anywhere I want it now. Unless you really put some effort into it, storage will probably grow faster than your collection will.
Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.
ashwinsundar · 1h ago
I want to do this too, and have a feeling that it's not as hard or time-consuming as it seems. 15 years ago, all my music lived in a /Music folder and I could play anything in there, instantly. It should be easy to just move that folder to a networked drive, get some sort of mp3 player app on my phone/devices, and point it at that folder. If the app is allowed to download files as well, that's even better. Otherwise, plugging in my phone/mp3 player and uploading songs manually was never particularly difficult, even back then.
If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.
roywiggins · 1h ago
You can more or less do this with apps that will stream your library off Google Drive. The one I tried demanded permissions to read everything in my Google Drive which seemed too dangerous, but if you had a separate cloud drive somewhere you could set it up pretty easily.
galleywest200 · 1h ago
The VLC app can read and play from networked drives, at least on my iPad.
toddbonzalez1 · 1h ago
Not sure what platform you're using youtube music on but there are a few open source third-party apps for android that may have better offline functionality (though I have not either of them, I just came across them while searching different streaming music options)
I'm always glad to see people move away from Spotify's model and towards options that better support artists directly, and I definitely don't mean this to take anything away from the article despite how it sounds, but just seeing the system diagram reminds me that it's amazing the lengths that systems-minded people will go to to create their own Rube Goldberg-esque systems to 'optimise' the experience.
I counted thirteen separate components. If it works for the author then more power to them, but I personally want to spend less time futzing with technology when it comes to this kind of thing and more time actually just actively listening to new music.
I buy from Bandcamp or Apple, sync locally, and I'm done. Bandcamp's iOS app is better than Apple's Music at this point (though not a hard bar to reach). And I find new music organically from listener-supported streaming public radio.
I haven't mentioned analysis or recommendations, but honestly I so rarely seem to find anything through the typical algorithms and recommendation-type mechanisms that I genuinely like, and stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons.
Still, a good starting point for people wanting their own similar setup.
sfRattan · 54m ago
> stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons.
I've largely given up on algorithmic recommendations and gone back to human curation. There are humans out there writing about music, movies, and everything in culture. I've found the ones whose tastes I largely trust, and I follow them via RSS to read about the things I might like.
Are some of those critics probably using algorithms themselves? Sure. Let them dive into that swamp and pull out the gems. I'll stay on the shore, watch, and wait.
sunrunner · 31m ago
> human curation
More and more I feel like recommendation algorithms for discovery of anything seem to just not actually work for finding things which are new and exciting, but perhaps that's by definition.
If information is surprise then the most interesting things are those which aren't like the things I already know. And the easiest way to find those things I find is to just tune in to something where you don't know what you'll hear, and simply wait. That's it. It might take a while, but I bet you'll find something that feels new, exciting and perhaps expands your tastes a bit. And what could be better?
sfRattan · 25m ago
Absolutely. I've made several new Spotify and Pandora accounts over the years. Initially they offer good recommendations but eventually the algorithms always aggressively funnel down to the same 2-to-3 dozen similar-sounding songs (though its a different set of songs with each new account). Once trapped in that algorithmic tarpit, the only thing to do is start over, which is annoying. Now I let myself discover things via human critics or just in the course of life.
traverseda · 16m ago
Worth noting that lidarr is broken right now. It relies on a metadata server provided by the lidarr org (like that's not going to blow up in our faces) and that metadata server is currently down. It's been like that for I think 6 months?
>If you're starting a NEW lidarr library, you should wait. It's not ready for that.
SirMaster · 41m ago
I don't understand.
At the start of the article the author says this is why Spotify is good.
"For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends."
How does one discover new music through algorithms or share playlists with friends on this proposes self-hosted stack?
He claims it tiges him everything Spotify offered plus more.
"Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more."
But I don't see how it does those things, and those are the main reasons I use Spotify. 80% of the time I listen to automatic playlists based on my music tastes and hear new and old (but new to me) music constantly. If I don't like it I skip the track to the next as much as I want. How on earth am I supposed to do that if I have to buy and curate every new album into my collection?
dankwizard · 1h ago
Ha, this is the guy that got absolutely butchered in his Reddit post [1] about the same link. OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.
> OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.
Copyright infringement is neither piracy nor theft, those are both metaphors used largely for the purpose of emotional manipulation.
BLKNSLVR · 43m ago
> believes piracy is not theft
That's true by definition isn't it? Piracy (Internet piracy, since that's the context) is copyright infringement, not theft.
dankwizard · 38m ago
Maybe by definition, but if you're a game developer and you find out everybody is pirating your game and not purchasing it from Steam/physical store, it's akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out. You're not going to say "They are infringing on my copyright".
sfRattan · 9m ago
> akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out
That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue:
If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here.
There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft.
Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.
wilsonnb3 · 1h ago
The table comparing the authors solution to Spotify is missing the biggest benefit of streaming services, which is the cost.
It would cost way more than $11 a month to buy all of the music I listen to.
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
If you're always listening to new music, that makes sense. But are you really? Or are you listening to the stuff you already know and like, with an occasional sprinkling of new music? My impression is that most people are more in the latter group than the former, and at that point you need to consider whether you come out ahead if you buy music rather than renting it. I know that I personally would waste a ton of money paying for Spotify, because I'm 99.99% listening to the music I already know and like.
nomel · 57m ago
For some napkin math:
I just transferred my library from Spotify to Apple Music (with the new built in tool!): 13k liked songs.
I started using paid Spotify from invite, before public release in the US, so 15 years.
Lets go very conservative (for me) and say every 3 songs is from the same album, at $12/album (LOL!): $52k, or $288/month.
Spotify cost: $2.1k, or $12/month
If I had to pay for albums, I would definitely be listening to less varied music.
bigstrat2003 · 30m ago
I mean, I did say if you're listening to new music all the time then Spotify makes sense. It sounds like you are, so it makes sense for you. But not everyone does that. For myself, I already have the music I like. I would say that once every 3-4 years I come across a new artist I like and I purchase a few of their albums. If we're really aggressive, let's say I buy two new albums per year at $12 each... so my marginal cost is $24/year versus $144/year with Spotify. It all comes down to one's listening habits.
echelon_musk · 1h ago
> Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels
> My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased.
Sure. I believe you.
seemaze · 1h ago
My own self hosted audio journey ended with Lyrion Music Server[0], formerly Logitech Music Server. It is now open source and run by the community.
There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate.
It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough!
It's annoying how the author mentions "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" along with buying from Bandcamp but doesn't describe how they integrate music from Bandcamp into their collection, instead linking to programs that seem designed exclusively for downloading from torrents and usenet.
I also have a Navidrome setup that is my main music streaming method which I've used for a few years now. I buy from bandcamp quite often and downloading and importing music from bandcamp (and managing metadata generally) is the most tedious part. I use beets[1] and if I buy, say, a mix of 10 tracks and albums, I then get 10 URLs and I have to download and run `beet imp` on each mp3/zip file. I do this over SSH with a bunch of copy-pasting since I haven't convinced myself it's worth the time[2] to change my method. It looks like there's some way to scrape bandcamp and automate this process based on the existence of this tool, bandcamp-dl[3]. If anyone has their own method to suggest I'd appreciate it.
Been rebuilding my music library from my sailing the high seas days when I did not have money. CDs sound really good. Some much better than streaming Spotify.
Glad I own the media. A buddy was listening to an Audiobook on Spotify, paused it and came back to it no longer being on Spotify. Between stuff like that and no toggle to disable AI generated music, I don't think I'll be going back.
_grabs minidisc player and goes for a walk_
al_borland · 1h ago
I've gone back and forth on this.
I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void.
I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice.
It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming.
From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to.
The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.
mingus88 · 1h ago
$30/mo seems pretty steep for backups. How much storage are you talking about, and what tier?
All of the music I purchased from bleep and bandcamp is still available to download again, and the CDs I rip from the used book stores are in a box to be ripped again if I ever need it.
al_borland · 1h ago
5TB through Synology's C2 service.
dijit · 1h ago
I wish I had a way of just bulk buying everything thats “in my library” on Apple Music.
I know its not Spotify, so maybe not related, but I have a much better experience with PlexAmp and would love to be able to buy my way out. Even if its €1,500 or something.
It should be noted that I actively fought against Apple Music as a subscription service, but buying music became (very rapidly) a third tier experience once they started pushing in that direction.
muratsu · 1h ago
Going through the trouble of maintaining a home server is not worth it for me. I wish dropbox offered some extra service for music/video.
leovander · 3m ago
If you organize your folders correctly, you could probably have that dropbox folder synced with one of those services. The maintenance isn't too bad once its up and running, probably more hurdles (proxies, etc) if you are accessing outside the home. If you are the only user, you can use tailscale to access your hosted apps when out of the home.
clueless · 1h ago
really the biggest service spotify has for me is its music recommendation engine... and so the big question with all this setup is: is listenbrainz's recommendation engine better than spotify?
justatdotin · 1h ago
I'm interested in the general direction, but for different reasons. IDGAF about AI artists and industry financials - but Helsing killer robots...
I also recognised different features I would miss. After an initial bump, the discoverability benefits declined to negligible. What I did greatly value was the unified interface. For that reason, the winner for me is to use plex as the media server, giving plexamp for all clients.
gregwebs · 1h ago
Navidrome looks nice but it looks like it is Desktop only. I am using Plexamp as well. I tried some alternatives but couldn't get them to work reliably. People miss Plexamp as an option because they try the regular Plex app and not the simplified Plexamp.
bigstrat2003 · 17m ago
Navidrome is a server, not a desktop app. It's more analogous to Plex than Plexamp. If you want a mobile app that can do Subsonic (the protocol Navidrome uses), Symfonium on Android is amazing.
sroerick · 21m ago
Navidrome is compatible with browser apps through a protocol the name of which eludes me at the moment
The web interface also runs pretty flawlessly on mobile browser. I was actually shocked at how responsive it was.
guhcampos · 1h ago
The genius of streaming was being more convenient than piracy. With streaming prices hiking up, recommendations getting worse and their libraries becoming plagued by one-song-releases and AI Slop, piracy is becoming a thing again. The same is happening for video, apparently, as people get tired of having to pay for half a dozen streaming services more than they used to pay for 300 cable channels.
Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.
In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.
The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.
I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'
Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?
I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.
I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.
Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?
The reason compensation isn't a settled thing is it's a very complex thing to answer.
The simplest possible answer is "the artist sets their own price" - assuming they just DIY'd the entire production, advertising, distribution, etc themselves. But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all, not to mention all the non-music skills if they're not paying professionals to do the rest.
If they're not just going to play at the local coffee shop, or bus from city to city barely making enough for gas and beer, they need some way to professionally produce, mass-market, and mass-distribute their songs. It's not feasible for most musicians to do this themselves, so there exists a music industry to do it... which gives them all the cards... letting them set the price, and contract terms... which are often unfair. That's what happens when an industry is given the power to exploit people: they do.
Why are any of these the distribution medium's (or better, listener's) problem? The songwriter, recording studio, audio engineer, marketing firm, etc should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed. The artist is the one who should accept this risk. Just like.. basically everything else in the world. The plumber who installed an office sink is not entitled to some fraction of the occupying organization's revenue, right?
> But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all
Which is why labels exist. They take the risk on, and pre-pay for (everything), in exchange for the lion's share of potential revenue. Artists are, of course, welcome to stay unsigned and handle all the risk and rewards themselves, but that typically isn't a good value prop.
IMO everything here is working as designed, including Spotify. The author just doesn't understand that "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" is exactly what should happen.
Because by and large they don't want that. They are creatives who would prefer to be invested in their work: Charge less now, putting more into their work in the hope and belief that it will pay off over time. Sometimes it does.
Could it be that the streaming platform pays 0.005 which then gets divided amongst the whole band, and then the label takes their cut for producing and marketing it?
Whereas before, the label was simply giving 10%?
I'd say overall though, streaming can be good for artists. It helps keep them fresh in fans ears (via auto-generated & editorial playlists) and provides a revenue stream for the older stuff that would never be selling in stores or iTunes now.
"Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by:
Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales Buying physical media from official stores Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists Attending concerts and buying merchandise Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further.
My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."
Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.
Live performances also have the added benefit of shielding artists from AI music.
Think about a ~$15/hour job. A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that. Only the top fraction of a percentage of artists on Spotify hit that.
Music has always been a tough business with middle men taking the lion's share of the upside. Streaming services just add another layer of middlemen.
How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc.
I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.
The people making the art, should be paid the most.
Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular.
If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
more than zero can still be too little money in exchange for the labor provided and the profit produced.
There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload. * maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song. * creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people. * creates ads to recommend the service to people. * ...etc
If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case).
If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort.
We live in a society.
I went to a show recently and the band was performing old material and they stopped to make a big deal about how they finally won back their music after 10 years. Famously Prince and Taylor Swift also went public with their disputes.
Good for them, but they signed the contract that locked up their rights for a decade. It seems weird to get too upset at the label for what you thought was a good deal at the time.
Would it be different if we started over? Maybe.
No one needs to sign a record deal. Or take an advance (which is a loan).
It’s like VC money. There are plenty of threads here which recommend not taking VC money and bootstrapping instead.
And yes, some artists self fund, self publish and self-upload. I’m not defending Spotify or streaming rates, just saying platitudes don’t seem sufficiently nuanced or informed.
It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around:
0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known.
1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging for me.
2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS.
3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid.
4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music.
5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5].
All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department.
[0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms
[1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag
[2] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy
[3] https://syncthing.net
[4] https://swinsian.com
[5] https://tailscale.com
It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.
If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:
* https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art.
* https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files.
If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).
As for mobile, while Symphonium supports Jellyfin, I prefer Finamp as it maintains the split from multiple music libraries.
For anyone considering it, I found Tailscale + Jellyfin work a charm. There aren't great docs for doing so, and I beat my head against it for a little bit, but all you need to do really is to add both your local IP range and the Tailscale IP range to the allowed ranges for Jellyfin.
With that, any device on your tailnet can access it. I went further and set up a cloud VM with a public web address behind an auth, installed Tailscale on the VM, and set it up to reverse proxy port 443 to the Jellyfin tailscaleIP:port on my tailnet. So now I can get to it through any web browser or Jellyfin app on devices that aren't on my tailnet.
I'm extremely happy with the results, and the nice thing is that unlike Plex this setup is never subject to forced changes in the future.
If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(
Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.
If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.
InnerTune: https://github.com/z-huang/InnerTune
Musify: https://github.com/gokadzev/Musify
I counted thirteen separate components. If it works for the author then more power to them, but I personally want to spend less time futzing with technology when it comes to this kind of thing and more time actually just actively listening to new music.
I buy from Bandcamp or Apple, sync locally, and I'm done. Bandcamp's iOS app is better than Apple's Music at this point (though not a hard bar to reach). And I find new music organically from listener-supported streaming public radio.
I haven't mentioned analysis or recommendations, but honestly I so rarely seem to find anything through the typical algorithms and recommendation-type mechanisms that I genuinely like, and stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons.
Still, a good starting point for people wanting their own similar setup.
I've largely given up on algorithmic recommendations and gone back to human curation. There are humans out there writing about music, movies, and everything in culture. I've found the ones whose tastes I largely trust, and I follow them via RSS to read about the things I might like.
Are some of those critics probably using algorithms themselves? Sure. Let them dive into that swamp and pull out the gems. I'll stay on the shore, watch, and wait.
More and more I feel like recommendation algorithms for discovery of anything seem to just not actually work for finding things which are new and exciting, but perhaps that's by definition.
If information is surprise then the most interesting things are those which aren't like the things I already know. And the easiest way to find those things I find is to just tune in to something where you don't know what you'll hear, and simply wait. That's it. It might take a while, but I bet you'll find something that feels new, exciting and perhaps expands your tastes a bit. And what could be better?
https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498
>If you're starting a NEW lidarr library, you should wait. It's not ready for that.
At the start of the article the author says this is why Spotify is good.
"For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends."
How does one discover new music through algorithms or share playlists with friends on this proposes self-hosted stack?
He claims it tiges him everything Spotify offered plus more.
"Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more."
But I don't see how it does those things, and those are the main reasons I use Spotify. 80% of the time I listen to automatic playlists based on my music tastes and hear new and old (but new to me) music constantly. If I don't like it I skip the track to the next as much as I want. How on earth am I supposed to do that if I have to buy and curate every new album into my collection?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...
Copyright infringement is neither piracy nor theft, those are both metaphors used largely for the purpose of emotional manipulation.
That's true by definition isn't it? Piracy (Internet piracy, since that's the context) is copyright infringement, not theft.
That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue:
If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here.
There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft.
Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.
It would cost way more than $11 a month to buy all of the music I listen to.
I just transferred my library from Spotify to Apple Music (with the new built in tool!): 13k liked songs.
I started using paid Spotify from invite, before public release in the US, so 15 years.
Lets go very conservative (for me) and say every 3 songs is from the same album, at $12/album (LOL!): $52k, or $288/month.
Spotify cost: $2.1k, or $12/month
If I had to pay for albums, I would definitely be listening to less varied music.
> My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased.
Sure. I believe you.
There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate.
It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough!
[0]https://lyrion.org
I also have a Navidrome setup that is my main music streaming method which I've used for a few years now. I buy from bandcamp quite often and downloading and importing music from bandcamp (and managing metadata generally) is the most tedious part. I use beets[1] and if I buy, say, a mix of 10 tracks and albums, I then get 10 URLs and I have to download and run `beet imp` on each mp3/zip file. I do this over SSH with a bunch of copy-pasting since I haven't convinced myself it's worth the time[2] to change my method. It looks like there's some way to scrape bandcamp and automate this process based on the existence of this tool, bandcamp-dl[3]. If anyone has their own method to suggest I'd appreciate it.
[1]: https://beets.io/
[2]: https://xkcd.com/1205/
[3]: https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl
Glad I own the media. A buddy was listening to an Audiobook on Spotify, paused it and came back to it no longer being on Spotify. Between stuff like that and no toggle to disable AI generated music, I don't think I'll be going back.
_grabs minidisc player and goes for a walk_
I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void.
I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice.
It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming.
From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to.
The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.
All of the music I purchased from bleep and bandcamp is still available to download again, and the CDs I rip from the used book stores are in a box to be ripped again if I ever need it.
I know its not Spotify, so maybe not related, but I have a much better experience with PlexAmp and would love to be able to buy my way out. Even if its €1,500 or something.
It should be noted that I actively fought against Apple Music as a subscription service, but buying music became (very rapidly) a third tier experience once they started pushing in that direction.
I also recognised different features I would miss. After an initial bump, the discoverability benefits declined to negligible. What I did greatly value was the unified interface. For that reason, the winner for me is to use plex as the media server, giving plexamp for all clients.
The web interface also runs pretty flawlessly on mobile browser. I was actually shocked at how responsive it was.
Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.