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.
