Music Streaming Services

Google's dropping the "don't be evil" line has been rather representative of how they've conducted themselves at several points in recent years, but I gotta say that at the least their music algorithms have been grand.

I have YouTube on a bunch as white noise or when I need to turn my brain down so subbed to Premium years ago (it's much more affordable in my country, just under $2.90 at current exchange rates for one person), and because Premium came with a YT Music sub I figured why not, I don't need lossless for general use and I just buy CDs or stuff off Presto/Boomkat/Bandcamp whenever I want something to really sink into. That was a good call because yeah I've found some great music through it. The UX is also pretty nice.

It sounds to me like YTM has a sort of... vividification going on? Whatever they do to their audio files, it just sounds richer and more vibrant than the same releases on Spotify when comparing the both at max quality. I have no clue if it's "accurate", but I rather like the sound of it.

Recent complaint: I noticed yesterday that they did this weird thing where, instead of keeping the seekbar the same red it's been for ages now, the tail end of the bar turns a sort of weird magenta. Caught it at the end of a song yesterday and I thought my PC screen corner was damaged somehow.



It's even more jarring when you hover over the bar and the red button pops up, makes the magenta stand out even more now. I hate it. It looks off.

 

Yeah the interface sucked and they always seemed to lose out on sq/technical comparisons, but the music selection and price best matched what I wanted at the time. Maybe one day a goldilocks streaming service will appear.

 

You probably couldn't re-up Tidal at the previous rate, because the plan no longer exists. The current Tidal plans are all high res for the same as the 'regular' price was before. I'm on the new high res family, and it's an incredible deal.

 

At the beginning of the current style of streaming services, but before Apple Music, I subscribed to Google Play Music for a long time. It definitely had the best discovery and algorithms at that time. Way better than Spotify. Apple’s really is still not that great in that regard.

 

I was doing some sort of deal for a few years where you signed up for a free best buy account and then bought a year's Tidal 16bit lossless subscription for $90 and they gave you a code to activate on Tidal. That is now gone, but I'm happy enough on yt music for now and it's free with my wireless plan, maybe they'll add flac at some point.