Music streaming is such a mess. I've tried a ton of services in an attempt to find one that's decent, and have found embarrassing problems for all of them.
Spotify: Really hostile, manipulative, and terrible to artists. On my end I hate how commercial the homescreen is, and the CarPlay interface is just a user-hostile to a degree that is frankly unsafe disaster.
TIDAL: Pretty good in a lot of ways. They pay their artists well. The recommendations are decent. The apps have some really stupid bugs that have persisted for years though, the most annoying of which is that if you shuffle a playlist it only shuffles the dozen or so tracks that the interface had pre-cached from the top. So if you try to shuffle your full library you wind up just hearing the same dozen songs only, over and over again.
Deezer: Wanted to like it, but the apps aren't great, and I ran into more missing tracks than I'd like.
So I finally settled on Apple Music. I've got an iPhone, so it's a natural fit there, and the CarPlay interface is great. They also pay artists almost as well as TIDAL. The recommendations are super good enough, and I don't really feel like the home page is constantly trying to push me to whatever the huge labels are paying them to promote (damn you Spotify). The Windows apps are terrible (like flat out embarrassing), and the Linux apps are non-existent, but luckily there's a pretty great open source app called Cider that solves that.
> The Windows apps are terrible (like flat out embarrassing), and the Linux apps are non-existent, but luckily there's a pretty great open source app called Cider that solves that.
This is what blocked me from trying Apple Music as well. Maybe i'll give Cider a look, thanks!
spotify's homescreen does my head in as well. im paying them but they still shove ads in my face. ive been meaning to try spicetify for a while now, it let's you customise the desktop ui so you can probably hide the homescreen completely
Spotify: Really hostile, manipulative, and terrible to artists. On my end I hate how commercial the homescreen is, and the CarPlay interface is just a user-hostile to a degree that is frankly unsafe disaster.
TIDAL: Pretty good in a lot of ways. They pay their artists well. The recommendations are decent. The apps have some really stupid bugs that have persisted for years though, the most annoying of which is that if you shuffle a playlist it only shuffles the dozen or so tracks that the interface had pre-cached from the top. So if you try to shuffle your full library you wind up just hearing the same dozen songs only, over and over again.
Deezer: Wanted to like it, but the apps aren't great, and I ran into more missing tracks than I'd like.
So I finally settled on Apple Music. I've got an iPhone, so it's a natural fit there, and the CarPlay interface is great. They also pay artists almost as well as TIDAL. The recommendations are super good enough, and I don't really feel like the home page is constantly trying to push me to whatever the huge labels are paying them to promote (damn you Spotify). The Windows apps are terrible (like flat out embarrassing), and the Linux apps are non-existent, but luckily there's a pretty great open source app called Cider that solves that.