Spotify

Temple of Blood wrote:

Black Rider wrote:Name any long running band that was better later on even before streaming.

Sure.  Judas priest, megadeth, and exodus made some of their best albums way past their first 4 when they were in their 40s+.

Flotsam & Jetsam is another band that has been able to do some of their best stuff later on. In my opinion The Cold is perhaps their best album. Even better than Doomsday, maybe. And The End of Chaos from 2019 was great too.

I guess that's how it's always been for them though. Very unbalanced set of great, mediocre and bad albums all over the place. After The Cold I had huge hopes for the next album, Ugly Noise. But that one was amazingly boring.

It's very rare for bands to make as good new albums in their late years as The Cold for F&J was.
Even for Megadeth the only top tier later albums are The System Has Failed and Endgame. I regard Endgame as maybe their fourth best album.  That was one of the strongest "late" albums an old band has ever made.

Spotify would die if they depended on my paid subscription
I am not a fan of the free Spotify

My response to "get with the times":
https://youtu.be/rYX1YFiQTDw

Tldr:  old music is demonstrably killing new music.  And its getting worse.

Temple of Blood wrote:
The old guard is worse than ever.
The new guard who should be replacing them is even worse than they are.
There is less incentive than ever to do what it takes to write a great album or even a great song. There is more incentive to just tour no matter who is in the band because you cant make money on albums and can only make money through tours and merch.

If you think this hasnt affected album quality then i dont know what to say to you.

Not sure I follow the logic here. If a new guard band doesn’t make a quality album, who would want to see them on tour for it?

I've never used Spotify nor do I plan on ever using it for the same reasons folks have posted above. But they scored one point from me today:
https://notthebee.com/article/lol-spotify-is-removing-neil-young-from-their-platform-because-he-cried-about-joe-rogan

oldschooldoom wrote:Spotify would die if they depended on my paid subscription
I am not a fan of the free Spotify

While I have used a few streaming services, I am not a fan of them at all.  Sadly, I am used to being able to control what I want to hear when I want to hear it.  I know some streaming sites let you customize more if you pay, but I can customize what I want to hear without giving them one thin dime.

I have used Spotify once and there was a certain joy in finding albums so easily that are very hard to find on CD. But after a few minutes that became the exact reason I will never use it again. I do not like listening to music I do not own physically; the smell of the booklets is part of the (early) Rhapsody album experience for instance. Besides, I believe that artists still earn more from a physical sale.