I’ve used streaming services for almost a decade now and nothing has ever come close to Rdio.
I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery.
I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caused me to speak with my $ and stop using it…plus its music discovery is no better than YTM.
I still use LastFM as my primary source for recommendations and it does okay.
But I will never forget how wonderful Rdio was to use…it felt (atleast to me) like a service for people who loved music and discovering new music
You're the only other person I've met online who knows of RDIO. I was an early adopter and I loved that service like it was my own child. I was HEARTBROKEN when it was shuttered.
Maybe it's just nostalgia, but it had a way of having a broad collection while still allowing you to discover new acts. It just... worked, seamlessly, and it didn't have any of the flashiness of Spotify. I like Spotify, but RDIO will always have a special place in my heart.
I’m basing this off of 7+ year old memories so please excuse errors / misinformation…
- It had label support. For example, if you wanted to find all releases by Deutsche Grammophon, you could
- It’s handling of classical music seemed much better than anything I can recall using
- It’s recommendations seemed to be better…like they went above and beyond basic genre recommendations
- For ‘radio stations’ you could dislike a song or artist and it only affected that station. So if you love Bowie but don’t want him on your funk station, you could dislike the artist but still have all the Bowie you wanted on other stations…same for songs
- The social aspect seemed to bade recommendations on people who had similar taste as you…kind of like Dig that would mention but it was built in to the service
Again, this is all based off of memory but I’m confident I discovered more artists and music on that single service vs the plethora of varied services I use today.
As to Dig, I have tried it but it’s such a manual thing I haven’t kept up. I tend to listen to local jazz / classical radio nowadays for the majority of my time and periodically use various services for discovery. I’ll have to give it another go.
Side note, similar to OP, I have found BandCamp (specifically their weekly show) to be also good for discovery.
This is very similar to what the British comedian James Acaster does/did. He buys music off Bandcamp then puts it on his iPod. He documented it all in his second book Perfect Sound Whatever, it helped him get over a breakup and depression around 2016 if I remember right. He jokes in his book that he has an 'iPod guy' who hooks him up with the old iPods. His recommendations here:
There is no way in hell that I am giving up on having instant access to 99.9% of all music, but I will say that Apple Music is infuriating in many ways. The desktop application is widely known to be crap, and, to the point of the article, my biggest frustration with the phone app is that 3 out of 5 icons along the bottom are dedicated to discovery. I don't want Apple to help me find music (that they likely get kick backs to promote).
It is a sad, terrible irony that Apple whose resurgence began when they acquired the best desktop framework from NeXT and further developed it into a revolutionary mobile one, is now a company that’s famous for how bad their new desktop apps are (Music, new macOS Settings, everything made with Catalyst…)
Music is not any worse than iTunes was. And the new Settings app being bad is not exactly consensus — IMO the redesign was much-needed and well executed.
Fair enough, but beside the point — if Music is as good or better than iTunes was, it can hardly be an indictment of the quality of Apple's recent system software.
I dunno if you can really call Apple famous for how bad the very recently updated macos settings app is. They were pretty famous before that and I don't think it's quite eclipsed them yet but I could be wrong.
I genuinly want to stop giving Spotify my money because of the increasingly horrible user experience. But the sheer investment I have there in the form of more than ten year's worth of curated lists and folders makes it damn near impossible to leave without abandoning pretty much my entire "music library" which it has become at this point.
I exported all my spotify data by going to Account > Privacy Settings on their website and requesting all the data that I could get.
This included:
-Playlists
-Streaming history for the past year (you can request history for the lifetime of your account too)
-A list of items saved in your library
-Search queries
-No. of followers, accounts you follow, and blocked accounts
-Payment and subscription data
-User data
-Family Plan data
-Inferences
-Voice input
-Podcast interactivity
-Spotify for Artists data
I used this data to buy the music I wanted to keep and make my own collection.
Pretty much everything about the UX on all platforms I use it on, the constant breaking changes to the UX, which just keeps getting worse. How its still completely geared around lists and recommendations, while 90% of how I listen to music is album or discograpgy based. How its piss poor (I believe that's the technical term) at actually recommending me music I like or could like, or in any way challenging my tastes. Deliberately not fixing bugs and known issues, and never addressing or implementing popular feature requests from the community, even those that are ages old and still requested. Still no lossless alternative, and it keeps getting more and more expensive.
I have the opposite experience both with the interface and the recommendations. I look forward to my Discovery Weekly and often use the "Daily Mix" and "Radio from this track" features.
I usually pick off the songs I like from these recommendation-based features and then I go to listen to at least their album, while adding tracks to mood/subgenre-based playlists for other activities. I dedicate time out of most of my days to just listen to music while walking.
I don't remember ever seeing a bug on the android app. Which's a bit odd now that I think of it.
Really polar opposite experiences from both of us. It seems that they're catering to people with my usage patterns, however it may be that they differ from yours.
When I switched from Google music to Spotify (not entirely by choice), one of the things I really liked about Spotify was the folders. I like the idea of being able to make playlists in a folder and either listen to a specific list, or all at once. Unfortunately it seems like I can't listen to playlist folders in the mobile client, so that benefit quickly evaporated.
But what would I do with it? Yes, the playlist itself is important, but arguably the content is what I pay for. Even if importing to another provider was possible, the alternatives seem to suck equally. Buying all that music and future music I want is simply not feasible from an economical perspective.
You can export both as GDPR requests on the Account -> Privacy pane of Spotify's settings or through the public APIs here: developer.spotify.net
As I mentioned in a previous comment in this thread, I work for Spotify and specifically on these APIs, we don't block you from extracting your data if you wish.
I don't think I've ever been introduced to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise through Spotify.
In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio.
I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one album. When I listened to a track I'd then lookup the album for the track, find the most similar albums and then play some random songs from those albums, but with some controls to make larger jumps possible. It was not using a vector database like FAISS so it was kinda slow and had other issues and with too much bitrot I'd need a complete rewrite to get it working again, but I found lots of new music with it.
Maybe there's some services like that out there now that can hook up to streaming services like Spotify?
For me is the opposite, almost half the value i get from Spotify is about discovery (the other half is convenience).
Specifically, I discovered amazing artists through the Discovery Weekly and the Artist's Radios. But also the "Fans also listen to" section in an artist profile. I found all sort of things, even obscure indies with a few thousands of listens and other "hidden gems". I'm really happy they now added the "Enhance" function to playlists.
What I noticed though, is that I have to be very careful with my interactions on the platform to "train" the algorithm in the right direction. I have to like only specific genres that I want recommendations about, use playlists for anything else and use a lot the "i don't like this" feature on the discovery weekly. There was a period where I listened to more casual genres than usual and it completely broke my profile. My Dicovery Weekly was terrible at that time, it was a bummer.
What I think would be great is if Spotify would be more open about this. I would love to be able to tweak the discovery by myself (like suggest specific genres or artists, blacklist others). Maybe even create different discovery profiles for different genres. Instead I have to play the game of interacting blindly with the platform and see the results next monday on the new discovery weekly.
I really wish that I could (while respecting privacy) dig into real people's music tastes. I used to download songs with Napster and find some amazing song/artist, and them dig into what else that person had and loved almost all of it.
I have been looking to recreate this discovery through kindred-spirits-in-music ever since.
I spent so many hours finding a user on Napster (or Soulseek) and looking through the albums they had in their collection. Maybe it was because there was a higher barrier to entry for an album getting into a person's collection back then -- they either had to rip it from CD or download it on relatively slow connections, and hard drive space wasn't what it is now of course. It's not anything like favoriting a song or album on a platform like Spotify, even if you could browse their saved albums.
I'd love to have discovery require a little bit of work again, there was a lot of fun and playfulness in digging.
Spotify's recommendation algorithm is weird. I feel like it knows exactly what I do like, but its only able to suggest slightly worse carbon copies of bands I already listen to.
Going through my recommendations feels like a bunch of bad cover bands of things I like.
Is your music recommendation system open source? Would be down to check it out and learn a thing or two from it.
On the topic of vector search, I'm fairly certain that Spotify still uses Annoy (https://github.com/spotify/annoy). Like Faiss, it's a great library but not quite a database, which would ideally have features like replication (https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md), caching, and access control, to name a few.
No. I released part of it as open source, but that was just a script to import Discogs to an SQL database. It was never really more than a proof of concept and I think it would be quite difficult to get the code running now. At the time one of the big issues I had was that I had no idea how to find the closest vector of a vector without it going like really slow.
I was also experimenting with finding a popularity score for songs and artists. The last.fm API worked well for this, but then that was just using an API, so there was a lot of other sources that I was looking into, like using pageviews on the Wikipedia article for an artist.
I've thought about making a new open source version at some point if I get time. I think I've got a decent idea how to make something work quite well now, basically make a vector with the genres/styles, do dimensionality reduction and then store in vector database, so you get like an embedding of the album essentially. A bit like those language models embed words in a vector space, but you don't need a neural network to do it, since that job is done already by humans who have listened to the music and tagged it.
They were acquired by Spotify in 2014 and according to announcements at the time, the intention was to enhance their recommendation/discovery system with the deeper insight they got into songs as a result (Infinite Gangnam Style, anyone?), but I don't know what came out of it.
I gave up on Spotify a long time ago. Pandora more recently. I find myself just listening to a handful of channels on SiriusXM since the desktop streaming app came with my truck subscription.
Anything that I find myself liking a lot I head out to one of the very few record stores out here and buy it on vinyl. But then, I'm old and like having things in my hands and not just streamed. I buy paper books too.
They used to be good, then Youtube has just stopped trying with me. It has shown me the same music recommendations for the past 2 years, and I'm not even joking.
The only thing that's always new and recommended is the latest hiphop song that's popular right now (i.e. video posted 12 hours ago, 3M views), and it should know I don't listen to hip hop, at all.
I tried Tidal and couldn't tell enough of a difference in audio quality with lossless in the car (very capable sound system) or in headphones (beyer dynamics). It's just one of those things that people will convince themselves is worth it sometimes when most of the time it's not, really.
Eventually there were enough things missing on Tidal that I gave up and cancelled the sub and went back to Spotify.
Spotify does everything well enough for me that it's still the best streaming service. The fact they listened to Adele and changed the functionality of how album playback works has a good side too!
For me what would be awesome would be if they paid artists more. But that's true of any and all platforms like this.
I held out for a really long time. Google Music used to sell music and be an online player at the same time, which was pretty good. Then they threw that away.
Spotify is mostly more of the same to me now. I get stuck in these ruts where I just listen to the same music because the interface makes that most convenient.
I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land.
Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember what I listened to this year.
Have you tried using the "Enhance" feature on playlists or playing a radio from a playlist/album/artist/song? Genuinely curious to know your experiences with those as they usually provide me enough variance and new artists recommendations, somewhat based on the general mood the original seed. Sometimes it can pigeonhole me into sameness but then I just feed something else to it and go from there.
Playing radio yes. Now it just seems to spit out the same dozen bands that I already listen to.
Maybe I will try “enhance” more (will save me from manually creating so many playlists; the centerpiece of Spotify which also sucks to manage). Thanks.
Sometimes the algo does get in a rut. It's up to you to tell it you're interested in other music. I do this by listening to a playlist I haven't in a while.
I had the same issue with Spotify prioritizing playlists over albums. My roommate and I built a Spotify "record player". We printed out album covers and glued them to plywood squares. There is a QR code with the spotify URI on the back. We have a Pi with a camera on the stand. When the album is in the stand we play the album from the beginning, using the Spotify API. If you take the album off the music stops. You can't pause or skip forward or back.
I've always liked how spotify's mobile app and web/desktop app work together. I get on Spotify here and there (unpaid) to see if things have improved over the years, not much has changed...
I used to do the ipod thing with winamp back in napster days, then i kept a personal library just of cds i've bought, then i tried the subsonic thing i really liked dsub app for android. It was great but i really dont want to do server stuff at home...metadata on discs and bringing it over to digital audio, its never perfect and bugs me to where i'll spend hours cleaning it up...
I've been using Youtube music/Google music for many years, abandoned my digital files and i find a lot of my music on youtube and recommendations on YTM. I usually pick the bands im into and they have similar artists and drill down that way, im not a huge fan of auto discovery playlists.
YTM are going to be raising their rates, i pay for family premium, $15 -> $22/mo in april for me. So now im looking at alternatives and trying to avoid running a server and/or managing files. I think YTM has more music because of the youtube side but the client side UI sucks.
I've been using Plex with a server for my music on it for a while. I'd like to eventually switch to subsonic. Music has always been very personal for me -- I still have some sub-1000 youtube view songs I found as a 12 year old. So I've always known Spotify wouldn't be an answer for me. There's definitely a lot of unique and sometimes Spotify-exclusive content on the platform.
That being said.... nothing ever changes. Any cloud music platform has always been just another radio-- whether they brand themselves that way or not. For the year or so that I used spotify I did find some gems, but I would forget about them as quickly as I found them.
I think of my media library as something I have to put work into to have it be meaningful. Organizing it, deciding what you keep and what you toss out, what to pay for what to skip, all make it more important to you and more memorable. Having a library in itself is also of course a useful UX thing to remind yourself what you like and continue to go back to it.
I'm definitely the odd one out here. I hate any streaming service because the value of my music is being able to listen to that music whenever I want...including 20 years from now.
I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art.
I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band.
Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire.
Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify:
beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope
Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope
Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes
Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff
Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify
Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope
Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes
Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No
The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes
So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate.
That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term.
Ditto. If my income drops or streamers shut down I'll still have my music. Owning nothing can be liberating, but not if you're replacing it with decades of renting instead.
Plus I've also got loads of stuff that isn't on Spotify, Apple, and the rest.
And as for discovery, the free Spotify still gives me some of that (I also like a bit of Smooth Chill or similar running in the background on ye olde voice assistant speaker).
I still pay for Spotify premium cause I’m scared they would remove my username and replace it with a random gibberish string. My account is one of the first sign ups where you get to choose usernames. Bandcamp looks nice, I miss buying physical albums.
I’ve never felt much of an allure for music streaming services. They’re great for skimming, but pretty useless for anything non-mainstream, so I’ve been slowly amassing a ripped CD library for decades, and use Plex (and the pretty amazing PlexAmp) to get at it.
My only gripe with Plex is that the only voice assistant that interacts with it is Alexa, and it requires me to have my Plex server shared over the Internet. On the other hand, that’s been handy a couple of times when I was out and about and wanted to stream a couple of songs (which it did as well as Spotify).
> I think a lot of people would probably look at my distaste of Spotify and recommend another, more suitable, streaming platform like Apple music or Pandora
Just go to YTM?
I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much).
Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now.
I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.
Hate that navigating Spotify feels like loading websites. And it has felt that way ever since they moved their app to whatever pseudo-webapp framework it is that they’re using.
Eh, I just left Youtube Music considering to go back to Spotify. Youtube Music has a terrible UI, lacks features, and feels like an afterthought to entice people to get Youtube Premium.
Honestly, if you're paying for Youtube Premium, you might as well use YT Music, but it's all around worse than Spotify.
I've thought about going from YTM to Spotify, but hard to justify since I have YT Premium.
One annoying thing I noticed with YTM is if I "liked" a song or artist, Google would assume I wanted to see news about them in my Google News feed. I don't think there's even a way to disable that.
I've been trying Deezer for a week or so. Other than an app crash once, it has been a good experience so far. It's just a simple music streaming app with a good collection of music. Not tied to a Big Tech company and actually based in France.
awesome to see somebody else fed up with it. i just did the same about 2-3 months ago and landed on bandcamp (and steam for video game ost's haha). sadly there's still a lot of fragmentation and i'm trying to find other good places to buy DRM free music. (looking for old BTBAM if anyone has an idea)
i do have vinyl as well for some of my favorites. but digital is still my primary listening mode.
It's really quite a shame how few options there are for buying music, especially with apple music no longer allowing to buy stuff. I recently got into Japanese classic city pop, and was surprised to find that there were several japanese sites that sold digital, drm free music still.
I'm positively surprised this is actually not another Why I'm leaving twitter virtue signalling post, since I can imagine people doing same with Spotify over some content they don't like, nice to see for change someone leaving some platform for actual rational reasons.
Tidal is a relevant half measure for those looking to leave Spotify for a more album centric service with better profit sharing for artists. I used the FreeYourMusic app to migrate playlists, favorited songs, and albums.
I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery.
I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caused me to speak with my $ and stop using it…plus its music discovery is no better than YTM.
I still use LastFM as my primary source for recommendations and it does okay.
But I will never forget how wonderful Rdio was to use…it felt (atleast to me) like a service for people who loved music and discovering new music