This is from a ‘consumer’ point-of-view, not as a platform for me to release music on.
Spotify can do one. I’ve always hated it and some recent revelations have tipped me over the edge.
Bandcamp is currently in purgatory for me at the moment. I will need to see how things work out with it’s new corporate masters. I’ve been using it for a while and it’s decent enough but I found it had only about 10% of artists that I was trying to find (and my tastest aren’t that weird)
Been checking out Tidal and Napster which are both decent platforms and, for what it’s worth, pay more than all of the other platforms. Napster considerably more but most review and tech and music sites seem to ignore or swerve it. Is there a reason for that?
Out of all of them I’ve tried (and I’ve done Apple Music, Deezer and Google too before you ask) Tidal is the one that impresses me the most but it has a…sketchy…history.
I like Tidal. Sound quality is great and the app works fine for me on iOS. They’ve introduced that new pay tier too which gives a chunk of your subscription fee to your most listened to artist per month. Not the end all in terms of artist compensation, but it’s something.
I will also rep for Tidal. The crediting information alone makes it a huge improvement over Spotify. You can actually search for, say, all the records produced by Cate Le Bon, or just records where Archie Shepp plays on it, or whatever . .
BUT, also the sound quality is immediately noticeably much much better than Spotify.
I moved from Spotify to Apple Music. Maybe that’s akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire but when forced to choose the least bad option I’d rather my money go to Tim Cook than Josh Rogan. Apple Music’s user interface sucks, but the sound quality is noticeably better. It also seems to have more B sides and extras for hard core fans of certain bands (my daughter is a big Vampire Weekend fan and has discovered loads of extras on Apple Music that weren’t on Spotify).
I like how Apple Music just started offering Lossless Streaming without really saying anything or changing prices. I had been using it because of the convenience (bundles and family sharing), but lossless streaming kind of stopped me looking elsewhere.
When I try a streaming service, whichever it is, there are always some songs that I am looking for that are unavailable.
And 99.99% of the time it is on youtube.
Most of my streaming use is from the mobile phone, mostly when in a not perfect environment. So I don’t see how I can justify paying monthly if I always end up firing up newpipe.
So my advice is buy your vinyls/CDs/DRM free lossless files directly, go to concerts to support the artists. Play the former when usung decent gear at home and just use an adfree youtube player for anything else.
If you want to access your CD/vinyls rips and purchased files from anywhere you can also host an ampache or libresonic server from an old computer or raspberry pi running as a server at home.
Purchasing music > streaming services. No artist or record label will ask you to give back your records/files at home, you don’t lose your collection or existing playlists when switching shop or if the streaming service dies. Streaming attract people by conveniency only to bite back months/years later.
You can definitely edit playlists in the Android app so I’m not sure you’re correct there?
You can’t change the cover image though on Tidal, which is my annoying. You can on Napster though but on Napster you can’t reorder them.
Edit: oh, no, you can reorder playlist tracks on Napster it just isn’t as obvious as Tidal. This round goes to Napster! I also like you seem to be able to tag your playlists with multiple genres. Nice touch.
