Streamers

Scott Hardie | June 14, 2014
Do you use a streaming music service like Pandora or Spotify? What do you think of it?

Samir Mehta | June 14, 2014
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Steve West | June 14, 2014
I got my daughter hooked on Pandora after she watched what I was doing. She can't make it stop throwing Bieber into her mix, though. It's always Bieber, feat. Bieber, Bieber covers, etc. It still works for me and I never get Bieber.

Scott Hardie | June 16, 2014
Yeah, I don't care for the socializing aspect either, partly because I don't want every last song that I play to be announced somewhere. I occasionally listen to really cheesy bad music from my childhood just for nostalgia's sake, or check out awful pop tunes just to see what's out there, and I would be too self-conscious if I knew it was being shared. I got my Spotify account just before they made the Facebook account mandatory, and I've been exceedingly careful to keep it disconnected from Facebook.

I have Pandora as well, but I don't use it as much. I don't understand: Pandora has more than twice as many songs in its library as Spotify, and by virtue of how it works, it should constantly introduce you to something new. And yet, most of the time when I play Pandora, it feels like it's always playing the same damn songs, over and over. The same way that Steve's daughter keeps getting Bieber, I keep getting the Scorpions and Lily Allen on every station, and a few other frequent names that I have no particular interest in. After every song is over, I scroll back to it and click "I'm tired of this song" to buy myself at least a month until I hear it again, but this is annoying and doesn't fully solve the problem anyway. Even with my old Rock Block-derived station, which is seeded with over 1000 artists, it keeps coming back to the same artists and songs again and again, often with live or acoustic or remix or remastered alternates. Pandora is good, but it has the potential to be a lot better, and I wish it lived up to its full potential.

Does anybody use other services like Amazon Music or Last.fm?

Samir Mehta | June 16, 2014
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Erik Bates | June 16, 2014
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Scott Hardie | June 22, 2014
My only real complaint with Spotify is that they keep losing the rights to my favorite songs, often right after I go to the trouble of creating elaborate playlists around them. It's a little bit heartbreaking to go to listen to your new favorite playlist only to find half of the list gray where it was white last week, and I've had that experience too many times to think that it's a fluke. I'm going to have to start augmenting Spotify with MP3s on the cloud.

Ok, I lied, one more complaint about Spotify: They need to let you create folders for your playlists. The list can get very long and unwieldy.