As per the title - do you use a music streaming service? If so which one(s) and do you spring for the pay premium versions? What are the differences that matter to you? Any deeper in certain genres than others?
pandora free. I like it, but if you are into anything out of the mainstream they start repeating themselves. I tried listening to some lesser known comedians, after a few dozen comedy bits they just start repeating the same bits over and over.
Spotify premium - totally worth it with the family plan because you split the bill. I mostly listen to single songs on my alexa and google home, but also stream and download music albums and comedy albums for long road trips.
NPR.
They have maybe 12 genres and very little talk.
no repetition.
I mainly listen to Alt Latino
It rocks!
IHeartRadio, mostly the channel that plays the Casey Kasem AT40 shows from the 70s and 80s.
I used to use Pandora and sculpted a channel with songs that I really like. I was happy generally. But it kind of stopped playing anything new.
Then in response to a thread opened by Idle Thoughts, I opened up a Spotify account and added some songs to “your music.” Unexpectedly, I discovered that there was a playlist under my account called “Discover Weekly.” I didn’t remember creating it, but I gave it a listen. I was blown away! Like 27 out of 30 songs were absolute winners that I had never heard before.
Apparently, after your account has been open for two weeks, every Monday morning they create a new playlist for you based on what you’ve been listening to called “Discover Weekly.” The percentage of smash hits has gone down a bit since then, but still every Monday morning I eagerly look forward to it.
I use the free versions of both.
Do you have that thread by Idle Thoughts? This sounds like a good idea. I am very disappointed in pandora and lastFM for recommending new songs or artists. If Spotify can do it I want to try it out.
Pandora premium. I love that there are no commercials. But to be fair, premium was a bday present. Not sure if spend my own beer money on it.
He proposed creating a shared playlist on Spotify to allow SMDB members to share their favorite songs. Unfortunately only like 3 or 4 people contributed to it. That’s a shame.
I like the Discover Weekly playlist, but I only have experience using it for the kind of music I like. It appears that most people here are into 60s and 70s or classic rock, which is really not my style. If that is your taste, I don’t know how well it would work – maybe great, maybe not so great. Let me know if it works for you.
I’m sorry, I just noticed that you said in an earlier post that you subscribe to Spotify already.
Look under “playlists” and you should already see a playlist called “Discover Weekly.” You don’t have to sign up for it or anything. It just magically appears in your personal list of playlists every Monday morning.
I am also a fan of Spotify and look forward to Discover Weekly. My wife and I share the account and we have some overlapping tastes, but do listen to a lot of different music. So, it’s always interesting to hear what shows up each week. It’s a lot of bands I have never heard of but really great stuff.
I pay for Pandora. I’ve found that I like the variety of music that it plays for me. When I tried Spotify, I didn’t like what they played nearly as much.
90% of my Pandora listening is on one station: Alt Country Radio.
Free Pandora for me. I’ve never had a problem with it and listening to a 30 second commercial every 5 songs or whatever is a pittance to pay.
I am subscribed to Slacker Radio. I do the $10 unlimited plan and like it a lot. Funny but it almost never gets mentioned on this type of comparison.
I will say that while the music service is great, the customer service is lacking.
I’m on premium-only Apple Music because they had a 3-months-free offer and I’ve been using Apple stuff for 30+ years now. I was fine with Spotify Premium before, but I haven’t had a reason to make the effort to switch back.
I don’t see a big difference nowadays between the two content-wise. They’ve nowadays got mostly the same music I care about. Discover Weekly and New Music Mix do pretty much the same thing. Their artist-based radio stations are similarly inferior to Pandora’s in my opinion, but I mostly listen to albums. I do like Apple’s suggested albums of the day feature – they’ve got 4 groups of 4 albums under categories like “Because you listen to rock,” “Since you’re into New Order,” “Explore more rock,” and “Some electronic for today.” I have about half of the albums they suggest, which I think is a nice proportion. I don’t remember if Spotify has something similar.
Apple Music is slightly better than Spotify on my iPhone because it integrates my existing library of ~400 CDs in Apple’s non-mp3 format better. (This might make the New Music Mix better than Discover Weekly, but I haven’t really noticed a difference.) Spotify is better on my PC because it doesn’t require iTunes to play, which means I could conceivably play it at work if my phone dies and nobody’s around to be disturbed. If Spotify gave me 3 free months, I’d switch back without much thought.
I didn’t see it, but I found online you can type ‘discover weekly’ into the search bar to find it if it isn’t showing up.
My issue is I don’t really use spotify like pandora. I use spotify to listen to singles on my smart devices, and I download some comedy and music albums for long trips. I don’t know if my spotify account knows my tastes well enough to predict what I’d like.
I’ll have to experiment with it.
I’ve always bought my music from Amazon (they had downloadable DRM-free music before iTunes did) so when Prime Music happened I was already right there, with a generous library of my own. And I was an early adopter for the Echo (it was $99 when I bought it, then I think $179 for quite a while) so I had this little voice-controlled speaker over which to play all my Amazon content. I was right there when they started giving away free streaming music.
I haven’t signed up for their Ultimate music streaming service. I don’t listen to enough music to need more than what I’ve already got (between what I’ve purchased over the years, what I’ve uploaded and what I’ve grabbed from fee streaming), which is only about 2500 songs but it’s 2500 songs I love.
I do have a free Spotify account. If there’s new music/new artist I want to check out I’ll head over there. If I like it well enough I’ll buy it on Amazon or grab it for free from Amazon. A lot of the new music I get I end up buying so I can download it and put it on my workout mix, which is for the pool, where I don’t have access to streaming.
Here’s Wikipedia’s comparison of services, which I like to check out from time-to-time.
I had a longer post that was lost. I have spotify free and Amazon prime music. Prime music comes with the prime account, and during my past couple weeks of use, there were a handful of times that they didn’t have the song I searched for. That rarely happens with spotify’s larger catalog. I’ll probably sign up for spotify premium soon because you can’t pair an Echo with spotify free, and spotify free’s mobile app doesn’t allow you to play music in the order that you choose.
At home, it’s Pandora free (usually the Sunday Funday Brunch station)
At work Amazon Prime because it’s my 2nd favorite and it isn’t blocked the Corporate Internet Gods.
Pandora is awesome; especially if you listen to the same station and cull the play list by using the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons.
Amazon Prime is nice because it’s easy to pick one artist only if you’re that’s your preference.
I subscribe to Google Music and I couldn’t go back to not having it. I use it all the time. As a bonus, it also includes YouTube Red which removes ads from all youtube videos and allows for offline playback which is pretty useful. YouTube Red is almost worth the subscription price by itself.
I love subscription music services, and currently have two active subscriptions, and am also enjoying a 90 day free trial of another. The rundown:
Napster - For the longest time this was Rhapsody, and I have had a subscription with them for over 10 years. Easy to use, plenty of featured playlists, easy to create your own playlists, and fairly easy to use to discover new music and related artists. Streams at 320 kbps. $10 per month, but discounted to $100 per year if you pay at once. I think the catalog is 30+ million tracks, which is a big improvement over Pandora.
Deezer - pretty similar to Napster, has a couple of interesting features, one is something called Flow, which is a playlist/radio that is based on your favorites. Also has live radio stations and podcasts. Similar size catalog to Napster. $10 per month for 320 kbps streams, also has a hifi service for $20 per month that streams lossless FLAC music. They are rolling that out slowly, but Sonos does support that, so if you go with a Sonos systems that may be worth considering.
Tidal - this is the one I am trying on a 90 day free trial, and while I didn’t think that I would like it, it actually turns out to be a nice as any other service I’ve tried. For this one I am trying the Hifi (again, FLAC files). Tidal seems to have some really well thought out playlists to listen to. One really nice feature for me is that their PC app allows Tidal to take exclusive control of a computer audio device. What that allows me to do is send the hifi music through my computer’s optical output to an outboard DAC, which then feeds my stereo. All other PC sounds still go to my cheap desktop computer speakers, so I don’t hear them on my stereo system. Nice touch. Like Deezer, $10 per month for 320 kbps streams, $20 for lossless.
I am still on the fence about if lossless is something I can actually tell from the 320 kbps streams. Certainly not through my car stereo or the Logitech speaker I have at work. But my home stereo is an Adcom preamp/tuner, Adcom amp, and Ohm Walsh 2 speakers, which has always sounded excellent to me. If I could hear a difference, it would be on that system I suppose. But it’s nice to think that I am playing CD quality music on it. At any rate, the lossless music doesn’t hurt, except for the extra $10.
But yeah, for me streaming is the way to go. I haven’t bought a CD in years but still listen to just about everything I want to, and have discovered a ton of new music and artists along the way.
Other thoughts - Spotify. I tried to like it but the interface never clicked for me (and the Roku interface just straight up sucked). It basically does what every other streaming app does though.
Apple music - again it basically does what every other streaming app does. I didn’t like the interface as well as Napster, probably because I was more familiar with Napster. But my real beef with Apple Music is that I used to use MOG, which at the time was the greatest service ever. It still would be, if it hadn’t had been bought by Beats, run into the ground, and then later bought by Apple to become Apple music as a shell of the wonder that MOG was. So fuck Jimmy Iovine and his shitty ideas.