I’m looking for suggestions.
I gave spotify a try this past week and was unimpressed. Using the search function on their app would yeild positive results maybe 3 or 4 times out of 10 searches for specific songs. Building playlists of the songs I wanted was basically impossible. Their premade playlists seemed really weird. Who puts Twisted Sister together with Slayer then Journey then Whitesnake, Yes and Dio? This just made their urging to switch to their premium service irritating, why would I want to pay for offline music storage and playback from them instead of just buying the song directly from the artist one time and getting the same thing?
So, tell me what streaming music service you use. Why do you like it? Does it have a decent free tier of service with a large(ish) catalog of music to choose from or do they just have a few B-side songs with one, maybe two A-side songs for any particular performer. Are playlists easy to compose? Do they have decent premade playlist selections that are more than just a bunch of songs from the same decade thrown together?
We have subscriptions to Spotify, Tidal, and qobuz. We have Tidal and qobuz because of the quality of the streaming music (something Mr. Athena is into) and Spotify because (if you can believe it) both Tidal and qobuz’s interfaces suck even worse than Spotify, and also because the whole world uses Spotify and I don’t like finding an interesting playlist on the interwebs and having to painstakingly reproduce it on another service.
They all have very similar catalogs, with Tidal probably winning by a hair. 98% of what we play is available on all 3 services.
I like the built-in playlists on Spotify the best of the three. Actually, I’m not even sure if Tidal and qobuz HAVE curated playlists; if they do, I haven’t found them on their stupid interfaces yet.
We will likely drop either Tidal or qobuz once Mr. Athena decides which one he likes the best. We do listen to a lot of streaming music since Mr. Athena decided to put together a kick-ass stereo a couple years ago. I love being able to stream whatever I want, whenever I want, but boy oh boy, I don’t understand why even one service can’t manage to put together a usable user interface.
I use Pandora, it was the first one I got and it’s the one I like best, it forces me to listen to variety and I find more stuff that way. I switch between their free service and their lowest cost one. When I find a song I like I will buy it in my own collection, which is not straight forward to do as Pandora doesn’t sell songs, at least not on their iOS platform. Over time this has allowed me to use their for pay service less as I have a alternative when I don’t want ads and I can wait for a deal to buy back in for a while. All and all I find pricing of streaming services too high and feel I would rather buy my own collection.
I have the opposite experience. At first Pandora gave me a good variety of stuff I liked but then it just settles into the same bundle of tracks and rarely has anything new. If I start a new station, it might offer a couple new songs but then goes right back to the same well, often playing songs that I’ve liked in the past but are barely related to the supposed “seed” track for that station. I eventually hit a point where I had already bought the new stuff I liked from their pool and they never had anything much new and canceled.
So how is pandoras catalog of older pre-digital age music? ABBA, The Captain and Teneille, Neil Diamond and the like?
Variety is ok when I’m driving, and commercials don’t generally bother me much, but sometimes I’m in a particular mood. Then I want my own playlists, not some mish mash thrown together by someone or a computer just because “category”.
F’rinstance, at work I like a variety of songs that include many of the different types of metal, country, pop, rap etc. The songs I might pick are ones that help me establish concentration, rhythm and speed. Driving music could be anything from classical (as a broad category including opera) to my “at work” music depending on variety of factors including fun.
Wait, wth? There are devoted channels to various artists? No, I’ve only ever been able to find playlists “featuring”
I’m not opposed to paying for the service, but I’d like to try it out for a bit, even at reduced levels of service before buying. Spotify has definately done a very poor sales job with me.
Is this a sarcastic comment that’s going over my head?
I use the free version of Spotify and I find hundreds of songs by Abba and hundreds by Motorhead – pages and pages of songs going back to the 1970s. Did you check the artist pages? Or are you just looking in pre-made playlists? I don’t follow either group so I don’t know if the list is complete or not, but I would be quite surprised if they don’t have almost every song either group has ever released.
I have never had a problem with Spotify not having a commercially-released track. The problem is just the opposite: If I search for a given song name but can’t remember the performer, I get thousands of hits.
When I use the search, I look for a specific artist, rather than a song. Either they have more than one song I want or I’ve heard one or two of their songs and want to explore their work.
I get 1 album, a few random individual songs and 3 to 5 play lists featuring that group or singer, thats it. To find additional music I have to dig for it with usually limited results.
How long have you used spotify? Maybe they’ve changed to try to drive more people into premium? This past week was the first time I’ve ever used it so maybe I got herded up into somerhing you didn’t as a longer term subscriber?
I use Amazon Music Unlimited and I’m really happy with it. They’ve had every song I’ve searched for and it’s extrenely easy to download anything you want to listen to offline, either to save data use or if you want to listen with no WiFi service.
This is a user interface problem. Search Motor Head. Click on the link below the title “artist” this will open up the artist page. Then you can scroll down and see the top played songs followed by the album page listing every album released followed by singles and eps followed by compilation followed by other peoples albums they appeared on.
You can get literally everything Motor Head ever recorded on Spotify and find it all on that one page. After you use it for a few weeks it will start making Playlists based on what it thinks you will like. I find these to be eerily accurate.
Spotify isn’t super intuitive but it has everything.
It pays artists like dirt though so if you want to support artists use Tidal or buy albums.
Or if you see an artist you like somewhere on Spotify, just click on the artist’s name and it will take you to the artist’s home page where you will probably see every track that artist has ever released.
Sure but I’d have to be doing that to 80% of my stuff. I wasn’t using the service to try to brute force it into giving me variety. Plus, I wasn’t necessarily tired of those songs and wanted them blacklisted for 30 days, I just wanted new stuff in the rotation.
