I’ve had an Apple Music subscription for years and use it A LOT. I tried some alternatives (Tidal, Sirius, and maybe one other?) and wasn’t super happy with the options.
Is there a service that people recommend that is good, like $10/month or less, maybe gives better pay to artists? I’d like to spend on a better company if possible too. If Apple has enough money to buy gold trinkets for elected officials they probably don’t need more from me.
Edit: Thanks for all the responses. Some good ideas for sure. Gonna start with qobuz and band camp. Cheers!
I really like Qobuz. They are a lot more ethical and paying the artists. I believe they are French based. App got a lot of updates too lately.
!PurchaseWithPurpose@lemmy.world recently had a post about how many music streams you would need to have per month to make a U.S. monthly minimum wage ($1.257), and Qobuz was the best out of all of them. (At least of the major music streaming services.)
https://lemmy.world/post/49759188?scrollToComments=true (Read the body)
Info from: https://royaltyexchange.com/blog/how-much-do-streaming-platforms-pay-per-stream
Why post a misleading graphic?
As the article says: No platform pays a flat rate per play. Each service splits a revenue pool by every artist’s share of total streams.
It’s not a flat get X plays earn Y amount, because as the amount of streams you get increases your share of the pool goes up which increases the amount you earn
In addition free loaders (people who have ad supported spotify for example) have a significantly lower pay per play than premium subscribers, and even then a premium subscriber in India for example has a lower pay per play rate than someone in Australia or Canada
Long time Qobuz fan here as well. Has quite a bit of obscure stuff on it in addition to mainstream music. Also quite audiophile friendly - looking at their settings, some albums are 24-bit, up to 192 kHz.
They also do a fair bit of curation to surface interesting tracks, thematic playlists and so on.
I gave Qobuz a really good try but in the end gave up because of too many issues with their (iOS) app. Went to Apple Music instead. At least they’re not as bad as Spotify, who I had been using before.
App is getting a lot of updates last weeks/months
Good to hear! I wonder if they publish a change log somewhere that would help me determine if they’ve resolved some of the bugs I found.
No. Buy their CDs and rip them into something like Jellyfin.
That’s not realistic. I have a CD collection, but that took decades and thousands of dollars. Plus I had access to Columbia House (if you know, you know) and a robust used market. That doesn’t exist anymore.
I don’t think a person who’s sensitive to $11 a month is going to be interested in a collection of $25 CDs.
A $10 a month streaming service without ads that is fair to artists isn’t realistic either to be fair
Exactly this. A music collection is expensive. Even more so if your tastes change over time.
Even more so if your tastes change over time.
This is a challenge. I’ve grown on hip-hop and rap, and finding the media is a struggle. For example, the first 'Run the Jewels" album is basically unavailable on CD.
I’m thinking of the other end of the equation: I don’t listen to a lot of the artists I liked twenty or thirty years ago. I’d be annoyed if I spent a bunch of cash on their albums only to have them be coasters now.
Buy used. OP can probably pick up five used CDs a month and stay under budget.
Of course the artist isn’t paid here, so you might as well pirate at this point.
While I don’t disagree with your comment, this part:
and a robust used market. That doesn’t exist anymore
isn’t as bad as you might think, at least where I live. Used CD sales are the highest they’ve been in over 20 years. Sure, it’s not like it was at its peak, but it’s coming back in style again. The rest of your comment is definitely true though.
I think Qobuz and Bandcamp have the ability to stream what you’ve purchased, as well as downloading to own. So in the interim you can still stream, and the option to self-host or just have it on your local devices is a bonus that could be explored later.
I feel like that’s a couple levels of effort more than I’d like. As good as it would be to support the artists by buying CDs I don’t want to buy more plastic and clutter the house. I could also do the same from the library, but that’s not supporting artists either.
That is what we did before streaming made us lazy.
And I just had to go and remove the CD player from my old car. Sigh…
You can load the song onto your phone and play via Bluetooth or aux cable.
Bandcamp was really good. It’s still going but it’s kind of a corpse animated by capitalism now. You get drm free music and sometimes musicians will like do listening parties or chat or other fun stuff.
If you buy one album a month for $10, after a few years you have a sizable library that’s yours to keep forever. Don’t rent music.
A good alternative would be:
- Ripping your own CD’s and playing them on an offline player.
- Use Soulseek (would recommend Nicotine+ app) to pirate music and playing it on an offline player.
For players; on my PC (Linux) I use Strawberry. Windows has AIMP which is really good. On my Android I use Shuttle.
If you’re on Linux, Rufin is an awesome player for those coming from streaming services. Offers familiar interface and functionality. Can be used with local files or Navidrome/Jellyfin/Subsonic instance.
Also, seconding Soulseek through Nicotine+, and there are programs allowing you to download music from streaming services, too.
Was curios about Rufin, but I can’t get it to work. I have music in a local folder, but when I try to add my music folder I get this error:
“Library persistence failed: integer value outside SQLite’s signed range”
Same as the other person said. Rufin is distributed as Flatpak, and thereby it has limited permissions.
Give Rufin access to your music folder. The easiest way to do this is using Flatseal.
I had the same problem. I had to manually give permission to Rufin to access my music folder. I used the 84 point answer here to help figure it out.
Incidentally, after some messing around, I think I’ll stick with Strawberry cuz I’m a weirdo who likes rating my music out of 5 stars.
Shout out to PlexAmp for IOS. Apple Music is terrible for playing your own files. Needlessly convoluted.
Throw out streaming entirely. Maybe buy an album here or there and pirate the rest. Legitimately, if you buy one album and nothing else, you are absolutely supporting the artist far more than listening to their songs “legitimately” through streaming.
Someone who buys a $10 album every other month gives more money to musicians than someone who pays for (and uses) a $10 a month steaming service.
+1 for Qobuz.
I have my own media server where i host everything that I buy digitally in the qobuz store to support artists and I use the streaming part to discover new things , or at parties etc. Its not the cheapest, but that’s kinda contradictory to supporting artists anyway. Its a good combination since a subscription gives you a bit of a discount on digital purchases as well.
Purchasing flacs between Qobuz and BandCamp is my preferred option.
IMO the best combo is pirated Youtube Music (e.g. via OpenTune) for music discovery, then Bandcamp to buy albums you enjoyed.
That way you’re not paying subscription to the giant corpo sucking life out of musicians, you get to actually own the music you buy forever, and in great quality (as long as you archive it properly), and a significant proportion of your purchase goes to the artists who created the things you enjoy!
Now if I could figure out where opentune stores its downloads in the damn android filesystem maze…
I recommend TPB. It is a wonderful value, great selection, mediocre UI.
As much as I hate nearly everything about my job, the one thing I can get behind is that they have a rule: the first time an acronym is used in a meeting, an email chain, or a chat, it needs to be defined parenthetically so that everyone with access to the conversation knows what the fuck we’re talking about.
Because if we’re just going by what I know, OP asked where to stream music and you told them to get some comicbook TPBs (Trade Paperbacks).
🏴☠️
I’m still using Tidal, and have been for many years. It’s got high fidelity (FLAC, Dolby Whatever), large catalogue and is not expensive.
The price for Apple Music, just like the price for everything else in the economy, has inflated.
When Apple Music launched it was $9.99 for an individual. That’s $13.98 in 2026 dollars. In October 2022 they raised the price to $10.99. That’s $12.32 in 2026 dollars. Now it’s $11.99 in 2026 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the cheapest it’s ever been.
https://keepingupwithinflation.com/tracker/apple-music/
Effective date Individual 2026 dollars Family 2026 dollars June 2015 launch $9.99 $13.98 $14.99 $20.98 October 2022 $10.99 $12.32 $16.99 $19.04 July 17, 2026 $11.99 $11.99 $19.99 $19.99 Okay but when does our pay get adjusted for inflation?
Yeah Apple Music definitely provides the best service overall, it’s too bad it’s impossible to get lossless playback on Linux.
Bandcamp + Navidrome
Same
Bloomee https://bloomeex.org/bloomeetunes/
Cross-platform music player built with Flutter and Rust. Mix your local library with online streams, sing along with lyrics, and own every bit of it. No ads. No account. No tricks.
Bloomee pulls from YouTube but works like a music streaming app. It has a robust feature set, it can work as an offline music player using local files, it has Last.fm integration, and it can import playlists and albums from Apple Music, Spotify and ytmusic.
Bloomee is free and open source, and has builds for Android, Linux and Windows. It is available in F-Droid via the IzzyonDroid repository: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/ls.bloomee.musicplayer
Bloomee is free so no money is being paid to the artists through it. If you want to support the artists, the best way to do that is to purchase from them through platforms like bandcamp.
Thanks for the quality info! I’ll check these guys out.
Good point on the artist support. I haven’t looked into bandcamp, but I will now.
Piracy + iTunes + Jellyfin + Symfonium
(for me)is symfpnium like soulseek?
Symfonium is the Android music player I use to stream and save music from my Jellyfin server (which is just my MacBook with my iTunes library on it)
I get that finances aren’t the best for many people, but it always makes me very sad to see that music has been undervalued to a degree where it’s not in anyway unusual to expect to get access to all music ever created for 10 dollars a month. Obviously, that means that the vast majority of artists get very little money. This has lead to a large share of the music available to stream being AI generated garbage. Because it doesn’t make sense to put in the time to create a work of art when people are just not prepared to compensate you properly.
I pirate music to see if I like it, and buy what I like, mostly on vinyl, often through Bandcamp. Despite the pirating, I pay far more than 120 dollars a year for music. That’s the price of like 3-4 albums, and I haven’t gone a year buying less than 10 albums. And that’s excluding all the gigs that I go to. Music is valuable to me, and I still have the first album I bought in 1992, and everything thereafter. It’s an awesome experience rediscovering stuff I listened to in the nineties, that I had completely forgotten about.
Option A: Pool your subscription in a family plan with others already using it anyway. The resulting share is far lower than the single subscription
Option B: Rip CDs and/or put on the pirate hat
