I’ve been looking for an alternative to Spotify that is fair for artists, and in line with how I consume music. I really love Bandcamp, but for me the impossibility to create playlists makes it very hard to use it.
What’s important to me in this digital world is to have my music synced on all my devices, content and playlists, and being able to listen to them without actively syncing, or needing to transfer via cable/bluetooth.
I want to purchase music, pay for its right price and own the digital file, but I don’t want to sacrifice the usability that I gained through Spotify.
Do any of you have a custom solution in that regard? A combination of Dropbox/iCloud and a music player?
I’m on my (what seems like) annual hunt for a better alternative. Just depends on how you class an alternative as ‘better’ as any of the streaming models, unfortunately, all work on different shades of the same apalling level of financial reward. Unless you’re Ed Sheeran or Adele.
I have dabbled with Deezer in the past which I really liked actually and, at the time, they were reported to give the highest percentage of streaming royalties but Deezer and also Apple now have all gone down the same shit route of promoting their own playlists and ‘compilations’ over a music-matching algorithmn that actually works like you’d want it to: to recommend you similar artists or albums. The story goes (I remember reading) that they can pay the artists less that way. I don’t know if that’s true or how that works.
Right, so what I am trying to get to is litteraly to buy music from Bandcamp and being able to sync it in a player that is playlist friendly accross all my devices.
Now I realise that iTunes is probably offering something like that already.
Yeah, I still have all of my CDs ripped onto a massive hard drive and use iTunes to access it as you describe. It’s decent if you’re fully immersed in the Apple universe, not so great if you’re not.
iTunes used to be a really good focus manager/player but then it all became really bloated when they started adding other media like podcasts etc.
Of course. You can ‘import’ and manage audio files with it OK though still. But as far as getting that stuff on other devices apart from the computer that has iTunes, that’s not fun unless you have iPad/iPhone.
I use cloudplayer, back up all your files to dropbox/google drive/onedrive and it automatically syncs and can be played back on your phone and casted, etc… it’s a nice player, premium version costs less than a tenner I think, worth it for sure
I think royalties are based on how many plays in a three hour period you play. If you play three songs consecutively by the same artist from the same album you need to pay royalties, so I’m pretty sure they’re pushing playlists for that reason.