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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Google Play subscriber, and I'm pissed, because YouTube Music was always forcing videos on me, and was harder to use for offline listening (stopping music when I locked the screen, like other people).

What is better to switch to right now, YouTube Music, or Spotify?

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I made the switch to Apple Music after GPM went on life support. It's got some weird UI choices (Apple conventions, I assume - I'm on Android), but I've been pretty happy with it, and it's more or less sold me on investigating how far an android user can invest in their cloud services ecosystem.

I avoid Spotify because I'm leery of their podcast play, especially given their employee's protests over the Rogan contract. Just because Rogan's too valuable an asset to compromise, doesn't mean they won't go after smaller podcasters.

Apple by contrast has been a fairly responsible steward of the podcasting ecosystem with its publicly available index, and hasn't attempted to exert undue control over individual podcasts beyond delisting them from their search engine.

I entirely stopped using streaming services and now buy and download my music from Bandcamp, using webradios to discover new titles (my personal favorite is the webradio Nordic Lodge Copenhagen, SomaFM also has a lot of good thematic radios).

I don't have any trouble listening to my collection when internet gets spotty, I can have real full shuffle on my collection without hearing always the same titles coming again and again, and I'm guaranteed I own my music, with no-one able to take it from me. It feels like the future :)

I've done the same but my problem is that a lot of artists (labels?) only made their songs available to purchase on itunes and google music. Now there's only itunes which of course only works with the native app and doesn't have Linux support.

Well, as far as I'm concern, if they only provide content with DRM, then piracy is fair game. I pondered for a time if I should buy the content on abusive platforms and then download it illegally without DRMs, but I decided that respect must go both way. Just to be clear, I pay for a lot of music every week and I even give a lot every months to charities, this is not about money and my difficulty to part with it. Ultimately, I very rarely use piracy anyway because when I have to, I lose respect for artists and don't want to listen to them anymore (it's not me making it political, it's just a feeling that happens when I realize the artist will force spyware on me). The only content I download through piracy is from long dead artists, mostly (they didn't chose to only be available with DRM).

That being said, I've been surprised how common it is to find albums on Bandcamp or bands' own sites. It may be the music I listen to (I try to never limit me to a few "genres", but I very commonly listen to music with small audience). I guess fees asked by platforms have something to do with it too.

Spotify. I doubt they'll shut down / rebrand / move their music streaming service in a few months time.

If you watch YouTube, then probably it's best to stick with Google since you get ad-free YouTube with your subscription (I think?) . Otherwise probably Spotify is better.

I have both Youtube and Google Play subscription, but never listen to Youtube music because the sound quality is quite bad. But now I'm getting really pissed:

Youtube Music has only 256kbit AAC compression...that's a no go for me. I tried Tidal once, but the user interface was very slow, so I unsubscribed.

Over here (France), ad-free Youtube comes only with Youtube Premium, not Youtube Music Premium (great branding!).

But YouTube Premium comes with YTM so just get that.

I can't say I've had that experience, I've never had YT music throw a video at me. I've seen them listed as results in searches though. The YT Music move annoys me more because it all just seems like such a dumb waste of time, and Google is making me think and expend effort to service their corporate nonsense.

(for me, I'm sticking with YT Music over Spotify because you also get a YouTube Red subscription, and no ads on YouTube is worth it for me personally)

I moved my purchased music to YT Music in additional to having previously downloaded it but I am not super happy: the old model of buying a song or an album and then downloading it seems to no longer be an option in this craven new world - I guess they don't want my money if it does not arrive vassal-like in fixed monthly amounts.

I switched from Spotify to Amazon Music Unlimited, as I found it to be much less buggy.

Amazon doesn't allow HD music in their Linux client and unfortunately does not play nicely with the Google ecosystem. Shame too because I really liked it.

I moved to Spotify. Tried YTM which just a couple weeks ago lacked many basic features - you couldn't go from a song to the album listing or the artist page, you couldn't browse albums alphabetically, and many more - now it seems all those missing features are added. It actually looks decent now, so maybe I'll consider it in the future - but I'm already migrated now - they needed up the launch badly.

My 2 cents, YouTube Music's interface is awful.

I was a google play music user since its inception and I switched to spotify. I paid 10$ for a tool to port over all my playlists, some which had over 800 songs. It was about 95% accurate so I'm a happy camper. Spotify's bread and butter is their music player so they're not going to cancel it anytime soon. lol

I switched to Spotify and I'm pretty happy. It's a bit more buggy and some features are missing, but overall it's a decent replacement and I'm liking the playlists/radio more.

Spotify.

Also made the move as a result of the switchover and far happier for it.

Third option: Tidal, better sound quality, huge library and awesome playlists. Based on my own personal experience of course :-)

Can I upload my own music to tidal?

I tried Tidal, but the UI was much worse for me. I'm thinking of trying Amazon HD as well, as it has great reviews.

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