I've got my own story and selfish questions below but to make things more interesting than just people recommending non-Apple streaming, what service would you use if your current one randomly died? (For realism purposes, lets say the owner spent all his and the company's money on hookers and had to declare bankruptcy)
I'm seriously contemplating making the move from being a long-term iPhone user to Android sometime within the next year. With minuscule advances in Apple's phones and price hikes that don't match up with that, I'm just about done with them. The only thing is...I've been an Apple mobile user since smartphones came out. Thus, my ENTIRE music collection outside of my absolute favorite bands whom I've bought CDs for (and no CD player, just for support and yay materialism) is on iTunes.
So if that's going away, what is my next best option? My knee-jerk reaction is to go with Spotify or Pandora but I don't know too much about how their plans work. I'm looking for something that I'd be able to download a decently heaping about of music onto whatever device (or Micro SD) I end up getting and have a streaming library of ten fold whatever I download. So like most people on the forum, a whole hell of a lot of music. For as much as Apple has gotten on my nerves lately, Apple Music has been really good to me. Great Radio, huge selection, unlimited downloads and storage (or as much as your device can handle), great playlist creation, and about the only band I can't find on there is Tool, which doesn't make me sad.
The good thing is that the only Apple loyalty I have is with mobile. I don't even own a Mac; never have and never will (not due to some ridiculous loyalty, but simply because they're workstations I won't make use of, and I love building PCs; hence Windows). So music, as far as I have researched and gone over things, is the only thing I'll need to reintegrate in a big way (oh, and losing iMessage, which seems to be a kind of forced loyalty thing, as far as I can tell and the more I think on it).
For my own purposes, what are non-Apple users using the most and how is the service? Have you run into any nasty restrictions regarding streaming itself, audio, or finding bands? I pay exactly $10.81 and get what I feel is a whole lot of leeway to download and stream a lot of music but I haven't ever tried any other services outside of Spotify years ago for about a week. I'm wondering if there's any streaming services out there that I haven't heard of that are awesome, but somehow feel that such an industry is, like a few others, heavily dominated by the big names simply because most labels/bands can't afford to shell out to a service that a whole lot of people aren't going to use on a daily basis.
It'd be so great if I could just download and use iTunes and Apple Music on other devices but...that's the other thing that really gets me angry is that Apple is so isolated and selfish that they (granted, can afford) to have all of their own apps and inner workings on Apple-only devices. It's pretty shitty. Not that I didn't know this for a long time but it's just now starting to affect me now that I, god forbid, decided to move to a non-Apple device. (Which, if anyone wants more discussion on, might be the Google Pixel 2; or the next iteration depending on how long I wait...my iPhone 7 Plus is still really new
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