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DIMM005: Music streaming services suck dick (and cock)

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Rant time!

Very sadly, my music streaming service of choice must be Spotify. I don't like spotify as a company, but their service is unmatched by any other app. I have been trying for years to escape the tight grasp of spotify, but it has been unsuccessful.

What's wrong with Spotify?

What isn't wrong with Spotify? A big thing for me is that they don't pay artists very much at all. From what I've seen, each stream on Spotify is worth about half as much as streams from other services. I want my stream to be as profitable for the artist as possible, because that gives me the highest chance of getting more music from them. And for the same stream, Spotify pays half as much as a service like Apple Music.

Also I don't feel very confident in Spotify as a company, I feel like any day now they are gonna just shut their doors and close down. Spotify has a deep money problem, because even though they don't pay their artists enough, they still don't make a lot of money. They spend a lot of money on stupid bets and stuff that doesn't make the core experience of the service better. They also just recently bricked their own product called the Car Thing, which gives me even less confidence in them.

For these reasons (and many more), I just want to get out of Spotify, but there are some things that a streaming service needs to have.

Very important

Nice to haves

Apple Music is disappointing...

I use many apple products and the best thing about this whole thing is the software. I am so deep in the ecosystem that it starts to become a feature, not a bug.

So I thought, oh I have so many apple devices, Apple Music will work so well with them and Tim Cook will sprinkle his magical software powder over everything and I'll never go back.

Then I realized that Apple Music is the worst software that Apple makes.

Little history lesson, back in the neolithic era, Apple was mostly known for iTunes and the iPod. With these you would store all of the music locally on your device, then just play the mp3 files. And that worked great, but with the advent of music piracy, and streaming services, this model doesn't work anymore.

It seems to me that what apple did was just hastily frankenstein a bunch of bullshit together to try and force that iTunes base from 2001 into a modern streaming service of the 2010s. And let me tell you it does not work.

It is just a nightmare to use, especially when compared to Spotify. It might seem fine if you just use it on your iPhone, but that is like the best of the best experience possible with Apple Music. If you dare to have it on a Macbook, or god forbid a Windows PC, no amount of Tim Apple's Magic Integration Powder™ can fix this mess.

The great thing about spotify is that you can control any device from any other device, so it ends up being this connected network that works really well. So I can play music on my Macbook Air, then move the music over to my Windows PC, or all of my Alexa's, or my Phone connected to a speaker. Play, pause, skip, volume controls are all changeable on any speaker and that is genuinely amazing.

Apple tries to do that slightly, but in the worst way possible. In my experience, if you are playing a song on your iPhone, then try to play a song on your Macbook, its super inconsistent. Either it will just play and the other one will be unaffected, or it will just stop the one you just played, and tell you that you can't play Apple Music on two devices at once.

Which is super infuriating because it knows that Apple Music is being played in two locations, and can control them, but Tim has decided not to give ME that ability.

This is just one of the many ways that Apple Music is disappointing.

Apple Music does have some great features, like karaoke mode, lossless audio, Apple Music Classical, incredible iPhone App.

However, another music service that I tried has improved a lot, but still not nearly enough to compete with Spotify.

Youtube Music has improved a lot, but not enough.

The draw of Youtube Music is very clear, because I already pay for Youtube Premium every month. So getting rid of it will save me $11 a month not needing to be subbed to Spotify.

I checked it out years and years ago, and it was terrible, just an awful attempt at even doing this type of thing. The big thing was that many of the songs that I wanted were either super low quality lyric videos, or not on there at all. Since I listen to some relatively obscure artists, this was really annoying because a ton of songs I really liked were just missing.

Over time though, Youtube has gotten way better at having all of the songs that I want in an official "Artist - Topic" channel, immediately after they release a song. Even for the super obscure people that I listen to like OK Glass.

But all of these features level them up from being completely useless, to being technically usable, once again only on one device.

Also unlike Apple Music, there's nothing really sticking out about Youtube Music. I guess you could say that having any song on youtube is nice, but you could already do through Spotify local files, soooooooo.

Take matters into my own hands.

I have been seriously considering renting a server out and using a service like Navidrome to have my music available from anywhere. There are some apps that are designed to connect to this service to essentially make your own streaming service.

This is the one option in this rant that I have not actually tried yet, because it's so ridiculous that I figure there must be some kind of catch.

This would be cheaper monthly (probably 5 USD a month), but there is a huge upfront cost of buying all of the music, which would likely never be worth it in cost. I have about 700 songs in my main playlist, and at about 1 dollar per song, that's about how much money I'd spend on Spotify premium over 5 years, and I still have to pay for the server! You maybe could argue that actually owning all of your music has benefits in and of itself, and I understand that, but that doesn't really soften the blow of 700 dollars for something I already have. Plus any album I want to listen to in the future would be about 10 dollars to buy.

We are on the internet of course, and there are some legally questionable ways of acquiring music for lower prices than 1 dollar per song. I wouldn't do this, one because it's illegal, and two, this whole thing started because I didn't like how artists were being compensated on Spotify. Pirating my music would be worse for the artists than continuing to listen on Spotify.

Old School.

As I'm mentioning buying music, there is a clear solution right in front of us, I could just keep a bunch of MP3 files on my various devices and listen to them. This is the lowest cost of all of them, being a fixed cost of just buying the music. But it's also the lowest functionality of all of them. The more I think about it as I am writing this, the less bad it sounds, but I am probably just generalizing the bullshit that future DIMM would constantly have to go through. Maybe something like Bandcamp would be the solution that I'm looking for, but I'm not entirely sure.

I feel trapped.

This sucks. I hate this shit. Each of them are mediocre enough that I feel no pride about using any of them. The most noble one is probably just buying the music, but I would have to have some robust system for that to work out I don't know what to do.

Anyways, new 30 minute video out tomorrow in celebration of Drama Mondays, this ones gonna be a doozy. Here's the link, it'll be a private video right now, but tomorrow at 11:34 AM Mountain Time, it'll release