Streaming music service options

[McNutt]

I have a subscription to Amazon Music and it used to be great. I downloaded a ton of music and created an offline playlist for listening in the car or on a plane. For some reason a lot of songs are no longer available on my phone. It's not the usual issue with licensing rights either. If you list my songs in alphabetical order I'll have a block of hundreds in a row that are not available, even though they should be. An entire playlist will be unavailable. It makes no sense.

How are the other services? I want a streaming service that allows me to download music to my phone and make playlists of that music. I just tried Youtube Music tonight and I'm having a hell of a time creating offline playlists.

Are there better options?

[McNutt]

So I just tried Pandora too. This looks much easier. I'm able to create an online playlist and download the entire list to my phone with one click. That is HUGE. With Amazon I had to download individual songs all over again and create offline playlists one song at a time anytime I got a new phone. With Spotify it seems I can just click download and go to bed.

[Blackhawk]

I use Spotify myself, with quite a few playlists. I don't use downloaded music, but it gives me that option.

[LawBeefaroni]

I have a subscription to Amazon Music and it used to be great. I downloaded a ton of music and created an offline playlist for listening in the car or on a plane. For some reason a lot of songs are no longer available on my phone. It's not the usual issue with licensing rights either. If you list my songs in alphabetical order I'll have a block of hundreds in a row that are not available, even though they should be. An entire playlist will be unavailable. It makes no sense.

How are the other services? I want a streaming service that allows me to download music to my phone and make playlists of that music. I just tried Youtube Music tonight and I'm having a hell of a time creating offline playlists.

Are there better options?

I use the former Rhapsody, now Napster. It's expensive as streaming services go but it does everything I want and has most of the music I listen to.


I think what may be happening with Amazon is that they get a new version of an album (same album, just a new database entry for whatever reason) so your saved playlist is pointing to the wrong song. Or rather, to a song that doesn't exist in the database even though the same song under a different ID still exists.

[msteelers]

I use Spotify. I have a ton of playlists, and I can tell it which playlists to download to my phone or computer for offline listening. I can also mark individual albums to download, and presumably I could do the same with individual songs.

One thing I like is that pretty much every artist has a "This is..." playlist. So if it's a Beatles kind of day I can either put on an album, or just load up that playlist and let Spotify do its thing.

I'm not sure how pricing stacks up against the other services. I know Spotify has a family plan. 4 separate accounts for $15 a month. That's what we use.

[disarm]

I've had a paid subscription to Spotify for years and have been very happy. The catalog is extensive, they do a great job of providing interesting playlists, and it's very easy to create your own. Once you've created your own playlist, there's a simple button at the top of every list that you hit to download to your device...couldn't be easier.

Another interesting perk of Spotify is that anyone with a paid individual subscription gets a free Hulu subscription (with limited ads) as well.

[Isgrimnur]

I'd been bandying about cancelling Pandora, as the stations are becoming shallow and repetitive, but the pending addition of differing settings for them coming to mobile has forestalled my hand in that regard.

[noxiousdog]

I have consistently had streaming problems with Spotify. When I'm playing songs it just stops. I use YouTube music and pandora.

[Blackhawk]

I've been using Spotify for a couple of years now and I've never had that happen.

[Jeff V]

If you don't mind regular commercial radio stations, I've gone from curated play lists to streaming radio stations off Amazon Alexa. I still have play lists of songs either on YouTube or from the 25,000 MP3s I uploaded to Google years ago, if I don't want commercial interruption, I just fall back on these.