michcia's notes

still trying to listen to music in 2025

I guess it bears disclaiming that the following is my personal opinion as a customer, unrelated to my employer or any work I'm doing for them.

Seems I've been paying for music streaming for at least a decade now. I dug into my old emails, and apparently I first picked up the Spotify free trial in 2013 when I was in middle school. I think it's very funny looking at it from such a far perspective — back then it was Spotify that wanted to be integrated with LastFM (not the other way around), and even "apps" inside the Spotify app (I still think Soundrop had the right idea all the way back, with a shared queue, playing as a sort of radio for a group of friends).

And it feels like Spotify "won", at least in the Polish market. I can't think of a more widespread music app here. My (actual, blood) family has been onboarded onto a Family plan forever ago, and I continue to pay for it, despite no longer actively using it.

The devices I listen on have also changed. One thing I considered a big benefit of Spotify over contemporaries was the libspotify library that even had a build for a Raspberry Pi, so you could really use your subscription anywhere you wanted if you tried. I was a heavy user of Mopidy, a remote controlled music playing daemon that supported this, on a Raspberry Pi — not sure anymore what the perceived benefit of it was, but fun was had.

Nowadays my priorities have shifted a bit, and instead of arguing with my dad what an ideal networked AVR should look like (my dad is really into his Harman Kardon 430 that's not a lot younger than himself), I bought a Denon AVR-S660H which seemed to tick all the right boxes but I still had some troubles with it because of course. I guess I can complain about AVRs another time, I guess the point here is that my Denon supports: Spotify Connect, AirPlay, and its HEOS system can integrate to some extent with Deezer and Tidal, and a few others I forgot to even consider.

hold on what do you even want?

Hmmmmmmmm I'd like 1) to be able to listen to my music, easily, on the AVR, and on other devices like my phone and my laptop. In addition to that, I'd like to 2) not lose my collection of songs I liked over the years, which is just wee little 2-4 thousand tracks (depends how you count the 2 thousand I forgot to copy over from Spotify for 2 years). 3) I listen to Japanese music a lot so it matters a lot that it's there, and 4) I still haven't learnt even the hiragana, so English metadata would be appreciated.

These demands are pretty decently covered by Spotify, actually. As the dominating platform: 1) It works on a variety of platforms, including the AVR and the little Raspberry Pi internet radio appliance I made for my dad some years ago. 2) All artists are on there, because no one can afford to ignore it. 3) Anime music used to be missing a lot, but that was more about Japanese labels ignoring streaming platforms for years. The only missing point is 4) – sometimes the metadata is translated, but not for me specifically. I suspect this is the problem with me being a rebel, and never setting my OS locale to en-US, always going for en-GB or en-CA just for laughs and "ou" in "favourite". Other than that Spotify only had some small turnoffs like pushing podcasts really really hard (with me making fun every week of it putting Polish-language shows about sex on my home page, unprompted), and what I call "shady SEO" which I will expand on in a sec.

did i buy a macbook just for this actually

So sometime in ~2022 I started experimenting with Apple Music. I already had some music bought on iTunes previously, I owned an iPad, and a student subscription was 50% off, maybe even undercutting Spotify's fee at the time, I don't remember for sure anymore.

I think Apple actually was beating Spotify on the "too big to ignore" thing, having the legacy of being The store for buying mp3s. Japanese music availability is solid, and I more often than not see the metadata in English. And it made me realize I had one more issue with Spotify – a type of shady "SEO" practice of putting a big name as the featuring artist on your album when you're covering their song (or sometimes even completely unrelated), so that it would end up in people's Release Radar playlists. It was a really obnoxious thing for me back when I was a Spotify user, and on Apple it felt much rarer? I've also seen fewer cases of multiple like-named artists being grouped up as one, despite coming from different countries or continents, which also made my Spotify Release Radar feel cluttered.

Finally, one thing I really loved back in 2022, and learnt to take for granted – DJ sets from Porter Robinson's festivals uploaded as albums. I listened to those for so many hours oh god.

All in all, I've been using Apple Music as my main service for those ~3 years, and a pretty happy customer. The only big issue I have is with the ease of playing music – I have no Apple TV, no HomePod, back when I started using it my only Apple device was an iPad reaching end of support. There was an Android app that Kinda Worked, and a Windows app that Kinda Worked, but nothing aside from web client for my Linux laptop.

So some months after, for reasons Totally Unrelated To Wanting A Proper Music App (believe whichever you want: the spec being absurdly good compared to my Thinkpad "X225", Tosti's recommendation, self-discovery that I'm trans), I ordered an M2 MacBook Air. And oh god what a good machine it's been to me. I love it. But at the same time, ahahaha the Music app kinda doesn't live up, does it. I even invested $100, which was still big money to me, in Apple dev license so I could maybe write an app to move my music library from Spotify, and maybe to also write other small tools like an album randomizer.

The AVR situation is also not the bestest. Spotify Connect is "stateful" in the sense that once you start playing on a device, it will continue playing until a technical error, an act of a god, or an end of playlist stops it. AirPlay is something else, just a protocol that funnels audio/video over the network to the AVR, so if I start playback from my laptop and then close it to let it sleep, music is gone.

One more usability issue I had here was that the Android app doesn't do AirPlay, but instead supports Chromecast, but only if you cast from phone, as there isn't a version of the app for Android TV. I actually have a Chromecast 4K attached to the AVR, but it's annoying to go through this path.

Since I spent a lot of time this Christmas break playing with home automation integrations at my parents' I figured I might as well see the full extent of my AVR's networking capabilities. Because maybe there is actually something that integrates well.

the whorleater

This will be the shortest subsection of the article because I used a free trial of Tidal some months ago, and it was missing the soundtrack of Yuru Camp∆ and as a shimarin pfp I am legally obligated to reject it on that basis. The app was quite okay though.

deez— nah i'm not punning on this particular thing

So actually the new app I tried out now was Deezer. This was in part inspired by Markus who posted about trying it out on fedi.

I really like it and I can tell it's trying very hard:

Sounds good so far, but over the 3-4 days since I started the trial, I started noticing some things I don't like that much. The Android app is alright. The Mac app seems to be more or less the web client packaged in Electron (with no arm64 specific build – not that big of a deal but a bit sad). The bad part is that this web UI is a bit sluggish, starting playback on a playlist with 1800 tracks (so, my main playlist) takes a few seconds, opening the "Favorites" section which contains my music library also seems to be a reload every time. Nothing show-stopping, but it stood out for me.

The worse issue than the app papercuts is, remember the "shady SEO" bits? They're happening here too. I don't know who Sunil Duhan is, but I'm pretty sure I would've heard of them if they had a song featuring Adele and Billie Eilish at the same time, and this is what I found in "New releases" recommended for me.

okay what now

I think I want to give Deezer a try for a bit longer, but I feel like I might just return to Apple Music. I will probably continue to pay for my family's Spotify plan, and buying FLACs, CDs and vinyl records. Maybe I'll even redo my "HOME" playlist (as seen on Spotify Apple Deezer). Most probably I will continue to kill time at work listening to the live concert version of "sons" by Kashiwa Daisuke.

I feel like between this and the home automation tinkering over Christmas my lesson is that it's impossible to find a nice tidy overlap of various app ecosystems and their respective business goals. But maybe that's a complaint for another time.