I was on Play Music/YouTube Music for years and ultimately switched to Spotify as I found that YTM didn't have accurate information about obscure artists. For some obscure bands I like it either had no information (and so playing radio of them would just play their own music, or unrelated music I like) or poor information (and would play music that wasn't really similar). It also became "over-personalized" - for example, on my wife's account it would only play power metal if I played Blind Guardian radio, but on my account it would play death metal and stuff that's somewhat related but not particularly.

Spotify has been better on the first front as they have a better database of music, but still has issues with the second. I'm also frustrated with the number of ads I still get despite paying - not audio ads, but popups and such for concerts, or recommended podcasts or whatever while browsing.

Any recommendations? I tried Deezer but found that they have pretty poor info about artists - with very dissimilar artists being noted as similar.

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[–] sudsieskymo@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Try Tidal. I'm not sure if it will be what you need. But I have felt the ad experience has been much better than Spotify for me.

[–] psudo@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago

Tidal was decent for me, but I do a lot of listening to more long tail acts, and probably 80-90% of them weren't on Tidal, so I ended up switching back to Spotify once I found out that they had cancelled the supposedly better revenue sharing with artists.

[–] AnalogyAddict@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Pandora is supposed to be paid ad-free, but you can't pick specific songs, I think.

[–] HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

Yup, I've had Pandora for many years. It's cheap, no ads, but you don't get to pick what it plays.