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 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).
🏴☠️
A couple of years back I gave up streaming for ownership. The main driver was the utterly unfair deal artists get, and the lack of ownership for my hard earned dollars.
At first, it felt like I was missing out, and I missed the algorithms that helped me find new music. Determined, I stuck at. Discovering BandCamp, and rediscovering CDs was instrumental. For algorithms, I actually found forums to be better, and connected to more amazing artists than before.
Where possible, I buy CDs. If not, I buy FLACs. From BandCamp, you can often get both. The CDs get ripped and stored unless I got FLACs too. I use MusicAssistant for streaming my own collection, and automatic file sync to keep a copy on my phone while on the go.
At the end of the day, I’ve a sizable collection, spend less than streaming (overall, obviously not up front), I have ownership, and artists get a much better deal 😃.
Fuck streaming from apple/Spotify or similar.
CD sales from the big labels also screw the artist. Buying merch and going to shows benefits them far more.
CDs and Bandcamp are also my way to go.
In my case, the main driver was disappearing songs. I hate it when I have a great playlist or collection of albums and some of them mysteriously disappear without notice. Or worse, they get replaced with a different version.
sigh so back to CDs we go… luckily second hand discs are dirt cheap, and even new albums are quite cheap (inflation-wise) compared to their prices in the 90s
What about 24/96 or other HiFi? CD quality isn’t really that great, even losslessly copied when higher quality is available.
Usually with BandCamp, you’ll get higher quality FLACs, although CDs are considered lossless despite the smaller sampling rate. Also, I like having a physical item 😃.
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.
Bandcamp, then tidal. A friend works in the music industry, he said tidal can’t always pay out but they have way better rates than the other streaming services. Bandcamp is like 999x better for artists though. You get the files (for free even if you buy vinyl or cd). It’s so much better.
Visit the library once a month and leave with 10 CDs. Rip 'em all to mp3’s. Month by month you’ll build up a valuable collection that is yours alone. If you are an audiophile then you might not like the mp3’s but I can’t hear any discernable difference that would make me say “what poor sound quality”. If I can tap my foot or sing along then it’s more than good enough.
I mean, can always rip them to flak as well if you are worried about quality. Even still, a good high bitrate mp3 sounds perfect to me so I still use it too.
Working on reorganizing my old music collection to try to de-apple. It’s a bigger pain in the ass than I expected, and I’m missing so much that I’ve added via subscription. Gotta do it though, I’m sick of paying subscriptions for everything.
Many have said buy music. I agree. You own your music fully. (effectively) and don’t buy from apple. Bandcamp ftw. I’m a strange one and use Pandora for gennral vibe streaming. Then if I come across a song that resonates with me I go out and buy it. And before peeps talk bad about Pandora, I discover artists with less than 1000 views on YouTube on it that actually sound good. My only problem with Pandora is that it has a station bleed issue where songs from other stations you made will “bleed” songs into other stations. like I have a dnb station that sometimes plays hip hop instrumentals because of the jazzy vibes that dnb sometimes has. But after a few forceful thumbs down, it behaves. But don’t do Pandora if you are wanting to listen to a SPESIFIC song. Just go buy it.
I use Pandora because they have a cheap no ads plan. You can’t choose individual songs but I think it’s only 5 US bucks per month.
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.
[email protected] 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.
My account was suspended due to the new app changes working the QBZ client, and now they are making me promise to never use the QBZ Linux client, when they don’t even offer a Linux client. No, the web version isn’t valid because the reason I’m paying them is to listen to high quality music! Bunch of assholes.
1 month after I paid the year subscription. Assholes.
They are asking me to reboot the router, I guess because they want me to have a different IP, and what if I have other stuff in there and I don’t want to reboot the fucking thing? Bully assholes.
If they need a Linux app, Tidal is another good option and there is a Linux installer.
It’s also unofficial fyi. I used to use it but went to qobuz to go European. Sigh.
Oh that’s shit. QBZ is great. What was the specific reason for the suspension?
My account seems to still be OK
That the app was spamming too many requests to their server apparently. It might be related to the new update they did. It might also be a fucking lie and them suspending the account because it did requests on the weekend where the service was down and it was retrying all the time. I don’t know. In any case, shame on them for making me promise not to use the only way on Linux to listen to their music on actually on HiFi.
I’ll have to install waydroid and do something hella over engineered to use their official tools.
Btw, QBZ was just a wrapper of the web player on a custom browser with HiFi enabled, they tried upgrading the tool recently to use API calls, but if this happened at that time I would have been able to defend it saying that it’s just a wrapper of the webpage. In any case, I’ll have to do something similar myself (electron browser with hifi enabled).
That sucks, a good company would instead work with QBZ to ensure it’s resolved properly.
I didn’t see any other reports of people being banned. I’ll just keep using QBZ but better keep the subscription monthly in case…
Yeah, that was my exact reaction honestly. If they aren’t offering the thing in Linux, maybe don’t demonize someone doing it for free? Whatever, apparently Linux Firefox doesn’t downsample audio so I can use the web player with bit perfect sound with some tinkering, so that’s nice. There’s even a tool to set the bitrate, I’m trying to build an appimage of the thing so anyone can run it to set their bitrates dynamically correctly.
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 they’ve ever priced it.
Family plan price went up a bit, adjusted. $19.99 over 2022’s $19.04.
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.
Qobuz has a streaming plan, and you can buy and download drm-free music. It’s a good option if you want to just stream (the app has added some nice improvements lately). Even better if you’re also looking to build your collection and looking to go the whole non-streaming route.
Purchases tend to be pricey, and there’s a slightly more expensive plan with a discount on drm-free that might make sense, depending on how often you plan to make purchases.
Edit: this currently doesn’t fall into the < $10 category but is comparable to the old Apple Music price.
Another fairly happy Qobuz user here. Prior to that I used Tidal, which has a better Android Auto experience, IMO. Prior to that I used YouTube Music, and technically I still have a subscription to that because I got used to YouTube Red (now Premium) when it came free with Google Music (now YouTube Music). I prefer a streaming service; I find it much easier to discover music that way.
For digital purchases, while that is possible through Qobuz, every artist I know would prefer you buy from their Bandcamp. ISTR Bandcamp might have been doing some shady anti-union stuff, but I could be misremembering and I wouldn’t know of any great alternatives.
I wish I could try it for free with ads or something
They used to provide like a 3-day trial, but I couldn’t find any sort of offer like that currently active.
If you are just curious about what they have on their streaming service, you can get a rough estimate by browsing their download store. It’s not a perfect match, but it’s very close. It is quite rare for an artist / studio / publisher to let Qobuz stream it but not sell a download or vice-versa.
Youtube ReVanced lets you use the YT Music app without ads, it also lets you watch youtube without ads
I carry around my music as mp3 files on my phone. It’s also stored on a NAS at home and I could stream it via my own jellyfin instance, but its just more convenient to have it on my phone.
I use foldersync to download any music I add to my NAS onto my phone every night automatically.
Finamp is worth it if you’re looking for a music player behind Jellyfin, offline downloads and capable of transcoding the files down to AAC to save on storage usage.
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!
I suggest Metrolist which will soon have a desktop version too (Linux, Windows and MacOS)
Now if I could figure out where opentune stores its downloads in the damn android filesystem maze…
Qobuz or buy CD’s and rip them. Or just fucking pirate flac files.
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.
Shout out to PlexAmp for IOS. Apple Music is terrible for playing your own files. Needlessly convoluted.
You havd to upload to itunes on a pc but then it stays forever, I have songs by post malone I grabbed off sc in like 2017 still
Lidarr is another good option.
Unfortunately no flatpak on Linux.
Lidarr is a server, put it on your NAS. I still prefer Nicotine+ though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pirate flac files and burn your own CD’s.
Interesting, I do the reverse and go to the library and rip CDs to FLAC.
Yeah, eBay is a great for used cds & dvds
The robust used market does still exist. eBay, and Discogs should be all you need. Bonus points if you have a local record store.
HiFi services are more like 16€ a month, ish, which is like 180 euros a year. 5 years and you already spent over 800 euros on nothing. My last skirmish with these services taught me to buy when I can and pirate the rest. Not like artists were earning anything relevant from my subscription anyway.
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.
