All aboard the LainTrain - We all love Lain!
Wish I had that experience tbqh, because Spotify algorithm is the only algorithm I use (that I'm aware of, anyway) and it's the only one I find that doesn't just suggest me random crap, but is almost dead on to what I want every time I'm building a new playlist, and while I had a fairly developed and diverse taste to start with, I have found hundreds of artists that I would consider myself a fan of through Spotify. It's genuinely a lot to give up to never find any artists like that again and go back to a much more narrow cone of vision for music :(
Even though I talk a big game about quitting algos everywhere else on Lemmy, I also can't say I was ever particularly impressed with recs of YT's, Google's, Tumblr's or Insta's or TikTok's algos in comparison, hence why all those were very easy to delete/block/disable.
Worth noting though, your phrase "came on" makes me think you are talking about some sort of smart shuffle or auto-generated playlist feature, which I never used. My only interaction with the Spotify algorithm is scrolling to the bottom of a playlist I'm making and seeing the list of songs that are listed at the bottom as recommended, if I like it and there's a place for it on the playlist, I will add it. The only flaw in this mode of interaction is after many many playlists, and the fact that I try not to repeat any songs between playlists, I find that what it tends to suggest is just songs I already have in my other playlists.
This 100%. Just because capitalism makes streaming unethical doesn't mean we need to go back to old studio system of other capitalist bastards to serve as gatekeepers of art.
I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8.
Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).
My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).
Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.
I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.
My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.
In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it, look up album/artist on Rutracker, filter out albums/songs I don't want from the discography torrent add it to my qbittorrent if available, mount the NFS share on windows with my staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the correct folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.
This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don't like the song and delete it later. It's way too much.
The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can't even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren't worth it for me.
Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that's frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves.
Feels like I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.
I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn't worked for me to move off of it long-term. I'd love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.
Actual answer.
Yeah but why are some people doing the maga thing to fit in whereas others see no need to? If it's all conformation pressure then surely it will go the other way and we'll all be trumpers soon enough.
This is what troubles me. More abstractly - Why am I x and others y. I think things would be more good if more people did x, but I cannot discern any particular surefire reason(s) or principle that makes someone x instead of y. To me I can never imagine being y, it is incomprehensible. Some people randomly stop being y and start being x and vice versa, but there's never a principle(s) that emerges that could be used as a basis of a theory, it seems chaotic, and it defies understanding. Are y misinformed? Doesn't seem like it. Are y just evil? Are x just fundamentally better, smarter, more moral than y?
Well then that's no good because that would mean people really aren't all the same, and anyway such thoughts are unbefitting a systemic humanist view of being able to alter the world unto better outcomes that people will go along with if it's made to be in their interest, like reducing poverty to reduce crime, and anyway that seems to hold true in data so it can't be. Can we all be nietzchean "over"men?
And so I continue to think.
Yes you demented moron I think I am aware that the world existed before the internet and before I did, especially since I mention music that was made before I was born? Stop huffing the asbestos for a moment and read and re-read my post until you understand it, you absolute cretin.
That's true and quite unfortunate, but to be fair Anti-Flag was still fairly popular from what I understand, and their lyrics are much more politically charged.
I think Rage Against The Machine just doesn't grab the same way, at least for me personally.
Rage Against The Machine is ok, but they are to me utterly eclipsed by the thousands of leftist artists before and after them that make far more poignant and interesting music both lyrically and musically.
Maybe I just haven't tried the right material or listened to them enough, I have nothing against them but they just don't grab me in the way every other leftist music artist has grabbed me, the ending song from The Matrix for instance while a cool mic drop in the film, I find just not very interesting.
I've listed some in my original comment, but if you're curious I can list many many more.
I actually maintain a playlist here:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5rYZABdJf5H8XmliZ9ZTIW?pi=KIskSDh8T--mY
I'm not really going to respond to all that because I'd just be restating the same thing over and over. I'll focus on one point:
Yes I'm more than aware of how Cleaners of Venus distributed their music.
That's my entire point - they're a very much niche band essentially unknown in their time - and I would have never, in a million years - known about their distribution method, or known of them at all, if it wasn't on Wikipedia and on the internet and their music wasn't easily torrented or streamed.
Even if they were less niche, and sold their records in stores: stores are very very expensive, anything meatspace is very very expensive due to rent costs of the actual precious physical space, they have to make their stock count, and that means catering to the mass market.
If such stores even exist - which they essentially don't and when they did they were few and far between and not exactly record stores - more something like HMV, they catered to the mass market first because they are giant mega corps and dgaf about anything but the bottom line.
The internet - anyone could post anything there. Any music, any news about any new music, and anyone could access it from anywhere.
So If you literally believe that finding music is easier via counting on random zines and special orders in magical vinyl record stores that exist as far as I'm concerned - in fiction only, and when most countries in the world didn't even have such a concept, than via the internet which is available everywhere at all times to everyone globally, you're insane and I can't help you.
That is an insane, obviously incorrect position to hold and if you can't see that, you can't be made to see it with any arguments anyone could present.
I think that must be it because you made another truly psychotic claim here:
There was, let me check notes.... cassettes. Bands used to record music in their living room with a cheap 4 track, and put them on cassette.
Cleaners from Venus have 261k monthly listeners on Spotify. That means they'd need 216,000 cassettes. They'd also need the logistics and distribution to ship them all over the world to simply even come close to the reach they have now, to even be hypothetically obtainable.
Just because you lived in a shitty place, doesn't mean your experience was universal. The city I lived in was so small, we had a single bar that catered to everything outside of mainstream. Gay, goth, punk and metalheads... all in the same place. It was not uncommon to hear a Sepultra song, followed by Bauhaus or the Pet Shop Boys or Skinny Puppy.
Of course it's not universal. But it is more universal, because most of the world are not in one of like, three-ish Western European countries and the 10 or so sane cities in the United States. I'm sorry that causes your narrative of the world and how things used to be and/or are to be incorrect, but it's the simple truth.
What was universal? Top 40 hits played on TV and Radio. That was pretty much everywhere. That is - until the internet and now you could be a Wavves fan in Russia, and I'm sorry the thought is so offensive to you.
Honestly I'm not sure I'd know Immich used Postgres if it didn't outright say so
We had local record stores
Keyword being "local". We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.
We had university radio which would play whatever the DJ was into, because it wasn't programmed.
We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.
would also bring in albums from small and indie bands
Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.
We had clubs that would book bands from everywhere. The club I hung out at had a band every night of the week, and no matter when you went, you would hear someone new.
No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.
None of it was about the music, and of course it wasn't - it was a place for cliques to flex fashion.
If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - I'm happy for you, really, truly, and I'd like to hear more stories, but most of us didn't, at least not those of us born after '97.
Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, there's no one you gotta know, there's no place you have to know to go to, there's no subcultures you gotta be part of, there's nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.
You're completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether you're in Pakistan or one of those places 'Jesus of Suburbia' was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.
Even if I lived in ye olden times, there's no way in hell I would've known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldn't have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, it's more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.
I agree, but that's on the users and their choices. Most people just dgaf about music anymore, it's been "surpassed" by tiktoks in their mind. Video killed the radio star etc etc.
The paternalistic studio system limited both discoverability and the potential creativity and integrity of artists, and I'm glad it's gone, most music I listen to either would not have existed, or I would've never found it without streaming.
It's funny, I find a good chunk of music I listen to is just plain unavailable anywhere else for purchase, piracy or streaming.
I'm pretty sure none of those are particularly "raging" against any "oppression", they were just popular, at least in Nirvana's case, in which case I guess Lil Peep would be comparable in popularity, impact and the immediate drama surrounding his suicide.
Lolwut.
Artists like Bob Vylan, Lambrini Girls, Narcissist Cookbook, Cheap Perfume, The Oozes, Problem Patterns and even Lil Darkie and many more are ones I'd never have found without Spotify suggestions. That and discovering some classics like Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, Against Me!, Crass, ZSK would never have happened without algo suggestions.
Generic bullshit doesn't even get clicks, the most outraging things get clicks, protest songs and politically charged shit does, just like the above, it just happens to be leftist music. Also check out Refused.
It's crazy we live in a time where there is music that isn't some poetic wishy washy love song top 40 studio bullshit which is all you would've known about before, but there's music that actually references material current events that happen, and then there's old classics that are so much easier to find thanks to discoverability via streaming.
There's obviously a problem with the inherent wealth transfer where both indie musicians and listeners pay Spotify, and now they want to cut out the middleman (the musician) entirely, but we absolutely must not go back to monoculture offline bs mandated by some fat cat studio exec Epstein list member looking ass.
Edit: I posted in another comment, but if anyone is interested in leftist, political, anti-capitalist and progressive music more generally I maintain a playlist here and I'd love suggestions: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5rYZABdJf5H8XmliZ9ZTIW?pi=KIskSDh8T--mY
Oh yeah for sure, if they're spewing falsehoods to cover their ass, that's no good.
Stop consuming content.
A confident, average, but nonetheless well-rounded individual with broad interests?
Seems like the word you're looking for is 'normal'.
Unless there's some other quality you're not describing like if they're unable to admit when they're wrong or they lie or exaggerate their skills, they seem like a pretty nice person to me who just for whatever reason doesn't specialize in any one thing, which tbf is far more normal for people than otherwise and frankly far more sociable.
You seem a bit jealous of and upset at this person judging by your other comments ITT. What do you have against them, other than them 'liking to pose as an intellectual' - which I assume just stands for "they like facts"?
Just gonna repost my comment from the thread on the Technology community yesterday for suggestions and discussion: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21273053
I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8 to be imported inside the Docker, then more elbow grease to actually make the playlist semi-accurate.
Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization and my credit card access for payments until I signed into the right Google account again, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).
My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).
Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally anywhere, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with some automation through Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.
I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.
My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.
In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it in dogshit quality, look up album/artist on Rutracker, pray that it's there when a lot of the time it is not, filter out albums/songs I don't want from the discography torrent and add it to my qbittorrent-nox on server, mount the NFS share on my main windows PC with my music staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the finalized folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.
This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don't like the song and delete it from the playlist, never to be heard again.
It's way too much.
The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can't even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen to when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren't worth it for me.
Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that's frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves, eagerly falling for whatever corposlop becomes available.
Felt like I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.
I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn't worked for me to move off of it long-term. I'd love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.
Some ideas of mine:
All that should hopefully ease the pain and make it so you can discover, listen and add to your library without so many barriers.