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I killed my Spotify account when they started shoveling millions of dollars at Joe Rogan, and everything they’ve done since then only confirms I made the right call.
Me too. Migrating to Tidal was extremely easy. They even imported my Spotify playlists and follows. And they are cheaper. Fuck Spotify.
Actually it wasn’t easy, they rely on a third party service that charges the customer instead of Tidal footing that bill for you. I thought that was a bit tacky.
I may have to try that again: at the time I got too many complaints from my kids. Now Spotify hugely increased prices, probably to pay for its attempt to collect Podcasts that I’m not interested in.
Unfortunately I agreed with my kids: other music services just don’t works as well
Tidal has been pretty good for me over the past 5 years. I don’t know what your criteria are, but for me it’s something like 1) is the catalog big enough to offer 90% of what I’m looking for and 2) no advertising if I’m paying for the service. It ticks those boxes. I imagine it’s only a matter of time until they introduce the bullshit tier where you’re paying and being advertised to, but for now you get what you pay for.
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My teens like it
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I can predictably ask for either an artist or “like an artist” and get hours of what I asked for. (Apple just segued into random stuff so I always had to get it back on track. Someone I want listen to specifically someone do if I ask for that I expect to get that)
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This one is actually out of their hands. Lyrics aren’t free sadly and they have to pay for API calls. It’s fucking stupid but the labels are the ones at fault here.
Fuck Spotify nonetheless.
Unless there’s some agreement / licensing thing prohibiting it, and considering that lyrics don’t change, they should be able to do some caching for a total of 1 API call per song
You and I can do that but they’re not just caching they’re redistributing which requires royalties
Displaying written lyrics does not require a royalty payment to anyone.
It does unless they agree to let you redistribute the lyrics without one. Lyrics are copyrighted.
https://www.musicconnection.com/copyright-issues-scriped-entertainment-song-lyrics/
https://www.thelaw.com/law/are-song-titles-lyrics-protected-by-copyright-or-trademark-law.317/
You may get lucky and have a band that doesn’t care or won’t notice your operation, but Spotify has music from the big labels and they do care and they will notice.
Not sure why you got downvoted… storing text isn’t a lot of data, they can easily do it once per song and wrap it up.
The issue isn’t the storage, it’s the copyright holders
It is not a copyright infringement to display lyrics.
So confident while being completely wrong.
It does look that way, doesn’t it? I’m dumb as fuck. Everything I have ever touched in my life has failed or crumbled. My few friends are dying or already dead and I seem to be wrong about most things in life. I should put a bullet in my head and get off this worthless ride. Thanks for the confirmation of what an idiotic, worthless piece of shit I am and what a valueless, burdensome waste of resources I have been on this planet. May your ride yield better results than mine did.
It very much is and Spotify would definitely get sued if they weren’t paying. I got a cease and desist for an app I made about a decade ago for this very thing
… Why would the lyrics service allow that?
I don’t get it. They are complaning that their limited free plan is limited?
They’re complaining that one of the things the limited free plan takes away is something they were using to accommodate their disability.
They’re complaining that the limited, free-tier plan is worse than it used to be. And really, for no good reason.
When EA releases Star Wars 2: A Sense Of Pride And Accomplishment, we complain about how stupid that is, do we not?
for no good reason
Hosting costs a lot of money
The 1 or 2 kB of lyrics are a few orders of magnitude smaller than the song being streamed.
The album art probably takes up more space than the lyrics.
So, album art should also be a paid feature?Album art would make way more sense as a paid feature than lyrics, considering it’s a largely cosmetic improvement.
How does it make more sense that “cosmetic” features are in the paid-tier? Would it not be the other way around?
Because it improves the experience, but isn’t vital to it. If you want the free tier to be accessible to everyone, limiting things like lyrics that people like OP use as a disability accommodation isn’t the way to do it.
The whole point with features being paid for is that they incentivize you to pay. There is no universal right to have a free tier or certain features for free.
It just makes sense to lock features that users enjoy to incentives them to pay.
While I agree that this is stupid, why would a deaf person be using Spotify in the first place?
Deafness isn’t binary, they could be capable of hearing the music but not making out the lyrics.
And even people who cannot hear anything at all still feel the bass and stuff.
If it were a paid account yeah, it’d be extremely shitty. But seeing as it’s a free account, it’s their prerogative to try and get people to pay for the service. Besides, I don’t get this entitlement that spotify has to provide music for free. They’re a (admittedly greedy) middle-man that wants to get paid. If one wants free music and everything, well, time to self-host.
it’s their prerogative to try and get people to pay for the service.
Except that this attempt could easily be shown to largely land on folks with accessibility needs. That’s a big no-no under many laws.
An interesting comparison is pay-to-ride elevators. For most folks an elevator is a nice convenience they would not mind occasionally paying for.
But for some folks, the elevator is completely essential. This dynamic resulted in making pay-to-ride elevators illegal in most places, today.
Due to the uniquely fucked up way music licensing works, it’s likely they license the lyrics through a separate company than the music and probably don’t even directly license it themselves (Tidal for example uses Musicmatch’s lyric library and api). There’s a cost associated with this that is likely outside their control. It’s shitty, but it is plalusibly reasonable they implemented this as a cost savings measure.
That’s a good point. That might actually make the case for “undue burden”.
A court case about it could be a way for Spotify to pass the problem to their licensors, in theory.
You keep claiming this “undue burden”, can you provide a source to the exemption in the legislation that states this is possible? Multiple people have asked and you keep just screaming at them.
Prove your point or kindly fuck off and stop making the most obvious fucking lies.
employer
Is Spotify an employer to their customers…?
Radio to the general public?
An elevator in a building…?
Did you do what they did and google something and read the first two lines only….?
You asked simply what they were referring to, ya fucking dick. I gave you an answer.
You don’t need lyrics to listen to music however. If she’s deaf and can’t hear the music then I don’t know why she needs Spotify.
Much like many disabilities, deafness isn’t a hard binary between hearing Vs deaf, but a spectrum dependent on many factors. For example, someone may have hearing loss in a particular frequency range, which may affect their ability to hear lyrics. I would also expect that someone’s relationship to music may be impacted by whether they were born deaf or acquired deafness later in life.
The point that other are making about this as an accessibility problem is that a lot of disability or anti-discrimination has provisions for rules or policies that are, in and of themselves, neutral, but affect disabled people (or other groups protected under equality legislation) to a greater degree than people without that trait. In the UK, for example, it might be considered “indirect discrimination”.
You might not need lyrics to listen to music, but someone who is deaf or hard of hearing is likely going to experience and enjoy music differently to you, so it may well be necessary for them.
I don’t even know the lyrics to some of my favorite songs. I think the whole complaining about unlimited, free lyrics is ridiculous. Spotify isn’t a charity and just because someone can’t enjoy music as much due to not reading lyrics isn’t an accessibility thing.
Guess Spotify should just get rid of the free tier and then this wouldn’t even be an issue.
Okay, well get back to me when you have some lived experience of deafness and maybe we can have a productive discussion then, seeing as my point seems to have gone completely over your head.
Should my free local newspaper also include everything in braille?
Listen, I don’t want to be in a pointless internet argument; I could answer your question by referencing some of the things that go into deciding what reasonable adjustments should be put in place, legally speaking (in particular, your question is getting at the “how much is reasonable” aspect of the problem"), but I only want to engage in this conversation if you’re actually interested to learn.
(On that front, I apologise for the sharp tone of my previous comment, because that certainly wasn’t conducive to conversation.)
hiding accessibility features behind a pay wall is disgusting, because only people with disabilities have to pay for it. *edit if you’re downvoting, just let me know so I can block all of the ableists running around this community. **edit 2 - c’mon guys, why are you afraid to name yourselves?
They can get Spotify but can’t Google lyrics?
so you’re cool with people with disabilities having to do more labor than you to get the same thing? go fuck yourself
If I want to get free lyrics for free Spotify, I would have to do the same labor…
Also I downvoted you, so go ahead and plug your ears and block me, like a child.
Oh yes, if you want them.
Sure is nice having working ears, huh.
they prolly won’t be the only one lmao
I didn’t even know they did that, Glad I don’t have an account with them. I’m partially deaf, most music I can’t understand what someone singing. Those fun things people do of like “most common misheard lyrics” is basically my life. On the plus side I enjoy music from around the world because unintelligible music is unintelligible no matter where it’s from. They’re very few artists I feel like I can understand, and realistically I’m probably wrong.
In real life, I read lips to help augment my terrible hearing. Fun fact during the mask man dates during COVID, was probably the worst time for me. A lot of people I could hear talking as I could hear noise but I could not make out what it was. Leading to a lot of awkward conversations.
Anyhoo, that’s all to say that for music that I do like I do have to see the lyrics. It’s what converts the noise into words.
So, fuck you Spotify, My life’s difficult enough already, I’m not paying your shitty service so you can charge me for my impairment.
most music I can’t understand what someone singing
Just like the rest of us, tbh.
Wit-ta burrdsahl sheardis-a loooooneleeeevieuuuuuuuuuuaaaand
-Red Hot Chilli Peppers
With the birds I share this lonely view?
Should have used Pearl Jam as the example.
Everyone is going on about this as anti disability, but why does a disability entitle you to a service that’s paid?
Unpaid Spotify sucks, full stop, no matter what part of you works or doesn’t.
but why does a disability entitle you to a service that’s paid?
why would you limit the ability to use lyrics though? It’s the same shit that every big article tabloid is doing “pay us five dollar a month and we will show you our articles, that we think are good” after showing you like three, in four months for free.
Either give people access to the service, or don’t, don’t play the bullshit of “well actually, here’s a free sample”
Same reason any tech company limit the ability to do anything - bandwidth, ownership etc.
Even if ‘lyrics’ are free, they still need to be written and proof read. You’re either going to have to pay other companies to provide you the lyrics or pay your staff to write them down.
There’s so many levels to this, Spotify still sucks, but you have to look at it realistically .
yeah but that still begs the question of why even give limited access. Just put it behind the paywall, it’s not like people don’t understand what spotify is, and it gives them a better excuse for selling a service anyway.
They’re lyrics, intentionally making the service worse for people with hearing disabilities is ableist.
Wow, that’s hot trash. Imagine subtitles on movies and TV being stuck behind a paywall.
Prime Video - ‘hold my hat’
