I realize I'm old, but I still haven't swapped from buying music to streaming all of it.

Seems like folks like me are being underserved. It's not that we don't like to buy music. In many cases, it's the opposite. I buy more albums & tracks each year than I'd like to count.

Why don't any of these music cloud services provide good, ad-free recommendation services for music buyers, not renters, like me? They're sitting on millions of people's listening habits. Why not convince me to buy more with spot-on suggestions?

For Apple, Spotify paid, and Amazon Unlimited, I've yet to find that I need to pay $10 a month or so to listen to everything. That's about ten new albums a year plus a few guerilla tracks, which seems enough, so far.

These are closed ecosystems. I can't easily get just the recommendations. I hear Spotify has great recommendation playlists, but ads are too annoying to listen to when I use my music (and I do, mostly to give myself a little more energy when coding). I'm not going to pay for recommendations if I don't know they'll be pretty good, and I'm not excited about listening to music with ads. I'd rather buy the good stuff. Nor do I want to pay so much for recommendations that I can't afford to own anything new. I'm not a fan of subscriptions in general... Enjoying music shouldn't be a capital addiction, just an emotional one.

And why don't I trust recommendations? I used & enjoyed Pandora for a while, and it was initially great for giving me suggestions for new music, but once good suggestions ran dry (and they did dry up -- at first the suggestions were great, but then they became repetitive and/or reaches that didn't quite fit), the honeymoon, as they say, was over.

Ads plus the same rotation of songs, plus a few new misses when I sign back in every few months? No thanks. If they were as good as they once were, I'd consider $5 a month for "personalized radio with no ads". But I'm afraid that because they're doing this with "curation" (human and algorithmic) rather than actual listeners' habits, the recommendations simply aren't as good as they should be.

Here's an easy example: For the most part, I like hard rock with female front'men. Why do they give me so many whiny dudes? NO WHINY DUDES, PANDORA, KK? THX. Apparently the music genome has no concept of XX.

Three services I actually use

Amazon Prime hits a sweet spot. In one app, I can listen to all of my own music that I've uploaded, and its catalog is just big enough and its recommendations are just good enough for me to occasionally discover new artists without ads when my ear starts wanting to wander. This is sort of how the radio used to work, but adless.

(It's worth mentioning that I listened to a lot of cassettes when I started driving. I don't like ads. And that means I've known a few albums -- Knowledge is Power, Pump, Aftermath -- really well for decades.)

Occasionally, I hear of something new that's not on Prime or an artist that I've "discovered" on Prime doesn't have their entire discography there, and that's where Spotify's free tier pops in.

Yesterday, I bumped into Samantha Fish on Prime (a follow-on from listening to Halestorm, I think), but the most recent record, Chills and Fever, that was on Prime, wasn't nearly as good as Black Wind Howlin' from a few years back, at least not for a Halestorm fan.

A little sleuthing later determined that she has two albums from last year, and that the Chills & Fever one was a little experimental. Belle of the West is a little more like her earlier stuff.

Spotify lets me take a quick listen with minimal ads to see if this I'm buying a track or two or the whole CD.

And where did I do this research? The last of the three services I use: YouTube. I really thought this one was "just for the kids", but, newsflash, it's MTV. This is not new, no matter what the internets are telling you.

I hate the ads (hello Grammarly and Wix. I code native javascript, dangit, and host my own servers! Stop advertising to me!), but I really enjoy the videos. I realize this dates me again, but I could deal with an adless YouTube streaming related music videos in the background while I worked, but I'd need a third or fourth monitor (depending on the office) to host it. ;^)

And YouTube's related videos list is a pretty good place for discovery too.

What can Apple learn?

As a stockholder, this pains me a little. Probably the coolest picture of Steve Jobs is the one when he's sitting, cross-legged on the floor, at home, with his albums, hifi on the floor behind him, fancy-pants light over his head, drinking tea. Minimalist. Relaxed. Big honkin' speakers. Good sound. Good albums.

^{(image from geeksandbeats.com)}

You know what's most important to folks listening to music? Good music. Knowing which albums to buy. Why do I use Amazon streaming? Because it's all of my music plus more, and that more is curated for me in a way that's not annoying to access.

But, like Jobs, at least in 2007, said, [some] folks prefer to own music.

Why can't folks who are stuck in 2007 get good recommendations from Apple Music? Why can't I play even the stuff I've purchased from Apple on the Android Apple Music app? Why doesn't Apple try to sell and sell me good music? Why does Apple Music feel like a closed system, and the iTunes Music Store feel a little like Tower a month or two before they started discounting for clearance?

Good recommendations are out there. Apple has them. Why can't I hear the recommendations without ads or a monthly access charge?

And if you hooked me on enough recommendations, enough that it'd far exceed my album budget to keep up? I wonder what I might finally do...

That's all.

Aside: Why do gal blues guitarists feel the need to dress so, um, not relaxed? It's not everyone, but let's just say B.B. King didn't wear an analogous wardrobe. It's a little embarrassing when I'm recommendation-rabbit-holing and pop up some of these NSFH[ome] album covers.

The worst part for me is that it's not even clear self-aware [and therefore often self-]exploitation like, say, Maria Brink in In This Moment, which is easier to ignore, because you know she's in on the game: This is not her. This is simply and obviously a brand. (That said, they made their best album before the brand went, well, over the edge with "branding".)

I was going to include some samples, but if I pixelate them at the same time, it kinda kills the point. Maybe folks are more comfortable making images with less on, which is fine, natch, but, eg, Ana Popovic doesn't seem to want to wear anything while she poses for covers. I know, I know, it's anti-feminist and Puritanical to suggest someone should put clothes on, but here's one vote to please wear whatever makes you most comfortable when you jam, and slap that on the cover -- if you want yourself on the cover.

I'm buying the music, not your picture. Like, literally, if streaming has done nothing else, it's given us the ability to hear everything we're considering buying. I'm just buying the music.

Painfully, I've ironically spoken too soon.

Labels: algos, apple, Apple Music, iTunes, music, pandora, spotify