Music Streaming Services

I've been suffering through Pandora for years (free account). I'm sick and tired of hearing the same 3 commercials on a rotation, and hearing the same music on a rotation so I'm willing to pay for a service. 

What do you use? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it?  

Currently I'm on day 2 of the 30-day free trial for Tidal. I like that they have higher-res files, but I don't find that a necessity. 

For those using one of these services, I have a question. On Pandora I had various stations that were built based on my search for an artist, then my thumbs up and down. I have varied tastes so there are a number of stations. The one thing I love about Pandora is that, after building these different stations I could either just listen to a station, or have Pandora shuffle the stations. One song I'm jamming to Godsmack, the next is Neil Diamond, the next is The Four Tops.  Is there a way to do that with another service?

Spotify seems to be the industry leader for standard-res digital streaming. HUGE catalog and very user friendly interface. Works on basically every device.

Spotify doesn't work *exactly* like what you're describing, but can get pretty close. You can give it a song or artist to start with and it will auto-generate a station based on that. You're not going to jump from Godsmack to Neil Diamon that way, but you'll get a wider variety than you might think. You can also create stations and self-populate songs. It gives you recommendations for other songs you might like to add. These feel a bit more like they're based on the genre of music *most* popular in a playlist, not on the full variety of a playlist. (E.g. my 'Lifting' playlist is a mix of Grunge, Classic Rock, Punk, Metal, and Hip Hop; pretty much all it recommends is 90's era Rock/Grunge.) When it gets to the end of a playlist, it will continue playing random music based on what was in the playlist.

It's not as good at randomly suggesting new music for you to discover. However, it does have a nice feature that many playlists others have created can be shared, and that can be a great way to discover music based on a particular interest.

I am eyeing switching over to Tidal or Amazon HD though, to be able to stream HD music on the hifi system. My problem is that I also do a lot of just popping in earbuds and running a couple miles. I don't want to be chewing through my bandwidth trying to play unnecessarily high res audio.

How user friendly is the mobile app for Tidal? How data friendly?

We use, uh, whatever Google Play Music is called now.  Youtube music or something?  Never really had a song I wanted to listen to that I couldn't find and it also means I never see Youtube ads.  They can build a "radio station" based on a playlist or a single song as well as automatically creating ones based on your likes.

I use Amazon music... it's free with my prime membership and actually lets you search for specific songs/artists and build playlists, not "similar songs" like a lot of free apps do. No commercials. The free library is pretty deep, but they do have just about everything on "unlimited" if you want to pay for it! 

I've been using a modified version of Pandora for years. No commercials, no skip limits, no cost. 

It's honestly as bad as radio, no matter how many channels I setup in shuffle, the same dozen songs almost in the same order every time I turn it on. Occasionally it'll sneak a gem in that I'll never be able to find again.

I started with a free version of Pandora but as others noted you're limited to their music offerings.   Plenty of categories but you take what they send.   More recently I started using the free version of Spotify.  There are more commercials than Pandora but you have the ability to "like" songs and build a library.   My son has a paid account and has sent a couple of playlists of stuff I otherwise wouldn't have run across so that's been fun. (Texas E36 M3kickers for example )     I have close to 900 liked songs now so with play on shuffle from that list it's pretty decent.   Then again, I'm old and somewhat of a Luddite so YMMV!

If you have Amazon Prime their free music service is really really good. It lets you download onto your device to play on airplanes etc when you don't have a connection and their stations are pretty decent

I'll 3rd Amazon Music as well. 

In reply to Beer Baron :

I haven't figured Tidal out yet (obviously), but I think you can chose the file size, essentially turn hi-res on and off. 

I'm going to try Amazon music today. I already have Prime, didn't know they had a streaming service too. 

I'd like to keep Tidal if it can do what I want with it, I do like the hi-res options. But in the end, the ability to have a good mix, or just rock out, is more important that the high-res.

I've been using spotify for the better part of a decade. The interface and catalog sells it. 

Amazon isn't looking good right now. I just started the account. The first thing they do is ask you to choose some artists you like. I chose 15, ranging from Van Halen to Motown. They presented me with a personalized playlist and NOTHING that I chose was on there. I would say, nothing remotely close to what I chose was on there. Some mumble rap and justin beiber. I hit thumbs down on EVERY track until I hit my limit of skips, only to be left with some chick rapping dropping f-bombs and crap. 
They asked for my input, then totally disregarded it. 100%!!

I've had both free & paid Pandora. The paid version gives you a lot more variety for each artist station than the free version that runs through a shorter play list of the most popular songs.

I wish there was a service that allowed you to listen to full albums rather than just the most popular songs.

In reply to DrBoost :

The way to get decent automated playlists is to start by searching for specific artists, like the songs you like. Add them to a playlist. you can listen to whole albums as well. Its different than Pandora in a lot of ways.Once you've added songs it'll offer Genres (rock, country, rap, alt, metal etc) and time spans as well (90's. 70's etc).

NOT A TA said:

 

I wish there was a service that allowed you to listen to full albums rather than just the most popular songs.

It is called Spotify

It has been 8 or 9 years but, I remember Pandora was a completely different service when you paid for it.  Gone was the crossover between stations, gone was the really out of place stuff.

At the time I would create a station that would be, say.... 1977-1980 punk. It would do a great job but there would always be something like buckcherry or even elton john interspersed in the mix and no amount of thumbs downing would get rid of it. The day I paid for the premium service all that went away. Turns out those were paid promotions and were tossed in like ads. 

In reply to DrBoost :

We use the paid version of Amazon music unlimited, the free one that comes with prime seemed to be lacking in many of the artists I wanted to listen to. We did the family plan since my wife, teenage son, and I all use it.

Now that I pay extra, I can pick stations based on Van Halen, Paul Simon, Led Zeppelin, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, JJ Johnson, Charlie Parker, or any other artist that comes to mind.

Over time it will learn preferences and have "your soundtrack" which is built based on what you pick. The app lets you pick quality as well, so you can choose lower quality when you want to limit bandwidth. 
 

On edit: I am also able to pick whole albums, artists, playlists or stations (artist or genre)

Spotify Premium here. I've had it for 10+ years. I really like that you can create playlists and download them to your phone/tablet if you'll be outside of cell/WiFi service so you can still listen to the music you want. 

Another vote for spotify. I quit Pandora several years ago. 

My daily driver is Pandora, but I've had a paid account for at least 5 years.   The paid account will automatically download music for your top 3 stations in the background so if you're without service (Or turn off your mobile data & wifi...) it'll play without streaming.  I don't know that I'd listen to it nearly as much if I had to put up with commercials, but for $50 or whatever per year ($4 a month), it's totally worth it.

I also use Amazon since we have Prime, but I don't like the selection engine as much.

In reply to No Time :

How's the user interface on a mobile device?

I find the interface to be fairly user friendly on my iPhone. It took a few minutes to find some of the functions after the last update, but otherwise it works well.
 

Another benefit for me is the integration with Waze. I can see what's playing and skip songs without leaving the nav screen. 

Here's a few screen shots:

Hears the search screen and just some of the results for a search for Van Halen. There are several stations and playlists in the search results if I scrolled down further. 
 

Check out radio.garden.  It's free.  It shows you a map of the world and you click on a city and the streaming stations in that city. 

I have been listening to 3FM from the Isle of Man all morning.  Yesterday I listened to a station in St. John's Newfoundland.  It's interesting to hear how different locales are handling the pandemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Garden

I chose to pay for Spotify, but that was mostly for selfish reasons.  Years ago (and maybe still today)  both Pandora and Spotify let you import your iTunes playlists.  That was particularly nice for me since I had spent years curating my iTunes playlists only to have my iPod AND my computer HD take a dump within a week of each other and I lost 60gb of music that took years to put together.

Originally I chose Spotify because I liked the user interface better.  I don't like the updates they've done.  It seems too complicated and not intuitive.  I'm ok with it because I've followed along with their incremental changes over several years, but I would imagine it could be daunting if you just dove in right now.

Both of them seem to go in and out of certain licensing.  If you make a new playlist you would never notice because it only populates with songs to which they currently have rights.  I do notice in my old iTunes playlist, many of them have several greyed-out titles.

If you're choosing between spotify and pandora, I don't think you can go wrong with either one.  I picked spotify, so I'm rolling with it, but I don't think its better.