I'm shopping for a new streaming service and I am choosing based on Artist Treatment and being Freedom friendly. With that, I am still picking from the major ones because I want access. I have considered self hosting my own, but It's hard to beat 10-20 bucks a month for the amount of selection.
Apple Music4.5%
Amazon Music0.0%
Spotify68.2%
Tidal18.2%
YouTube Music9.1%
22 votes \ poll ended
this territory is moderated
I’m a professional musician. That’s my day gig. For artist treatment, bandcamp is above and beyond the best. I recognize it’s not necessarily the best for the listener, but (aside from people who do it as a hobby, which is totally cool) you won’t find a musician who doesn’t like bandcamp best.
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Something like Bandcamp with Bitcoin LN integration would be cool. Or Bandcamp could integrate Bitcoin.
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That would be ideal. Unfortunately, the folks that develop Bitcoin apps believe in “value for value” music, which is literally the exact opposite of what it sounds like (free music for tips), so it falls on deaf ears with basically every musician I've ever explained it to. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad model, but it certainly won’t incentivize the kind of musician who publishes on bandcamp to sign up.
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I've bought music off of bandcamp in the past. And I am all for independents, but sometimes you want to listen to that obscure song from highschool 30 some years ago and the big services will be the ones that have it.. so I need one.
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Yup, I totally get it. It’s skewed big time towards the musician. I only mention it because the OP asked what would be best for artist treatment.
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I do have Wavelength, but at this moment it's severely limited on Artists.
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I like Spotify.
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There must be 'any other' option.
We need an open Source Decentralized music app!
Do we have one?
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For me, neither of the services mentioned. And I own a music label. If you really want to support artists use services like Bandcamp or web3 ecosystem (wavlake, soundxyz, audius)
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I've looked at all the above, the issue is, I'm old, I signed up for Audius and they say follow 3 people, never heard of 1 of them... I'm a Willie Nelson, Grateful Dead, Americana type guy... most indie sites have nothing for me.
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I have Spotify Premium Family. But for a lot of music prefer also having MP3 / FLAC locally on computer. And still also buy physical CDs.
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I uncovered my hard drive from college, and found ~80 GBs of MP3s from when you used to manage your iTunes library haha. Set up a Plex server and love it. Considering bailing on Spotify, but my wife uses it so I feel I may end up keeping it anyhow.
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That's awesome! I remember back in middle school connecting to my cousin's FTP server and downloading his MP3 collection at a blistering 14.4 kbps. I was downloading for days straight!
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I have considered self hosting my own, but It's hard to beat 10-20 bucks a month for the amount of selection.
That makes two of us.

I personally use Spotify Premium Duo, but if you are into the Apple ecosystem I would recommend Apple Music using Apple One, as its overall value is pretty hard to beat.
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I have Apple Music now, because of my Family.. I have an Android and an iPhone, and run Linux as my OS... so Spotify may win if those two were the only choices.
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Isn't there an Android version of Apple Music too now?
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There is, but it sort of blows..
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Yeah... It's definitely not on par with Spotify's Android experience.
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Never heard of Tidal!
Though I don't use any of them. We've Wynk Music here for Bollywood songs!!! This also has almost all of the music from all around the world. Also, I agree to @IamSINGLE and want to ask if we have some decentralized app for music??
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Never heard of Tidal
I chose this because they seem to have virtually everything Spotify has (my wife uses Spotify), but with better sound quality. More specifically, support for Dolby Atmos on many tracks. Plus other loss-less formats such as FLAC. All for the same price as Spotify.
And just a the other day I learned that Jack Dorsey is apparently involved in Tidal in some capacity. I just find that quite interesting.
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I believe Tidal is one of the better ones in terms of artist support. They're also playing with Nostr (shoutout Jack Dorsey)
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They're also playing with Nostr
Have you tried that? I haven't yet, but I also thought that was a cool feature.
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No, I bet we see something come from it tho in the next year or so
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Voting time is almost over... Spotify in the lead, but I do think I am going with Tidal.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 6 Jul
I think most streaming sites don't pay artists very well. My album has earned like 0.50c lol!
TBF it's not the most easy listening music. I have it up on wavlake and the community has been kind enough to zap about 60k sats.
I hold a different view to most musicians which is that the music needs to be free, and you try to make money in other ways like playing concerts and selling merch.
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Be your own spotify with navidrome+tailscale.
Pay artists for their work using bandcamp or wavlake. Add the song to your library. Stream whenever/wherever theres internet.
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🏴‍☠️
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The better is to have a self hosted Music streaming base with MiniDlna, Plex, Subsonic Music Streamer, Ampache, Airsonic...
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I would say wavlake but they don't have a large collection of music so wavlake but also Spotify.
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🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🦜⛵🏝️
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Honestly, I use Spotify because of some exclusive content on their, I've also been subbed since 2010 and have a huge collection of playlists saved.
I can switch over for a lower fee or something, but ultimately I'm sticking with Spotify because the switching cost to rebuild everything is too high.
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I get that completely....
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i guess tidal if ur gonna go the music streaming route. i think they pay the most but its prolly the diff between a nickel and a dime.