Example: Mine is Pandora, but I’ve used Jango for more independent artists as well.
Despite my complaints about their business practices, I still stick with Spotify. Their family pricing is pretty decent, the integration with third-party services/products is really solid, and it’s exceedingly rare that they don’t have what I’m wanting to listen to (and in those cases, it’s usually because the artist doesn’t have their music available to stream anywhere at all). I just wish they weren’t such scumbags in pretty much every other area.
I’ve been ride or die Spotify basically since they release in North America, and have had a family plan going for years with my wife, a house account, and then my sister and my parents on it, and it was great, but they’ve become such turds about their family plan. Yes fine, my sister and parents don’t live with me so if your IP flag shows up and you want to email them to have them confirm their address, that’s whatever. But they emailed my wife, and when she didn’t reply in a week they dropped her from my account and noted that she couldn’t rejoin it and that was a bridge too far for me.
I’ve been paying for Apple+ or whatever it is for a while for the two of us but liked Spotify enough that the now $20ish a month was worth it, but this pushed me to migrate all our playlists over to Apple and just use the service we were already paying for. I can’t understand why Spotify would be such butts about it because I easily would have gone up to $30/month to cover my family but now they’re getting nothing from me.
Similar - I signed up for my Spotify account with a VPN, as it was only available in Europe / UK / something like that. Have been paying for as long as I can remember.
With our family account, we had a house account, wife, mother, grandmother, and myself. In reality, only 2 of those accounts really got used.
The family verification emails were definitely annoying. But the yearly price hike with few important feature improvements, combined with things like audiobooks being for the primary account only, caused me to re-eval.
Now, my wife is on a student plan on Spotify, and I’m trialing Tidal. I expect to stick with Tidal based on lossless and higher pay for artists. If I don’t, I’ll likely swing over to Apple Music. Switching and migrating playlists is pretty painless, overall.
In any case, I’m glad I’m out of that abusive relationship with Spotify.
Bandcamp, 100%. I’m under the impression that it’s the best third party platform for forwarding the biggest percentage of sales to the actual musicians. If there’s a better one I’d love to hear about it. That’s the most important thing to me before anything else.
Tidal or Apple Music.
I’m currently leaning toward YouTube music.
I’ve subscribed on and off from Pandora for years (remember their founder sending you an email thanking you for participating in his experiment?). I find that my stations quickly start playing the same set of songs over and over.
I’ve also given Spotify a shot, but it seems like you either have to make your own playlist or listen to someone else’s. I personally like the algorithm fuled rabbit hole.
YouTube music has a decent catalog and their suggestions have introduced me to a lot of good music. Their android auto experience kinda stinks, and most things are transitory (eg no stations you tweak to your preferences over time), but IMO the discovery it offers is worth it. I also like that it lets you actively manage your queue, add songs/albums to it, rearrange things, etc.
My beef with YouTube music is that no matter what song I start from, in 4 songs it has turned into Levitating by Dua Lipa.
Children’s songs? Foreign language? Electro swing? Hip hop? Doesn’t matter. Levitating is coming soon.
With regular YouTube I swear if I watch any music video, or even non-music videos sometimes, there’s about a 50-50 chance that the next recommended music video is “In the meantime” by Spacehog. Don’t get wrong it’s a good song, but jeez I keep attempting to go down music video rabbit holes and all it shows me are ones I’ve already seen.
Mine is pain by boy harsher. I like boy harsher. But the frequency that it comes up is uncanny. Though on the whole the algorithm does do fairly well for me and I have quite eclectic taste. Punk, Post Punk, goth, electro swing, horror Punk, Psychobilly, chap hop, EBM, EDM, darkwave, new wave, all the other wave wave, classic rockc, metal, rockabilly, etc.
But for me. YT just has way more of what I listen to. And one of the nicer things is I can switch between regular audio or music video on appropriate devices.
Pandora because I’m old. Also I don’t like the Spotify algorithm.
Pandora’s “radio” function is just way better. I spent years on Pandora when it was brand new, then years on Spotify when it came out in the US, then back to Pandora a few years ago. Predictive playlusys on Spotify suck, it gives you the same songs over and over based on genre rather than artist or song. Pandora digs way deeper and often plays me music I’ve never heard before.
I’m bummed they’re owned by SiriusXM now, I just have this feeling they’re going to stop investing and kill it one day
Pandora has best radio functionality of all the stteqmong services till date, iniwws tp have Pandora when it was available globally and with radio functionality it was as if you are one who selected those songs. Ibtoed of coming back to USA , tried it with VPN. I have tried all the streaming services and nobody has best algo to choose songs like Pandora has YouTube is coming that way but it’s still not as good as Pandora. I would have bought 0andora solely because of that but it seems that they will never be available out of USA :(
