Your guide to a new Music Streaming service (Reworked)

Music artists absolutely fucking hate music streaming services! It's too big to not participate, and in a lot of cases, their record label won't let them not do so. But the pay is absolute shit! If you care about tbe artist behind the music, buy their music. If you don't want to have all your music stored on device because it takes too much room, there are self-host options.

Going solely with streaming is actively screwing artists over, especially in the case of Spotify, which pays out to the tune (pun intended) of 0.0001¢ per stream. Even an artist as well known as Weird Al barely makes enough to buy a sandwich from what Spotify pays! Other platforms are better, but not by much. I don't say this to guilt trip; many big names make good money from record deals and will be just fine, while most of us don't make much. Indie artists are the real losers here.

That said, music had gotten cheap! Most of your favorite indie artists will sell FLAC versions of their albums for $10 an album, or $1 a song on Bandcamp, and prices are between $10-20 for major artists on platforms like Qobuz. It might take time to build your library back up, but the average person can make a huge difference here by taking the money you would spend on Spotify or any other platform, and buying your music directly. You'd be paying the artist more than they'd get from you streaming nothing but their album every day all year, eventually you'll be paying less in the long run by not being subbed to a greedy music platform, and you'll get better quality!

This graphic seems to put Spotify in a "less shit" category than the other big players based on national origin or something.

From a quality and fairness perspective Spotify is just as bad. A large list of credible musicians and content creators have detailed the poor compensation, shift towards fake artists and AI filler tracks, and other moves Spotify has made that harm the artists and provide a worse listener experience.

If you want to fairly compensate artists, you'd be better off pirating 100% of your streams using alternate frontends for YT music, then making a list of your top 10-20 artists and buying an album or T-shirt from each of their official websites. They will make a lot better margin on that and its better for their career than any amount of streams you can give as one individual. (Also go to shows when available locally)

Some of the categories for this infographic are arbitrary within the context of the music streaming market. Spotify is literally a more "incumbent" "monopoly" than the "big tech incumbents" if you only consider the segment of those companies' operations related to music streaming. Spotify is probably the worst choice of all, both using the ethos provided by the infographic and by other metrics too. Tech companies with 150B capitalisation are big tech regardless of how much bigger others are.
I've been considering this and although I'm not one to pirate anything (my skills for this stayed in 1999) I've been buying CDs out of thrift stores and ripping them :)

Reality check here. If morals or personal philosophy means the most to you, then self hosting is really the only honest choice, assuming you then buy merch from artists. If features and library size are most important then you probably need Spotify. All the other worthwhile options might come with a good USP but they're usually flawed in comparison to Spotify.

Screw AI music, but it is on every platform. Spotify is just a victim of its success in this regard.

Edit: not a fanboi btw, just a dad with a family who likes to use Spotify. I have to pay for YT premium as well so the kids don't get ADs on their stupid iPhones. If the YT music app wasn't so shit I'd dump Spotify and make everyone switch, proving my point.

i decided to self host my library in as high of a res I could using Navidrome/subsonic.

I had a FiiO X3 anyway so i already had a FLAC capable player.

in the end, even if i know it's not for everyone. selfhosting is the only way to never lose what u love. so many of my lesser known tracks are just gone on spotify.

Is there an easy way to transition from Spotify other than looking for all of your songs yourself?
Never lose as long as you have a good backup strategy.
- Very True, that is one of the few things people don't realize enough when starting selfhosting. Backups and documenting what you did.
  I have a raid NAS keeping my data in-house which has an encrypted backup in the cloud (Infomaniak kdrive) and my FiiO X3 SD card which is an additional portable backup. So on that front, I don't worry too much.
I did this but I am not able to find new content.
- That is indeed quite a gap and nothing that fills the "discover weekly/release radarr" that spotify gives you once you use it for a while, I tend to go to tons of music events and I pick up music here and there.
  Browsing what's popular/trending on beatport also helps a lot in adding fun tracks you wouldn't know from the radio.
- You could scrobble to listenbrainz and last.fm and pull suggestions from there
I listened to this one band's music a decade ago, pretty small, just two guys in college making music. Looks like they broke up and took all their music off streaming platforms, really sucks that can happen

I tend to wear a special hat that allows me to consume music in any format or device I like.

and then go donate to, or purchase music directly from the artists that I like.

yar har har.

Laughs in Navidrome, again.

I switched from Spotify to tidal then deezer and finally landed on qobuz. While the app still has some problems and the music selection is not as massive as on Spotify (but mainly in super niche content), the higher artist pay and amazing soundquality are definitely worth it

Spotify to tidal then deezer and finally landed on qobuz
Steps out of Time Machine from 15 years ago
WTF
- Deezer is from 2007, someone from 15 years ago could easily have heard of it
  tidal is from 2014, so not quite
  Qobuz is actually new, 2023
- Wipur is the next big deal, but Boodle is likely to replace it. Slove is already dying, but iMPUR and Doofz look promising as replacements.
- Poob has it for you.
I really wish Qobuz would let me bookmark individual songs in my browser. That's the real sticking point for me (I use it).
If something's not on Qobuz I can just listen on Soundcloud.
I really want to like Qobuz, but it's hard when there's a bug that starts playing music randomly after I pause the music for any reason, including playing sound from another app, and I have to kill the app (Android) for it to not start randomly playing again. (It's the "There's a problem playing the current track"-bug.)
I still use it alongside Bandcamp, but it's hard to love Qobuz for now.
I recently moved from Spotify to Deezer and I'm considering moving to Quobuz, how's the UX on it compared to Deezer?
- I didn't use deezer that long but found the ux a bit confusing (maybe because I got used to Spotify). Had no problem with the qobuz ux.

Qobuz also does purchaseable music, not just streaming.

Same with Apple Music.
Edit: this is slightly misleading. When I used "Apple Music" in this sense, it included the "iTunes Store", which most people do not realize is a separate store where you can buy individual songs or albums. Both Apple Music and iTunes Store purchases show up in the same iTunes library.
- Yeah until they remove the albums and you don't keep them anymore afaik
- Is Apple Music the same as iTunes?
It's written in the image
- It is, but I found it strange not seeing it in the actual purchaseable music section

Tidal is owned by Block, the owners of Square, which is the biggest POS vendor in the US. If that’s not big tech I don’t know what is.

Part of the reason I just shifted to a fully self-hosted setup.
Left Spotify because of all the bullshit they pull, tried out Tidal because of the higher quality and higher artist pay, but even if it is a substantially better platform, its ownership is questionable to say the least.
I dusted off bandcamp and learned to use slskd to build a full local high quality library powered by a Navidrome instance.

A glance at this makes me happy to just keep playing my mp3s.

I've been happy with Bandcamp. They got sold recently so their future is uncertain, but I downloaded all the music I bought.

They don't really have an algorithm, but you can see who else purchased something, and they do blog posts about like "what's new in [genre]" that's worth reading. So far as I can tell it's written by real people.

They also have regular "Bandcamp Fridays", where they forego their 25% and give musicians 100% of proceeds for the day. It's a good chance to directly support small artists.
- Yeah, from the conversations I've had, they're kind of the best of a bad bunch, all things considered.

I just use OuterTune for YT Music. It works and it is less sus than ReVanced YT Music

Naspers is a South African multinational internet, technology and multimedia holding company headquartered in Cape Town... did you mean Napster...? Did you generate this with AI or something?

Why would the largest music streaming service in the world be in the "other" category and not the "Big Tech Incumbents".

Yeh and the blurb for splotifry reads like an ad, with not a negative word to say about this exploitative monster.
- I mean, the "To Note" section includes information about their worse practices. The whole infographic is such a nonsense mishmash.

I'm trying to get most of what I like on CD and then host a jellyfin server

This figure mentions Spotify on a side note. You must be joking.

Indeed. It should be at the top as the defacto music streaming platform based on popularity.

Qobuz rocks!

I tried them for a bit and really wanted to like them but their "modern" metal catalog, playlists, and discover-ability was so bad I had to begrudgingly go back to tidal.

Can't ungoogle myself this time. YT music has probably the best catalog of all and it's easily moddable

Which one has the biggest selection and highest quality audio, ad-free for $0/mo?

I use YouTube Music ReVanced, and while the audio quality isn't the highest (because it's YouTube), you can't beat the song selection. Especially when it's free and ad-free.

ReVanced can also patch the Spotify app
- Spotify has no music. I don't like it.
  (Seriously, it's missing so many songs! But thanks anyway.)
You're likely violating the YouTube terms of service and can be banned at any moment. Also you're stealing from musicians. Lemmy has multiple piracy communities that can probably give you more options
- "Stealing" from record industry executives, you mean. Artists make the vast majority of their income from merch, autograph signings, and ticket sales. I couldn't care less if a billionaire executive misses out on a few hundred bucks from me over my lifetime. And secondly, making a copy isn't stealing.
  Edit: Also why would you think that I give a single shit about YouTube's TeRmS oF sErViCe? (Why would any non-government citizen?) Fuck Google.

Some of these services don't offer themselves in turkey (tidal)

There are also Faircamp and Mirlo, if you are looking for even fairer and progressive alternatives.

Is there a way to get a list of all the songs I like on spotify for archival purposes? Not the file, just a list. Like a shopping list.

You can check out Soundiiz
If you are moving to deezer they will take over all your playlists. They have a third party service on teir website that does it. It moved thousands for me with minimal issues. A couple live tracks and very niche local sonfs missing. I would say easily 99.9% transfer accuracy and it listed the outliers.
The service works regardless of who you move to or from.

spotdl

If you're paying for music, stay away from any music publisher that doesn't give you the option of keeping a DRM-free copy for yourself that can be played back in perpetuity, unconditionally.

Is Spotify EU? They're headquartered in Sweden, but they're listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but their largest shareholders are Swedish and British.

Also, Soundcloud probably warrants more information. In no universe would it be someone's primary option but if someone's looking for a specific song that's not in the (limited) Qobuz library then it's a decent fallback.

I'm actually one of the rare only SoundCloud users.. The way I like to discover music can only be done on SoundCloud. I've been with them for 9 years now
- Wow! Care to expand a bit on your process?
  I used to love Spotify's Discover Weekly but those bastards fixed the adfree cracked one I were using and boy do I miss it.
  edit: oh look, they fixed the apk again. Just in time for next weeks Discover Weekly.
It's developed in Sweden, so yeah, that would make it EU.
- However it is just as predatory and scummy as a US based company so I wouldn't feel all that great about giving them your money 🤷. Arguably they are about the most unethical choice you could make for a streaming platform.

Is there a higher res version of this image? It's too blurry/small for me to read

Sure, this should get you a direct link to the image: https://mobidrive.com/sharelink/i/2TWnMWgOrKoCcbsSc8ZaH54P6IlGSGScCi2lfDBSbBPt
- Awesome, thanks!

Anything that can work with Android Auto?

Tidal does. Haven't tried others.
Excellent question! Qobuz should be and I believe TIDal /Deezer as well. But feel free to create a post on !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world for more exposure :)

No Qobuz on Linux afaik :(

I'd otherwise consider the switch

Though being part of a family plan, I'd either have to pay for it myself – an added cost to expenses – or somehow get whole family to move over.

I wonder also how they be with people living separately

I see there might be some unofficial apps... But maybe ask in !PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world a few Linux lovers there, that might be able to help :)
I had no problem using Qobuz on Linux (firefox and chrome based browsers); unless you are mean you were expecting a separate app or something.
- Yeah, I guess that could work. Downside is my browser isn't exactly set to remember stuff. Not sure if it's the cookies or what exactly. Having to log in every time I reopen my browser would maybe be a tad annoying, but I guess I could do it (especially with Bitwarden's autofill making log in quicker and more convenient)

I use Anghami myself

if only deezer didn't have data breaches

Currently streaming out of my Nextcloud server. Its nice. Does that count?

I think it does! Although you might want to check out iBroadcast for a few extra features :)

I haven't heard of half of those but SoundCloud is in the "other" category.

I am not able to find iOS apps for Deezer, Qobuz and Tidal.

Edit- not available in my region

Here is the link to Qobuz.
I have it on my iPhone, I just haven’t moved my Apple Music over just yet. Hard to get off that Apple One subscription when I am still finding a Nas setup for my place.
Tidal is for sure on iOS.
https://offer.tidal.com/download

Are you talking about the 24 bit 192kHz part?
I thought so too, but can we really tell the difference?