I'm trying to shift away from paying for my music. When I got my first iPod, I converted everything I owned onto CD onto my iTunes account, but then I went through a few phases where I spent all kinds of money downloading songs. As a result, I have a pretty sizeable iTunes library.
*The problem- after several years, I noticed purchased songs disappearing. I'm not sure if Apple loses rights to have some things on there are what, but I've had a good 20-30 songs just disappear. There's some residue of them, but they can't be played and Apple has given me odd responses for why they can't be recovered or reloaded. As a result, I have a distrust of Apple's music services and won't buy in. While I didn't buy as many songs on Amazon Music, I've had a couple of those disappear like that as well. Amazon said they no longer had the rights to provide what I paid for. So, like Apple, I won't buy into their services.
I got tired of buying individual songs, so I had Sirius for several years. I just hit a point where I was flipping channels an awful lot trying to find something I wanted to listen to. So, I canceled that service (which isn't an easy task). Before my Sirius subscription ended, I created my "ULTIMATE PLAYLIST" on Spotify. I loaded everything and anything I can think of, as well as listening heavily to Sirius before my subscription ended to make sure nothing was missed. In the end, the playlist amounted to 200 hours of songs. The only problem...I feel like it repeats songs. You'd think with that much music, I could go a long time without any repeats, but there have been times where the same song could play 2-3x over the course of a day. It also doesn't shuffle artists well. If I wanted to hear the same artist, I'd just pick an artist specific playlist already in existence. So, for this reason, I refuse to buy into the commercial free version and only stick with the freebie. I will say that it has been good for holiday music. My personal iTunes holiday music playlist is many hours long, but sometimes I want to change it up. Sirius was great for holiday music, but I'm not buying back in just for that. The local radio station plays way too many commercials and repeats the same things over and over. So, Spotify has been excellent as a filler when I don't want my 7+ hour iTunes holiday playlist.
