Before you read the following information on listening to music, I want to make clear that the experience with how you listen to music and how you find new music is entirely individual and everyone should listen to music independently however they want to. This guide is mostly advice and knowledge that I have gained throughout a decade+ of listening to music and my goal is to have these thoughts and pieces of advice out there for people who are searching for them.
Streaming services are the most common way of listening to music nowadays. Most streaming services are loaded with a lot of ads and have features implemented to annoy the user, so the user purchases (most of the time) a monthly subscription, so the platform becomes useable. It's hard to find someone who hasn't used streaming-services before, because of how convenient they are to the average listener. There is a lot of criticism directed towards streaming platforms for various reasons, which I will try to document as well as I can in every subcategory for each streaming service, that I'm going to list.
Spotify is likely the best paid streaming service for music that exists right now, even tho soundclouds paid-service competes with spotify very well The official playlists are often kinda bad, but they can help some people get into genres that they havent gotten into. The non-premium version of spotify is very bad and absolutely not recommendable, free soundcloud easily tops free spotify.
Pros:
+ Unlimited amount of playlists (10k songs limit for each playlist)
+ Userprofile customization
+ Probably the biggest selection of music on any platform
+ Local-file system
Cons:
- Free-spotify is horrible (loaded with unskipable ads, skip-limit, limited search option, bad playlist editing on mobile)
- Artists are severly underpaid and not protected by any system (meaning anyone can upload songs/change covers/upload albums under their profile under their name without them allowing them to)
- Not much UI-customization
- Official playlists are horrible and often don't make sense
- Spotify is buyable by small artists for them to promote themselves (streams are also non-spotify-side buyable and can manipulate the market too)
- A lot of great musiciands/bands from the past are missing and won't ever be uploaded
- Devs/Managers don't listen to the users for advice on what to update/change
Noteworthy:
~ There is mods to bypass premium and customize the UI
~ You are able to revert to a 2017 version of the programm through a little bit of tricking, if you know how to. - Why would one try to revert back? + Cleaner UI, More structured Album/Artist/Song/Local-file selection, less laggy (way more lightweight than the 2024 spotify version)
Quick Tutorial for uploading Local-files to phone/pc (premium needed):
You have to be logged into spotify with the same account on PC and phone and both devices need to be on the same Wifi (LAN doesnt work).
1: On PC, you go into Settings > then scroll down to "Library" and turn on "Show Local Files".
2: There should be the "Show songs from" option, I advise you turn off "Downloads" and "Music Library", create a new folder on your PC where you only add your music into and then link it with "Add a source".
3: Add any mp3 files into the folder and they should appear in your "Local Files" category on PC.
4: To get the Local-files to download on phone, you have to add them to a playlist of your choice --> you have to download the playlist on your phone and it should automatically download the local-files on your phone.
Important advice for Local-Files in Spotify: Make sure you edit the artist, song and cover (embedded picture) information accordingly to your preference before you add them to spotify, because spotify has a weird system, where you can't edit the file after it has been added to the folder. Be careful when you delete the playlist, the files get lost on your phone and you have to add them into another playlist and then download the new playlist to get them back on your phone.
Whetever you choose to use Itunes/Apple Music is up to you, but to me it is easily replaceable with Spotify, especially with the fact that a ton of music is missing compared to spotify.
Pros:
+ You can buy music permanently (you actually own it, can download it whenever you want, but can't extract the music file LOL)
+ There is options to get Apple-music for very cheap for 6 months, but after that it's the same price as monthly spotify.
Cons:
- Lacking a definite amount of music
- Non-latin letters don't get scrobbled to Last.fm (they get auto-reverted to latin letters)
- Subjectively worse UI than spotify
- You can download the program for Windows, but you're forced to download the other apple-programs too
As Youtube provides visuals to audio, you can watch MVs and visualizers on there. Theres some good channels that upload mixes of different types of music, which may put you onto some artists that you don't know about. Youtube is already pretty old, so theres a great chance of you finding old music that is practically impossible to find on the average streaming-platform. I don't have a clear opinion on YT Music, since I haven't used it's paid version, but to me it seems like it sucks a bit, since it doesn't have anything speaking for itself, except for the fact that Youtube-premium also has other on-site pros which don't have anything to do with music and the only realistic pro I can think off is you being able to listen to music, that has been uploaded by other users a long time ago. Also since Youtube is monitoring playlists more closely than other platforms, there are cases of people having their playlists deleted, because these playlists contained videos that were taken down for various reasons.
Soundcloud is a good, free streaming service that lets you listen to music uploaded by users and artists. It automatically caches music that you have listened to, so you can listen to songs without having to have a connection. A ton of young, upcoming artists use this platform to share their music, because the platform is very easy to use and the underground scene is thriving. Theres also a paid-for version that enables you to download music, avoid advertisements and gives you access to music that is locked behind a pay-wall.
Bandcamp exists since a long time and it isn't really a streaming-platform, I'm including it, because I think that it is probably the best place to support artists directly. You can buy merch from them, buy their music for how much money you choose to give and it lets you listen to music for free without having to pay anything. Every artist can freely set, if they want their music to be listenable without having to pay or how much they want users to pay. There is a lot of record-distributors helping smaller, upcoming artists and it is a nice community with everyone being able to have a profile and being able to choose what they display on there. Only cons that I can think off are the fact that the platform is kind of bad on pc to listen to music, so best-case would be to download the music you want to listen to, which most artists allow for a set-price or even for-free. Also the platform on phone isn't well programmed, so it can definetly use one's phone battery quicker than the average streaming platform.
This platform is very known to have an terrible community, nevertheless im listing it here, because its still a great way of finding amazing projects. As the name indicates, you can rate music, I personally use the site mostly just for looking through genres and release-years to check if theres some good releases that I have missed and not listened to.