this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Clearly most people care more about other factors than they do about audio quality that isn't even discernable through their Bluetooth earbuds.
Streaming sites not including the option to block content is frustrating.
I remember when Netflix let you hide individual movies so they didn't clutter up the categories. When it was removed there was a rumor that giving it a low score would hide it but that never worked for me. Don't even remember the other services offering an option to hide stuff.
Really wish that option was common.
You can still do that on YouTube.
I don't think of youtube as a streaming site for some reason. Maybe because I only interact with it on a computer and the others through TVs even though everything can go through both.
They also have movies, but I figured "buying" them over there is more expensive than getting DVDs or sometimes even BluRays shipped from UK to Slovakia via Amazon.
Random example: Blade Runner 2049 bought from seller RAREWAVES for €5.64 ($6.30 currently) incl. shipping, the DVD itself being £2.24 ($2.97 currently). It was new, not used.
"Renting" on YouTube for 48 hours within 30 days is $3.99, while "Buying" is $14.99.
Seems like I could get it used in "Very Good" condition on BluRay for around €6. Just UHD BluRay is more expensive than YouTube.
I never moved from pandora to Spotify and could never find a good reason to.
I realize I’m a decade out of the loop, but what did it do better?
Pandora was initially antithetical to playlists, the concept was utilizing the music genome project to play songs that are like songs you’ve liked, intelligent radio.
Playlists probably was the thing Spotify had that pandora didn’t have that made Spotify get big, you can make playlists now.
I only use pandora because it’s music discovery is so good tbh.
I’m not entirely sure how selecting the song or songs you want to listen to differs from a playlist, but ok.
I think the concept of a playlist is exactly what you’re describing.
I think generally it is the key feature.
Internet radio existed before pandora came along, pandora was novel in that it implemented the music genome project. The idea of the user selecting the next song was counter to their intent.
Playlists, and/or the user selecting their songs wasn’t exactly novel except for the free2play model w/ads allowing its widespread adoption.
IMO pandora paved the way for the commercial viability of Spotify, now pandora has playlists and you can select individual songs and albums. I still use it just for the music discovery
In the early years of Spotify I liked that it stored the songs on your sctual device, so you didnt need an active Internet connection to listen to the songs.
I'm so confused, I'm a Spotify user and there are multiple artists I've selected "don't play this artist" on that Spotify blocks for me; it won't even play those artists when I click playlists including them.
it's the social features and the network effect. if you want to make a playlist and share it with your friends the easiest way to get them to listen to it is to host it on spotify. also blends, collaborative playlist, jams, and now listening all provide the illusion of connection through a shared listening experience. and it's not so much that these things are better than what we used to have for sharing music, it's that corporations have all killed our ways of sharing music. that's what they really hated about groove shark. artists made more money in the groove shark era, but umg, sony, and warner didn't control how we shared on it.
Yeah seriously; unless you're an audiophile who spends extra on quality headphones, your Bluetooth buds are probably using the SBC codec, which cuts off frequencies at 16kHz and thus is hardly better than listening to a 128Kbps MP3. (In Android you can see what codec your headphones are using by going into the developer options.)
And to be honest, if you care enough about sound quality to spend extra on the high res tier in your streaming service of choice, you're probably using wired headphones. Audiophiles don't fuck with Bluetooth.
Just the other day I was listening to the new Linkin Park album on Spotify in a car with a friend (no fancy speaker system)
We both thought it sounded kinda low quality so we switched to youtube and the improvement was instantly noticable to us. Spotify just sucks. At least if you are used to HQ audio
Happened to me too with the same album. Then I remembered I hadn't configured the audio quality after switching to a new phone. So I did that, and then it was fine.
Hm could be that. Though I vaguely remember he checked the Spotify quality setting before going on Youtube
It's actually worse than lossless being discernable or not on bluetooth - people cannot reliably tell between high-quality compressed audio and lossless audio generally. This has been studied to oblivion - the jury is out, there's no more discussion to be had on the subject.
Just switched from iPhone to Android. If your Bluetooth headphones support aptx you can definitely hear the difference