Paul’s Tech Makeover: Music (Premium)

We’re currently using multiple music services and speaker systems, and that has to change. So as part of our move to a new home, I’ll be consolidating both.

My goals here match up nicely with what I wrote in And It Just Doesn’t Work back in early July. I want to minimize complexity and maximize functionality. It needs to be broadly interoperable and compatible. It has to work for everyone in my family. And it has to make sense financially.

No problem, right?

Looking at music services first, I’ve tried them all, in part because of my job and in part because I’m a music fan. Whatever the reason, we’ve been paying for several subscription services: Google Play Music, Groove Music Pass, Pandora Plus, and Spotify Premium for Family. Plus, we have an Amazon Prime membership ($80 per year) and that comes with some form of music capability. Oh, and I pay Apple $25 a year for iTunes Match, which contains my ripped CD collection.

So that needs to change.

And it needs to change with an eye towards those goals. Hopefully, a single service that is best-in-class, works with the smart speakers and other technologies we’ll be using in the new house, meets the needs of everyone in my family, and is cost-effective. (Just reducing the number of subscription services we pay for would meet that last goal.)

Fortunately, there is some low-hanging fruit here.

After forcing Groove on my kids for a few years—like many, I had taken advantage of a great deal a few years back where you could get one-year subscriptions to Groove Music Pass for just $30 (I believe), and bought multiple keys—I gave in to their demands and subscribed to Spotify Premium for Family. This is an incredible value if you want to use Spotify: It costs just $14.99 per month (compared to $9.99 per month for an individual subscription) and provides up to 6 people with their own Premium subscriptions to the service. We have four family members.

My wife had been using Pandora Plus (at $60 per year), and only occasionally, through her phone to a speaker in the kitchen. So when I subscribed to Spotify Premium for Family, I asked her about switching to that instead, which she did. And we canceled the Pandora Plus subscription.

That left me.

After stacking multiple Groove Music Pass subscriptions on my Microsoft account, I was set through mid-2017. But you may notice that mid-2017 has come and gone and, sure enough, on June 13, 2017, a subscription that dated back to the original Zune finally elapsed. I let it happen: Groove isn’t horrible, but I have concerns about its long-term viability and compatibility, and, more to the point, there are better services out there. So Groove was out. That’s $9.99 saved each month.

But I evaluate music services regularly, as you may know. And after briefly considering Apple Music—for which I have compatibility and moral concerns—it became clear that Spotify and Google Play Music where the top contenders. Everyone seems to love Spotify, but I find the UI to be a bit strange and unfamiliar. Worse, I identified a key failing of this service that impacts me directly: Alone among all the major music services, Spotify offers no way to upload your own music to the service.

Why is this an issue? Because no music service has all of my music. As I wrote at the time, “There are a variety of reasons for this shortcoming, but ‘why’ won’t help us solve the problem. If you are really into music, and are particular about having access to some music, you need a way to combine your own music with the cloud-based collection found in whatever service you’re using.” Even Groove supports this functionality (via OneDrive), for crying out loud.

For this and other reasons, I stuck with Google Play Music. I really like how it works, and the service’s liberal upload policy—you can upload 50,000 songs (!) to the service for free—is amazing. So the service provides, for me, the best balance between an online collection and my own music, which cannot be found in any collection.

But a Google Play Music subscription is another $9.99 per month. And, ultimately, I decided it had to go.

My own music is in the cloud. It’s in Apple’s iCloud, thanks to iTunes Match. It’s in Amazon because I uploaded it there too. Some of it is in Groove, because I put it in OneDrive. And it’s in Google Play Music, because, my God, they give you the ability to upload 50,000 songs for free. It’s not, alas, in Spotify. And unless this service wakes up and offers this capability, it never will be.

There is a workaround, of course: Spotify can access locally-stored music. So I could download music to my phone or PC, perhaps, using OneDrive (or whatever) and then access it from the Spotify app that way. But regardless of the difficulty, the decision here came down to the fact that only one of the four people in my family, me, even cares about this. The rest are happily using Spotify already. We’re already paying for it.

So Google Play Music has to go. That’s $9.99 saved each month. Or about $120 per year.

I may let the iTunes Match subscription lapse the next time it comes up; I would rather not rely on Apple for this sort of thing, and I am ambivalent about Apple Music anyway. (And will not use it, I just chose Spotify.) Amazon’s Prime-based music capabilities are not super-interesting to me: They included radio-type capabilities, but not the Amazon Music Unlimited service, which is their version of Spotify Premium.

So I’ve chosen Spotify. How does it meet my requirements?

I was able to whittle our music subscriptions down to a single service that many would argue is best-in-class, though I award it an asterisk for the issue I raised above. (This only impacts me, of course.) Spotify works with the smart speakers and other technologies we’ll be using in the new house, as described below, and it even has a special power in one important case. (Again, see below). It meets the needs of everyone in my family, as noted. (Yes, dad gets an asterisk.) And it is particularly cost effective at just $14.99 per month. That’s just $3.75 per family member. (It’d be even less if I just had two more kids!)

Not bad, right?

There is one more related service I should mention: I regularly use, and strongly recommend, Audible for audiobooks. And while you can buy individual audiobooks from the service as needed, I do subscribe to its Gold membership at a cost of $14.95 a month. This only makes sense if I download and listen to at least 12 audiobooks a year, as most audiobooks are more expensive.

It’s close, and I actually have two monthly credits waiting on me at the moment. The issue (which many people would be happy to have) is that I don’t commute to work each day because I work from home. So my Audible listening is relegated to off-times, when I’m walking, or when I’m flying. And it fluctuates based on the quality of the book to which I’m listening; it’s funny how you can find the time when you’re in the middle of a truly great book.

Anyway, I’m not going to solve this one right away. Because Audible is tied to the Amazon account that my wife and both use, the same account we use for Prime, we both take advantage of the audiobook library and downloads. So it’s possible I’ll simply continue along as-is, though my wife and I have been looking at the Audible Channels functionality we get as Prime members as a possible hedge. (Channels are not audiobooks but they do provide some neat long-form selections.)

As for the home technology we’ll use to listen to music (and audiobooks), that is still in flux. But I have a few thoughts here.

First, we’ve decided on Google Home as the obvious choice for personal digital assistant and voice control. Yes, Amazon’s Alexa platform is amazing for now, but Home is powered by Google, and it is already quickly catching up. Spotify works just fine with Google Home. Audible? Not so much, but that’s not how I would listen to audiobooks anyway. (My wife may want to.)

We currently have two Google Home appliances. One will be in the kitchen, where it will replace a Chromecast-connected standalone speaker. And one will be in the living room with the 4K/UHD set and whatever home entertainment devices. That should be about right for starting and controlling playback where we need it.

As for smart speakers, this is where things get really complicated. And expensive.

We currently own three Sonos Play-1 speakers, two of which are in a stereo set that will be placed in the living room. The other one is a one-off that we use in the bathroom.

Sonos speakers are nice because they sound great, and can pump music all over your house as a complete system. The Sonos apps are OK, not great. But Spotify can be used to control Sonos, too: This is that special power I mentioned earlier. That means we can control the speakers using an interface that everyone already uses and is familiar with.

But Sonos speakers are super-expensive; that’s why I have only purchased a few of the cheapest models. And I’ve only bought them on sale: The normal price is $200 each.

Worse, these speakers are useless outside of the Sonos ecosystem because they don’t even provide line-in capabilities. You need to spend $500 per speaker on the Play-5 series to get that capability. This Apple-like pricing bothers me, as you might expect.

Fortunately, there is a solution, and it meshes nicely with Google Home (and Spotify): You can use inexpensive Chromecast Audio devices ($35 each) to create a Sonos-like whole-house system with different (and otherwise incompatible) speaker sets. With great speaker pairs available for as little as $100—I own these Edifier powered bookshelf speakers, for example, and I think they sound great—you can save a lot of money.

I can’t resolve this until I do some testing in the new home, but I will most likely be moving away from Sonos. The alternative is to mix and match, which isn’t necessarily horrible. (It is contrary to my goal of minimizing complexity, I guess.) And I could always add the non-Sonos speakers to the Sonos ecosystem using an expensive little add-on called Sonos Connect ($345). I can’t imagine spending the money, but you never know.

Just to throw another stick in the spokes, I’ll mention, too, that Apple supports its own technology, called AirPlay, for moving music and audio around the home. What Apple lacks is an inexpensive, Chromecast-like device that you can add to existing speakers. The closest they have is a dated AirPort Express device that costs $99.99 and only supports 802.11n Wi-Fi. AirPlay will, ahem, play a role if only because of my kids’ use of iPhones and our Apple TV. But probably not for getting music around the house.

Anyway, we’re getting ready to head back to the United States on Monday and then spend the following 10 days or so moving. So I’ll be able to get moving on the hardware side of this soon.

Note: While most of the links above are not affiliate links, there are a handful of affiliate links in there. –Paul