Comments on: Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye

Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye

the sobsister — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:02:30 -0800

Following on a recent posting to the blue about musical acts and subscribers quitting Spotify, Apple, in late August, quietly rolled out the ability to import playlists, as well as songs and albums, from other streaming platforms to Apple Music.

Here's Apple's instructions page. Besides Spotify, one can import library and playlists from Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal, and YouTube worldwide except Russia, Myanmar, and China. For those wondering about Apple Music's catalog depth, I found about 1,400 albums on AM that I'd had in Spotify, with only 85 unavailable. The process does inform you of near-matches for songs and albums that you can approve or reject for importation. Note that sometimes the same album is, in fact, available on Apple, but the title is different in a small way, e.g., "4" instead of "Four." If you have a shit-ton of playlists, the import function will choke on them, so that will require a bit of time and attention. Post title inspiration.

By: phooky

phooky — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:01:43 -0800

"We've made it easy to jump ship from this silo to this silo. You will not regret migrating to our silo."

By: jedicus

jedicus — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:08:22 -0800

At least their silo provides the option of purchasing DRM-free copies of (most of) the music.

By: misskaz

misskaz — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:14:45 -0800

This solved the remaining issues I was having with switching to Apple Music (which I did years ago): all those playlists I had created from years of using Spotify and was too lazy to recreate on Apple Music. Thank you!

By: Pseudonymous Cognomen

Pseudonymous Cognomen — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:21:31 -0800

At least their silo provides the option of purchasing DRM-free copies of (most of) the music. Still a silo, though. Not a fan of that aspect, nor of algorithmic playlists which just tend to feed you more of what you already like. I'd rather listen to a radio station like KEXP or KRCW or (insert callsign of some obscure quirky independent station here) and find new music that way, personally (one of the reasons I carry a pocket notebook is so I can write down the song title and artist of new-to-me music discovered by radio listening).

By: chavenet

chavenet — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:24:06 -0800

KALX

By: at by

at by — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:28:25 -0800

> "We've made it easy to jump ship from this silo to this silo. You will not regret migrating to our silo." Streaming services are silos. Every streaming service -- even open-source self-hosted ones -- are silos. Being able to migrate between silos -- at least in one direction -- is a start. I imagine Spotify and Youtube have heard shots fired and will reply in kind. I tried and burned out on algorithmic playlists quickly and decided I much prefer discovering music on my own, through friends and via radio. But if you have your collection and wanna listen to it anywhere, your options are toting around a storage device (not necessarily a massive burden, but it's a thing to lose or damage) or subscribing to a streaming service. The streaming service is much less burdensome, the subscription price being your convenience fee.

By: Clever User Name

Clever User Name — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:29:06 -0800

I guess I'm just old, but I'm more then happy with my CIFS share of DRM-free MP3s (mostly ripped from CD) which can also be copied to a folder on my mobile devices.

By: jordantwodelta

jordantwodelta — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:37:44 -0800

It's nice that they're making it a native capability, but users have been able to do this for a long time. There's a great, and cheap, tool available called Soundiiz that will let you import your entire Spotify footprint (tracks, playlists, and all) to pretty much any streaming service. I used it last year when I dropped Spotify and moved to Tidal. Highly recommend it.

By: The River Ivel

The River Ivel — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:41:51 -0800

I use Apple Music, and while I'm more than happy with the audio quality, I have never felt so misunderstood by a service as I do by Apple Music. And it's simple things too - no, I don't want to listen to high energy music in the morning. No, I don't want to listen to the nutcracker suite in June. No, I don't want to listen to John Coltrane's love supreme directly after listening to a different jazz album. It's pretty much the equivalent of "hey you brought a toilet seat, would you like a toilet seat, or a toilet seat" but with musical streaming. This has meant that I've been intensely researching the music I like. I've learned more because Apple Music is terrible (at discovery) than I have from just listening to streams. I hear the cool kids are going back to MP3 players these days, which is going to have much the same effect - you have to work out what you like

By: nicwolff

nicwolff — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:43:45 -0800

Still a silo, but it's a silo that integrates a good bit more smoothly with CarPlay. That's how they getcha!

By: seanmpuckett

seanmpuckett — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:51:20 -0800

I've been a subscriber for years. The catalogue is very good but the UX is utter shite. I am convinced no one who likes music works on that team.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:57:51 -0800

I'm just waiting for the right moment to start selling my vintage MP3 collection to hipsters. Some of those files are over 20 years old at this point, many of them hand-encoded using bespoke methods directly from the original CDs at full 320k CBR super extreme settings from the command line as Nyquist himself intended.

By: CynicalKnight

CynicalKnight — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:14:50 -0800

hand-encoded using bespoke methods If you examine the bits closely, you can still see latency scars caused by their passage through an original Pentium 4 processor.

By: UN

UN — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:24:15 -0800

Spotify is one of a handful of globally successful European tech companies, so this of course cannot be allowed to continue. It's nationalistic economic warfare. Sure, Joe Rogan is available on Apple but that shouldn't get in the way of things. The CEO of Spotify invested in a German weapons manufacturing startup, and so what? There's an existential war going on here and we need that money to fight the fascists. If some wealthy American artists don't like it, that's their choice. They can hand over a gift of gold to their president like Apple's CEO did, if it helps their bottom line. But I'm not supporting that garbage. /rant

By: jordantwodelta

jordantwodelta — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:30:54 -0800

What?

By: UN

UN — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:39:27 -0800

Spotify boycott: Artists leave 'garbage hole' platform after CEO invests in AI weapons Apple CEO Tim Cook appeals to Trump's love of gold with a 24-karat base for Apple plaque The Joe Rogan Experience on Apple Spotify is European /Re: What?

By: tiny frying pan

tiny frying pan — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:06:49 -0800

own your own music, damn

By: UN

UN — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:13:42 -0800

Further reading on the attempt to crush Spotify in context of the broader economic war currently waged by the US administration and their tech oligarchy: How Europe Must Respond to Trump's Economic War. For a European economic deterrence strategy Trump threatens 'substantial' new tariffs against countries with 'discriminatory' digital rules The U.S. administration has launched repeated attacks on digital taxes and on the EU's Digital Services Act. [Trump acting in support of US tech companies ie Apple, Meta, X] [I do not use Spotify personally. There are better hifi alternatives from Europe, such as Quboz

By: prefpara

prefpara — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:23:19 -0800

I have to say, I really miss iTunes. I had a significant CD collection (I Am Old) that I uploaded and had organized in iTunes which now exists as an un-navigable mess in youtube music for no good reason and it's so disorganized and inaccessible that I effectively can't and don't use it. This doesn't seem to solve that problem, including because it still seems to want to serve me music from the cloud. Why did I throw out all my physical CDs????

By: fragmede

fragmede — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:44:13 -0800

anyone got the magnet link for the all-music-2024-flac.torrent?

By: SoberHighland

SoberHighland — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 15:55:42 -0800

I had ~450 music CDs that I ripped to iTunes, one by one, on my work desktop computer (so I wouldn't burn out my own CD drive!) back around 2006. I threw away all the old plastic boxes. Many were broken, and the majority were full of the grime of 20+ years of sitting in various smoky apartments and being moved from place to place. I bought several HUGE CD binders and filled them all up, so I kept the discs (and for the most part, the paper CD inserts). I have these stored somewhere in a cardboard box in place in my lower level that I refer to as The Undercroft. I kept all my CDs but I haven't even seen them in close to 20 years. I use Apple Music. I'm not a power user, so I don't have a lot of playlists. I have made them in the past for my in-laws anniversary parties and a few birthday parties. But I'm more of an impulse listener. So I think about something and I listen to it. Apple has some pretty obscure stuff, so it works for me. I mostly listen to my local community supported, ad-free radio station CHiRP Radio Chicago (https://chirpradio.org) where I am a sustaining member.

By: phooky

phooky — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:10:29 -0800

I keep a streaming account for the kids, but at this point I'm pretty much entirely buying music on bandcamp/faircamp/LP, mostly because it's hard to be an artist and I want to support the people who make sounds I care about. Streaming services aren't an effective way to do that. I particularly like how you can choose to pay as much as you like on bandcamp, so you can, say, drop £500 on Jim E Brown's new album (please do not actually do this, his liver will not survive)

By: funkaspuck

funkaspuck — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:34:24 -0800

I used to work in the digital music space, at a company that handled all the licensing and infrastructure behind most of the brand names. "Fun" fact about artist payment, if the track is played as part of a "radio" station playlist that came from the service, the artist gets about 1/100th of what they get if you search for the same track and press play directly. This same disparity happens with "make me a station out of this track/artist".

By: theory

theory — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:07:14 -0800

I really miss iTunes. I had a significant CD collection (I Am Old) that I uploaded and had organized in iTunes which now exists as an un-navigable mess in youtube music for no good reason and it's so disorganized and inaccessible that I effectively can't and don't use it.

Do you still have the original files on a drive somewhere? You can import them into the Apple Music app and play them exactly the same way that iTunes worked, without having to subscribe to the Apple Music streaming service. If you no longer have your music files and they only exist in YouTube Music, you can download all your original files by using Google Takeout. Click 'Deselect all' at the top of the list and then go all the way to the bottom and select 'YouTube and YouTube Music'. Then click where it says 'All YouTube data included' and deselect everything except for 'music (library and uploads)' unless you also want to download other stuff you see in that list. The next steps are pretty self-explanatory.

By: DoctorFedora

DoctorFedora — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:08:32 -0800

On the one hand, Apple Music pays better royalties than basically any other streaming service people have ever heard of. On the other hand, the royalties are still... pretty minuscule overall, really. Incidentally, the iTunes music store is still around! You can still buy songs and albums and download them (mostly) DRM-free, and you can use the software for local library management. It used to be much less junk-drawer overall back in the day, but it still functions well enough, all things considered.

By: nickmark

nickmark — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:54:03 -0800

Still around? I didn't know there was any other way to buy music these days!

By: sickos haha yes dot jpg

sickos haha yes dot jpg — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:16:33 -0800

I'd rather listen to a radio station like KEXP or KRCW or (insert callsign of some obscure quirky independent station here) and find new music that way, personally (one of the reasons I carry a pocket notebook is so I can write down the song title and artist of new-to-me music discovered by radio listening). not all of us have your commitment to analog terrestrial indie snobbery--thought are you using streaming radio????--i admire your stamina

By: adamsc

adamsc — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:33:34 -0800

I use iTunes Match to hold the hundreds of albums I've bought. It's the convenience of streaming but without lock-in and it works great with all of the weird outlier albums which aren't in streaming catalogs.

By: Smedly, Butlerian jihadi

Smedly, Butlerian jihadi — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 18:36:49 -0800

Tidal is great, and I'm not a huge fan of the Apple ecosystem, but I love anything that takes people away from Spotify, which is a horrible, horrible company.

By: DoctorFedora

DoctorFedora — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 19:53:11 -0800

yeah like Apple is evil but mostly just in the by-default sense for a company that size, while Spotify is like... maybe not quite Facebook level, but definitely at least Epic level "actually evil" in their policies and goals

By: rjd

rjd — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 20:37:10 -0800

(What I thought of when I read the title: https://youtu.be/HmRofx_suTg?t=146 ) Right there with you, Clever User Name... Also feeling old and also happy with my digital library that exists on my own server.

By: billsaysthis

billsaysthis — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:42:28 -0800

Strange I thought of this for the title

By: gtrwolf

gtrwolf — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:56:34 -0800

not all of us have your commitment to analog terrestrial indie snobbery--thought are you using streaming radio????--i admire your stamina Actually quite a few stations "left of the dial" (including the ones mentioned above) not only have live streaming but also have their shows archived for two weeks or so. So if you initially miss a show or hear about an interview happening after the fact, you can go back and stream it (assuming you're still within the two-week window of course).

By: deeker

deeker — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:42:02 -0800

Perhaps better on the thread that apparently inspired this one (thanks for the shout out, btw!), Massive Attack have not only removed their music from Spotify but have signed up to No Music for Genocide which seeks to encourage and assist artists to geoblock Israel at the distro portal level. Artists not signed to Sony, Warner or Universal record labels should be able to do this relatively easily; for the Big Three, they suggest getting in touch for further assistance. As No Music for Genocide note: "Within a few months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, every major label either unilaterally removed their entire catalogue from Russia or closed operations entirely, implicitly or explicitly condemning Putin's actions while donating to Ukraine. No such measures have been taken against Israel, or in support of Palestine, after decades of illegal occupation and 23 months into Israel's accelerated genocide." And: "No Music For Genocide is a cultural boycott of Israel. Over 400 initial artists and labels have geo-blocked and removed their music from that territory in response to Israel's genocide in Gaza; ethnic cleansing of the Occupied West Bank; apartheid within Israel / '48; political repression of Pro-Palestine efforts wherever we live; and the music industry's own ties to weapons and crimes against humanity. This tangible act is just one step toward honoring Palestinian demands to isolate and delegitimize Israel as it kills without consequence on the world stage. The successful cultural boycotts against apartheid South Africa prove that our creative work grants us agency and power. When we wield it together, we add unified pressure to a growing, global, interdependent movement, from Hollywood to the docks of Morocco."

By: parm

parm — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 03:17:52 -0800

The Joe Rogan podcast is available on Apple Podcasts but so is literally anything else with an RSS feed. Spotify paid him $250m for it. There's a difference.

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 04:20:15 -0800

I think this is great, because Apple is totally a company that has never done anything bad and that we should all feel great about giving our money to, lol. No problems with these folks!

By: seanmpuckett

seanmpuckett — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 05:00:12 -0800

wae geurae?

By: adamsc

adamsc — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 05:37:55 -0800

kittens for breakfast: no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc. etc. but if you want to make a difference you generally want to offer alternatives people actually use. Apple is far from perfect but they're not actively contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to elevate right-wing provocateurs or creating AI slop to undercut human creativity the way Spotify does and that means we're better off with people using them instead, just as how the planet would still be much better off if people who aren't going vegan switched their beef consumption to chicken and pork.

By: mrgoat

mrgoat — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 05:46:34 -0800

Count me among those who were quite happy to see that Winamp exists on Android, still plays the mp3s I got at lan parties in the 90s, works just fine if there's no cell signal, doesn't make me pay a subscription, always plays exactly what I want, and has zero issues with the music I buy and download from whatever drm-free store the artist has chosen. I feel like this whole thing was a solved problem back when I was in high school, then Spotify came along and tried to forcibly un-solve it.

By: JustSayNoDawg

JustSayNoDawg — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 16:07:45 -0800

I kinda think Apple itself isn't doing the whole "generate music with an AI that sounds just like this other music so we don't have to pay royalties" thing (atlthough they may not have worked out how to defend against people uploading their own AI-generated music.

By: HearHere

HearHere — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 03:15:23 -0800

wae geurae? 괜찮아

By: They sucked his brains out!

They sucked his brains out! — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 09:58:35 -0800

I use Spotify mostly in protest to Apple Music ruining how I managed music with my iTunes library. But I didn't know about the Rogan contract and that is definitely making me think about how to jump ship. Silos suck, but seem unavoidable, and at least Apple isn't a Nazi silo funding Nazis.

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 10:35:50 -0800

Apple is far from perfect They run sweatshops. It's basically impossible to abstain from buying all products associated with Apple or sister corporations, and I wouldn't bother even trying to boycott them; on a practical level, it cannot be done. But I'm also not going to point to them as the lesser of two evils. I think they're the cooler of two evils, which is not the same thing.

By: adamsc

adamsc — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 10:41:41 -0800

kittens: my point was simply that they're not actively funding the right the same way Spotify does, and lesser matters even if it's not perfect. It's like the decision between buying a Prius or Ram truck even if you'd really prefer to bike to work.

By: They sucked his brains out!

They sucked his brains out! — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 17:13:17 -0800

They run sweatshops Folks, hate to break it to ya, but they all run sweatshops. Be that as it may, Apple isn't run by or funding Nazis. Sorry you hate this one company that much but facts are what they are.

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 20:38:09 -0800

I don't really see a significant difference between a nazi and someone who runs a sweatshop. I don't hate this one company that much, but I don't love them more than another company either. If you like what Apple makes more than what Spotify makes, that's great. But it's not a moral victory to pay for Apple Music over Spotify. Trying to make it into one is empty posturing, no offense.