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Artist-friendly music streaming alternatives to Spotify et al.

DanielT

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This seems interesting!:)


Anyone with experience with any of these? Ease of use? Catalog size? Sound quality?

Is what is stated in the link true? Levels compensation to artists, musicians that is.

This for example:

Going all in on a musician-centric model, on SonStream you pay artists directly for streams. Instead of a subscription it’s straight up pay-as-you-go — around 2.5 pence a song (or 3 cents). No fucking around.

If you listen to no songs in a month, you pay nothing. If you listen to 500 songs you’ll pay somewhere in the region of £12.50 (or $15). Seems reasonable right? The direct line between listeners and artists is a real pro here. There’s no opaque processes whereby your money mysteriously finds itself in the pockets of artists you’ve never listened to.

As far as ease of use goes SonStream is getting there. It recently rolled out apps for Android and iOS, which is a mammoth effort in itself. There’s some teething to be done but for a plucky underdog without billions of venture capital to pump into development it’s not half bad. Find a song, press play, enjoy. Simples.

The catalogue is a little lean — one millions compared to Spotify’s sixty million — but it’s growing. Radiohead, Talking Heads, and The Specials are there, to name but a few. An especially nice thing about SonStream’s pay-as-you-go model is it costs nothing to have it installed and ready to go. If an artist is on SonStream, great, listen to them there. If not, no harm done.


Edit:
If the sound quality is not top notch, I can use one of these in the bedroom. It's enough with ok sound quality, for me, in the bedroom. Or in the garage, maybe. Hm, I'm going to think about that.:D
 
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DanielT

DanielT

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somebodyelse

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I followed the link above to https://sonstream.com/ which I expected would tell me something about them, but there's minimal text with buzz phrases, and buttons to sign up or log in. I used the sign up one which took me to https://sonstream.com/rc21/auth/signup which doesn't really tell you anything about what you're signing up to, but does have what looks like a link to the terms and conditions. It's not actually a link though - it just shows them in a panel over the signup page. It encourages you to print the terms for future reference, but if you try to print it you only get the currently visible portion of the text (at least in firefox) and the text isn't selectable so you can't copy and paste easily either. If you look at the terms you find things like the bit above, and stuff about advertising which seems odd for a site that claims to be free of it. None of the above encourages me to fill in the form. The terms do contain the company's registered address though, and you can look it up on streetview to see a back streets building with a huge 'SONS Records' sign - turns out they're an indie label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_records
 
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DanielT

DanielT

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I followed the link above to https://sonstream.com/ which I expected would tell me something about them, but there's minimal text with buzz phrases, and buttons to sign up or log in. I used the sign up one which took me to https://sonstream.com/rc21/auth/signup which doesn't really tell you anything about what you're signing up to, but does have what looks like a link to the terms and conditions. It's not actually a link though - it just shows them in a panel over the signup page. It encourages you to print the terms for future reference, but if you try to print it you only get the currently visible portion of the text (at least in firefox) and the text isn't selectable so you can't copy and paste easily either. If you look at the terms you find things like the bit above, and stuff about advertising which seems odd for a site that claims to be free of it. None of the above encourages me to fill in the form. The terms do contain the company's registered address though, and you can look it up on streetview to see a back streets building with a huge 'SONS Records' sign - turns out they're an indie label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_records
Interesting, thanks for researching.:)

I can easily imagine testing an extra stream provider, similar to the ones in the link start post, as long as I really know how much compensation goes to the artists, the musicians. That is, at least for me, the main purpose, the most important criterion if I were to supplement with another streaming provider. I can happily pay a little extra to musicians.

Edit:
Of course there are many other ways to support musicians. To be honest, this feels more important:

 
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somebodyelse

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If their site had been a bit more forthcoming about what they were offering I wouldn't have gone digging so far. Anything that asks me to sign up before telling me what I'm signing up to is going to set off alarm bells. The press coverage sounds good, but it's not what their site shows, and my starting level of trust for anything from the music industry is very low. I hope the press claims are real, and that they'll give the site the attention it needs to make it a bit more believable, but I won't hold my breath.
 
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DanielT

DanielT

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If their site had been a bit more forthcoming about what they were offering I wouldn't have gone digging so far. Anything that asks me to sign up before telling me what I'm signing up to is going to set off alarm bells. The press coverage sounds good, but it's not what their site shows, and my starting level of trust for anything from the music industry is very low. I hope the press claims are real, and that they'll give the site the attention it needs to make it a bit more believable, but I won't hold my breath.
That's the tricky part. You must not be naive but at the same time you (or at least I) want to help. Unfortunately, I have no solution on how to get it together. References and generally recognized serious and transparent companies and organizations. That in itself should in any case increase the possibility that the money goes to the intended purpose. But easy to know if so is the case it is not.
 

sgent

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Of the "major" streaming services I believe Apple is the best, Spotify the worst, and YouTube and Amazon are closer to Apple. The flip side is that Spotify has the best discoverability IMHO and best "AI" DJ's.
 
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