Why YSK: Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it. It’s better to find a free alternative, both for your wallet and for your peace of mind.
Introducing: ViMusic
Downloads: https://github.com/vfsfitvnm/ViMusic
- Free and open source
- No ads/trackers
- Song lyrics
- Music from both YouTube Music and YouTube
- Weights 2MB or so
- Beautiful UI and amazing UX
Cons: no high kbps streaming support
DO NOT TRY TO DOWNLOAD THE APP FROM ANY SOURCE OTHER THAN THE ONES LISTED IN THEIR GITHUB PAGE. They are malware.
Potential bias: I’m a developer at Spotify.
“Spotify forces you either to pay, listen to ads or to find unofficial, potentially dangerous versions to use it.”
I don’t think the company forces you to do anything. It is their business model, how they can provide copyrighted music to you and have a share of the pie too.
I’d say the very idea that Spotify is forcing you to pay with time and attention or money so you can have music conveniently streamed to your devices is a testament to the company’s success. It created this business model and fulfilled an apparently basic need to the point you think that charging for it is unfair.
But “forcing” is too much. You can always buy discs, digital downloads and so.
Of course they don’t force you to use spotify, but it’s one of those “soft monopolies” many other companies have. It’s not the only option, but they basically are, because everyone thinks so: it’s like whatsapp, if you catch my drift (everyone use it because everyone’s on it)
And when a company realizes they’re in that position, they will prey down on their users without fail, and I’m talking about:
Privacy invasive app: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.spotify.music/latest/
Investing in military AI: https://mixmag.net/read/spotify-daniel-ek-ai-defence-investment-criticism-news
Patents for extremely invasive technologies: https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/spotify-tech-emotion-manipulation/
Allowing disinformation during covid, not paying properly the artists and many other things I’m not going over for sake of brevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Criticism
What I don’t like about spotify and all the companies who are in a similar position in the market is that, as usual, their share of the pie it’s unfairly big, which is why I try to drive people away from them. Not saying YouTube is better, but at least with vimusic you don’t have to listen to ads (which I think heavily harm people’s mental health, among other things)
Of course music can be bought, but people only buy what they like nowdays, and use online services to discover new music. Few have the money to buy music and listen to it for the first time afterwards. Many people don’t even have the money to meet their basic needs, let alone buy music
Spotify really isn’t a “Soft monopoly” though. There are a lot of competitors in the music streaming business. Youtube music, Apple music, and Pandora, just to name a few. Sure, Spotify is perhaps the most commonly used, but it’s also unfair to punish a company because they’re successful.
Not to argue against any of the points against Spotify, but YT Music (and it’s parent, Google) are much worse; leaving only Apple Music with a much smaller library as a realistic alternative to streaming music.
I do miss the old days of Google Play Music though - it is a shame what Google did to a neat app with a standalone subscription.
Cool to find a Spotify dev here. I agree with your points, and I’m a happy customer. I will happily support Spotify over the likes of Google and Apple, one of the few market dominant tech companies that hasn’t been swallowed up by one of the big 5. Not sure how they could be considered a monopoly, it’s not like there are songs out there exclusive to Spotify (thank god).
As far as I can tell there is only one big downside to Spotify, and I’m really sorry but I have to use this opportunity to ask, why on earth does it still not support 2FA??
I’d also add that I wish Spotify paid the musicians better. Even relative to other platforms Spotify is pretty bad about that. Of course if you want to support the musician it’s always better to buy merch and music and stuff directly from them, but that isn’t really an excuse for streaming platforms to pay them so poorly. And I’m not suggesting that Spotify should just give the musician everything of course. They should get their cut too. But perhaps something even slightly more reasonable would be appreciated.
I like Bandcamp because of this, and their app has really improved over the last year with the addition of ques and playlists.
2FA and ad free links for podcasts. I already pay for an ad free experience on Spotify, and sometimes I’ll pay to support someone on Patreon, but I can’t use their link to even just remove the ads the podcast itself issues. I’m not sure where the ads come from every time but it feels like I’m being had.
But ad free music is worth the price, which I was buying before they even hosted pods so it’s hard to complain too much.
I love Spotify and am not considering ditching it, but I also wish it supported higher fidelity playback like Tidal, or even higher bitrate like Apple Music
I mean the streamers have to get paid too, you might hear artists complain about how much money Spotify takes but as someone who has released lots of music on Spotify they do pay you, pretty decently too! Lots of artists are making hundreds of thousands a year from just Spotify and the business itself is profitable, which allows pretty much anyone to upload their music and try their dream.
That is valuable in it of itself, without services like Spotify many of the artists I listen too would probably have given up on music for a boring IT job, like I did.
Thanks to you and/or other Spotify devs for the linux desktop app that I understand you develop in your free time
AFAIK ViMusic is no longer being actively maintained. An similar app which is InnerTune although I’m experiencing some weird glitches during search (unable to subscribe to an artist and playlist tab remains empty for every search).
It’s true its last update was in November, but the dev(s) still monitor and reply in the issues tab. Most important, the app works flawlessly.
The project still seems alive to me, but if you prefer innertune by all means go with that! I followed it for a bit (when it was still called “Music”) and it’s a great app
@UprisingVoltage Good to hear that the Dev is still involved. This makes me more comfortable to keep using ViMusic
How long is this likely to stay online? It sounds like it’s circumventing paid services (YouTube Music, specifically) - I can’t see Google being too happy about people skipping out on paying for their service.
(I’m not saying this is a bad idea, I’m openly wondering about the longevity of the app and slightly nervous about the dev’s wallet when it might come to a lawsuit. I don’t know if that’s a thing that would happen.)
As long as you can acess an youtube music from the web, it should be safe to keep working (as long as google doesn’t rewrite something on their end) there are a gazillion of projects that are able to stream/download from youtube (youtube-dl, newpipe come to mind now)
I too am weary…
How? Projects like Newpipe, Invidious, Freetube have existed forever. this is no different.
Could you please add a “Why YSK:”? It’s rule #2. It’s also helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. Thank you. :)
Oh I’m sorry, I skimmed through the rules and I missed that one. Ty for letting me know
I’ve been mostly using newpipe for the same purpose but this one looks great too. Thanks!
So it is basically Premium for free?
Yeah! You choose your songs, create your playlists and stream all the music you want. No ads or costs
Vimusic is free and open source software, just like lemmy
Thank you so much for showing me this. I’m sick and tired of Spotify and YT Music locking crucial features behind paywalls on mobile (playing with without shuffle on Spotify and background playing on YT Music).
I feel you. Enjoy your free music!
youtube revanced
It’s not quite the same thing. ViMusic is a dedicated app for streaming music, which means better user experience. You’re free to stick to revanced if it better suits your needs obv
Hmm I need more info on revanced
I’d paste the R*ddit post but…
So basically you rebuild the YouTube app using revanced manager.
- Make sure you nuke YouTube from your phone.
- Download YouTube apk from apkmirror (don’t install yet)
- Download and install from revanced.app
- Patcher -> select the YT apk. Patch as recommended and install
- Download, install and login from microG.org (basically an emulator for Google play services)
- ???
- Realise you can do the same for ad-free R*ddit, twitter, Instagram apps
Is it for YT music too
This is great, just before my free Spotify trial runs out too.
Thanks!
I discovered ViMusic a few months ago and the app is just amazing!
It even saves all your played songs offline.
Just pay for Spotify… £10 for access to almost every song ever published. People need to appreciate how good they have it.
I’m not affiliated with the devs in any way, I’m jusy a user tired of bloated apps and ads.
If you’ve never installed apps from github/froid I’ll be glad to help you out
For youtube, I use newpipe. It’s pretty cool. You can import your subscriptions so you don’t miss out on new videos.
I’m just waiting for the day I can shuffle playlists on Newpipe then I could use it as my primary music app. Right now though you can only play all in order unless I’m missing something
You can do that in NewPipe. Just start playing a playlist, tap on the “now playing” notification to open the play queue, and then hit the shuffle button
Adverts like this post shouldn’t be a think in “YSK”. It makes no sense.
This app is literally just music piracy in a fancy shell anyways. Since there’s no YouTube ads displayed, artists get nothing. Think Spotify is bad at paying artists? Try… piracy…?
That’s fair, but I am curious how much of streaming revenue go towards the artists and how much goes towards the labels.
That isn’t up to Spotify, all money goes to the labels and then the labels and artists negotiate their share. They’ve got a good site actually: https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/
But did you know that when Spotify negotiated streaming rights from the labels, the labels only agreed if they could take an ownership stake in Spotify. Then the labels insisted on LOWER streaming fees for themselves. This shifts their income to come from their Spotify stake, which they don’t have to pay to artists.
