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What streaming service do you use?


SDG

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In the spirit of all the good info in the "cutting the cable" thread I wanted to ask Surly what streaming service do you use and why.  I typically use Pandora because its easy and free, but just started using a Spotify paid subscription which was also free.  I'm thinking after my sub runs out I'll buy the Pandora sub as I like song transitions a lot more.  Amazon Prime is also an option but I've never tried it.    

 

Am I doing this wrong?  Are there better options out there? 

Edited by SDG
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So far I like Spotify with 2 exceptions. 1 I’m a playlist idiot so setting and forgetting isn’t really an option.  With pandora you search for a track you like and it continuously picks similar tracks.  2 as stated in the op, there is dead space between tracks where Pandora blends/beat matches tracks.  

Ill have to try the download feature.  

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I have Spotify, but I send a lot more time listening to apple music -- most things that I want, I download to the phone on the apple music app.  I don't stream very often.  

I use apple music a lot like a notepad.   For example, last week I was hanging out with some musicians, and one told me he thought I'd like Dan Baird's 90's solo records.  Grab the phone... boom.  Those are downloaded.  Later, someone talked about seeing Nada Surf recently.  And I realized that I'd heard references to that band for 15+ years, but I didn't know anything about their music.... boom, downloaded.  

I'll circle back around to all of it, and depending on what it is, either listen to an entire album, or add a song to my library and it will pop up when I have it on random play.  

Been a long time since I compared services.  Apple music is $9.99/mo, I think.  Not sure if they reimburse the artist at different rates, but I'd put that in the calculus if I ever switch.  

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23 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

Spotify has a pandora like function also. I personally like it better since it goes into some deep cuts and obscure music I’ve never heard before. Pandora rarely gives me anything I haven’t heard before.

This is true.  Pandora actually hires human music experts to listen to songs and map out song characteristics.  Spotify (and almost everyone else) uses a machine listening technology (called EchoNest) to build playlists.  I think the Pandora approach does a better job at predicting user tastes . . . but the draw back is the smaller playlists you mentioned.  The machine listening approach allows for an exponentially larger catalog of songs when building playlists.  

Both services have on-demand features that should have nearly identical catalogs. 

Apple music is good too.  YouTube is supposed to be revamping their services this year, and it should be better than Google's prior offerings.  

 

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Even stuff you had added that isn’t in their library? I was worried about losing bootlegs and live shit I’d added into iTunes over the years. 


I don’t listen to a ton of that stuff but no, imagine it can’t match those up. I uploaded all that stuff to Amazon because I didn’t want to be limited to Apple devices.
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On 6/4/2018 at 10:20 PM, 4th&Five said:

Even stuff you had added that isn’t in their library? I was worried about losing bootlegs and live shit I’d added into iTunes over the years. 

Spotify has a "local files" section that I've added stuff into that isn't on Spotify but that I had mp3 or in iTunes.  

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  • 2 weeks later...

Rhapsody, which was acquired by Napster last year, is a really interesting story in failure. 

I've used the service for almost 15 years. They were the first to launch streaming for a monthly subscription, they were the fist to allow downloading of songs for offline without having to purchase, their interface is great, it's super fast, etc. BUT nobody uses them. Pandora and Spotify kicked their ass even though Rhapsody was first to market by several years.

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  • 1 year later...

Bump: to update because I’ve managed to end up with both Spotify (through Hulu) and Pandora (through ATT) premium services and they are remarkably similar as far as selection goes but I have noticed the eq setting on Pandora tends to be a lot more clubby/bass heavy.  I compared the two using the same song and device and it’s definitely noticeable.  It seems like Pandora adjusts everything to what they think you’d like while Spotify sends the flat file and lets you decide how to eq it. 

Anyone else notice this or am I off my meds?  

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