[achairapart]

Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever now is called. I tried them all. They are all the same to me.

There is one big thing that all these streaming services are missing: *METADATA*

Give me all the album by this label, all the songs produced by X or all the songs where in Y plays drums. All the albums recorded at some studio in the year Z. With tools like this I will spend years (and whatever money) on your service. They will give me unexplored ways to find and listen to new music, totally new meaningful relationships!

Heck, 9 times out of 10 even the album year is all wrong with these services! (I know, all these "remastered" editions from the labels don't help at all).

And they don't even need to build those datasets, they are already there, just ask (or buy out) discogs.com!

[joshvm]

I understand Spotify actually has an advanced search (including range queries, lyric match and metadata like labels) but it's not documented well and the app itself doesn't present any options to the user.

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/search/

[achairapart]

Interesting! I never heard about those advanced search tags, at least there's something.

Thanks!

[loudtieblahblah]

please god, do not buy out discogs and leave it the hell alone.

i already stopped last.fm after CBS ruined it.

I've used every music service and quit for a multitude of reasons. Libraries that "have everything" but manage to be missing albums or have albums takne down all the time, "shuffle" functions that don't work (Spotify), apps that prioritize and shove music in your face that you have no interest in (Tidal), or just being unlucky enough to be owned by some of the shittiest corporations the world has seen since the robber barons (Apple/Google).

The more they get rid of digital music stores, the more i fall back to vinyl.

Streaming sucks.

[ValentineC]

Have you checked out MusicBrainz [1] as an alternative for Discogs?

They're run by a non-profit [2], which is worth supporting, and a bit hard to "buy out".

[1] https://musicbrainz.org/

[2] https://metabrainz.org/

[loudtieblahblah]

I, mainly, use Discogs more as a trading platform for vinyl. The fact their meta-data db is phenomenal is an added bonus

[SllX]

I second this. Discogs is amazing in the way that only independent websites can be, and not just as a database (which would be locked up by the buyer, stripped of its more interesting and obscure data and turned into a feature for the buyer’s “platform”), but also as a marketplace.

[hedora]

> apps that prioritize and shove music in your face that you have no interest in (Tidal)

Tidal’s ML algorithm has a pretty strong prior probability set to match their owner’s taste.

However, their recommendations are excellent for other genres once their suggestion algorithm has had time to digest your library and listening habits (about a week or two for me).

[mixmastamyk]

Musicbrainz has the most of this kind of information. I often use it to find out where/year the songs from a compilation came from. Wikipedia as well, though it is unstructured.

[isolli]

There are such niche services for classical music. For instance, idagio.com is really excellent with metadata. You see e.g. all works by a performer or all performers of a work.

[elzbardico]

Hey man. Thanks, just subscribed. Classic music experience always sucked on modern apps. This is the first one that does it right.

[conception]

Idagio is so good. I sub even though I'm not on it a lot to keep it afloat.

[ladon86]

Check out Roon: https://roonlabs.com/features

You can use it with both Tidal and your own music files.

[Tiktaalik]

Listing who performed on the album would add so much more value to these services.

Like a song, why not show the performers so that users can what else they worked on. They'll probably like other projects the performer was involved in.

Apple does have little writeups about albums which I like. Nice to have context about what the album is and why it might be worth listening to.

[indrora]

You may enjoy Quod Libet: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Additionally, you might enjoy Jellyfin. While they're not streaming "services", they do have a high focus on metadata driven library exploration.

[conradev]

Much of that data is in these services, in some form, for billing

Too bad that exposing it is likely too “niche” for them to prioritize

[kall]

I would love to see more of this.

Since this is the "did you know Apple Music actually..." thread: You can at least browse by record label nowadays and it's pretty nice.