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Slashdot Asks: What's Your Preferred Music Streaming Service?

Posted by msmash on from the affinity-for-music dept.

Spotify announced on Monday that it has hit 100 million users on its music streaming service, with over 30 million paid subscribers. The Swedish music company's service rivals with Apple Music, Pandora, and Google's Play Music. Apple's streaming service, which was launched last year, has over 15 million paid customers as of earlier this month. Amazon also reportedly plans to launch its music streaming service later this year. YouTube is also a stop for many music listeners, and so is radio.

How do you get your music? Do you still purchase CDs and DVDs? Anyone with a turntable in the audience?

7 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. MP3 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative


     

    1. Re:MP3 by alvinrod · · Score: 5, Informative

      I think people get confused by the name, but the AAC format is not a proprietary Apple format, nor was it even developed by Apple. If you have older hardware it might only support MP3 (which AAC was designed to replace) but almost any newer "MP3" player will support AAC. Apple originally sold their music with a closed DRM wrapper called FairPlay, but they (along with everyone else in the business) stopped selling DRM-encumbered music years ago.

      For what it's worth if you're going to buy music online you should probably get it in a lossless format (FLAC) so that if you format-shift it won't result in additional degradation beyond what the lossy codec would normally involve. In practical terms it doesn't matter that much since audio codecs aren't changing terribly often and almost everything is backwards compatible with the older formats, but if you re-encoded your lossy files enough they would eventually sound like garbage.

  2. I listen to a free service... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Radio.

  3. Re: Family Plans by lucm · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pandora > Google play music (songza) > Spotify > A tape mix done by my gf in 5th grade > Apple Music.

    But no Pandora in Canada I think.

    --
    lucm, indeed.
  4. Re:Pandora and Amazon for me by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Back when I finally started rethinking my resistance to the idea of paying for streaming music, I kept reading about how Pandora had "only" a million songs, while Spotify and Apple Music had somewhere around 30 million. But when I was listening to Apple Music in the genres I often like to play in the background (jazz, swing, blues), I was hearing a lot of repeats - so I did some testing.

    This is obviously subjective, but - I felt like I heard fewer repeats on Pandora than on either Spotify or Apple Music. And Apple Music was by far the worst when it came to playing the same songs, over and over. And Pandora certainly trains well. So... I'm now a Pandora customer, and paying 1/2 of what Apple or Spotify charge.

    I'm sure there are cases where those huge Spotify/Apple catalogs actually matter... but it doesn't seem to be the case with the music I stream.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  5. Amazon by Thelasko · · Score: 3, Informative

    Amazon Prime Music was included in my Prime subscription. Not only can I listen to "Stations", I can pick from thousands of songs and albums to listen to whenever I want.

    The only drawback is the algorithm they use to recommend new music sucks. It's constantly recommending songs I hate. With that regard, Pandora is the king.

    However, there are a lot of other things I don't like about Pandora. One of which is that the app's permissions are ridiculous. It doesn't need to access everything on my phone. I suppose Amazon already knows everything about me, but I don't need another company doing that too.

    --
    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
  6. Re:My challenge by Nunya666 · · Score: 4, Informative

    My challenge is finding new music. I'm not young anymore, approaching 40. My time is spent primarily with my wife and son and some co-workers. Music never comes up with us so discovering new music these days is harder for me. Spotify has opened me up to new stuff I wouldn't otherwise have known about. That's why I maintain a Spotify account.

    I have a lot of music that I've collected over the years but frankly, I'm bored of it. It's also cheaper to just stream off Spotify than buy multiple CD's a month.

    I have a similar issue, and I'm 50. I like Pandora for similar reasons. I like the multiple "stations" feature that Pandora has. It makes it easy to find both older music that I had forgotten about, and newer music that I've never heard of. For example, listening to the Bon Jovi station also played Aerosmith. And listening to Elle King (I really like her hit single "Ex's & Oh's") also played Gin Wigmore.