UKC

I used to have spotify, but my account got hacked and I ended up just cancelling the payments.

I reverted to just using youtube, which is fantastic for finding music, but it's messy and not right as a way to get all your music.

Is Spotify the best way to have an online music collection, giving some dosh to the artists, and hearing stuff in decent quality? Or are there better/cheaper/fairer alternatives?

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Hey Jon,
I recently moved from Apple (which was ok) to Amazon which is just as good if not better.
Moved due to compatibility issue with Amazon Alexa.

Both about £10 or £15 for multi users.

In reply to Urban5teve:

Cheers. Is is the availability of stuff as good as Spotify?

No point in me paying the tax-dodging bastards (in an effort to give my money to those who are being ripped off) if I can't find stuff that is completely unpopular - electronic/experimental/jazz/afro stuff that is of absolutely no interest to 99.8% of the population. Spotify doesn't have everything that youtube does (which is amazing for revealing obscure white label vinyl that you've never heard of, for free), but it's got plenty.

In reply to Urban5teve:

Spotify just gave me a month for free, so I'm back on there. Will see how it goes.

In reply to Jon Stewart:
I have Google Play for the mainstream stuff and for films. I think the streaming only account is a fiver a month.

for high res - 24 bit plus I have Qobuz. They have a range of accounts, the top one allows free streaming and downloads. Streaming 24bit in the car is so much more pleasant than woofly compressed mp3.

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:

Great stuff. Qobuz looks good.

Spotify and Paypal just sent me into an infinite loop of frustration rather than giving me a free trial. So Spotify can piss off (again).

I have a decent amplifier and speakers I've had since the old days of CDs and vinyl. Since the digital revolution, I've been listening to crappy files off the internet, completely missing the point of the amp and speakers.

And Qobuz's blurb about what they offer made me think they were cool - full marks to their marketing person, I consider myself 'hard to get' in that respect. And there I was thinking, "yeah, these guys are my kind of people, I'll give them as much money as they ask for".

When it comes to the car, my speakers rattle at every frequency in the human aural range, so it doesn't matter what's getting played, it barely sounds like music whatever it is. Think I'll go to Halfords and get them replaced, come to think of it.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


You'll like Qobuz.

It's French, so it's "quirky", but they have a really eclectic catalogue.

I did invest in a music streamer at home, linked to my account, but we live in the middle of nowhere and have to use a microwave link to a pod on the church steeple 5 miles away - I had to sell it because of the latency causing endless spooling.

I know, cool story bro.

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:

It's sounding good. Thanks!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

A music buff friend recommended 'Tidal' to me recently.

I've no direct experience myself but it'd be worth a look.

How much each such service pays to the artists involved is a good question: I can currently only find some old (2015) info online at https://nextshark.com/tidal-pays-artists-spotify/

In reply to Nevis-the-cat:

Yes! A tune I've wanted to find for ages is on there.

Wake Up by Matthew Herbert. Beautiful song, exquisite production.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I'm currently a Spotify user but I'm looking to change to another service soon a Spotify keeps pissing my off and after googling a few of the issues I was having the consensus on forums seemed to be that the best fix was to change to another streaming service because Spotify doesn't give a Sh*t about its users or resolving issues.

The biggest issue I've had is that if I download a playlist onto an SD card on my phone, it periodically deletes the entire downloaded library (seems to mostly be when I turn my phone off or take the battery out but it happens at other times too). This has happened to me so often that I've actually given up trying to download playlists which is a big part of the reason I have the service I the first place.

Occasionally it will just refuse to play any music (either online or offline).

There are a lot of other usability issues that generally irritate me too (not bugs as such, more a poorly thought out user interface) such as not being able to re-arrange the order if songs in a play list, a terrible shuffle algorithm that frequently clumps tracks of the same artist, not being able to remove the track that is currently playing from a playlist (generally this is the time when you notice that it was added to the playlist by mistake), when it reaches the end of a playlist it will automatically switch to a 'playlist radio' which is fine, but it then wont let you skip back to the playlist you were listening to (which is a really pain when driving an the only controls you have a skip forward/back). There are definitely other gripes too but these are the ones that immediately come to mind.

On the plus side, instead of getting a mulit-user account, you can just download music to your phone and then if both you and your partner want to listen at the same time one of you can just turn off your data. I don't know if you can get away with doing this for the other services.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Excellent.

I found some Hector Zazou on there at the weekend.

The other half just calls it plinky plonky jazz shit and heads off to watch Cillian Murphy on an endless repeat..

In reply to Jon Stewart:
I used to have a free 12 month subscription to Deezer and over the 12 months I enjoyed the service however when the time was up I cancelled the subscription. I just did not want to pay out any money.

At the moment I stream all my own collection using Google.play. Google allows me to put my entire music collection onto the internet to stream while I am out and about.

And if I want anything unusual then I dip back into the free version of Deezer.

In reply to SuperLee1985:


In my experience you should be able to do this in Spotify, except if you're logging on via a web browser. Works in the iPhone mobile app and the desktop client anyway - I believe there is/was some issue with the Android app.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I got a Spotify account for free. But don't think you can download stuff. But if you just want to plays stuff from an internet connected PC at a home it's totally fine. Don't think the interface is that great though. The controls don't seem to work the way you'd expect them too.

There's also Soundcloud that's pretty good, with better controls IMO.

In reply to stp:


I like soundcloud but it's a different beast. Great for unreleased, live sets, little nuggets, but it's just stuff people put out for free, rather a database of gazillions of 'proper' records.

Not really worked out what to use in the car. I tend to like live sets and mixes, so often these are best just downloaded (no signal most of the places I drive) off soundcloud or youtube onto the phone.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I've tried Amazon Music (it comes free with Prime so why not?) but ended up with Spotify instead : it's just got a lot more music on it. I get the student discount as well, so at £4.99 a month it's a no brainer for me

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Jango if you don't need any bells and whistles