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...