YSK a free, lightweight alternative to Spotify

I mean the streamers have to get paid too, you might hear artists complain about how much money Spotify takes but as someone who has released lots of music on Spotify they do pay you, pretty decently too! Lots of artists are making hundreds of thousands a year from just Spotify and the business itself is profitable, which allows pretty much anyone to upload their music and try their dream.

That is valuable in it of itself, without services like Spotify many of the artists I listen too would probably have given up on music for a boring IT job, like I did.

First of all, thank you for your work to create or improve Spotify! I think that - as some others have pointed out - the word "force" here comes from Spotify's quasi-monopoly these days. It has gained such an important position of power that both musicians and listeners are almost "forced" to make use of it. As somebody who makes music, I think that Spotify urgently needs to realize the responsibility that comes with its success. Paying the people who create and offer the very content that makes their platform useful and successful in the first place laughable 0.003 - 0.005$ on average per stream is destroying any chance of realistic income for most artists. The amount of streams required for even a minimum wage can only be achieved with heavy and expensive marketing efforts, by abusing Spotify's systems and getting lucky by being placed on larger playlists. There's a lot of money made there, and only very few selectively benefit from it. We see entire phenomena due to this. For example that "songs" are getting shorter and shorter, in order to increase the amount of streams and thus compensating for that joke of payment. Creating longer, atmospheric pieces with a REAL structure and buildup worth exploring just isn't financially viable on Spotify. Any form of creative risk is also not helpful to earn money, so you get more and more super short bits of music that are very playlist-friendly and thus, samey. And this has a negative effect on music as an artform itself. And in the long run, it will make Spotify's catalogue less valuable, because it will degenerate into a grey, boring mass of meaningless low-effort content. Spotify offers a great service, but also devalues music as a medium and the carreers behind it. You may say that people are free to purchase physical media or directly purchase music on other services. But let's be realistic. Spotify offers an enormous, centralized catalogue of music for just a few bucks a month. If people can listen to your songs there for a cheap flatrate, they will simply not navigate other services and purchase a single album for the price of a month full of anything they like. So, if you have even the smallest amount of influence, please use it to improve Spotify on that field too, not only in terms of the app's code base. Make Spotify a healthier place for artists, which will help sustainability for everyone involved. And find ways to not only financially reward the shortest, most playlist-friendly pieces of music.

Thanks to you and/or other Spotify devs for the linux desktop app that I understand you develop in your free time

Of course they don't force you to use spotify, but it's one of those "soft monopolies" many other companies have. It's not the only option, but they basically are, because everyone thinks so: it's like whatsapp, if you catch my drift (everyone use it because everyone's on it)

And when a company realizes they're in that position, they will prey down on their users without fail, and I'm talking about:

Privacy invasive app: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.spotify.music/latest/

Investing in military AI: https://mixmag.net/read/spotify-daniel-ek-ai-defence-investment-criticism-news

Patents for extremely invasive technologies: https://www.accessnow.org/press-release/spotify-tech-emotion-manipulation/

Allowing disinformation during covid, not paying properly the artists and many other things I'm not going over for sake of brevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Criticism

What I don't like about spotify and all the companies who are in a similar position in the market is that, as usual, their share of the pie it's unfairly big, which is why I try to drive people away from them. Not saying YouTube is better, but at least with vimusic you don't have to listen to ads (which I think heavily harm people's mental health, among other things)

Of course music can be bought, but people only buy what they like nowdays, and use online services to discover new music. Few have the money to buy music and listen to it for the first time afterwards. Many people don't even have the money to meet their basic needs, let alone buy music

I think the important thing is to keep Spotify from being the only way you can stream music. While I agree you can buy discs or digital downloads, these are fundamentally different methods of consumption from streaming.

Stopping Spotify purchasing the exclusive rights to stream prevents a monopoly where, if you want to stream, you are 'forced' to use Spotify and pay/listen to ads there. Keeping artists' options open allows the most customer-friendly streaming service to win out as consumers choose which streaming service gives them the best product to listen to who they want

Spotify took an existing thing and made it convenient and worse at the same time. How long before we are just listening to AI music? Since their cost is the artists...it's only a matter of time.