I’m a fan of symphonic metal, and something about that is telling YouTube Music that I must fucking love repetitive, soulless AI slop featuring guitar sounds.
It’s probably just time to set sail, but I do appreciate the convenience of streaming. Seeding a playlist with a single song has let me to a lot of music that would have otherwise flown under my radar, but every fucking time it plays something I haven’t heard before nowadays, it’s just more AI slop. Thumbs-downing them doesn’t seem to do shit.
Youtube Music is the only service I’m aware of that work doesn’t block (which… honestly why would they disallow Pandora, but leave Youtube?? I digress…) so that’s what I’ve been using. But I do have my phone, so I could run an alternative off of that.
The obvious answer would be YT with filters, but… I don’t actually see a way to set a filter - you just search a song and it does its thing. If I could just block every channel made after… idk, 2022, that would pretty well solve the issue… Is there a way to do that? That’d definitely be the easiest option.
Otherwise, is there better streaming service (which for me means decent selection of metal / actually categorizes its subgenres, and active ban of AI slop)?
The convenience of running this from my workstation just isn’t worth the amount of garbage flooding YouTube.
For awareness - I acknowledge that roon is expensive… I bought a lifetime license a few years back when it was cheaper.
The filters for metal subgenres are subpar in terms of handling what you’re describing, but again, the overall curation for new metal is pretty solid. Overall I feel that qobuz helps to identify good new releases. Turned me onto immortal disfigurement and to the grave (likely more symphonic than what you like).
Best of luck finding out what works best for your use case.