honestly i'd say lg android phones. quite a few of them had good DACs

Check out dankpods, he does (among other things) reviews of mp3 players. A lot of modern DAPs are catered toward audiophiles so expect to pay a premium if you want something new. He still uses and recommends old iPods. You can mod them to have expanded storage and better battery life if you feel like tinkering too

Looks like new sign ups are paused right now, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

This is an interesting idea, but I would assume that over time, the number of "owned" streams would dominate the number of "new" streams, and thus eventually their operating costs would reach a point where they don't have the revenue to cover it...

This is an interesting idea, but I find their catalogue to be quite terrible for me (so far). Service like this really, really needs big names and much broader catalogue to attract people and start moving. Even though I'm far far from listening to mainstream I literally could not find a single interpret I looked for, and believe me I tried.

FYI bandcamp was acquired by Epic and subsequently sold to Songtrader 2023

If you want to support local business, you could dig through some crates at a record store. Most shops have metric shitloads of CDs on the cheap. Idk if lossless audio is a big deal to you but that's a surefire way to get lossless files too

Surprised nobody mentioned 7digital, a store to buy music in mp3 or FLAC format. They have both mainstream and niche stuff

Your subscription costs as much as a CD and a half each month.

Go buy your music and host a jellyfin instance, stop paying these fuckin scammers

I buy my music on Bandcamp and Qobuz and put it on my Jellyfin server. It's great! Also I don't need 10.000 songs at once so it's not really that expensive, I end up paying a little more a month now than for streaming, but I build up a library of music I actually like and don't have to think about losing it when yhe service get shit.

Why are you paying these oligarchs at all? Pirate your music

DayZ

Do you mean Jay-Z?

It's now owned by Square, the same company behind squarecash

I used it for awhile, specifically because while Spotify promised lossless for years, they never delivered. A bonus is, as you said, that it is the platform that has the highest payout for artists.

That being said, when I stopped using it, it was mostly due to the UX decisions they had made on the platform to force videos on everything. It's a music app, and yet, one of the main navigation options in the app was for videos. Spotify also fired their original designer and has focused on "engagement" over actually good UX.

What’s brain-dead radio?

Both have unofficial Linux clients.

Qobuz doesn't?

Sticking with Spotify for now, it supports Linux and has last.fm integration (and is amazing)

He can take Bowie if he wants, but Charli???? This is not what PC Music fought for :(

Tidal is cool but it lacks a lot of vocaloid and some japanese songs for me.

Respect their artist payout and the nice link site which lists a bunch of different sources of the shared song, so that Spotify or other streaming users don't need to manually search for that shared song.

Qobuz!

I would personally suggest Qobuz, as it is demonstrably the service that pays artists the most and has multiple tiers of lossless audio options. The next best thing would be to buy from artists directly, whenever possible (maybe even physical media, if you have a good sound system for that).

People here advocating for piracy sound cute, but I wonder how actual musicians would feel about that.

Download MP3's or FLAC's

Pirate everything. Pay directly to artists only when they allow you to do so (like direct sales on their website). If they don't allow you to make money go to them without also paying pigs then don't pay them at all.

There's no ethical consumption under capitalism

host it yourself.

I find that it's really easy to find new artists and albums I like on Bandcamp. I just started by following a few genres and listen to a some music at random. If I like it I add it to my whislist and carry on. And I just listen to the "new and hot" section. Gives way better results and more variety than Spotify ever did for me.

From time to time I go to my whislist and listen to some of it again and usually decide to either buy the album or delete it from my whislist.

I also use Qobuz for more mainstream artists that's not on Bandcamp.

Recently started to put all my purchases into Jellyfin for easier management between the services.

I also have a few pirated playlists of my favorite songs from years ago. I go through them when I have time and money and see if I like the songs enough to buy some albums or songs from the artists.

I like Tidal, it pays the artists the most of all services.