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

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?

Comments

MP3

[Anonymous Coward]

 

Re:MP3

[MightyMartian]

For me as well. I actually buy music. I'm not interested in streaming services at all.

Re:MP3

[jenningsthecat]

For me as well. I actually buy music. I'm not interested in streaming services at all.

Yup. I rip my CD's to FLAC and play them off a computer. Occasionally I'll just play a CD. I have no interest in streaming. (Unless you count the canned music channels that come with our cable subscription as 'streaming' - we use those as background music sometimes). I DO listen to a lot of stuff on YouTube, and I've found quite a bit of new music there that I like. I'll download it from YouTube, then if I find I listen to it more than a few times, I'll buy the CD.

When I want stuff that I can't find on CD, I have no qualms about using youtube-dl or BitTorrent. I'm happy to pay for music, (if it's in a lossless format), but if the music company sees fit not to make it available in some permanent, non-DRM'd format, then too bad, so sad, oh well - I can usually get what I'm looking for in some other way.

Re:MP3

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:MP3

[PopeRatzo]

I have actually started to purchase more music.

Spotify is best for music that it's impossible to buy. I find out-of-print music on Spotify all the time.

The real value of a service like Spotify is its back catalog.

Pandora and Amazon for me

[mamono]

Pandora (paid) for radio-type streaming and Amazon Prime Music for purchased music and playlist type stuff. I would get rid of Pandora but it's the only streaming service out there that still plays Tool.

Re:Pandora and Amazon for me

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:Pandora and Amazon for me

[cloud.pt]

The reason those big catalogs don't matter is exactly why you get so much repeats: most labels only allow Spotify/Apple use their artists if they agree to constantly bomb you with their hidden "sponsored" content - artists and songs they'd prefer you to hear. Why do you think Spotify is a "curated playlist"-service, and they bury Discover in the browse section and only update it weekly. Pandora basically only has Discover, and it never is a static, weekly list. It not only trains to offer you music you WANT to listen due to your "likes", instead of forcing you to just listen to the most popular thing of any genre/artist you happened to give a like last YEAR, but it will also train by song structure in order to keep providing you stuff outside your common genres/artists. That is one of the main reasons why Pandora is reported to pay less per song/artist than other services: they just don't repeat that much. of course they also don't force you to subscribe for anything other than clearing up the commercials, unlike Spotify does, for instance. This is also one of the reasons I feel sad every time I remember my current workplace doesn't allow me to use VPNs and listen to Pandora - I live in Europe, and we don't have "legal" Pandora here.

Re:Pandora and Amazon for me

[PopeRatzo]

This is obviously subjective, but - I felt like I heard fewer repeats on Pandora than on either Spotify or Apple Music.

I can speak to the Spotify part of this. Their algorithm for shuffle and radio are just awful. If you've got a 10,000 song playlist and put it on shuffle, you're going to hear the same 50 songs over and over. There has been a complaint thread in the Spotify support forums about this since at least 2012.

If you like jazz, swing and blues, the nice thing about Spotify is that you can find records that are out-of-print and impossible to buy anywhere. But you have to be prepared to do a lot of fiddling with your playlists to hear the songs you want.

I listen to a free service...

[__aaclcg7560]

Radio.

Re: Family Plans

[lucm]

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.

Still CDs.

[SumDog]

I buy a lot of CDs are bars when I see bands. I rip them to FLACs and sync them to my phone/work.

I also use Bandcamp because they only take 10~15%.

If a band I like has no other options and they're not playing in my city any time soon, I might use Amazon MP3 or CDBaby, but I don't like it.

I haven't bought off Apple/google ever. They use to take ~30%, but I think some of that may have change. It's till too much. They have the volume that they could easily take 5%, still turn a massive profit and give more to the artists.

I don't use Spotify and never want to. I prefer to own my music, not rent it.

Main stream artists I torrent if I want them. If you already have a million in sales, there are artists out there who tour out of vans with better music than your shit. Just because you got lucky with a label since your music is generic enough to reach a wide audience without offending anyone doesn't entitle you to as big a peace of the pie as you have. Things haven't really changed since Metallica and Napster. Also, all my Metalica CDs are pirated.

I'm more into streaming talk....

[the_other_one]

CBC Radio One

My challenge

[geek]

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.

Re:My challenge

[Nunya666]

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.

'Streaming' is just another form of 'rental'

[kheldan]

Even if you're not paying for it, you're paying for it, in the form of being subjected to commercials.

I personally don't believe in 'streaming' services over the internet. I've tried them, and I don't like them one bit. If I want to listen to music for free and not have a choice in what I'm hearing, I'll turn on an FM radio, and mute it/turn down the volume/change the station when there's a commercial block. Otherwise I want to own copies of the music I want to listen to. Likewise I don't like or believe in 'The Cloud', since anything you're paying for that exists in 'The Cloud' isn't ever really yours, it's only available to you until someone else decides you're not entitled to it anymore. Nope, no thanks, I'll keep my own copies of media, or at least files, on a local piece of hardware that I own, that nobody else has the rights to examine, alter, or delete.

Spotify for streaming, vinyl for owning

[mouse_8b]

I use Spotify for streaming. The curated playlists are good, and the native chrome cast support is super helpful. As others pointed out, it is renting your music, but there is a lot more music that I want to listen to than I want to own. When I need to own a physical copy of the music, I go for the vinyl. Most new vinyl releases include a download code for digital files, which gets the best of both worlds.

Amazon

[Thelasko]

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.