Because I've got a Prime membership I've been using Amazon Music. About a year ago I ponied up for their Unlimited service, which of course involves an added fee on top of the regular annual Prime membership fee. 800 pound gorillas and all that crap...

So anyways, I'm finally fed up with the Amazon's shenanigans and utter incompetence in operating a reliable music streaming service. Too often Amazon drops music out of their so-called "unlimited" catalog of music, presumably due to some stupid licensing or reimbursement dust up with the artist or their associated music label. Also irritating is their penchant to drop a seemingly random artist's album only to replace it with a slightly "different" version. This act ALWAYS breaks any links within music playlists that I've created and has me going back and forth trying to fix these broken playlists time and again. Not cool.

I've used Spotify's free service prior to signing up with Amazon's pay service. Originally I figured I'd give the "local" company my money rather than some overseas operation. But the longer I stick with Amazon Unlimited ("unlimited"...a misnomer if there ever was one) the more I want to firebomb Amazon's HQ, if only in the faint hopes that they would have to tear their putrid web services down and build it back up again, only this time done (more)right (it's Amazon after all...using the word 'right' in their presence only goes so far).

Unreliable app (Android especially)...balky connections and data transfers from their servers...content that disappears without warning...streaming songs that skip back to their beginnings a minute or two into them...different, maddening levels of functionality from phone to tablet to PC (I mean, no means of deleting a dead link to a newly missing album from the catalog in the Android app? I have to delete each and every SONG link one by one? WTF, Amazon?). What kind of shitshow is this? I know it's only $8/mo but seriously, is it possible to be any less competent in running a service?

So, my question to the room is: for those who stream their music these days, who do you use? And why do you prefer them?

Like I said, I used Spotify Free prior to paying for Amazon's (lack of)service. With SpotFree I tolerated the ads and their rather bland sound quality of the free music, but Spotify touts that their for-pay music streams sound a lot better. So does it really sound better? Amazon's free streaming music is much better, although the amount of music available without first paying is paltry compared to Spotify. And SF certainly indexes and cues up their music content a hell of a lot faster than Amazon does. Nothing spoils the mood more than waiting 30sec to a couple of minutes waiting for the next tune to start playing. But Amazon Music Unlimited has got that FUBAR'd action down pat. Spotify charges about 25% more per month (okay, so it's ONLY $2 more...but "25%" just sounds more shocking in its burden and woe) than Amazon does to their Prime members, but at this point the adage about getting what you pay for sadly rings truer than I thought possible.

I've only spot tried other services over the years (like Pandora) and the now dead Real Networks. I don't know what to think about Google Music (another 800 lb gorilla), but I do like that my own ripped tunes can be stored in their cloud and accessed and played by my devices any time that I want, something Amazon once offered but unceremoniously nuked.

EDIT: The intent is that with any new service I join, I will be paying for the service (and the lack of ads).

I've had spotify for a couple years now and I really like it. I'm not too concerned with sound quality as most of my listening is done while driving or while working around the house. I do crank it up on the boat and have never noticed an issue though.

I don't stream over LTE, only while on wifi. They raised the download limit last year from 3333 songs to 10,000 if I remember correctly. That was my biggest gripe with them, but its no longer an issue.

The only thing I think spotify lacks in is in song suggestions. I personally think Pandora is much better at this. I'll still listen to the free version of pandora when I'm wanting to find new stuff.

I also really like being able to find other peoples playlists. I usually search by activity (Boating, workout, construction) and it will return many playlists that I often enjoy.

It really comes in handy for when I have family come over. I can search for family friendly rock or whatever and feel pretty confident that the kids won't leave with some new vocabulary.

Spotify, Slacker, Tidal and Apples service are the ones I’ve used and are most happy with. Tidal is suppose to be less compressed and sound better, but I think Spotify sounds the best. Once you join you can go into your settings and improve sound quality.

I use both Spotify and Apple Music (free trial) and like Spotify much better...It is easier to use and seems more robust

I stream Amazon Prime music all day at my desk. I usually use the stations or playlists. No problems here.

I use iHeartRadio app on my devices. They have a free service (limited ads) and a pay service with additional features and NO ads. Easy to set up.

The paid Spotify service is great, it's a CD-quality or higher sound and you can skip tracks till you're blue in the face and also download whole playlists for offline play like when you're on a plane and don't have internet. Well worth it.

Spotify (free) here.
Liked it better than Pandora, as you can specify artist & stick with it, without a lot of 'related' music. Limited to skipping 6 songs/hr though.

Wife has the paid version & it's a lot more open.

I use Pandora, DI.FM, XM and my own Cd collection which I carry about 50% on my phone. I have wanted to XM for years and every time I call to cancel they deal hard so I keep it, for now. The only reason I use streaming services is I don’t have time to sit on my home machine and make playlist after playlist. Well that’s not the only reason, commercial free is the main reason. I loathe commercials and avoid them at all costs. I refuse to watch or listen to commercials of any kind. I removed them from my life in 2003 and haven’t missed them once. Thank God for satellite tv and radio, and streaming applications for audio. Living commercial free gets harder and costlier every year.

We have a family subscription to Spotify. I was reluctant at first and my teenage daughter begged me endlessly to sign up for premium. I love it and we all use it daily.

Spotify premium for 5 years or so. $15 a month for family plan and I used to but so much music this probably saves me $20+ a month.

There is very little that is not on spotify. It is basically like owning every album in the world. The ease of making your own playlists and listening to others' playlists is incredible plus I find that all of their personalized curated playlists are very good.

App always works well and syncs up to PC and FireTV very well.

I found myself skipping songs constantly on pandora free. Spotify has the same functionality that Pandora has plus so much more.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: YellowJacket,

Google Music.

Bonus points because you get YouTube Music, YouTube Red, etc.

 
Apple Music. It is not perfect, and especially their preconfigured playlists and curators, but search for any artist you want and you'll find plenty by that artist. It also plays on all of my Apple devices (duh), including the HomePod.

I’m on my exwife’s Spotify plan. It works great. I have carplay in my car and the setup works great. I can control stuff from my steering wheel.

You’ll find the dropping of songs and albums with all of them. Netflix and Hulu do the same.

I use Amazon Unlimited and do get frustrated when stuff gets dropped but it is not all that often.
Also perturbed they don’t have any TOOL.

I had Tidal for 6 months and it was not worth the extra money. Tried the trial of Spotify and found no real difference from Amazon.

I also have the $2.99 Pandora radio (can’t choose specific songs just genres or artists).

I think you’ll find things that bother you with all of them.

quote:

Originally posted by henryaz:
 
Apple Music. It is not perfect, and especially their preconfigured playlists and curators, but search for any artist you want and you'll find plenty by that artist. It also plays on all of my Apple devices (duh), including the HomePod.

Been giving this one a go after a free trial offer. Works ok, especially for a specific artist or album, but a request for a specific type of music results in the same 40-50 songs over and over. No idea how quickly it changes.

I liked he free iHeart Radio better but it has been a while since I have used it.

I listen to music almost all of the time. A lot of it is downloaded podcasts, but there are some streaming services I use. My taste is eclectic; I doubt you'd recognized the names of most of my favorite.

That said, these are the ones I listen to. A $ indicates I pay for a subscription, a # indicates a channel/app I have on my AppleTV:

• Soma FM (30 channels) ($ - I donate)(#)
• Digitally Imported (DI.fm)
• Hearts of Space ($)
• Ultima Thule (free podcast/stream from Australia)
• Pandora (#)
• Mixcloud (#)

I subscribe to Tidal, run it through a BlueSound and into a McIntosh tube amp

sounds great

quote:

Also perturbed they don’t have any TOOL.

Tool is nowhere to be found on pretty much most digital streaming services, I think. On Amazon, early on with my paid account I uploaded their catalog when Amazon still had online uploaded music storage as part of their service. Although now canceled, Amazon allowed the paid users to opt-in and keep that storage so Tool as well as some other unavailable material I stored remains usable by their app and allows me to build playlists with that uploaded content intermixed with Amazon's own catalog of music.

As for OTHER missing music, Amazon LOVES to drop away greatest hits albums and compilation packages. For instance, CCR and The Allman Brothers are two such musical artists that have been spindled and mutilated several times around during the past year. Build up a playlist and BOOM!, Amazon decides to drop the album and the link in the playlist goes dead. They've killed various regular albums of artists as well; recently a number of jazz albums from Stan Getz, Maynard Ferguson, Weather Report and others were ditched; I only found out when I tried to play my compilation jazz playlist only to find about 1/5th of the entries were no longer working.

Thanks for all of the input. I'm going to give paid Spotify a try; if it doesn't work I'll probably default to Google, as painful a company as they are to me. I'm so darn tired of Amazon's servers being unable to keep up on either of my Android devices (however it does well when streaming through my Windows PCs). It's time for a change.

As for some of the rest: I've bad history with Apple so their service is a non-starter. I still have a Pandora free account but I've long since found Spotify more likable to me. Tidal really seems sonically interesting although the list of its key owners is a serious downer (yeah I know I should keep politics out of it, but I can't help it...ugh...#$#@!!* NYC-based libtards).