Example: Mine is Pandora, but I’ve used Jango for more independent artists as well.
Amazon music. It has high quality files and not that expensive compared to Tidal or Quobuz. The UI on android is a bit strange, but ok. I hate how everything is a remaster though. I want the original damn it!
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.
YouTube Music that comes with the YouTube Premium plan.
Until it doesn’t. Until the service is killed and you need to use a new one, and your library doesn’t migrate over. I got sick of Google just killing everything and not supporting anything. I remember when Google play music was killed and ytm was a way worse interface. Ad blocker and Spotify for me.
I got sick of Google just killing everything and not supporting anything
I agree with that. I think YouTube won’t be killed as long as it is the biggest platform for videos, but I’m not sure about ytm.
ytm was a way worse interface
I think it’s fine? What’s wrong with it?
Did you ever use Google play music? Interface was way better. I remember when they first kicked it over I’m like “am I watching a YouTube video of this song, or is this like the actual song front the actual artist?”
It just crammed it all into one and I had no idea if I was getting the good quality original songs half the time.
RiMusic
I’ll probably get downvoted for it, but I use Amazon Music. It’s the only Amazon service I’m willing to pay for because it works well and unless I’m looking for something super obscure they usually have whatever I want. The only real problem I’ve ever had with it is that some songs that are considered “too controversial” are sometimes removed from albums.