I’ve been meaning to distance myself from Spotify for a while now but I’ve got a lot on my plate and their service has been very convenient. I’ve been paying for no ads since 2014 so I haven’t heard the ads personally but have seen multiple sources online describe them and confirm they they haven’t stopped as of today. I cancelled immediately. Not sure how many Spotify users there are on Lemmy but I just thought y’all ought to know what they’re up to. Spotify let’s you write a message saying why you’re cancelling and I was very descriptive. Hopefully they’ll back down just like Disney with Jimmy Kimmel.
I find it works fine for playing albums, and that’s usually how I want to listen to music.
I now have a Qobuz subscription which does all the other discoverability stuff when I can’t be arsed to read the Bandcamp curations.
For the most part it will play albums fine until it doesn’t and won’t load the next track getting stuck in a perpetual loading loop and requires being restarted. That is my experience anyway and whilst it doesn’t happen all the time it is often enough to just be a little annoying.
For the most part though playback is decent and so if that is your primary use I can see that it would seem like an OK app.
If however you do a lot of your discovery and new music listening on there as I do your opinion would probably be quite different. The search function is dog shit and navigation is horrendous, there are so many illogical decisions. Also the fact that if you click a bandcamp link within the app itself it opens it in a browser rather than opening it in app is absolutely infuriating and has been that way forever.
Unfortunately qobuz still has a some what lack lustre library for my specific niche genre choice but it is getting better and I keep checking it so hopefully soon it will have caught up, although their search is a bit shit as well clumping artists that have the same name but are certainly not the same artist together as one.
Annoying that our experiences are so different. Makes it hard to recommend since there might be hardware issues.
I won’t discount hardware issues but my experience is consistent across 6 different phones now so make of that what you will.
All of this aside I still wholeheartedly recommend bandcamp, I still think it is best for both variety of things available (particularly for niche genres) as well as artists actually getting paid.
The app still works absolutely fine I just would never describe it as “great” personally, it is just annoying because a lot of the issues I have could be resolved fairly easily and have been present for many many years at this point.