Tell me about streaming music apps

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been listening to most of my music on YouTube(the free version)and Sirius xm (car and phone app)for years. My devices are Android, no Apple.
If i get sick of commercials on YouTube, or don’t know what i want to hear, i switch to Sirius.
I just passed my “trial offer” period with Sirius, so its time to cancel again, or get hit for $22 a month. The Sirius Phone app just dropped my favorite station, Nug s .n et, a live jam band station. I sent Sirius a pleasantly worded email stating that i will not renew my sevice if they don’t find a replacement for my favorite station. No reply, its been months.
I’m thinking of dropping Sirius for good now. It just seems like most folk are using Spotify these days. I do love the Sirius phone app. I can always find something i like.
What are the advantages of Spotify over YouTube?
Mrs. Trees uses Pandora in the car. We did a four hour trip a few weeks ago. Her Pandora didn’t play a commercial the whole trip. Mrs. Trees insists that she is not paying for premium service. She says Pandora doesn’t play commercials if she doesn’t skip songs. I don’t buy it. I told her to check her bank statement.

Is there an app that is the best choice for buying premium service? How do the prices of premium music streaming apps compare? Best special features, like on demand, recording or saving features, or exclusive content?
If there is a free app that is lighter on commercials than the others?
My solution cannot be to download all the apps.
I buy the cheapest phone available, and i don’t bog it down with apps. I take it easy on my cheapo phones, and they serve me well for years.

Im sure this topic has been done, but i want to hear what’s going on right now.

2

I can’t speak to the other parts, since I use Apple Music which doesn’t really work if you aren’t on Apple devices, but you can easily get your promo rate back for SiriusXM.

Just log in to you account, and use the chat bot saying you want to cancel service unless you can keep your rate. They will allow you to do so, and perhaps even provide a better rate. Mine is $6/mo for 12 months. You just have to play the game every year to keep the rate.

I don’t have unlimited data on my phone plan, so I tend to use SiriusXM in the car or listen to music I have already downloaded to my device via Apple Music. It does have a nice feature where it will auto-generate a playlist based on what you like and you can download the whole list to play offline. Again, probably not a solution if you don’t use Apple devices.

3

I have tried Pandora, AppleMusic, Spotify and YouTube Music (formerly GooglePlay). For my use case, YouTube Music is far superior and as a bonus you get ad free regular YouTube with a paid subscription. They all cost about the same and on the surface behave similarly.

My usage is probably different than yours though. Every one of them, last I checked, will give you a free month. Do the free month of each and pick the one you like best.

4

All of them have that. Some do better than others depending on your taste in music.

5

I think it boils down to what the OP wants in terms of a streaming service.

Yes, I know that’s bloody obvious, but let me dig down a bit - it’s about priorities. So, for me, I generally look at the following:

  1. Cost.
  2. Ease of Use
  3. Selection of Music

And it’s normally nearly in that order, although 2 and 3 shift a bit.

So far, we’ve heard the OP doesn’t want to pay 22/month for Sirius, and that the selection of music isn’t as good as it was. There’s also a second cost mention, the not having unlimited cellular data (which is a cost choice) so that offline streaming was a better match.

If I consider all three, then, frankly, streaming is at a bit of a nadir right now compared to the golden age.

I’ve used Pandora, which very quickly got overtaken by excessive adds, Amazon Music which suffers from extreme enshittification but still gets some love due to not being considered an ‘extra’ cost in the household (we use Prime Video and the shipping enough to consider it nearly a “utility”), and Youtube music.

Of them all, Youtube music has been the best in all categories, even at the “free” level with advertisements.

But, depending on the OP’s technical savvy and offline music collections, it’s really hard to beat ripping your personally owned music library via any number of applications and just hitting random on a self-built playlist. It’s basically free, gets you a wide variety of music you like enough to purchase, and ease of use is normally fair-to-good depending on the software you use.

At a casual glance, my (owned) music library synced to my phone is over 11 days of music. Sure, not all of that would meet all my moods, but with over a dozen themed playlists, I have a good bit of pre-arranged subdivisions.

I may or may not be an outlier in that respect though, so YMMV.

6

Rick Beato largely agrees with you:

Stranger

7

Apple Music works fine on Android.

8

Part of it will have to do with your taste in music. All of the major names in streaming will have the popular bands/musicians but Spotify is better in my opinion for more obscure, new or small acts since everyone assumes they need to be on Spotify anyway. I’ve looked at a few other services and plugged in some names off my Like list and none of them had all the groups.

Youtube might be closest but I’ve never really liked YT’s algorithm. It regularly tries to push some artist I’m not interested in despite me saying I’m not interested and I don’t find much new music I’m interested in based on its suggestions. That’s on the video “standard” Youtube side but I doubt its music side is using something significantly different. I couldn’t about the ad situation since I use it enough to warrant paying for a Duo sub for my wife and I.

9

Thanks all!
It seems like most of you are saying they’re all about the same.
Im going to try Spotify first, because was on my phone when i bought it. I’ve never opened the app yet.

10

From the standpoint of an artist, I’d rather you bought my music through iTunes or Bandcamp. None of the streaming services pay us anything remotely worthwhile. I’ve made more busking in the subway for a couple of hours than I’ve ever made off Spotify, for example.

11

Regarding Sirus, the whole $22 a month thing is really annoying to me. If you call to cancel and tell them it’s too much money, they will after several back-and-forths give you a deal of $5 per month, $60 per year. But after taxes/fees/whatever it’s more like $75 per year. Still a decent deal.

I still wound up canceling in January because yearly cancel to get a better rate charade got old, but there are better deals. I called them in May to see if they had any deals and they gave me 3 months for like $2. Their pricing is non-nonsensical. They could save a lot of rep time and customer frustration by just offering a straight $5 per month with no games.

12

I would keep Sirius for $5 a month. Last year when i canceled, the best deal i was able to get, was $11 a month. Maybe i need to hold off a little longer this time.

13

Well, i tried Spotify. So far, nothing too impressive. I take it that YouTube Music was made as a clone of spotify. It seems to be exactly the same.
I often listen to whole live concerts, mostly jam bands. Youtube seems to come out on top in this regard.
I’m probably going to end up sticking with free Youtube.
I may look into subscribing to Nugs dot net. Its just hard to justify paying for a subscription for only one genre of music.

14

Yep, keep saying “No, sorry, that is still too much.” Every time they have given in and went down to $5 (plus fees) per month. I did that 4 or 5 years in a row.

15

On one hand, I don’t doubt this is true. On the other, the artists I HAVE spent money on buying their albums/merch/tickets in the last ten years were almost all small acts discovered via streaming service recommendations (mainly Spotify but Pandora for a while there as well). I wouldn’t have found them by randomly browsing Bandcamp or waiting for their music to appear on FM radio.

16

Me too and absolutely. That’s why I have YTM. nugs doesn’t have the value for me especially since they don’t have the Black Friday special anymore

You should 100% check out ReListen which is free and has thousands of jam band recordings from all of our favorites from the 60’s to the present.

17

Thanks for suggesting ReListen. So much stuff i love!
It looks like they don’t have an app for Android, but i don’t mind streaming from a website.

18

I have had Tidal for a few years and I like it. I haven’t compared services lately so I can’t comment on what’s happening right now with various services. But at the time, Tidal had the best audio quality and it also paid the musicians more fairly than the other services.

19

First off, on behalf of all the artists you support, may I say “Thank you! We all appreciate you!!”?

I’m sorry to say that you are a rare person, ‘più unico che raro’ as the Italians would say. (‘Closer to unique than to rare’ - it just doesn’t roll off the tongue in English…) The overwhelming majority of people who use Spotify tend to think of it as their only source of music, and seem to think ‘There’s the maximum value for my dollar on music; now, I can use the money I save on other things, like wine or chocolate.’. My roommate of two years was certainly like that - she had no means of listening to music other than Spotify. It went on, and was in the background - she had no idea what she was listening to other than the description of the playlist, and it would freak her out a bit when I’d say things like ‘What was playing three songs ago? What can you tell me about it?’. The answer was invariable that she couldn’t remember anything about what she’d listened to ten minutes ago.

Different strokes and all, but that’s not even remotely how I approach listening to music…

And the artists are indeed paid the cube root of fuck all.