The end of November used to mean something.
It wasn’t just that the festive season was mere weeks away, or that Black Friday shopping madness was imminent, but that something fun and exciting was about to drop at any moment: Spotify Wrapped.
But this year, the internet is uncharacteristically quiet during the period when Spotify Wrapped typically appears. The lack of anticipation comes during a challenging time for the streaming platform, as it faces backlash on such issues as artist compensation, AI-generated music and ICE recruitment ads.
First, there’s artist compensation. Spotify has long been criticized for its dismal payouts to artists. Earlier this year, some Grammy-nominated songwriters even boycotted a Spotify awards event in response to the company’s decision to reduce royalty rates for songwriters and publishers by merging its premium music service with audiobooks last year.
Then there was the outcry around Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek’s investment in Helsing, a German defence company. When the news broke that the CEO had been funding the AI military tech company through his investment firm Prima Materia, indie artists like Massive Attack, Deerhoof and Godspeed You! Black Emperor pulled their music from the platform in protest during the summer.
After trying out the alternatives to spotify I simply didn’t like any of them. Either other services didn’t have artists I liked or their players were horrible.
Instead I simply set up navidrome on my server, used a soulseek script to convert my youtube and spotify playlists to download all my music to my server, and then opened up said server to myself and my friends/family. So now they can all stream for free AND if they want they can easily add music to the server. Which is fantastic because now I’m discovering new bands and artists without any effort. Just shuffle all my tracks and “oh that’s new” because my buddy added it and it’s really good. Plus the various apps for both PC and mobile are way better than what I was using before.
Oh thats interesting, I tried doing music in the past but it was just not as easy as movies and shows.
I saw a few people on my discord recently taking about how bad Spotify DJ has been getting so maybe its time to try it out again
it’s painfully easy to set up now. I run navidrome in a docker on my server. I also use Nicotine+ to make downloading and sharing music easier instead of going through a terminal. But my Dad for example will just rip CDs he has and drag and drop the mp3s into the music folder and it’s good to go, navidrome will automatically get the album cover and all the meta data and instantly add it. I use SuperSonic as my client on my PC and laptop and Synfonium on my phone. Everyone has their own accounts for navidrome so they can login where ever and be good to go.