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.
LiDARr and plexamp
all of them are the same. they dont give artists jackshit, that is the business model.
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
Piracy + iTunes + Jellyfin + Symfonium
(for me)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 Yeah Apple Music definitely provides the best service overall, it’s too bad it’s impossible to get lossless playback on Linux.
Okay but when does our pay get adjusted for inflation?
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.
Soulseek and musicbee
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
Apple Music has the second highest payouts to artists, only behind Tidal which is much more expensive.
You really can’t have it both ways. You either want artists to get paid, in which case you’re paying more, or you want it for cheap and artists get paid less.
Oh great, 0.25 instead of a 0.1 cent per listen what a great payout.
Yeah, I’ll continue buying the CDs/individual songs (assuming they make it not too annoying)And how much do you think the artist gets from the CD sale? Listen to it more than a handful of times, and it’s a lower payout than streaming.
Bandcamp? Pretty much 100% (excluding deals with a label)
Any other CD label? I don’t care what the artist negotiated with their label. That is their own problem who they chose to do business with. But Spotify/Apple can’t skim of 30% of the sale price.And I don’t buy on iTunes.
I buy on OTOTOY and other sites I can get FLAC files from.
IMO the best combo is pirated Youtube Music (e.g. via OpenTune) for music discovery, then Bandcamp to buy albums you enjoyed.
That way you’re not paying subscription to the giant corpo sucking life out of musicians, you get to actually own the music you buy forever, and in great quality (as long as you archive it properly), and a significant proportion of your purchase goes to the artists who created the things you enjoy!
I suggest Metrolist which will soon have a desktop version too (Linux, Windows and MacOS)
Now if I could figure out where opentune stores its downloads in the damn android filesystem maze…
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
Yarrrr!
Bandcamp + Navidrome
Same
+1 for Qobuz.
I have my own media server where i host everything that I buy digitally in the qobuz store to support artists and I use the streaming part to discover new things , or at parties etc. Its not the cheapest, but that’s kinda contradictory to supporting artists anyway. Its a good combination since a subscription gives you a bit of a discount on digital purchases as well.
Purchasing flacs between Qobuz and BandCamp is my preferred option.
I’ll just have the old one please. (Just kidding, I don’t have any apple stuff)
