Those who fail to scan the address verification QR code within seven days will see their account demoted to the free tier and be barred from joining any other Duo or Family plan for 12 months.

Well that's pretty crummy. That's a very long ban, and a lot of extra money.

Oh shit, I'm in trouble

Navidrome.

“We'll heave and haul and roar o'er the dark blue wave!”

Ive spent all day working on a way to move my family off Spotify.

Ive settled on navidrome behind wireguard and a signal chat where they can request music. The requests are filtered through AI to format it before they are fed into sksld to be downloaded and moved into the respective family members navidrome library.

Will it work, I'm not sure but ive spent so much effort and I'm gonna be sad if they dont even try it out.

The free tier 3 ads per song will get them.

Test out which navidrome client each person would prefer yourself. I made the mistake of first advising Amperify to someone who likes to listen on shuffle instead of by album.

Is navidrome hardened enough to expose to the internet? i think my sister would like to use the sharing function which is currently locked since its only available inside our lan

Christ, that UX sounds horrifying, honestly. I'm sure they appreciate your effort, but realistically I wouldn't expect anyone to use it over any streaming solution

Meanwhile in a meeting room in Stockholm:

Remember how we reduced music piracy to an insignificant amount by making the legal choice convenient and relatively affordable? I forgot! So let's torpedo our business.

Probably I mean it’s built to not edit your mp3s (for better or worse), it’s written in GoLang yay but who knows in this age.

Currently I’m only hosting it on LAN and relying on song caching of outside but I wouldn’t be too worried about opening it up.

And people have scoffed at me for buying individual songs on iTunes instead of just jumping in bed with Spotify....

No matter how bad my financial situation becomes, as long as I can still charge my iPhone I will have access to not only my full music library, ad free, I also have access to the 50+ audio books I have bought on Apple Books completely ad free.

I just need a way to download the audio books without DRM and save them on my home server to feel fully at ease.

Don’t forget the warmongering Spotify do. Their profits pays to create tech that’s aimed at killing you.

All the songs I listen to on Spotify I downloaded to have offline. There are a few apps out there that actually rip from Spotify instead of finding the song on Youtube or other services, and I actually have all in Opus 320kbps quality. Ofc I share a family subscription with my friends. If they were to give me just a week, I would simply start downloading anything I have not downloaded yet. For anything else I could rip from youtube, and once a year, buy a month of subscription just to rip all songs in higher quality and cancel again.

They are mostly set in their ways music wise so once I have 95% of their music which ive already done via Spotify cloning. It shouldnt be to many individual requests. I dont know I think saying !music chapel roan expectations and then having it show up a few mins later isnt to bad of a UX.

But yeah I don't know how else to make it better. It can never be "search and find any song" like Spotify. I did look into writing a plugin to hook it to soulseek but it didnt seem like it would be doable at my.level.

They did something like that once a few years ago. I didn‘t see their email and my account was swiftly permanently blocked from the program. No chance to appeal. I was pretty upset for a moment, then made a new account and connected it to the family account. If they kick me out again I‘m gone for good.

I‘m not paying the kind of money they‘re asking for to listen to some music and podcasts that run ads and sponsor segments. Discoverability became insanely bad years ago. Most of their recommendations are obvious product placements that they‘re not declaring properly.

So yeah, looks like Spotify is about to extract some more money from customers with dubious methods short term and losing a lot of us long term. But I am prepared.

I have this. It’s an adjustment but it’s pretty decent for an almost free cost. It takes some tinkering but it play music fine. That’s good enough for me.

I have to give location permission to a music app?!

I wonder if you can you log in on a new phone once you got the notification

Why not just use Qobuz instead?

spotify single-handedly increasing music piracy rates back to napster levels

It's a temporary solution. they're bound to enshittify if they ever come close to spotify's popularity. or they'll just get bought out before getting there

Using a different music service is so easy. You can't even use the excuse that your friends are all on there. Stop giving them your money.

You know what would be better? Have the audio files, in flac, or at least high-res mp3 to listen whenever you want, from any device you want, without the need of an Apple account.

If they do this to me, I have zero reason to stay with them. My ex pays for it. If they kick me off because my physical address is no longer the same, I won't use them. I'm sure he will stop paying for the daily plan and go back to free or, use a different app altogether. Good luck spotify. Did you learn nothing from Netflix?

whats a good way to find new music based on a curated library/playlist/settings? i’m on apple for now but yeah.. this has always been rough finding new tunes or artists.

On android Bluetooth is tied to the location permission, because scanning for Bluetooth devices can be used to narrow down the device location.

My navidrome subscription just blocked my daughter...

No, wait, that was me, nevermind.

Or Joe Rogan?

Netflix actually ended up with an increase in subscribers from their crackdown. Maybe Spotify did learn from Netflix.

Netflix tweeted in March of 2017 that “Love is sharing a password” before launching its own enforcement policies in May of 2023. Later that year, Netflix raised prices up to 17 percent, and by April of 2024, the company saw the policy pay off with 9.3 million added subscriptions and a 54 percent bump in operating income.

No, they didn't. Please, let's not interrupt.. I want them to torch their subscriber numbers

Which is why I have downloaded my music from iTunes as normal non-DRM files.

location permission

It doesn't really say that, I don't think? It only says you need to be "in the same place", because you need to scan a QR code, right?

Nothing really preventing you both from just sending the QR code via message either... 🤷‍♂️

Wait, why did you block your daughter on your free Navidrome?

I cut them out and canceled my subscription when they gave rogan that contract, fuck spotify

I haven't used it in a while since I don't have an active account there, but I really liked the randomizer in Deezer. It always showed me interesting songs that I hadn't heard before.

Wow I missed that part, thank you.

I'm not on Spotify, but I'd like to use Qobuz. Sadly it's not available where I live. The idea is great though, listen whatever I want with an option to purchase drm free albums I like the most.

Their stock is down 40% YoY and they are cutting thousands of staff including their director of content. Looks like it bought them 24 months of bluster and then their watchtimes plumetted.

Take picture of QR on primary phone. Send photo with QR to people on the family plan

They are not that dumb. Apparently the code changes every few minutes (or seconds). Just a matter of time until they also check geolocation and/or IP during the scan.

Deezer is also pretty lenient with its family plan so far. However so is YouTube. YouTube family, which includes YouTube music, isn’t even excessively expensive if you actually share it between 6 people.

If you're going to pay for music, buy it DRM free on bandcamp etc, or CDs and rip them, you can make multiple copies and anyone in your family can play them at any time. Shitify is a joke.

This won't really make them more money. Considering there's better services like YouTube Music.

I'm still learning how to set it up to meet the easy of YouTube music. But storing more content is getting troublesome with price of drives. What do you use for mobile access? I use Symfonium

I mean a simple video call where you share your screen, and some network thing/config might solve that? If they’re not given exact/precise location on eg your phone, will they default to country/city? There must be some workarounds to these silly things.

Actually they probably already have geolocation enabled because the article says the family member needs to be at the same location when they scan the code.

I guess family plans are for members who live at the same house. If someone moves away to college then they can't be a part of the family anymore.

"analysts are confident that music streaming services such as Spotify can enforce strict account policies, raise prices, and still make more money."

They looked at Netflix and Disney and they are right. This is a no brainer if you're a business. There's literally no downside other than angry comments online.

I use the slsk interface. It’s fine popping a few songs at once.

I generally hate Ai but I used it to tidy the old lists I had and present in the organisation level I wanted (albums etc)
I then found a script, that when ran finds and DLs those playlists. It gets it about 95% right.

For navidrome it’s not great with the info pulled from music beats etc. I was trying to do it manual then I found a tool that lets me match an album to the music. It’s created for missing data/covers.

You can spoof a lot with enough motivation. But it’s likely inconvenient enough that it will “catch” 90% of the targets.

This is desperation just like the disney ad thing.

I need to get a RED account, ugh, the entrance test seems annoying but I want to selfhost my own music.

If they want it to be a household plan, they should call it that instead of falsely advertising it as a family plan.