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.
I disagree; Spotify is good at serving up sound, so it makes sense for them to also serve audiobooks and podcasts; just like it makes sense for video streaming services to have both movies and tv shows. Similarly for concerts; people who listen to a lot of music are probably interested in going to see their favorite band live.
Mind you, I definitely have complaints about the app (like notifications interrupting music, their abysmal lock screen widget, and their "randomization" that always ends up playing the same few songs from a list of thousands); but I also understand why they want to expand.
I have definitely become informed of concerts I’ve then gone to by way of Spotify. They know everyone I listen to and are well suited to advertise the artists I’d actually like to see to me.
Unbelievable that spotify's shuffle is still broken a decade later. No chance the people working there dont know about this as everyone with large playlists runs into it, but for whatever reason they refuse to fix it.
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.
I haven't set up my own stack for music, so I'm just guessing tbh, but administering Jellyfin has been completely painless. Let Claude write a docker compose file, toss it on the server, haven't had to think about it again. I bet there's something equally good out there for music management.
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.
If you're on Apple devices it's $25 a year for iTunes Match. You can throw all your Bandcamp purchases into the Music app and they'll be available across your devices.
> 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).
For the last 20 years, my "stack" has been a NFS-mounted hard drive full of MP3s, and the occasional rsync mirror to a USB stick if I need to listen to something without a network connection.
Well to elaborate on what I meant - Spotify makes it extremely easy to have access to your music everywhere. Once you get into (or back into) storing MP3s you have to solve that for whatever level of convenience you want. I have Plexamp and things setup myself but it does require some work.
>Of course then you've gotta setup a whole stack to store it, make it available to your devices, etc etc.
Uhh, no you don't? Nearly all of my Bandcamp purchases, except the literal one or two physical-only purchases that didn't also come with a digital copy, are all available to stream to my heart's content via the Bandcamp app and their website.
I mean, I also download it all because I DJ, but yeah... having access to it whenever I want is entirely effortless and doesn't require anything beyond Bandcamp itself.
Less than 10 years ago I could stroll into a local record store in my city and buy paper tickets to concerts directly from them, zero markup, zero "processing fees". And the ticket itself would be a souvenir because it often had a unique design or typeface. Now it's just a hideous barcode.
Apple’s prioritization of Apple Music on their HomePod turns me off it a bit. Could help guide users more to alternatives but would reduce services sales.
Meh, I’m being kinda unfair b/c the experience is gonna be better. Shame Spotify forces streaming from phone (YouTube Music can run on HomePod itself like Apple Music). YouTube Music via HomePod might play the audio from a music video instead of playing the real song, so does make sense to shuttle normies to the Apple service, but guess I don’t find the situation perfect.
At least concert tickets are somewhat aligned with listening to music, unlike autoplaying video podcasts on the homepage rather than showing my playlists.
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.
its not garbage. podcasts is now major chunk of listening. so why not give ppl what they want. "one thing" is not just music. My own listening habits have shifted from music into podcasts.
I'm sorry what? Artists do not make money on streaming, they make it in touring. Spotify integrating concerts into the same product surface is the MOST logical thing they could do.
Touring costs a fortune for bands. They don't even keep most of the money, the record label takes a big cut and there's Ticketmaster after that, and now Spotify I guess. Selling paper-thin T-shirts, vinyl and lapel pins for absurd markups at the merch booth is how they make money.
Hmm, see I don’t agree. I use Spotify extensively for music, but also for podcasts and audiobooks. Great for a long car journey, or background listening whilst doing DIY.
I have plenty of frustrations with the app, but not with the core offer as a delivery mechanism for various types of audio entertainment and information.
Most? You mean all. 240V [0] as been the standard in the US basically since electrification started in the late 19th century. 120V has for all practical purposes never been a thing, it has always been an artifact of split-phase 240V. A deliberate choice to offer two voltages to every consumer.
[0] Okay, technically 240V did not become official until around 1967, but the split-phase design was there from the beginning. They capped it at 240V to stop the creeping up that had been going on in the earlier part of the century. This is why you still have a lot of people (not all of them old enough to have been alive in 1967, oddly enough) that refer to 240V as 220.
Sure, but that is the exception proving the rule. Not quite urban legend, you can find people on mikeholt.com who have actually seen one in the wild. Usually because of some shenanigans the local power company pulled to directly connect more houses by giving each one a phase of a three-phase feed.
> When you go to work, do you go maximize shareholder value?
Yes. The further up the ladder you go, the more this is pounded into your head. I was in a few Big Tech and this is how you write your self-assessment. "Increased $$$ revenue due to higher user engagement, shipped xxx product that generated xxx sales etc".
If you're level 1/2 engineer, sure. You get sold on the company mission. But once you're in senior level, you are exposed to how the product/features will maximize the company's financial and market position. How each engineer's hours are directly benefiting the company.
> Were you ever part of a team and felt good about the work you were doing together?
Maybe some startups or non-profits can have this (like Wikipedia or Craigslist), but definitely not OpenAI, Google and Meta.
Of course the business needs to work as a business too. I'm not saying that's not real, I'm saying it's reductionist to say it's only that.
Put another way, you need to have an answer to the question: Why should I work towards optimizing the success of this business rather than another one's.
If there isn't a great answer to this, you'll have employees with no shared sense of direction and no motivation.
Most of the work I as an engineer do is jumping through hoops that engineers from other departments have drawn up. If someone up high really cared, wouldn't they have us work on something that matters?
When Trudeau first took office, he was the meme of being Canada's young and handsome PM, and he enjoyed a good few years of "honeymoon" period that many leaders can only wish for.
It does absolutely work both ways, but there's a non-incumbent advantage in that, until an opp emerges all the non-incumbent has to do is attack whereas the incumbent has to defend.
In this case, it's definitely Trudeau's administration fault by flooding the Canadian job market with immigrants, which lowers job compensation and increasing housing cost.
They've always been lower, but it was always 20%ish lower. Now it's like 50%.
And in the meantime, housing prices have gone up exponentially. Housing in greater Toronto is more expensive than the Bay Area, but the compensation is far far lower.
I'm not one to blame Trudeau personally, or even immigration per se. I think there's a multitude of factors. But it's best not to deny the situation, which is that in the last few years there's been... problems... in the Canadian SWE labour market.
It's not the quantity / size of pie. It's the fact that the Canadian labour market has explicit "escape valves" for "skilled labour is too expensive" built in as a policy plank in the form of the LMIA and TFW process.
They are tools that "industry" lobbied for expansion of, and got. Have persisted through both Conservative and Liberal governments for decades, but was expanded markedly under both Harper and (especially) Trudeau.
I am currently trialling a pair of Phonak hearing aides (mid-range audio package, roughly AUD$5K) and I can assure you the sound quality is garbage even at this price point.
Yes, they pick up sounds I don't normally hear, but I would compare the experience to listening to world through a cheap high-school PA system.
Are you used to wearing aids? Like have you worn them for several years? I remember when I first wore hearing aids it sounded like really tinny bluetooth speakers hovering behind my head. It was distracting and a bit depressing to think this was what I was going to have to listen to.
Over a few months my brain priced it in, and now I don't get that at all. Putting them in just means I hear better. It is like my brain has noticed the new sounds and interprets them before I hear them. The audiologist I spoke to said this happens to everybody, however the longer you've had untreated hearing loss and the older you are, the longer it will take your brain to adapt.
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.