I would like to switch away from Apple Music, and Spotify despite being a European company, is not a desirable option for me. What music streaming services would you recommend?
I managed to download a text-only list of the albums in my Apple Music library, so if there’s a simple library import option then that would also be very helpful.
If you are technically inclined: self host Jellyfin, use one of the various music streaming apps for it. Put the money you would have paid for x years of subscription into buying the albums.
I’m trying out Qobuz as they partnered with Soundiz so transferring all your music is pretty easy.
pirate for offline storage, and use what you’d pay for the subscription to buy an album on Bandcamp if you really like it. you get to keep your music forever, and your favourite artists get to eat.
Soundcloud. German 🙂👌
I’ve switched to qobuz and like it.
What’s your budget and what’s your risk appetite?
what are you goals with having a music streaming service (IE: just to play albums you know or discover new artists)?
Ideally not much more than I currently pay (€10.99/mo).
I’m not sure what risks you’re referring to, but I’m not going to download
linkin_park.mp3.exefrom Limewire if that’s what you mean.I have about 1000 albums in my library and I mostly just play my entire library on shuffle. I don’t want “mood” or “genre” playlists when listening, but I do like recommendation systems that just tell me what artists are similar to the ones I’m listening to (without auto-playing them).
If you’re okay doing a little bit of legwork: Whatbox.ca as a remote service that you can upload (or download torrents) directly to it. I think they’re Canadian but I’m not 100% - just has a lot of good guides to get you up and running.
I’m a fan of Plex, but they are an American company and they continue to enshitify with their policies - I bought a lifetime pass a long time ago because I really enjoyed their music player plexamp.
Jellyfin is the free and open source option, but I don’t think you’ll get some of the nice features like music analysis and a library radio that tries to pull things together in a somewhat comprehensive way.
This is my music solution. If you’re listening at lossless and only have 1000 albums their smallest option is 2tb(€14/mo) server slot which would likely be hosted in NL.
RE: risk tolerance if you’ve got the know how you can set this up on a locally hosted server using Jellyfin and torrent directly to it. Advantage of a seedbox is the transfer of risk.
Thanks for the pointers. If I had 1000 albums already downloaded then I don’t think I’d have a problem setting up something like Jellyfin to stream them to my devices, but the problem is that I’ve only used streaming services for the past ~15 years or so, which means I would need to do a lot of legwork to locate all of these albums to download.
Here is a comparison:
Qobuz vs Apple Music
Qubuz pays artist 1.8c per stream French Small Company
Apple Music pays artist 1.0c per stream American More Selection
To be clear, music streaming companies don’t actually award any money on a per-stream basis - license holders get a fraction of the sum of subscription- and ad-revenue proportional to the share of total streams that happened on that music streaming service.
Since these companies all have fairly similar pricing, it’s mostly just a matter of the amount of consumption that happens on each platform.
That one streaming service would be better than the other with regards to paying license holders is largely a myth. If you think music streaming is unfair to artists, you might want to just hand them money instead.
Deezer, french service
Sadly owned to a large part by an american investment company
It is not even owned at 50% by this company, so I wouldn’t call it alrge.
True, but 40% is definitely not small either
I’m using Soundcloud having moved from Spotify and am enjoying it.
I’m not a massive music fan (i.e. No library to import) so can’t say how good it is at that
Deezer is decent.
and US + oligarch owned
They don’t pay artists much though
Spotube
