Despite my complaints about their business practices, I still stick with Spotify. Their family pricing is pretty decent, the integration with third-party services/products is really solid, and it's exceedingly rare that they don't have what I'm wanting to listen to (and in those cases, it's usually because the artist doesn't have their music available to stream anywhere at all). I just wish they weren't such scumbags in pretty much every other area.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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I’ve been ride or die Spotify basically since they release in North America, and have had a family plan going for years with my wife, a house account, and then my sister and my parents on it, and it was great, but they’ve become such turds about their family plan. Yes fine, my sister and parents don’t live with me so if your IP flag shows up and you want to email them to have them confirm their address, that’s whatever. But they emailed my wife, and when she didn’t reply in a week they dropped her from my account and noted that she couldn’t rejoin it and that was a bridge too far for me.
I’ve been paying for Apple+ or whatever it is for a while for the two of us but liked Spotify enough that the now $20ish a month was worth it, but this pushed me to migrate all our playlists over to Apple and just use the service we were already paying for. I can’t understand why Spotify would be such butts about it because I easily would have gone up to $30/month to cover my family but now they’re getting nothing from me.
Similar - I signed up for my Spotify account with a VPN, as it was only available in Europe / UK / something like that. Have been paying for as long as I can remember.
With our family account, we had a house account, wife, mother, grandmother, and myself. In reality, only 2 of those accounts really got used.
The family verification emails were definitely annoying. But the yearly price hike with few important feature improvements, combined with things like audiobooks being for the primary account only, caused me to re-eval.
Now, my wife is on a student plan on Spotify, and I’m trialing Tidal. I expect to stick with Tidal based on lossless and higher pay for artists. If I don’t, I’ll likely swing over to Apple Music. Switching and migrating playlists is pretty painless, overall.
In any case, I’m glad I’m out of that abusive relationship with Spotify.
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Bandcamp, 100%. I'm under the impression that it's the best third party platform for forwarding the biggest percentage of sales to the actual musicians. If there's a better one I'd love to hear about it. That's the most important thing to me before anything else.
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Tidal or Apple Music.
I'm currently leaning toward YouTube music.
I've subscribed on and off from Pandora for years (remember their founder sending you an email thanking you for participating in his experiment?). I find that my stations quickly start playing the same set of songs over and over.
I've also given Spotify a shot, but it seems like you either have to make your own playlist or listen to someone else's. I personally like the algorithm fuled rabbit hole.
YouTube music has a decent catalog and their suggestions have introduced me to a lot of good music. Their android auto experience kinda stinks, and most things are transitory (eg no stations you tweak to your preferences over time), but IMO the discovery it offers is worth it. I also like that it lets you actively manage your queue, add songs/albums to it, rearrange things, etc.
My beef with YouTube music is that no matter what song I start from, in 4 songs it has turned into Levitating by Dua Lipa.
Children’s songs? Foreign language? Electro swing? Hip hop? Doesn’t matter. Levitating is coming soon.
That's interesting, I haven't had that experience. I wonder what's creating the difference between the two of us :(
With regular YouTube I swear if I watch any music video, or even non-music videos sometimes, there's about a 50-50 chance that the next recommended music video is "In the meantime" by Spacehog. Don't get wrong it's a good song, but jeez I keep attempting to go down music video rabbit holes and all it shows me are ones I've already seen.
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Pandora because I'm old. Also I don't like the Spotify algorithm.
Pandora's "radio" function is just way better. I spent years on Pandora when it was brand new, then years on Spotify when it came out in the US, then back to Pandora a few years ago. Predictive playlusys on Spotify suck, it gives you the same songs over and over based on genre rather than artist or song. Pandora digs way deeper and often plays me music I've never heard before.
I'm bummed they're owned by SiriusXM now, I just have this feeling they're going to stop investing and kill it one day
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bandcamp.
- drm free copies of the music to keep forever
- I'm building a library of music I can keep forever, even if I stop using the service. Some months I don't pay anything because I'm happily listening to what I already have. I'm not stuck paying a subscription
- musicians get a good cut
- their blog posts about genres and cities and stuff are good, and are (or feel like they are) written by an actual person.
- Sometimes musicians do "listening parties" where you just hang out in a livestream with the band
- when you buy stuff, you can write a message to the band and sometimes they write back
Now, if nothing you listen to is on bandcamp it won't be as appealing. But there's a wide variety of genres.
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Google Play Music was my favorite of them all. Good UI, good music selection, decent quality, good integration with my Google ecosystem. Then Google did a Google and turned it into YouTube Music.
Spotify was a decent replacement - the best part was how it has an app on EVERYTHING. I listen to mostly albums so the mediocre playlists and crap shuffling rarely factor in. The worst was funding Joe Rogan, price increases, and paying artists shit.
Tidal pays artists more, and they have higher quality audio, though the UI is kind of meh. At least I'm not indirectly funding Joe Rogan anymore.
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YouTube Music that comes with the YouTube Premium plan.
Until it doesn't. Until the service is killed and you need to use a new one, and your library doesn't migrate over. I got sick of Google just killing everything and not supporting anything. I remember when Google play music was killed and ytm was a way worse interface. Ad blocker and Spotify for me.
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Don't give google money.
Do you pay for the artists tho?If you don’t, you’re doing what Google is doing, or worse.
Was on spotify for a long time but I got really tired of them blocking access and randomly logging me out because they hate VPN users. So earlier this year I decided to try all the services I can find and settled on Deezer.
They are doing all the right things in the music streaming world but everyone gets hung up on the ugly rebranding they decided to do. Just tells you how important it is to have a great brand identity.
Interesting, people hate their new branding? I thought it was a huge improvement, previous one was way uglier to me
The Current from Minnesota Public Radio. They have 4 or 5 stations, and the occasional sponsor spots are read out by the DJ. No car horns and space sound effects interrupting your bluegrass jams.
bandcamp/soundcloud/youtube downloaded locally with yt-dlp and the files put on a real mp3 player. I enjoy owning my music and listening to it any time any where without internet connection or monthly subscription payments.
I've tried Spotify, yt music, and tidal. Tidal and Spotify are pretty much identical for the most part but has higher quality files and pays artists more. Yt music is really good at recommendations from my experience with it.
So anyway, now I pirate all my music in lossless flac (whenever possible) and listen to it via plexamp. If I want to try a new artist I just download their most popular album, if I like it I get more of their stuff. The library must grow.
Deezer. They had great prices for a while. Luckily I locked in a yearly subscription before the increase. Right now it's equal to Spotify, so I'll reconsider after it expires.
Bandcamp is also great if an artist you like is on there
Apple Music. I had such a sizable library from years of iTunes gift cards I figured why switch. I hear they pay Artists better than Spotify so that’s a bonus.
SDXC 1TB
Qobuz!
Tidal because Plex integration.
How exactly do you use these together?
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Tidal. Higher quality audio is the main reason. I got tired of hearing Spotify's muddled compressed sound and waiting for them to release a higher quality plan.
I use Pandora too! There is an option for “deep tracks” to get some more obscure options played.
I'll probably get downvoted for it, but I use Amazon Music. It's the only Amazon service I'm willing to pay for because it works well and unless I'm looking for something super obscure they usually have whatever I want. The only real problem I've ever had with it is that some songs that are considered "too controversial" are sometimes removed from albums.
None. I mostly download and torrent music from wherever I can find with reasonable quality.
Spotify... It's very convenient
I've downloaded nearly everything I listen to from youtube. I forget what I even used to use before discovering youtube-dl.
youtube-dl is not maintained anymore, the new one is called yt-dlp (I'm writing this so people know what to search for)
I used to like Deezer. I found the audio quality better than Spotify’s. Better user interface too, simple and straightforward unlike the messy and cluttered Spotify inteface. Stopped using it when they removed regional pricing.
Jellyfin 😎
I used to use Google Play Music for years but when they shut down YouTube Music has always been garbage by comparison. I just pirate the music I like and donate occasionally to artists I like.
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Mine’s Mirlo. It’s not owned by a big corporation, plus it’s open source too, with an ability to customise your own artist page, just like bandcamp, alongside being able to help and contribute to independent artists as well.
iBroadcast
you upload your own library and then stream it anywhere
RiMusic
Nugs
just switched to apple music for the lossless quality. honestly its the only lossless steaming service that was good. everything else had honestly kind of glaring issues imo
For the rare instances when some songs are not available on streaming sites and youtube has it, then I'll use newpipe app to download that audio file. My music collection is all downloaded songs, on pc use mpv for playback and poweramp for android.
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