Category: Music

It is that time of year once more where I let you all know that my 2023 Spotify playlist has been completed.

I discovered a good few artists this year, and I have gone back to listen to them more often than not.

New albums from BABYMETAL, Q-Rabbit, HANABIE, Superflat and Sparkly Night.

Some classics mixed in there too.

Enjoy!

And you can listen back to all the playlists that I have made since 2017 here:

Spotify Playlists

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Back in January, I looked at each of Spotify’s competitors to see what could potentially become the next streaming service that I was going to subscribe to.

For a couple of months, I had been using Deezer almost exclusively but now I seem to be back on Spotify with absolutely no reason for me to use it over the other.

The track selection has been good, the UI is neat but how and never, I always feel drawn back to Spotify. The high fidelity audio option is a really nice touch and worth it on it’s own.

Discoverability is somewhat lacking. Deezer seems to have a look at it’s close circle of artists that you listen to and gives a small list of artists outside before roping you back to square one.

Most of the artists that I would be listening to are from Japan and they would be putting their music on Spotify over Deezer and any promotions either point them to Spotify, YouTube or LINE (LINE is only available within Japan)

I seem to be at a crossroads when it comes to finding city pop / future funk music. So my attention turned to Bandcamp and this opened a massive can of worms.

Bandcamp doesn’t have an official desktop client. There is a 3rd party one that is literally just the website in PWA with keyboard shortcuts. The music discoverability appears to be better on the one hand and the fact that I can subscribe to a LABEL rather than just the artist is very nice.

Bandcamp’s search is good too as it’s able to show new music in a particular genre or by a label.

I wasn’t sure if this was the best way to ‘support’ or ‘listen’ to an artist or whether something like Spotify/SoundCloud/YouTube was the way to go:

One thing I do like about Bandcamp is the ability to support artists by buying their album or a set price or you can contribute more.

Some artists/labels have the ability to purchase full discographies which you can download and listen to offline is a really nice touch.

Overall, I have decided to go back to Spotify for most of my listening but from time-to-time, Bandcamp.

I expect big things to come from Bandcamp in the future as the platform was acquired back in March by Epic Games.