I am starting to dislike YouTube Music for cramming in music I don’t like no matter how many times I use the thumbs down. I have already tried Spotify and Apple Music and didn’t like either. I do buy records from Bandcamp but a streaming service is necessary as well. Should I try Deezer? Pandora not available here. Or even Amazon Music?
I’ve been using Deezer for the last few years, and its (mostly) great
Have used Spotify in the past, then went to google Play Music, then tried YouTube Music for three frustrating months before coming to Deezer.
Deezer pluses;
Absolutely awesome range, more music from more artists than any other service I’ve tried, and very little missing. They have every Johnny Cash album bar one, pretty impressive. Their Country and Western catalogue is unparalleled
Although you can only download onto three devices, you have unlimited downloads on each one, as opposed to Spotify which limits you to just 50,000 tracks. I blew past that on my phone in three weeks. I cant see myself needing to download into more than three devices
Good stable Android app, better even than Spotify, as good as GPM, and far far better than YTM. It isnt perfect, can be a little slow to load playlists sometimes, but I have only had to shut it down and restart it 2-3 times in almost a year of use. YTM had to be restarted 2-3 times a day, the Android app fell over more often than a drunk after happy hour.
Great sound quality on mobile and web, I really cant fault it
Good simple web interface too, and I can edit playlists and tracks fairly easily
Good value for money - cheaper and better than the rest
Apparently pays artists better
Deezer minuses;
Android app playlists only have a shuffle play button, and there is no way to change this to regular linear play in settings, even for Premium users, or disable shuffle across the app. This is the biggest flaw by far, and it is shared with Spotify. It is the only aspect of YTM that is superior
The MP3 upload feature is a bit clunky and not terribly intuitive, and limited to only 2000 tracks. However this really doesnt matter as I havent needed to upload much music at all as practically everything I want is available on Deezer anyway
Editing big playlists on the web interface can be a sluggish and buggy, especially moving around large blocks of tracks. Was a bit frustrating when I needed to edit playlists I’d moved across from YTM, I found that often it was easier to just delete almost all the tracks and rebuild from scratch. Now all my playlists are cleaned up it isnt a major - building new playlists works fine
You need to favourite a lot of artists and/or tracks to get the automated recommendations after a playlist finishes to work properly (as opposed to Flow which just works off one artist). Artist exclusions dont seem to work, but now I have favourited 190 artists that doesnt seem to be an issue now. Minor glitch though
Thank you for this extensive answer. I am trialing the free version this week to see.