I’ve subscribed to Google Play Music cor several years, and love it. It does all the same stuff Spotify and Apple does: radio stations, playlists, etc. It also has podcasts and links to videos. You can upload your personal mp3s and stream them, or listen via an SD card.
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Well, it did give me a link (didn’t explore it at the time) to what seemed to be an artist page or channel or whatever they call it, that was new for me.
Everyone keeps saying that spotify doesn’t have a very good user interface, plus, I’ve never used it so I’m trying to figure this out. Everyone I know around me locally uses pandora or other services. I’ll give spotify another go now that I have a bit of advice and see if I can do better.
My advice is to take advantage of the free trials and try them all. That said, here is my two cents:
Napster. I really like the interface, and creating playlists is easy. It also has a huge amount of featured playlists if you like that sort of thing. I may pick up and drop other steaming services, but I always have Napster. And they offer a discount if you pay for an entire year for $96 ($8 per month).
Tidal. I started using Tidal because of the lossless files, and if you have a good stereo system I think it is worth it. It has the ability to output directly to a optical or coaxial digital output regardless of what your computer settings are, which means that the music goes to the stereo system, and sound from your computer (such as autoplay videos on a web site) goes to your computer speakers,which you can turn down or off. No one wants to hear that over the music. Tidal will also develop specific playlists for you called ‘My Mix #’ (I currently have six of them). They are based on your listening history, and if you like them it is easy to save them. Which is important because they are dynamic and change over time. Here’s the thing, it turns out that these My Mix playlists are really good. Amazingly good. Surprisingly good. And they stay within a genre so you don’t have jarring changes. I go to these playlists first when I open the app. Did I mention that they are good? They are.
Deezer. I like the ‘Flow’ feature that plays a customized radio stream based on what you have as favorite tracks. It also tends to have tracks that other services don’t have.
Apple music. I use this only because Verizon is giving me 6 months free. Let me tell you a story about Apple music. A long time ago there was a streaming service called MOG. MOG was simply the best streaming service there ever was. Then a few people in the music industry (Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre, among others I believe) vastly overrated their expertise and bought MOG and turned it into Beats music, completely fucking up everything with the actual streaming service. But they had flashy artists and an image. Apple was attracted to this image, and bought Beats and turned it into Apple music, without once noticing that the streaming service was crap. And so it remains, in my opinion. Man, I am still pissed that they fucked up MOG. Anyway, it’s free for me and I still don’t use it. But I have tried listening to the Beats1 radio several times, and every single time it’s been stupid gits with British accents talking incessantly about stupid shit, and not playing music. So if that’s your thing, they got you.