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I’ve had an Apple Music subscription for years and use it A LOT. I tried some alternatives (Tidal, Sirius, and maybe one other?) and wasn’t super happy with the options.
Is there a service that people recommend that is good, like $10/month or less, maybe gives better pay to artists? I’d like to spend on a better company if possible too. If Apple has enough money to buy gold trinkets for elected officials they probably don’t need more from me.
A good alternative would be:
For players; on my PC (Linux) I use Strawberry. Windows has AIMP which is really good. On my Android I use Shuttle.
If you're on Linux, Rufin is an awesome player for those coming from streaming services. Offers familiar interface and functionality. Can be used with local files or Navidrome/Jellyfin/Subsonic instance.
Also, seconding Soulseek through Nicotine+, and there are programs allowing you to download music from streaming services, too.
Lidarr is another good option.
Qobuz or buy CD's and rip them. Or just fucking pirate flac files.
Bandcamp was really good. It's still going but it's kind of a corpse animated by capitalism now. You get drm free music and sometimes musicians will like do listening parties or chat or other fun stuff.
If you buy one album a month for $10, after a few years you have a sizable library that's yours to keep forever. Don't rent music.
A couple of years back I gave up streaming for ownership. The main driver was the utterly unfair deal artists get, and the lack of ownership for my hard earned dollars.
At first, it felt like I was missing out, and I missed the algorithms that helped me find new music. Determined, I stuck at. Discovering BandCamp, and rediscovering CDs was instrumental. For algorithms, I actually found forums to be better, and connected to more amazing artists than before.
Where possible, I buy CDs. If not, I buy FLACs. From BandCamp, you can often get both. The CDs get ripped and stored unless I got FLACs too. I use MusicAssistant for streaming my own collection, and automatic file sync to keep a copy on my phone while on the go.
At the end of the day, I've a sizable collection, spend less than streaming (overall, obviously not up front), I have ownership, and artists get a much better deal 😃.
Fuck streaming from apple/Spotify or similar.
What about 24/96 or other HiFi? CD quality isn’t really that great, even losslessly copied when higher quality is available.
Usually with BandCamp, you'll get higher quality FLACs, although CDs are considered lossless despite the smaller sampling rate. Also, I like having a physical item 😃.
I really like Qobuz. They are a lot more ethical and paying the artists. I believe they are French based. App got a lot of updates too lately.
!PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world recently had a post about how many music streams you would need to have per month to make a U.S. monthly minimum wage ($1.257), and Qobuz was the best out of all of them. (At least of the major music streaming services.)
https://lemmy.world/post/49759188?scrollToComments=true (Read the body)
Info from: https://royaltyexchange.com/blog/how-much-do-streaming-platforms-pay-per-stream
Long time Qobuz fan here as well. Has quite a bit of obscure stuff on it in addition to mainstream music. Also quite audiophile friendly - looking at their settings, some albums are 24-bit, up to 192 kHz.
They also do a fair bit of curation to surface interesting tracks, thematic playlists and so on.
Bloomee https://bloomeex.org/bloomeetunes/
Cross-platform music player built with Flutter and Rust. Mix your local library with online streams, sing along with lyrics, and own every bit of it. No ads. No account. No tricks.
Bloomee pulls from YouTube but works like a music streaming app. It has a robust feature set, it can work as an offline music player using local files, it has Last.fm integration, and it can import playlists and albums from Apple Music, Spotify and ytmusic.
Bloomee is free and open source, and has builds for Android, Linux and Windows. It is available in F-Droid via the IzzyonDroid repository: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/ls.bloomee.musicplayer
Bloomee is free so no money is being paid to the artists through it. If you want to support the artists, the best way to do that is to purchase from them through platforms like bandcamp.
Thanks for the quality info! I’ll check these guys out.
Good point on the artist support. I haven’t looked into bandcamp, but I will now.
I'm still using Tidal, and have been for many years. It's got high fidelity (FLAC, Dolby Whatever), large catalogue and is not expensive.
No. Buy their CDs and rip them into something like Jellyfin.
That's not realistic. I have a CD collection, but that took decades and thousands of dollars. Plus I had access to Columbia House (if you know, you know) and a robust used market. That doesn't exist anymore.
I don't think a person who's sensitive to $11 a month is going to be interested in a collection of $25 CDs.
A $10 a month streaming service without ads that is fair to artists isn’t realistic either to be fair
The robust used market does still exist. eBay, and Discogs should be all you need. Bonus points if you have a local record store.
Exactly this. A music collection is expensive. Even more so if your tastes change over time.
Even more so if your tastes change over time.
This is a challenge. I've grown on hip-hop and rap, and finding the media is a struggle. For example, the first 'Run the Jewels" album is basically unavailable on CD.
Buy used. OP can probably pick up five used CDs a month and stay under budget.
Of course the artist isn’t paid here, so you might as well pirate at this point.
Yeah, eBay is a great for used cds & dvds
Pirate flac files and burn your own CD's.
I feel like that’s a couple levels of effort more than I’d like. As good as it would be to support the artists by buying CDs I don’t want to buy more plastic and clutter the house. I could also do the same from the library, but that’s not supporting artists either.
That is what we did before streaming made us lazy.
And I just had to go and remove the CD player from my old car. Sigh…
You can load the song onto your phone and play via Bluetooth or aux cable.
Hope you kept your CDs if you want a service that isn’t shit that doesn’t get more expensive for a worse product over time.
YouTube. Then send 5$ to the artist.
I mean, if you were happy with the service at 10.99, is one dollar that much of a deal breaker?
If you didn’t already know, the subscription comes with Apple Music Classical for free. Maybe look at that as a mandatory $1 add-on.
Well, a few years ago it was $9.99, and in a few years it’ll be $12.99. That extra dollar indeed is a problem.
That's just inflation though, at a normal 3% a year you should expect a dollar increase every 3 years. And inflation has been running higher than that.
I mean, if you were happy with the service at 10.99, is one dollar that much of a deal breaker?
It kinda is. Lame of me maybe, but it’s not like Apple is paying out more to the artists or making the experience better. Just shaking us down for more money. Idk how many people use AM, but it’s gotta add up.
I do like the positivity of your silver lining though!
For what it's worth Apple Music has much higher payouts than other platforms like Spotify, Pandora or YouTube Music. Like 4x higher. I dont know if 0.8 cents is a fair price for compensation, but it doesn't seem terrible... if you listen to an hour of music per day that's maybe 15 cents to artists per day? That doesn't sound like a ton but that's about $4.50 per month to artists. Meanwhile according to the BBC artists get like 13% of CD sales so at $20 that would be a $2.60 cut. Meaning unless you were buying 2+ albums a month streaming on apple music gives as much money to artists as buying physical media.
I think thats my takeaway from the streaming era - its a lot less money per listen, but people are listening a lot more.
You should take a look at Apple Music Classical, it’s really good and actually the only reason I subscribe to Apple Music in the first place. Classical is what I pay for, the pop music is bonus.
The best answer is self-hosted/private music libraries but a less cumbersome option is Youtube Music. Premium gets you ad-free Youtube and YouTube music. I think is the best bang for your buck at the current moment outside self-hosted, private music libraries.
I know a lot of people are going to dislike this answer, but 🤷. I do still have my 2010 iPod Classic with my OG iTunes library on it.
I have YouTube premium because of the music and videos, but they keep raising the price. unfortunately I have had playlists on there for years that have hundreds of songs - some fairly obscure - and it's the thought of trying to recreate them all from scratch that's kept me there.
Does anyone know if there's a tool that can export my playlists into a streaming service that's more artist friendly?
Yes you can use https://soundiiz.com/transfer-playlist-and-favorites
This is what Qobuz uses when you sign up, you get a free transfer from whatever you're switching from, seems like it supports YouTube
