Funnily enough that is the exact situation I got. Parents started paying for Spotify almost 2 decades ago, and the great people they are have just kept it going since for me. I do have a YouTube premium (I know this is a bit frowned upon on Lemmy) sub going, but YouTube Music just doesn’t quite function the way I want it to.

It’s kinda offical but not quite. It’s ported over and distributed by some Spotify engineers who wants to use it for Linux, but as far as I can tell, officially as a company Spotify don’t support Linux as a platform. Source: https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/

Wow, that’s a fantastic write up! Very cool to hear from someone who has used all the major platforms. I’m leaning towards Tidal, but they all seem to work quite well for everyone in here. I think what I’m going to do is dedicate a month to each service, write down my experiences with it, and go from there. Deezer has the free trial, so could start with that. Some other people in this thread has noted about the non-sorting of downloaded tracks and other questionable UI choices, so I’ll keep an eye out for that.

I didn’t expect to find any native apps, even Spotify’s client is an unoffical distribution, but I’m glad to hear they all have something available at least. I’m intrigued by Cider, seems like one hell of a project.

There is an unofficial flatpak client. Spotify is in the same situation, so that wouldn’t be a downgrade at least 🙂

Mm good shout about the free trial with Deezer. Not much point not giving that a shot then.

I hear you on the algorithm stuff. I normally find most my music through more organic means anyway, like soundtracks in games and movies, word of mouth from friends, or youtube/twitch. So maybe discoverability wouldn’t be so bad for me if I do decide to go for a local collection at some point.

Having a local (well local as on my Jellyfin instance) might be an end goal for me. I have started buying and playing LPs recently, it’s a good vibe to have it physically spinning next to me. I only really look for what I already know when I go into a record store, maybe time to expand when I next go into one.

Oh, the VPN is a good idea. No struggles with playing back when not on a VPN?

Hm, yeah that sounds like a big missed market! I love tuning in to live DJ’s on twitch sometimes. Would be really cool to have some of that directly in a streaming platform. Now you’ve made me really sad it’s not a thing.

I have heard very good things about Apple Music to be fair. With them it’s more about staying away from the big guys you know and give the smaller guys some room, although I generally trust Apple to be more on the decent sides of things than other large tech companies.

While it’s not off the board, I’m unlikely to try them out 🙂