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!
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.
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.
No. Buy their CDs and rip them into something like Jellyfin.
That’s not realistic. I have a CD collection, but that took decades and thousands of dollars. Plus I had access to Columbia House (if you know, you know) and a robust used market. That doesn’t exist anymore.
I don’t think a person who’s sensitive to $11 a month is going to be interested in a collection of $25 CDs.
A $10 a month streaming service without ads that is fair to artists isn’t realistic either to be fair
Exactly this. A music collection is expensive. Even more so if your tastes change over time.
Even more so if your tastes change over time.
This is a challenge. I’ve grown on hip-hop and rap, and finding the media is a struggle. For example, the first 'Run the Jewels" album is basically unavailable on CD.
I’m thinking of the other end of the equation: I don’t listen to a lot of the artists I liked twenty or thirty years ago. I’d be annoyed if I spent a bunch of cash on their albums only to have them be coasters now.
Buy used. OP can probably pick up five used CDs a month and stay under budget.
Of course the artist isn’t paid here, so you might as well pirate at this point.
Pirate flac files and burn your own CD’s.
Interesting, I do the reverse and go to the library and rip CDs to FLAC.
Yeah, eBay is a great for used cds & dvds
While I don’t disagree with your comment, this part:
and a robust used market. That doesn’t exist anymore
isn’t as bad as you might think, at least where I live. Used CD sales are the highest they’ve been in over 20 years. Sure, it’s not like it was at its peak, but it’s coming back in style again. The rest of your comment is definitely true though.
The robust used market does still exist. eBay, and Discogs should be all you need. Bonus points if you have a local record store.
HiFi services are more like 16€ a month, ish, which is like 180 euros a year. 5 years and you already spent over 800 euros on nothing. My last skirmish with these services taught me to buy when I can and pirate the rest. Not like artists were earning anything relevant from my subscription anyway.
I think Qobuz and Bandcamp have the ability to stream what you’ve purchased, as well as downloading to own. So in the interim you can still stream, and the option to self-host or just have it on your local devices is a bonus that could be explored later.
I feel like that’s a couple levels of effort more than I’d like. As good as it would be to support the artists by buying CDs I don’t want to buy more plastic and clutter the house. I could also do the same from the library, but that’s not supporting artists either.
That is what we did before streaming made us lazy.
And I just had to go and remove the CD player from my old car. Sigh…
You can load the song onto your phone and play via Bluetooth or aux cable.
Qobuz or buy CD’s and rip them. Or just fucking pirate flac files.
A good alternative would be:
- Ripping your own CD’s and playing them on an offline player.
- Use Soulseek (would recommend Nicotine+ app) to pirate music and playing it on an offline player.
For players; on my PC (Linux) I use Strawberry. Windows has AIMP which is really good. On my Android I use Shuttle.
Lidarr is another good option.
Unfortunately no flatpak on Linux.
Lidarr is a server, put it on your NAS. I still prefer Nicotine+ though.
Shout out to PlexAmp for IOS. Apple Music is terrible for playing your own files. Needlessly convoluted.
You havd to upload to itunes on a pc but then it stays forever, I have songs by post malone I grabbed off sc in like 2017 still
If you’re on Linux, Rufin is an awesome player for those coming from streaming services. Offers familiar interface and functionality. Can be used with local files or Navidrome/Jellyfin/Subsonic instance.
Also, seconding Soulseek through Nicotine+, and there are programs allowing you to download music from streaming services, too.
Was curios about Rufin, but I can’t get it to work. I have music in a local folder, but when I try to add my music folder I get this error:
“Library persistence failed: integer value outside SQLite’s signed range”
I had the same problem. I had to manually give permission to Rufin to access my music folder. I used the 84 point answer here to help figure it out.
Incidentally, after some messing around, I think I’ll stick with Strawberry cuz I’m a weirdo who likes rating my music out of 5 stars.
Same as the other person said. Rufin is distributed as Flatpak, and thereby it has limited permissions.
Give Rufin access to your music folder. The easiest way to do this is using Flatseal.
Bandcamp was really good. It’s still going but it’s kind of a corpse animated by capitalism now. You get drm free music and sometimes musicians will like do listening parties or chat or other fun stuff.
If you buy one album a month for $10, after a few years you have a sizable library that’s yours to keep forever. Don’t rent music.
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.
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!
Now if I could figure out where opentune stores its downloads in the damn android filesystem maze…
I suggest Metrolist which will soon have a desktop version too (Linux, Windows and MacOS)
I’m still using Tidal, and have been for many years. It’s got high fidelity (FLAC, Dolby Whatever), large catalogue and is not expensive.
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.
+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.
Bandcamp + Navidrome
Same
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).
🏴☠️
Bloomee https://bloomeex.org/bloomeetunes/
Cross-platform music player built with Flutter and Rust. Mix your local library with online streams, sing along with lyrics, and own every bit of it. No ads. No account. No tricks.
Bloomee pulls from YouTube but works like a music streaming app. It has a robust feature set, it can work as an offline music player using local files, it has Last.fm integration, and it can import playlists and albums from Apple Music, Spotify and ytmusic.
Bloomee is free and open source, and has builds for Android, Linux and Windows. It is available in F-Droid via the IzzyonDroid repository: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/ls.bloomee.musicplayer
Bloomee is free so no money is being paid to the artists through it. If you want to support the artists, the best way to do that is to purchase from them through platforms like bandcamp.
Thanks for the quality info! I’ll check these guys out.
Good point on the artist support. I haven’t looked into bandcamp, but I will now.
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.
