I am looking to move on from spotify, what music streaming service pays the artists the best while still having a large library.
I strongly recommend Apple Music. It has one of the largest libraries and pays better than YouTube, Amazon, or Spotify.
Apple Music is also platform agnostic; there’s even a browser version now. Also, you can download music and choose the quality. It’s far less “algorithm-y,” which I prefer.
Tidal and Qobuz do pay out more, but have much smaller libraries. I don’t personally like them much. The apps feel subpar.
YouTube and Amazon are straight up bad experiences for me. If this was back in 2013, I’d actually have recommended Google Play Music. RIP.
Keeping a local library on your phone and computer.
No need to worry about if a streaming service changes anything, not pepetual bulls just to listen to music
Navidrome
None of them. Buy music, don’t rent access to it.
Please be realistic, who does that in this day and age?
I only know two sides (in the bigger scheme) people who rent it and people who pirate it.
In all kinds of tech media that exists the disc music are the ones that amazes me the most because they still have their spot in certain stores.
I buy all my mysic on iTunes, and have done so for a long time, it makes my music library more focused and I have no worry if loosing access if I can’t pay rent.
Not going to downvote you since I use iTunes for streaming, but when they changed their policy a few years ago about DRM, they fucking deleted about 20 songs I wrote and recorded solo or with my bands. My friends had backups, but man that sucked. So beware, I suppose.
Wait, what? That seems odd. They’ve deleted music videos from my account (which I had the files for, and the videos in question were also pulled from YouTube etc by the band, so I don’t think it’s apple’s fault they were pulled), but I still have all the music I’ve made myself. I do back it up every 2 or 3 months (I would cry for the rest of my life if I lost it, I have nearly 2yrs of continuous music), but I’ve never had to restore it (and this has reinforced why I do back up).
Edit: looked it up, I see the issue now. I don’t use Apple music, and every instance I can find of this happening is associated with ceasing that subscription. But I just use iTunes and the iTunes store. Dunno how this would work for you since it’s your own music (and I dunno if it’d work for music not in the iTunes catalogue, ie stuff from Bandcamp, qobuz, cough cough less than legal methods, etc), but it would appear all you have to do is log in to your account again and re-download the deleted files.
Second edit: just realised I have lost some actual music from my account. The series of live albums that iTunes directly released from the iTunes festivals they ran like 15yrs ago just came to mind. They’re gone from my account. And probably a bunch of others. They were never deleted from my hard drive though.
I think Apple Music and Tidal pay the most per stream, but Tidal has a smaller library than Spotify. It might be different now so not sure.
Anecdotal, I’ve not actually had a lot of instances (if any) of Spotify having something but Tidal not, usually find albums that I’m interested in from band camp no problem and if it’s missing its missing on both. Sound quality is noticeably higher which is the reason I tend to prefer, the app has gotten better in my experience
I have all my digital copies on my NAS with jellyfin to stream them as well, sometimes it’s just easier to stream off tidal or Spotify though
