I’ve used streaming services for almost a decade now and nothing has ever come close to Rdio.<p>I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery.<p>I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caused me to speak with my $ and stop using it…plus its music discovery is no better than YTM.<p>I still use LastFM as my primary source for recommendations and it does okay.<p>But I will never forget how wonderful Rdio was to use…it felt (atleast to me) like a service for people who loved music and discovering new music
This is very similar to what the British comedian James Acaster does/did. He buys music off Bandcamp then puts it on his iPod. He documented it all in his second book Perfect Sound Whatever, it helped him get over a breakup and depression around 2016 if I remember right. He jokes in his book that he has an 'iPod guy' who hooks him up with the old iPods. His recommendations here:<p><a href="https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/</a>
There is no way in hell that I am giving up on having instant access to 99.9% of all music, but I will say that Apple Music is infuriating in many ways. The desktop application is widely known to be crap, and, to the point of the article, my biggest frustration with the phone app is that 3 out of 5 icons along the bottom are dedicated to discovery. I don't want Apple to help me find music (that they likely get kick backs to promote).
I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.
I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify.<p>In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio.<p>I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one album. When I listened to a track I'd then lookup the album for the track, find the most similar albums and then play some random songs from those albums, but with some controls to make larger jumps possible. It was not using a vector database like FAISS so it was kinda slow and had other issues and with too much bitrot I'd need a complete rewrite to get it working again, but I found lots of new music with it.<p>Maybe there's some services like that out there now that can hook up to streaming services like Spotify?
I tried Tidal and couldn't tell enough of a difference in audio quality with lossless in the car (very capable sound system) or in headphones (beyer dynamics). It's just one of those things that people will convince themselves is worth it sometimes when most of the time it's not, really.<p>Eventually there were enough things missing on Tidal that I gave up and cancelled the sub and went back to Spotify.<p>Spotify does everything well enough for me that it's still the best streaming service. The fact they listened to Adele and changed the functionality of how album playback works has a <i>good</i> side too!<p>For me what would be awesome would be if they paid artists more. But that's true of any and all platforms like this.
I held out for a really long time. Google Music used to sell music and be an online player at the same time, which was pretty good. Then they threw that away.
Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient.<p>I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land.<p>Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember what I listened to this year.
For those going down this path, Funkwhale[1] provides a good user experience with ActivityPub support to join/build a community.<p>[1] <a href="https://funkwhale.audio/" rel="nofollow">https://funkwhale.audio/</a>
I had the same issue with Spotify prioritizing playlists over albums. My roommate and I built a Spotify "record player". We printed out album covers and glued them to plywood squares. There is a QR code with the spotify URI on the back. We have a Pi with a camera on the stand. When the album is in the stand we play the album from the beginning, using the Spotify API. If you take the album off the music stops. You can't pause or skip forward or back.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc</a> (Sorry, youtube made it a short and I don't know how to make it a video.)
I've always liked how spotify's mobile app and web/desktop app work together. I get on Spotify here and there (unpaid) to see if things have improved over the years, not much has changed...<p>I used to do the ipod thing with winamp back in napster days, then i kept a personal library just of cds i've bought, then i tried the subsonic thing i really liked dsub app for android. It was great but i really dont want to do server stuff at home...metadata on discs and bringing it over to digital audio, its never perfect and bugs me to where i'll spend hours cleaning it up...<p>I've been using Youtube music/Google music for many years, abandoned my digital files and i find a lot of my music on youtube and recommendations on YTM. I usually pick the bands im into and they have similar artists and drill down that way, im not a huge fan of auto discovery playlists.<p>YTM are going to be raising their rates, i pay for family premium, $15 -> $22/mo in april for me. So now im looking at alternatives and trying to avoid running a server and/or managing files. I think YTM has more music because of the youtube side but the client side UI sucks.
I've been using Plex with a server for my music on it for a while. I'd like to eventually switch to subsonic. Music has always been very personal for me -- I still have some sub-1000 youtube view songs I found as a 12 year old. So I've always known Spotify wouldn't be an answer for me. There's definitely a lot of unique and sometimes Spotify-exclusive content on the platform.<p>That being said.... nothing ever changes. Any cloud music platform has always been just another radio-- whether they brand themselves that way or not. For the year or so that I used spotify I did find some gems, but I would forget about them as quickly as I found them.<p>I think of my media library as something I have to put work into to have it be meaningful. Organizing it, deciding what you keep and what you toss out, what to pay for what to skip, all make it more important to you and more memorable. Having a library in itself is also of course a useful UX thing to remind yourself what you like and continue to go back to it.
I'm definitely the odd one out here. I hate any streaming service because the value of my music is being able to listen to that music whenever I want...including 20 years from now.<p>I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art.<p>I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band.<p>Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire.<p>Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify:<p>beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope<p>Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope<p>Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes<p>Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff<p>Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify<p>One Last Kiss - Utada Hikaru -> Yes<p>follow slowly - Nekomata Master -> Nope<p>Masada Gestalt - Zen Albatross -> Nope<p>Yin-Yang - Victor Wooten -> Yes<p>Zipangu - Wednesday Kanpanera -> Surprisingly, yes<p>Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope<p>Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes<p>Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No<p>The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes<p>So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate.<p>That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term.
I still pay for Spotify premium cause I’m scared they would remove my username and replace it with a random gibberish string. My account is one of the first sign ups where you get to choose usernames. Bandcamp looks nice, I miss buying physical albums.
I’ve never felt much of an allure for music streaming services. They’re great for skimming, but pretty useless for anything non-mainstream, so I’ve been slowly amassing a ripped CD library for decades, and use Plex (and the pretty amazing PlexAmp) to get at it.<p>My only gripe with Plex is that the only voice assistant that interacts with it is Alexa, and it requires me to have my Plex server shared over the Internet. On the other hand, that’s been handy a couple of times when I was out and about and wanted to stream a couple of songs (which it did as well as Spotify).
> I think a lot of people would probably look at my distaste of Spotify and recommend another, more suitable, streaming platform like Apple music or Pandora<p>Just go to YTM?<p>I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much).<p>Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now.<p>I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.
awesome to see somebody else fed up with it. i just did the same about 2-3 months ago and landed on bandcamp (and steam for video game ost's haha). sadly there's still a lot of fragmentation and i'm trying to find other good places to buy DRM free music. (looking for old BTBAM if anyone has an idea)<p>i do have vinyl as well for some of my favorites. but digital is still my primary listening mode.
I'm positively surprised this is actually not another Why I'm leaving twitter virtue signalling post, since I can imagine people doing same with Spotify over some content they don't like, nice to see for change someone leaving some platform for actual rational reasons.
Tidal is a relevant half measure for those looking to leave Spotify for a more album centric service with better profit sharing for artists. I used the FreeYourMusic app to migrate playlists, favorited songs, and albums.