Do people like Spotify? I'm thinking about trying it but don't love the idea of another monthly expense.
The absolute, unquestionable best five dollars I spend a month (on the student discount). And I'll happily up it to $10 when my student offer expires. They have an enormous library where I basically never want for artists or tracks (my music interests are not extremely niche, though). The app is great and bug-free. And I'm happy with their music-recommending algorithms (many different playlists appear at the main screen which are populated on daily or weekly for you to listen to based on your interests). Only feature I want for is a built-in song lyric display, which I see Apple Music has, for when I want to belt loudly along.
This is a major selling point, so thanks for mentioning it. I've been using Plex which has some features I like, but it also goes through broken-slightly broken-fixed-broken cycles on the app.The app is great and bug-free.
If you are techy, you could put all your music on a server, open a port on your router to the outside, and stream to the VLC app on your phone via SFTP. I've been dying to do this so I listen to my music more but don't have home internet, just my phone hotspot.
Spotify is brilliant. I set up a playlist of 10 songs that I liked that were kinda-sorta related. Their genres ranged a bit, but they all had a similar "feeling". I hit Play, and enjoyed the music. After the 10th song, another song played... and I liked it. Then another song. And I liked that one, too. And another. THIS is the magic of Spotify. Pandora simply randomly throws in a different song every 5th track. There's no logic to it. If you are listening to "Rock", and the 4th song plays on Pandora, the 5th song will be in the "Rock" category, but may not be at all musically related to your playlist. Spotify knows the soul of the track you are listening to, and is VERY good at finding another track that fits in the same vein. tl;dr: Spotify introduces me to new artists. Pandora plays radio-friendly shit I don't want to hear again. Pay for it. You will be very happy. (But the Spotify interface is TERRIBLE. Just... the absolute worst melange of weirdly inexplicable functions and features... nothing is where you would expect it to be, and none of the buttons or links go to where you think they will go. It's terrible. But the algorithms are SO GOOD, it is worth it.)
My gripe with Pandora is that it’s exceptionally good at finding music that has many technical similarities to what I like while managing to completely not be something I’d actually like. The “music genome” is a noble idea and all, but it really highlights the superficialities of their methods in qualifying music. I’d venture a guess that connecting bands solely by the scene and social connections they came from is a way better predictor of musical tastes than musical qualities.
Absolutely. If not Spotify, another streaming service would probably do you. I love music, and Spotify gives me (virtually) all the music I could want for $10/mo. I use it all day at work, whenever I'm doing chores...Really, just all the time. I think if I wanted to break that $10 down, I'd be paying less than a dime for every hour I spend listening to it. There are some concerns about how they compensate artists, but I encourage you to do some research and decide how much that matters to you.