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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[–] TheBaldness@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

Not really streaming, but I find Bandcamp has a lot of good stuff, and if you're willing to self-curate, they're a good way to find music.

[–] AnalogyAddict@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] GammaGames@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Which is exactly what I want from a radio! Been using Pandora for years and don’t plan on changing.

[–] sudsieskymo@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year 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 1 year 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.

[–] DeForrest_McCoy@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

This map is linked to spotify....for any genre/subgenre in existence.

[–] martinbasic@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I would suggest using InnerTune and ViMusic, which are free and open-source client for YouTube Music, if you don't want to let Google advertise on you.

However, you may need to build your music library all over again, as they doesn't support import from your YouTube Music library.

If you already switched to Spotify, then you consider Spotube and BladePlayer which seems are free open-source Spotify client, although I haven't tried these two.