If you don’t listen to a lot of new music, I agree, but I was talking about with a constant influx of new music. Let’s say, that if on average about four albums come out in a month that I want to listen to, the streaming service is going to be about a quarter of the price (at least). This is assuming there is always new music coming out I want to listen to of course. When I was younger that was the case, but not so much now.
I don’t listen to a lot of new music. So ideally I could go without a service at some point if I really wanted to, but that is going to take a large initial outlay of money to get to that point (filling in the gaps of all the CDs I never bought because they were on Apple Music or I bought bad MP3s of for over a decade). As I listen to less and less new music, the services make a lot less sense. So I am working on making that transition.
But the services also make it easy. Managing a large digital library of music takes some work. Tagging, managing files, backups, and software. The services really do offer a good value for all they do…if you want that kind of thing.
One thing I have found I really like about Tidal. In Apple Music there are 4 personal playlists (new music, your mix, Get Up, and another one I have already forgotten). I used these a lot when I had Apple Music.
The problem was that they influenced what I listened to. I have some main music styles I listen to a lot. When I listen to those Apple personal playlists, I want that music. Except sometime I listen to classical, jazz, or background type of music (Brian Eno type stuff). So if one night I am in a jazz mood, all my Apple Music playlists would shift to a heavy jazz focus. Sometimes I would think I shouldn’t listen too much of some music, just so it doesn’t screw up my playlists. (Stupid, but it would always cross my mind.)
Tidal has 8 “My Mix” playlists, to cover everything. So if I listen to a lot of jazz, I end up with a mix for jazz. Except the other 7 are all other types of music I listen to.
After almost a month and half of using Tidal, I like it far more than Apple Music. Better playlists, better apps, and it integrates with other services. Highly recommended.
Just an update based on semi-remembered events. In Tidal, I found I reached the 10K favorited song limit, which suprised me. I’m not positive, but I think this is possibly the result of any loved albums in Apple Music causing every track in the album to be loved. Then, when I import loved/favorited tracks into Tidal or other apps, every track was added as a favorite, instead of the album. Again, not sure if that’s what happened, but worth looking into if you’re migrating.
I ended up using phind.com to create a javascript program to distinguish any songs that share the same album from songs that have a unique album, and export a csv with songs with unique albums and another csv with songs with shared albums. Then imported the first one into Tidal songs, and the second one into Tidal albums. This reduced my total favorited albums and tracks list by thousands.