Technically, I have Prime Music with my Amazon Prime subscription, but I tried it a couple of years back, but the interface was a disaster.
Likewise, we tried Spotify Family this summer, but my wife wanted it mainly for the audio books and the UI is a total and utter failure! You can’t search for books (at least not in Germany), they get mixed up with songs based around the films of the books, for example, you cannot set a filter to only list audio books. Remembering your place in the book is a disaster and bookmarking next to impossible. It was very hit and miss. My wife isn’t very technical and it left her wanting to throw her phone against the nearest wall!
I tried listening to about a dozen songs, 80% weren’t available or were only available as remixes or covers. Setting up playlists whilst out walking the dog was frustrating and I quickly gave up.
We cancelled the free months subscription.
We are currently switching to iPhones, so we might give the Family membership there a chance - I already have a year of free Apple TV+, which is interesting but apart from Foundation, nothing really outstanding so far.
We have around 1,000 CDs, which have been ripped at high quality and are currently on OneDrive. Since OneDrive dropped music playback, this has become fairly redundant, so maybe putting them in Apple Music will make a difference - I’ll have a look, when I get my iPhone and have time.
I also have the access to Amazon music you get with Prime. That’s used if somebody asks for a song in the house on the Alexas. Not used for anything else.
My music collection that goes back decades is now sat on a microSD card in my phone. That gets used a lot, mainly in the car. I’d never want to lose that.
For music discovery/listening at home, I subscribe to Qobuz.
Podcasts and speech I keep separate and use PocketCasts/BBC Sounds/Audible/TuneIn.
Technically have the Amazon Music Prime, which is different than Amazon Music Unlimited. That is only used when my daughter wants to play “What Does the Fox Say” on repeat from the Echo Dot. Also technically have Youtube Music, as I pay for Youtube Premium. It’s pretty rare I use the actual app, unless there’s something specific I’m looking for. I tried Apple Music early on, but I have a pretty curated music library already, and when I asked Siri for a specific artist, it played a more popular artist with the same name on Apple Music rather than from my music library. So that ended quickly.
I prefer curating my own library. I enjoy using Plex for this. Plexamp is a pretty great app. For a while I was purchasing 1 album per month (sometimes digital, sometimes physical/used). I stopped doing that during the pandemic as my income was affected enough where I had to make some budget cuts. That may come back soon, though.
I love music, but these days I rarely “actively listen” to it. Most of my listening is fairly passive–it’s background “company” for me… kind of like “comfort noise”. I have a [paid] cable TV channel (called Stingray Hits) that plays [mostly French] pop music hits in the style that MTV or MuchMusic used to in their early days (but there are no “VJ’s”) and I frequently keep it on the TV when nothing more interesting is on.
I have been a long time Deezer user, and recently began a paid subscription so I could simply request specific music or playlists on the Google Homes. One of the things I find annoying about music subscription services (or at least Deezer) is the weird way country borders sometimes seem to apply. Some [older] songs seem to randomly not be present at all, or are restricted from Canada. This is most frequent in playlists or compilation albums. This also happens with YouTube music videos as well, so I presume it’s just the silly license agreements getting in the way.
I pay for a family plan on Spotify. The kids use it a lot but the audio quality annoys me when listening on decent equipment. I’m too mean to pay for a high-res music service as well as Spotify so I usually just play my self hosted .flac audio on my bluesound.
In the car where I used to listen to most music, I mostly listen to podcasts these days.
This can be annoying. TuneIn I see this the most. I can’t listen to TWiT live in the UK via TuneIn for example. Also I can’t listen to any BBC Radio in the UK, but I can when I’m in the US
Deezer offers a higher tier of audio quality for not much more money, and they seem to have that in a family plan as well. Maybe be worth a “check into” for you? https://www.deezer.com/us/offers/hifi It appears you need to take an extra step for the family option:
Yeah but the rest of the family are too invested in Spotify, and don’t care enough about the quality to change to something else, so paying for tidal or whatever HQ service would be an additional cost.
I actually listen to SoundCloud quite a lot when I am working as I like listening to remixes and want to put something on in the background.
Yeah that good old lock-in. I note that Deezer does offer a link in the settings to import favourites via a service https://www.tunemymusic.com/ but I have no idea how well that would work or if it gets playlists too.
I’m a YouTube premium subscriber so I guess that includes their music catalog. I hadn’t really used it until I bought a car that runs Android Automotive OS, so I’ve started using the YouTube Music app on there.
But aside from that, I don’t think I would subscribe to a standalone music service. I’ve considered Tidal because of their focus on audio quality but I just don’t think I’d use it enough to justify the cost.
I have Amazon, but only because a tier of the service comes with Prime. I don’t use it at all. I also have the free tier of YouTube Music, but don’t use it very often. However I do pay for SiriusXM and use it almost daily. Otherwise I buy music and store it in on my phone and in the cloud. I currently have about 68 GB of music in my collection.
The way I see it, if the cost of new albums purchased each month surpassed the monthly cost of a streaming service where I could find all of those albums, then the streaming service would make more sense. So far I don’t buy enough over the course of an average month to clear that bar. So I listen to what I have collected and mix in some radio via SiriusXM.
I used to pay for Sirius before the merger. I used to love the BPM music channel for up beat music when I was driving, especially when I was on a road trip. I had an after market radio in the car and even one of those “ghetto blaster” style ones in my house. They allowed up to 4 radios on the account (but charged for each) so I also paid for my brother to have one and my step-father to have one in his work truck. (He worked in the middle of nowhere where even a cell phone didn’t work, but he had the truck radio as company.)
When they merged, they screwed around with the content, and I called to quit, having been a customer for many years. They asked me to stay for 6 month for free while they worked out the merger. I did stay out the six months, but still quit, as it just never recovered for me.
They ran a deal recently where it was basically free for a year. (It cost $50 or so, but they gave a free Amazon Echo, supposedly worth the same. As I wanted to try the Echo I was okay with the idea.) The new thing is they have the online streaming now. I did use it a bit, but now I find they do far too much cross channel advertising, and I find their DJ’s do not add to the experience, but detract. I actually found the Pandora aspect (DJ-less) to be much better, and to offer a better selection I enjoyed, but none of those are on the radio in the car, so that didn’t really help me love it. When the year was up, and they wanted way too much money for a renewal, I just decided it wasn’t worth it to me, and I switched to Deezer.
SiriusXM sent me a mailer wanting me back for another year at $50/year… but I just don’t want to play that game with them, and I had already subscribed to Deezer and gotten it set up how I like. If I could actually cancel SiriusXM online, on my own, then I might consider giving them another go, but they make you call, and they literally fight you when you try to cancel… it took me two different one hour phone calls… so I’m not even going to consider going back until they fix that BS.
I premise this as not being a big music fan. I listen to it, but its more background noise to me.
I have SiriusXM, that I listen to mainly in the car. Subscribed years ago mainly due to Howard Stern. However, I’m so rarely in the car these days I’m questioning whether or not to keep it.
I have Apple Music, through my Verizon Wireless plan. It works very well for me.
I’ve tried Spotify and Pandora. In all honesty, they all work relatively the same for me. I guess I also have access to Amazon (whichever tier is included with Prime).
I have Apple Music as part of my Apple Premier Service and I really love it! I’ve found every song I’ve ever looked for (they have 90M) and I really like the “Essentials” Feature. (“Hey Siri, play Billy Joel Essentials”) - I have 2 HomePods and 1 HomePod mini - I also have a subscription to SiriusXM and have satellite radios in both my cars and the SXM app on my iPhones and iPads - this is also a winner especially for news, sports etc and also music
I have SiriusXM, that I listen to mainly in the car. Subscribed years ago mainly due to Howard Stern. However, I’m so rarely in the car these days I’m questioning whether or not to keep it.
You might consider switching to SiriusXM’s streaming plan. I made the switch when I started to work from home 3 days a week and didn’t have the daily commute to listen from my car. Now I just stream it from my phone and bluetooth to either the car stereo or the speaker in my home office.
The customer service point is certainly valid. I made the switch to streaming through the app only several years ago and I recall it wasn’t as straight forward to make the change as I would have liked.