I think about switching from Spotify for a longer time now, but with the recent ICE ads I want to be in solidarity with the people in the US and kick Spotify out.

Now I checked the Quboz app and I am in a test month with Tidal right now - so far Tidal is great on my mobile. However I also need a client for Linux!

I am using spotify-client on Linux Mint and works flawlessly. I know its development is not the main goal of Spotify engineers, but it just works.

Now for Tidal and Quboz it seems to be problematic - only Electron apps without HiFi sound because the chromium engine throttles the quality. How am I supposed to switch from Spotify if I can’t use the alternative on Linux? Any advices/experiences?

  • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
    2·
    13 hours ago

    Yes, but these are my two thoughts:

    1. That’s basically just piracy, and my feelings are that while sometimes it’s ethical*, a lot of musical artists have made a good faith attempt to allow you to acquire it in a legal, DRM-free format at a reasonable price, meaning in a lot of cases it’s not ethical, especiallyf with streaming basically eliminating record sale revenue and tour profit margins getting thinner and thinner.1
    2. When I want to pirate, I would at least do it right; why extract lossy audio from YouTube with yt-dlp when you can easily get a lossless FLAC on SoulSeek or another peer-to-peer network?

    *: if the media isn’t easily legally accessible, if it’s stuck under a bad corporation, and fair use like making an FMV. I think it’s much more ethical to pirate film and television, as if you pay for a film (whether a subscription or a Blu-Ray), it’s often just going to go to some ultra-rick executive who had nothing to do with the talented people who worked on the film. Also, DRM makes streaming an inferior experience to just opening a video file. Music is a completely different game, especially with the proliferation of indie labels and self-publishing.

    1: Of course, if the artist is some multi-millionaire or billionaire artist, then go ahead.

      • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        At least in the objective legal sense, it very much is in the eyes of the YouTube terms of service and the law of most jurisdictions with strong copyright protections.

        There is a legal distinction between streaming on YouTube (normal TOS-compliant use) and downloading the video as a whole through a 3rd party tool (circumvention of copyright protection, and YouTube gets no ad revenue with the download), which is usage outside the TOS.

        Now, I don’t really give a darn about following US* copyright law for a megacorporation’s sake1 and have gone ahead and downloaded from YouTube, but it’s still piracy in the legal sense. This is not intended as a criticism of your actions, just a legal nitpick.

        *Obviously, not everyone here is American (good riddance); this is just my personal experience. 1: Especially considering Google’s breaking it all the time with their ML models in my opinion.