Sockpuppet Blog.

tl;dr summary: If you are able to, buy your music, ideally from Mirlo or Bandcamp. If you are going to pay to stream, use Qobuz, and if you want to stream for free (and I totally get it! times are tough!), use YouTube Music or Pandora.

Ranking the services

Here is my personal ranking of the best ways to get and/or listen to music, ordered from best to worst.

Note: All per-stream prices are an estimate and based on my most recent available earnings data at the time of this writing, and based on the US market. They are definitely subject to change based on a number of factors that are difficult to predict.

From the band’s own website

If the band has their own website¹, they’ll probably display their preference for how you get their music. Above all else, that should be your top consideration.

Mirlo

Mirlo is an independent online music store run as a cooperative. The audio quality is great and musicians are in complete control of how much money they make on it, including choosing how much of the purchase price goes to Mirlo itself. The people running it are doing so for the love of music rather than to make fat stacks of cash, and my understanding is that the site pretty much just breaks even on its operating costs.

It is also open source meaning people can contribute changes or directly influence the development efforts, and you can run your own instance of it if you really want to for some reason.

With Mirlo you will have to own your collection, which is a good thing. More on that later.

itch.io

itch isn’t really a music store, but a lot of people sell music there. The experience usually isn’t great and is up to the musician (although things like bandcrash can help to make it better). Like Mirlo, it’s totally up to the musician how much money they get and how much goes to the platform.

With itch you will also have to own your collection.

Bandcamp

Bandcamp is probably the most popular indie music download site there is, and with good reason. They offer high-quality downloads in a number of formats, they were the first site to offer a lot of features which many places take for granted these days (pay-what-you-want pricing, embedded lyrics, optional per-track artwork, full discography purchases, and so much more), and if you buy something on Bandcamp you can also stream it through the app so you don’t need to manage your own local library. They also only take a 15% cut for small musicians, and a 10% cut for larger musicians.

They’ve somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years due to a series of changes in ownership, but it is still a great place to buy music which supports the artists.

While it isn’t strictly required that you own your collection (thanks to the streaming app), it’s still a good idea that you do so, especially if you listen to music that comes from a mix of sources.

Qobuz

Qobuz is both a streaming provider and a download store. Their claim to fame is that they provide everything in the highest possible bitrate and quality, and they are also quite good in terms of how they support artists.

They’re not the best option for purchasing (since Mirlo and Bandcamp match them in terms of quality and exceed them in terms of payment cut), but they are the most-desirable option for streaming (since they provide the highest per-stream rate in the industry, at 1.5¢/stream at the time of this writing).

If there’s an album you want to buy and which isn’t on Mirlo or Bandcamp, Qobuz is probably the best place to acquire it.

Tidal

Tidal has good quality, a reasonable monthly price, and one of the better per-stream rates (1¢/stream) of the larger/better-known providers.

Amazon Music

The Amazon Music store and Amazon Prime Streaming are pretty okay, all things considered. As a download store they take a 30% cut, but they provide music in reasonably-high-quality (but not the best quality) MP3. The streaming service pays around 1¢/stream.

The main downside is that using them means supporting Amazon, which a lot of folks do not want to do for very good reasons.

Apple Music

The iTunes Music Store is one of the longest-lasting download services out there, and it’s still a reasonable option. It’s far from the best, though, mostly because they only offer AAC downloads at a high-but-not-amazing bitrate, and being Apple they heavily encourage its use on Apple devices (although there are Windows and Android clients as well, and with effort you can make your purchases on Linux too).

For downloads they keep a 30% cut, which isn’t the worst in the industry but is also far from the best. For streams, their payment rate is just okay, currently around 0.8¢/stream.

YouTube Music

YouTube Music has a bunch going for it:

• You’re already there to watch video
• They have basically everything (especially if you consider unofficial uploads)
• The quality is decent

The main downsides are that the subscription is on the expensive side, and that you’re supporting Google, which a lot of people don’t like.

They currently pay around 0.6¢/stream for subscription plays. (They also pay based on ad revenue for content match videos but that’s not relevant to this discussion.)

Most other streaming providers

Providers like Deezer, Rdio, Napster, etc. all seem to offer rates of around 0.8¢/stream.

There are two notable exceptions:

• iHeartRadio, which seems to pay around 1.2¢ but I get so few streams from them it’s basically statistical line noise, and it’s hard to tell if that rate would last if they got more popular.
• Pandora, which pays a mere 0.5¢/stream

Piracy

I would honestly prefer people pirate my music before they listen to it on Spotify. This is because:

Spotify

If you listen to music on Spotify, even on a free plan, they get money. And where does that money go?

• Joe Rogan and other right-wing podcasters
• Their CEO², Daniel Ek, who uses his billions of dollars to directly finance the war machine and the economic destruction of all future creativity via generative AI
• Spotify’s own AI efforts towards turning all music into bullshit slop

You see what’s missing from that list? The actual musicians.

Back when Spotify paid musicians, the rate was about 0.5¢/stream. This is among the worst in the industry.

HOWEVER

At this point they rarely even pay musicians, especially the smaller ones:

• Any track that doesn’t get at least 1000 streams per year doesn’t get paid, because it’s assumed to be low-quality filler (and not just undiscovered)
• Any small-artist track which does get at least 1000 streams per year and doesn’t come from a major label is assumed to have gotten “algorithmic streaming” (i.e. bot traffic) and is removed from eligibility on that basis

So, for a smaller independent musician like me, Spotify pays essentially $0.

You may then ask, why do I keep my music on Spotify if it’s so bad? It’s because at this point in my career my most important consideration is getting more people listening to my music, because more listeners means more fans, which means more people who want me to make more music, and more people who want to hire me to make commissions for them.

I totally get why musicians would want to remove their music from Spotify, and I absolutely support those who make that decision.

The reality of the situation for many musicians (such as myself) is that we have to begrudgingly keep our stuff there because that’s where the listeners are, and we go where the listeners are.

Every time I perform at a show I get people asking me not “where can I hear your music?” but “Where’s your Spotify?” Or if they do ask where they can hear it and I point them to my website, they ask about Spotify, because that’s the only place they can conceive of listening to it. I usually just tell them, “My music is on all the streaming services, or you can buy it from Bandcamp or Mirlo.” They end up listening on Spotify anyway.

I resisted putting it on Spotify for a long time, and the response I always got to not having it on Spotify is, “Oh, well, I’m not going to sign up for something else just to hear your music.”

That’s what musicians are fighting, here. My goal in this post isn’t to encourage musicians to leave Spotify. My goal is to get listeners to do so. It’s the listeners who make Spotify money, and that money goes to terrible places.

There are better listening experiences that cost you less and directly support musicians.

Owning your collection

Owning your collection means buying and downloading your music, and managing it in your own local collection. This has so many advantages:

• You can get music from many different sources (including CDs!)
• It’s a one-time purchase instead of a recurring monthly payment
• Way more of the money goes to the artists (typically, buying a song once is worth over 100 streams' worth!)
• Once you have it, it won’t disappear if the artist stops listing their music for whatever reason (contract disputes, dissolution of the band/death of the artist, streaming service disappears)
• You can choose the way that you listen to music depending on preferences and such

I manage my collection by keeping it all on my desktop computer and then use Music.app/iTunes to track it in its database. Then I have a smart playlist setup that will randomly select albums I haven’t listened to recently, and use that for actually listening to my music and for building playlists to sync to my phone.

I also have a backup (always keep it backed up!) on a file server which is also running Plex and Jellyfin, which gives me the ability to stream my collection from just about anywhere. Plex in particular provides an “Album Radio” mode which will build a playlist from randomly-selected albums, and the paid version gives you some nice virtual DJ things for automatically building mixes from a particular song (great for crate digging!).

People often ask me about how I discover new music.

First of all, my playback setup is integrated with last.fm, so that maintains a history of the music I’ve played, and can also make recommendations for more music to listen to. Plex has last.fm support built in directly, and both macOS and iOS have tracking apps to feed the play history in.

The other major thing is that I follow a lot of musicians and music fans, both via blogs and via social media (the Fediverse in particular). Ether Diver has a blog called Other People’s Music which has been particularly helpful. (And of course sometimes I try to remember to post similar things here to pay it forward, and this is also why I keep my last.fm profile public.)

Sometimes I also listen to the radio. A good radio station will expose you to so much good music that you hadn’t heard before. Also be on the lookout for various community Internet radio stations like KVRR. But most of how I discover new music is by word-of-mouth, and then buying entire discographies of bands I like.

Not on a Mac or iPhone? Totally fine! Here are some other pieces of software to consider:

• Foobar2000 is a well-regarded music player for local collections, which supports Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS
• Gonic is a self-hosted streaming server, similar to Jellyfin, with a number of client apps available
• Navidrome is another self-hosted streaming server with a really nice user interface
• Audacious (a modern fork of the venerable XMMS, in turn a clone of Winamp³), which has versions for Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Doubletwist is basically the phone sync part of iTunes, but for Windows
• VLC runs pretty much everywhere, and now you understand the traffic cone memes too