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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?
How do you get your music? Do you still purchase CDs and DVDs? Anyone with a turntable in the audience?
Radio.
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.
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.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.