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Comment by pokemon-trainer | Hacker News Reader

My wife listens to and enjoys Pandora daily. She especially enjoys the curated playlists put together by Pandora. I remember the gimmick at launch had the system build playlists for you based on your preferences. It's interesting to see how the service has pivoted to provide a more radio station-like experience.

What other services do folks enjoy? What's the best streaming service out today?

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I use Spotify since I get it for free with my mobile phone provider (well, not actually free, but it's cheaper with my provider than on its own).

Discover weekly is usually really good and choosing good music, it's a shame that it's only once a week. Spotify radio is also usually quite good and making a playlist of songs based on an artist or a song.

They also now have "your daily mix", which I'm fairly sure only takes songs that you've listened to before, but often gives me songs I haven't heard in a while.

They also have running radio, which matches songs to your running pace. I don't use it though, since I don't run.

I haven't used any other streaming services out there, but Spotify does everything I need it to. The one thing it doesn't have is Taylor Swift, but none of the streaming services do.

Before Spotify, I had actually never paid for music, I'd usually torrent it (or sometimes use youtube). But the sheer convenience of Spotify has caused me to hand out a few bucks a month for it.

Apple Music has Taylor Swift if I remember correctly

AM is missing other things, like beyonce's latest album.

The music streaming services are competing now with exclusive albums (this was Tidal's big draw; are they even still around?), to the detriment of their users.

Definitely also recommend Spotify. Has enough that if I can't find something I want, I'm quickly distracted by something else soon enough.

The Discover and Daily Mix options have been great. It's brought dozens of great artists and tracks to my attention that I don't know I'd have found otherwise.

I'm sure they're likely also on other services, but I really like the instrumental versions of some albums (by RJD2, Aesop Rock, etc) - often makes them good options for the office.

Spotify Radio is horrible. It always plays the same songs over and over, for months. It doesn't seem to learn or adapt at all.

This comment made me realize that I switched to spotify for a more on demand service, but now discover weekly (an automated curated playlist based on my tastes) is one of my most listened to playlists.

I try to use Bandcamp whenever I can. Most bands make their music available to stream for free on there and you're able to play their albums straight. There's no playlists or queue for songs but you can buy the music you like for relatively cheap to support the bands. I don't think the Bandcamp cut is that deep on the transactions either.

You won't find many, if any, big names on there but I see it as a great service for independent music. They also have discovery pages to explore genres.

It takes some work to use but I at least don't feel like I'm cheating bands on it.

Also, Paypal isn't mandatory anymore on Bancamp.

Bandcamp is amazing! I just wish they could sell through their iOS app. :/

I use Google Music. I have the family plan and I use role accounts in my "family" for my car and for my Sonos. It includes YouTube Red in the same subscription.

I also use Google Music. The stuff they added in since the Songza acquisition makes it (IMO) a better "Pandora" than Pandora ever was for me.

I feel like I had the opposite experience with Pandora. Back in the day, just playing Pandora through my browser, I'd up or down-vote most songs and I'd get these great playlists where I'd discover lots of music. It was great.

But with Pandora on various user-surly devices (car stereo, Roku, etc) I just don't have that interaction and it seems like playlists just drift off into nonsense or repeat endlessly.

I enjoy listening to music with YT Music app. They seem to have many different versions of many songs I enjoy. Though, I am probably biased since I work at YouTube. Definitely check it out though, and decide for yourself.

Do you mean YouTube red? I can't find any reference to YouTube Music on the iOS App Store.

I believe it's Android-only?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

It's also on iPhone

Here ya go: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtube-music/id1017492454?m...

If i remember right it's a part of YouTube red. It uses a special app though, on iOS it's called YouTube Music.

I understand the licensing deals with record companies set much lower prices for radio-station-like ux compared to on-demand ux. ML-built playlists aren't necessarily ideally equivalent to the playlist you'd make yourself with infinite time and patience, but... I wonder if licensing terms influenced the pivot.

I'm not sure how much ML applies to Pandora. They apply a list of characteristics to music, which is done manually, and select music with similar characteristics. Their algorithm seems to favor music is cheap to play from an unknown artist and small label.

Their algorithm seems to favor music is cheap to play from an unknown artist and small label.

One exception I noticed a couple of years back is that Pandora started playing Mumford and Sons on pretty much all of my stations. I like their music, but it is definitely not dubstep, so something fishy was definitely going on. That year M&S was Pandora's highest paid artist.

Payola 2.0

I subscribe to tidal. It is expensive.. $20/month for "hifi" streaming. It is the only streaming service that offers lossless streaming. Their catalog is good - if I can't find a band it's not a huge surprise. Their playlists are pretty decent - I miss a bit of the community playlist building that spotify has. I like that there is a company offering a better quality of music and am willing to support that.

I used to use what.cd before it was shut down. Now I'm not really sure where to go...

Same. I tried Spotify recently but the compression is awful - I prefer FM to Spotify's awful compression. What.cd had most content in V0 as well as lossless.

What do you mean with "compression". You can set it to use high quality streaming where it's 320kbit ogg or something.

I meant the quality of the sound based on the audio format.

Thanks for pointing this out! I had it set on Automatic and it sounded consistently like 128kbit CBR MP3 or worse (maybe they were sending down their 96kbit Normal stream - yuck). I switched it to Extreme now, hopefully that solves my issue.

Since the what sysop decided to take it down a few other trackers have popped up. The one that has the most Potential would be passtheheadphones.me. It has competent staff and a great community. The second website would be apollo.rip. I would suggest avoiding it since the staff is quite incompetent. PTH will open up recruitment like wcd used to do on their irc.

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