I’ve had an Apple Music subscription for years and use it A LOT. I tried some alternatives (Tidal, Sirius, and maybe one other?) and wasn’t super happy with the options.
Is there a service that people recommend that is good, like $10/month or less, maybe gives better pay to artists? I’d like to spend on a better company if possible too. If Apple has enough money to buy gold trinkets for elected officials they probably don’t need more from me.
Edit: Thanks for all the responses. Some good ideas for sure. Gonna start with qobuz and band camp. Cheers!
Throw out streaming entirely. Maybe buy an album here or there and pirate the rest. Legitimately, if you buy one album and nothing else, you are absolutely supporting the artist far more than listening to their songs “legitimately” through streaming.
Someone who buys a $10 album every other month gives more money to musicians than someone who pays for (and uses) a $10 a month steaming service.
I recommend TPB. It is a wonderful value, great selection, mediocre UI.
As much as I hate nearly everything about my job, the one thing I can get behind is that they have a rule: the first time an acronym is used in a meeting, an email chain, or a chat, it needs to be defined parenthetically so that everyone with access to the conversation knows what the fuck we’re talking about.
Because if we’re just going by what I know, OP asked where to stream music and you told them to get some comicbook TPBs (Trade Paperbacks).
🏴☠️
Visit the library once a month and leave with 10 CDs. Rip 'em all to mp3’s. Month by month you’ll build up a valuable collection that is yours alone. If you are an audiophile then you might not like the mp3’s but I can’t hear any discernable difference that would make me say “what poor sound quality”. If I can tap my foot or sing along then it’s more than good enough.
I mean, can always rip them to flak as well if you are worried about quality. Even still, a good high bitrate mp3 sounds perfect to me so I still use it too.
Working on reorganizing my old music collection to try to de-apple. It’s a bigger pain in the ass than I expected, and I’m missing so much that I’ve added via subscription. Gotta do it though, I’m sick of paying subscriptions for everything.
Bandcamp, then tidal. A friend works in the music industry, he said tidal can’t always pay out but they have way better rates than the other streaming services. Bandcamp is like 999x better for artists though. You get the files (for free even if you buy vinyl or cd). It’s so much better.
The price for Apple Music, just like the price for everything else in the economy, has inflated.
When Apple Music launched it was $9.99 for an individual. That’s $13.98 in 2026 dollars. In October 2022 they raised the price to $10.99. That’s $12.32 in 2026 dollars. Now it’s $11.99 in 2026 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that’s the cheapest they’ve ever priced it.
Family plan price went up a bit, adjusted. $19.99 over 2022’s $19.04.
https://keepingupwithinflation.com/tracker/apple-music/
Effective date Individual 2026 dollars Family 2026 dollars June 2015 launch $9.99 $13.98 $14.99 $20.98 October 2022 $10.99 $12.32 $16.99 $19.04 July 17, 2026 $11.99 $11.99 $19.99 $19.99 Okay but when does our pay get adjusted for inflation?
Yeah Apple Music definitely provides the best service overall, it’s too bad it’s impossible to get lossless playback on Linux.
Many have said buy music. I agree. You own your music fully. (effectively) and don’t buy from apple. Bandcamp ftw. I’m a strange one and use Pandora for gennral vibe streaming. Then if I come across a song that resonates with me I go out and buy it. And before peeps talk bad about Pandora, I discover artists with less than 1000 views on YouTube on it that actually sound good. My only problem with Pandora is that it has a station bleed issue where songs from other stations you made will “bleed” songs into other stations. like I have a dnb station that sometimes plays hip hop instrumentals because of the jazzy vibes that dnb sometimes has. But after a few forceful thumbs down, it behaves. But don’t do Pandora if you are wanting to listen to a SPESIFIC song. Just go buy it.
I use Pandora because they have a cheap no ads plan. You can’t choose individual songs but I think it’s only 5 US bucks per month.
Youtube ReVanced lets you use the YT Music app without ads, it also lets you watch youtube without ads
Qobuz has a streaming plan, and you can buy and download drm-free music. It’s a good option if you want to just stream (the app has added some nice improvements lately). Even better if you’re also looking to build your collection and looking to go the whole non-streaming route.
Purchases tend to be pricey, and there’s a slightly more expensive plan with a discount on drm-free that might make sense, depending on how often you plan to make purchases.
Edit: this currently doesn’t fall into the < $10 category but is comparable to the old Apple Music price.
Another fairly happy Qobuz user here. Prior to that I used Tidal, which has a better Android Auto experience, IMO. Prior to that I used YouTube Music, and technically I still have a subscription to that because I got used to YouTube Red (now Premium) when it came free with Google Music (now YouTube Music). I prefer a streaming service; I find it much easier to discover music that way.
For digital purchases, while that is possible through Qobuz, every artist I know would prefer you buy from their Bandcamp. ISTR Bandcamp might have been doing some shady anti-union stuff, but I could be misremembering and I wouldn’t know of any great alternatives.
I wish I could try it for free with ads or something
They used to provide like a 3-day trial, but I couldn’t find any sort of offer like that currently active.
If you are just curious about what they have on their streaming service, you can get a rough estimate by browsing their download store. It’s not a perfect match, but it’s very close. It is quite rare for an artist / studio / publisher to let Qobuz stream it but not sell a download or vice-versa.
I carry around my music as mp3 files on my phone. It’s also stored on a NAS at home and I could stream it via my own jellyfin instance, but its just more convenient to have it on my phone.
I use foldersync to download any music I add to my NAS onto my phone every night automatically.
Piracy + iTunes + Jellyfin + Symfonium
(for me)is symfpnium like soulseek?
Symfonium is the Android music player I use to stream and save music from my Jellyfin server (which is just my MacBook with my iTunes library on it)
If you’re interested in a FOSS alternative, try metrolist. You can download songs and it’s a frontend to YouTube music, so you have access to their full catalogue
If you want a way that more directly supports creators, nothing is is better than buying their songs place a place like bandcamp
all of them are the same. they dont give artists jackshit, that is the business model.
I get that finances aren’t the best for many people, but it always makes me very sad to see that music has been undervalued to a degree where it’s not in anyway unusual to expect to get access to all music ever created for 10 dollars a month. Obviously, that means that the vast majority of artists get very little money. This has lead to a large share of the music available to stream being AI generated garbage. Because it doesn’t make sense to put in the time to create a work of art when people are just not prepared to compensate you properly.
I pirate music to see if I like it, and buy what I like, mostly on vinyl, often through Bandcamp. Despite the pirating, I pay far more than 120 dollars a year for music. That’s the price of like 3-4 albums, and I haven’t gone a year buying less than 10 albums. And that’s excluding all the gigs that I go to. Music is valuable to me, and I still have the first album I bought in 1992, and everything thereafter. It’s an awesome experience rediscovering stuff I listened to in the nineties, that I had completely forgotten about.
The problem is that they increase the price, today is 12, tomorrow 13 and so on, all this without paying properly the artist (and also financing a shit ass company)
If they increase prices without a proper explanation, i’d stop using the service too
The problem is that they increase the price
Apple’s price increases on Apple Music have not even kept up with inflation. Adjusted for inflation, Apple Music costs less today than it did when they launched it in 2015.
Have they increased the pay to artists too? I don’t know where i can find such data
I don’t know that information. My understanding is that Apple is right behind Qobuz/Tidal for percentages paid to artists, and significantly better than Spotify/Meta.
https://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-royalty-rate
There certainly doesn’t seem to be any reason to disfavor Apple on this front.
Option A: Pool your subscription in a family plan with others already using it anyway. The resulting share is far lower than the single subscription
Option B: Rip CDs and/or put on the pirate hat
i just use Soulseek and download all the music i could want onto my phone (have 1tb microsd).
best way to support artists is buy their merch
