For another look at the Spotify launch, see “Why Spotify Will Kill iTunes.”
Unless you’ve been living somewhere without net access for the past week or so, you have heard about Spotify, an online music service that just launched in the U.S. The initial reviews have been pretty positive, and it has generated a lot of buzz, although it’s quite similar to some services that have been available here for some time (Rhapsody comes to mind). But there’s something pretty insidious buried inside music rental models like this. It’s prime territory for a bait-and-switch strategy. In fact, this approach could be exactly what the music labels are relying on.
At first blush, paying a monthly amount to “borrow” content like this over the net seems like a pretty good idea. Many of us have used Netflix or Hulu and become accustomed to the idea of paying our monthly subscription fee and getting to watch as much as we want. Both of these companies have done a fantastic job with their offerings. Netflix has become so popular that it recently surpassed the amount of Bittorrent (“pirate”) traffic on the web, proving that it’s compelling offerings, not lawsuits, that win customer’s hearts and minds. But if Hulu and Netflix are so fantastic, what’s the concern about Spotify?
Simply put: the way we consume music is fundamentally different to the way we consume movies and TV.
The following Spotify Playlists are weekly updated using Songs from labels and artists (FiXT, NCS, The Midnight, Riot, Tasty) that have declared them safe of DMCA strikes. You can use them in your Twitch streams. The algorithm used by twitch could mute some of this songs in the recorded VODs. That’s usually out of these labels/artists control. Spotify’s free tier isn’t really free; it’s ad-supported. Companies are paying Spotify to make you listen to ads every few tracks. Spotify makes less money per-play from ads than they do from Premium subscribers, so to encourage people to upgrade, the free tier is limited in certain ways.
Spotify is a trap. I've been using Spotify for more than a year now and it's great, but the more I use it, the more I realize just how much I need to leave. Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs. Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need. Listening is everything - Spotify.
Think about it. It is relatively rare to own a movie or TV series that you sit through and watch multiple times. Sure, there are some classics where that’s the case, but most people watch a video once and that’s it. Music is not like this. The same songs get listened to time and time again. We build playlists (custom CDs or even mix tapes, if you’re old enough) around them. It’s the very reason most people don’t just listen to the radio. They want to own their favorite songs and albums so they can play them when they want. Understanding this — that we consume audio in a fundamentally different way from video — is critical to understanding why, from a consumer point of view, paying a monthly rental fee is a risky way of obtaining music.
Let me illustrate why.
Again, unless you’ve been living somewhere without internet for the past week or so, you would have seen the outrage when Netflix upped its prices. Well, if you think this is bad, just wait until Spotify does it. With Netflix, if the price gets out of step with what the company delivers you every month, it’s a pretty simple decision to stop subscribing. You were paying your $10 per month to watch your movies or TV shows, you watched your shows, and now they’re charging too much. So you stop subscribing. You don’t lose anything, because you don’t really want to re-watch all those old shows and movies that you’ve already seen. All you need to do is find somewhere else to watch next week’s episode, or next month’s movie.
But if Spotify were to do this and you choose to stop subscribing, all that music you have on your Android or iPad is gone. You can’t get the music out, and there’s nothing to suggest that you’ll be able to get the playlists on your computer out as easily as Spotify does from iTunes.
This makes it the ultimate breeding ground for a bait-and-switch strategy: once you’re invested, your willingness to pay goes up dramatically. Most of us would probably be willing to pay quite a lot to not lose all our music. That becomes all the more alarming when the initial indications suggest that Spotify is a tricky balancing act to make profitable. Three big variables affect its profitability: the percentage of paying users, the amount they pay each month, and — here’s the real gotcha — the cost of track licensing.
I’ve got no insider knowledge that Spotify is planning on raising prices. But I do know this: Spotify get all its content from the same place everyone else does — the same industry that has forced price increases on other online services once they have become successful. That appears to be at least partly what happened with Netflix last week. At least in the case of the existing a la carte music services, if you don’t like the new price, you don’t have to buy the new track. In Spotify’s world, if you don’t like the new price, there goes your music library. Or, if Spotify tries to stand up for its users, the labels can just pull the songs and those songs simply disappear. Here’s what one user in the U.K. had to say about that:
“It’s really frustrating, and it seems to be happening a lot. Spotify has changed how I buy and listen to music, and I pay for Premium so that I don’t have to download albums from iTunes, but now I’m having to do both.”
If you’re interested in seeing what the buzz is about, you should try it out. But beware. Spotify may try to resist price increases. But, given what we know about the record industry and how it approaches licensing negotiations, I wouldn’t let my music get held hostage to a monthly ransom.
7 Free Ways to Download Spotify to MP3 in 2020
With more than 40 million songs, Spotify offers a massive music library that you can listen to online without taking your storage space. If you pay the premium subscription fee, you can also listen to music offline.
The only problem is that you can’t transfer them anywhere or play them with other music players other than Spotify because the music files you downloaded with Spotify are DRM(Digital Rights Management) protected. In this article, I will show you 7 ways to download songs from Spotify as MP3 without recording even if you don’t have Spotify Premium. No matter what devices you use, you can find at least 2 methods that work for you.
Disclaimer
All these methods are for personal or educational use only.
You should not use any of these tools to pirate or distribute music.
Some of the methods may be illegal to use this in your country, so be informed.
Method 1: Download Spotify song or playlist with Siri Shortcuts
If you are using an iOS device, you probably have heard of the automation application Shortcuts, which is the updated version of Workflow. I have three shortcuts to help you download music from Spotify.
If you are not familiar with Shortcuts, you can free download it from AppStore and get a few pre-made shortcuts in the Shortcuts Gallery to see how it work. To get the shortcuts that I am about to show you, you just open the link in Safari to download it.
This Spotify playlist downloader can only download an entire Spotify playlist. You will have an option to select some of the tracks in the playlist to download if you don’t want to download them all.
Note: This only works for playlist. It won’t work if you input a Spotify track link. Free spotify premium accounts generator. It is recommended to run it from Spotify share sheet.
You can simply copy the Spotify playlist link from Spotify app and run this shortcut. You can also tap the Share button to run this shortcut from the share sheet. Besides the playlist link, you can also input playlist ID Or playlist URI to download Spotify playlist to MP3.
When downloaded, you can open the Files app, and then select iCloud > Shortcuts > Music to check the downloaded MP3 file. If you are not familiar with iOS Shortcuts, be sure to watch this video below to see how it works.
For advanced users, you can also use Shortcuts to Move Spotify Playlist to Apple Music and vise versa. Though the authentication process is a little complicated when you want to transfer playlists to Spotify by using Spotify API.
Method 2: Download Spotify to MP3 Using Telegram Bot
If you use Telegram, you can simply use a Telegram bot to download free music whether you are on Android or iOS. It does not require any setup or your Spotify account login info. All you need is this @SpotifyMusicDownloaderBot. After you get this bot, type “/start” (without quotes) and then you can paste any Spotify track link to start downloading music for free. If you are using iOS, you may want to tap the Share button and save to Files after the music is downloaded.
If you do like using Telegram bots to download music, you probably also want to check this post to get more Telegram Bots for music.
Is Spotify Safe For TeensMethod 3: Download Spotify Playlist to FLAC or MP3
There is another open-source software called Deezloader, which is developed to download music from Deezer, can also be used to download a playlist from Spotify. The software actually converts the Spotify playlist to Deezer playlist and then download music from Deezer. You can set it to download Spotify Playlist as MP3 or FLAC. The lastest version Deezloader Remix 4.2.2 also allows you to download any single Spotify track and it much easier to set up.
Step 1. Download and install Deezer Remix. Log in with your Deezer account (free account also works).
Step 2. Go to this link: https://developer.spotify.com/dashboard/applications and log in with your Spotify account (free account works).
Step 3. Click on Create a Client ID and then compile the form as you like.
Step 4. Save the settings and then you will see the Client ID and Client Secret. Copy the Client ID and Client Secret to Deezloader Remix.
If you are using an older version of Deezloader Remix, the setup is a little bit complicated than this. You can refer to this video to see the configure process.
As you know, not all tracks on Spotify are also available on Deezer, so you will see some tracks are failed to download because Deezloader cannot find the matched songs. If you want a tool to download all tracks from Spotify playlist, keep reading to see the next tool.
Update: Since Deezloader is discontinued, you can only use this method to download 128kbps MP3. If you prefer high quality, jump to Method 5.
Method 4: Download Spotify to MP3 with AllToMP3
AllToMP3 is free open source software that allows you to download music from Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Deezer. It is available in Windows, macOS, and Linux. https://newqr.weebly.com/blog/spotify-block-ads-on-mac. If you check the source code, it is easy to find out that it actually matches the Spotify music track with YouTube video and convert YouTube video to MP3, so the music quality is not as good the other methods. You can free download from its website or Github.
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After installation, you can paste the Spotify song link or playlist link and press Enter to start downloading. The music, by default, will be saved in the Music folder. The downloaded music files include all the tags and cover art, but the quality is nowhere close to the next free tool.
Is Spotify Free On PcMethod 5: Download Spotify Music Using Allavsoft
Allavsoft is your ultimate media downloader software for Windows and Mac. It allows you to directly download Spotify playlist, album music to MP3, FLAC, WAV, M4A, WMA, etc with ID3 tags.
The latest version allows you to download Spotify music as FLAC (1441 kbps). Unlike Deezloader, you download all the songs that Deezloader cannot download, literally, unmatched songs with Allavsoft. For me, Allavsoft is the best Spotify Music Downloader.
Is Spotify Safe On Pc
Once you get it installed, you can copy the Spotify music link whether it is a song, album, or playlist and then launch Allavsoft. The program will automatically paste the URL and you just need to click Download to start downloading.
By default, it saves Spotify music to MP3 as 320 kbps with artwork and other metadata, so you don’t need to check the option “Automatically Convert to”. If you choose the Best Available quality, you may find some songs are downloaded as FLAC 1411 kbps, which is really cool. If you want to convert Spotify Music to FLAC, WAV, AIFF, AAC, WMA, DTS, etc, you can click the “Automatically Convert to” button to select the specific format from the drop-down menu.
Besides Spotify, Allavsoft allows you to download music from Deezer, SoundCloud, MixCloud, and download videos from Udemy, Lyda, YouTube, Facebook, etc. That is to say, Allavsoft is the only downloader software that you ever need.
Method 6: Convert Spotify music to MP3 with TuneMobie
There are many programs that claim to be able to convert Spotify, but deep down they are recording the audio, TuneMobie is one of them. I tried both free and paid versions. Let me tell you how it really works.
When you open this program TuneMobie, it asks you to launch the Spotify app or download it if you haven’t. Then you can see in the preference where you can select to save as mp3, m4a, WAV, and FLAC. These are all the supported audio formats and other settings that you customize.
When you try to convert a song, the Spotify app actually plays the song, but you hear no sound. Compared to other audio-recording kinds of competitors, Tunemobie Spotify Converter is 5 times faster. Usually, it takes less than 1 minute to convert a song.
You can also copy a playlist link to download Spotify playlist as MP3 or other formats. The trial version allows you to download (record) unlimited tracks for the first 3 munites in 30 days, which is much better than its competitors.
Method 7: Download Spotify with a Chrome extension
If you use Chrome web browser, you can install this free extension and then you can see a download button appears when you go to Spotify web player. You now can click on the download button to download almost all the songs from Spotify web player.
Why do I say almost? Because this extension certainly is not downloading music from Spotify directly. You just download music from its own server, so you will see some Spotify tracks are not available in their server for downloading. Some tracks downloaded using this extension may not be the same version as the Spotify version. Bonus: Chimera — Multiple Source Music Downloader for Advanced Users Only
Chimera is a command-line based multiple source music downloader that allows you to download music from Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Soundcloud, Napster, Qobuz, Google Play Music, etc.
It is open-source and completely free to use for educational and private use only. It is very powerful, but the setup process is more complicated than the other methods. You can choose Spotify source from Deezer, Tidal, or Qobuz.
As you know, Tidal and Qobuz provide Hi-res quality music. If you have paid subscription, you can use this tool to download Spotify music in very high quality in FLAC format.
You will need to grant your Spotify account through Spotify client ID and client secret. Based on your choice, you need to also set up Deezer, Tidal, or Qobuz account. For detailed steps, check this guide to see how to set it up.
Conclusion
That’s all the seven different methods for downloading Spotify music to MP3. If you care about music quality, then Allavsoft is the best choice. Personally, I like the Allavsoft method the most because it is convenient, high quality, and with cover art. More importantly, you don’t need any other video/music downloader software anymore once you have Allavsoft installed since it supports more than 1000 websites.
If you really love the iOS environment, then Shortcuts is a great way to download music on iPhone. Now, it is your turn. Which method are you going to try first? If you have other better method to download music from Spotify, please share it in the comments.
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