Hi,

Up to now I have been getting by with the music streaming service included with Amazon Prime but the unavailability of some of my favourite artists and fact that it only works on one device leads me to look for a paid music service.

Can I have recommendations for the best service – I need at least two simultaneous streams to be supported, listen mainly via phone or PC so audiophile quality not needed. I would also like the artists whose music I stream to be rewarded sensibly (may be deluded there).

Equally reasons not to use a service would be of interest.

I’m using YouTube music premium.

Its algorithms are rubbish.
The ui is rubbish.

The only thing it has that keeps me subscribed is the fact that you can find all the rare, live, remixes etc. You don’t get all that on Spotify etc.

If someone somewhere has uploaded rare stuff to YouTube then you can play it in the music app. Quality varies obviously.

Spotify is the default; the artist selection is broader than most (any?) other services. Remuneration is a problem, but one could argue it’s a fundamental problem with the industry rather than the specific platform…

Remuneration is a problem, but one could argue it’s a fundamental problem with the industry rather than the specific platform…

It certainly is a problem, you’re actively promoting the idea that artists should be paid virtually nothing for their work in return for ‘the exposure’, except for the great majority of artists it means they earn far less than minimum wage, the top one percent get most of the exposure.
And Spotify is far and away the worst of the bunch.

I went from Amazon Music Prime to Amazon Music Unlimited for similar reasons to the OP – I rarely found any tracks/artists missing on Music Unlimited. I now also have a Tidal Hi-Fi subscription (bought a Naim Mu-So 2 and wanted the best quality streaming source which meant using it’s native app that only supports Tidal or Spotify). I thought about going with Spotify instead but I don’t agree with their shit payments to artists and from reading reviews etc. it didn’t seem the sound quality was quite as good (although I likely wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference myself…)

I intended to cancel my Music Unlimited sub (after signing up to Tidal) but have kept it for now as I still have a couple of Echos I listen to music on and would lose half the songs in my playlists going back to the free Music Prime 🙁

I use spotify it works very well

s for the argument about payments. Surely the issue is the copyright holders let the music be played for too little money?

Pre spotify I used to buy CDS then went to file sharing which got the artists nothing. Once spotify came along I could get online music in a way that some money went to the artists.

I plug a £22 Echo Dot with AMU into a Naim player and all seems to work surprisingly well, it would just be nice to get rid of her voice announcing each track requested. Is that possible?

I keep coming back to Spotify (which works well) because I get it included in a phone contract or some other promotion.  Take that away and I’d have kept my YouTube music and video combo going.  Mostly because no ads on YouTube was so nice but the range of music is good too

Spotify here, it’ll do what you need and I’ve had no reason to change for a number of years.
I’m sure Apple Music and the other services are great too, but Spotify work for me!

Availability of tracks across the major streaming platforms is much the same and functionally they’re very similar so I use Tidal because when I last looked into it they appeared to pay about 3x what Spotify does per stream. Now, 3x cock-all is still not much and it’s difficult to find reliable info on the payments streaming services make but hopefully I’m not entirely deluded.

s for the argument about payments. Surely the issue is the copyright holders let the music be played for too little money?

That’s an odd argument to hear from you tj, in that it seems to disregard the power imbalance of the 2 sides.

if you buy an album the artist would receive about $1 per cd or 5-10c per track. on spotify, they tend to get 0.5c per play of a track. So if you would have listened to an album more than 10 times, the artist actually benefits from you using spotify instead of buying their cd..

spotify allows 2 simultaneous streams but you need 2 spotify accounts, linked to the same ‘premium duo’ account.

if you buy an album the artist would receive about $1 per cd or 5-10c per track. on spotify, they tend to get 0.5c per play of a track

It’ll vary by artist and country but for US/UK I think you’re overestimating what Spotify pay by a factor of about 100. They pay around 0.004 cents per play.

I use Spotify and it’s good but the model is pretty broken for artists. Nothing stopping you buying music and having Spotify though. Or buying merch direct from artists to support them if you listen a lot.

And yeah 5lab I think your numbers are waaaaaay out.

I plug a £22 Echo Dot with AMU into a Naim player and all seems to work surprisingly well, it would just be nice to get rid of her voice announcing each track requested. Is that possible?

I sometimes (rarely) connect my amazon (not dot) to my naim muso using bluetooth (rather than plug it in?) and tracks don’t get announced. sounds like it might be a setting somewhere. Possibly Song Id. just tell Alexa to turn it off.

Song ID
When you’re listening to a new song you’ve never heard, it can be annoying to interrupt the song by asking Alexa what it’s called or who sings it. However, with a feature called Song ID, Alexa will announce the artist and name of the track before playing the song. To enable, say, “Alexa, turn on Song ID.”

it would just be nice to get rid of her voice announcing each track requested. Is that possible?

You could put a playlist together?

TBH I very rarely play individual tracks. I have two main playlists, one is all my cassettes (about 200 albums) which went to landfill, the other all my CD’s (a Billy bookcase’s worth) which went to a mate to hoard in his loft. Other than that, I’ll generally request an album rather than a single song.

One thing I’ve found useful is you can request [artist] radio. Eg, “Alexa, play [Napalm Deth | S Club 7] radio.” It’ll play [artist]’s greatest hits interspersed with ‘you might also like’ tracks from similar artists.

They pay around 0.004 cents per play.

its 0.004 dollars, according to my googlefu. Which is about half a cent.

That figure is the payment to the ‘rights holder’:

Spotify pays whoever holds the rights to a song anywhere from $0.006 to $0.0084 per play. The rights “holder” can then split these earning between the record label, producers, artists, and songwriters, which means splitting pennies between many parties.

https://qz.com/1507361/mariah-careys-record-breaking-day-shows-how-little-musicians-make-from-spotify/

the kids use Spotify and I use Tidal hifi, as it has better bit rates, and MQA.

its 0.004 dollars, according to my googlefu. Which is about half a cent

Sorry 5lab, I’ve done some googling and it looks like you’re right, it’s a lot more generous than I’d thought. Like about 100 times as much, funnily enough!

It still looks like Tidal are the least tight-fisted of the major players at about 3x that much so I’ll stick with them.

Deezer HIFi for me and family. Spotify for Son1. I much prefer the Deezer app. I had tidal until Deezer went FLAC.

@johnners see above that figure is what Spotify pay not what artists get. Tidal do seem significantly better though.

I kinda do and don’t agree with the whole moral quandary over this.

1) One would assume that artists / producers agree to be listed on Spotify?

2) Radio has existed for a century, I don’t hear people railing against how little money Metallica make whenever Enter Sandman is played on Chorley FM.

3) If we couldn’t legally and legitimately stream on a paid-for service, what’s the alternative? Are we all going to run out and buy [insert band name here]’s entire back catalogue? There are albums I would have bought, back before physical media was deader than A-line flares with pockets in the knees, but realistically 90% of the time I’d just have not listened to it. This is the “home taping is killing music” argument from the 1980s, it assumes a 1:1 relationship with loss of sales and it’s bogus. Insert Band Name Here might only get half a cent per track when I listen to Difficult Second Album on Spotify, but it’s likely 5p more that the 0p they’d have received if it wasn’t on Spotify.

The artists don’t have much choice. You might not feel bad about it but it has become much harder for artists to make a living from making music without performing live.

That might sound ok but for artists who don’t make the kinds of music that is really performed live, or have family commitments or health/mental health issues that make extensive touring difficult, the advent of Spotify etc has been a bit of a disaster.

It’s not the same as radio because radio didn’t stop people buying music. I still use it so I’m a hypocrite but I do try to buy stuff from artists I listen to a lot.

Sure. Plus brexit something.

I dunno though, it’s difficult times. As people baying for the death of STW whilst virtue-signalling that they “used” to subscribe are quick to tell us over and over, physical media is dying. I moved house recently and a lifetime’s worth of magazines / videos / DVDs / cassettes / CDs / video games went variously to friends, CEX or landfill. So what’s the phrase, adapt or die?

Bleeding-edge games consoles no longer accept physical media. The last two cars I’ve had did not have a CD player. Subscription services are the new Our Price. Shitloads of people signed up to Disney+ to watch shows like The Mandalorian, how many DVD box sets do we reckon they’d have sold in its absence?

I don’t know what the solution is to ensure that artists get remunerated fairly but like it or not it’s the the way the world is tending. And this is either a sustainable model or it it’s not.

With most of these ‘disruptive’ technologies like Uber and Spotify yes they offer the customer benefits in terms of convenience etc but the main effect seems to be concentrating more and more wealth and power in the hands of already vastly wealthy nerds who don’t like paying taxes, and taking it from the people who actually do/make stuff.

I agree we probably can’t put the genie back in the bottle but I don’t think that means we should just give up entirely.

I went from Amazon Music Prime to Amazon Music Unlimited for similar reasons to the OP – I rarely found any tracks/artists missing on Music Unlimited

I found this, plus it integrates nicely with all of the Amazon gadgets knocking around our house, Spotify works quite well on an echo as well.

We tend to have the parental controls enabled on the echo in the kitchen so the kids can stream music to their heart’s content without rude words warping their tiny minds, the dot in the garage and my phone are still fine with the swearing.

Remuneration is a problem, but one could argue it’s a fundamental problem with the industry rather than the specific platform…

It certainly is a problem, you’re actively promoting the idea that artists should be paid virtually nothing for their work in return for ‘the exposure’, except for the great majority of artists it means they earn far less than minimum wage, the top one percent get most of the exposure.
And Spotify is far and away the worst of the bunch.

From what I’ve read it’s the record companies at fault, they pass a much smaller % of overall revenue from streaming to artists than with physical sales. Although, they’re quite happy for the blame to fall on Spotify etc.

The bug problem with the music is they took the absolute piss before streaming came along.

Had an album on vinyl? Pay for the right to listen to the music.

Got a CD of it too now? We’ll take that licence again thanks.

I don’t know what the answer is of course but they don’t offer any good alternative.

I’m still mourning the loss of Google Play Music. YouTube Music is an absolute horror show in comparison.

Spotify for car and walking round at work with a BT speaker. Also for round at mates and creating a group session.

Tidal if I want to listen to something in decent quality on my headphones

Also have Prime unlimited that I occasionally use on the Echo Show in the office