Retro Roundup's guide to music streaming services

These vessels of music introduced me to some of our great Canadian groups via the K-Tel cassette Canadian Mint, some Broadway shows and movie soundtracks, the double entendres of the raunchy Ruth Wallis and the mixed English/Yiddish humour of Mickey Katz, who happened to be the father of movie and Broadway star Joel Grey and grandfather of Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey.

I started to get serious about buying my own music after John Lennon was killed in 1980 and I acquired the 1979 edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide, which led me to purchases on vinyl of (of course) the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Who, Otis Redding, James Brown and many other critically acclaimed luminaries.

In the 1990s and especially after I got my first car, a 1998 Honda Civic, I loaded up on cassettes as that was one of the car's features — pre-recorded cassettes as well as blank cassettes, not only to record off vinyl but as part of my work reporting for The Suburban. My CD collection was starting to grow as well as prices came down from the originally outrageous $30 in 1983.

The onset of MP3s changed things radically, as I and many others downloaded songs from the likes of Napster, or I recorded YouTube videos off my computer. This phenomenon, of course, sadly prompted the closure of many record stores.

Now, with the advent of streaming services, I limit my CD buying to rare pressings of famous artists, such as the theme-oriented Elvis Presley CDs that came out in the mid-1980s and are now long out of print. My holy grail would be some of Elvis's 1950s albums in fake stereo, as those are ultra rare.

Don't get me wrong. The sound of CDs at their best is sublime, especially when I listen via good headphones through my Sony Blu-ray player. But I've all but stopped dong that, because it's way too sensitive and many CDs either skip or have gaps in sound. These discs don't skip as much or at all on my cheaper Sony boombox-type player, but it doesn't sound nearly as good.

So I now largely depend on streaming services. The problem is, I find I have no choice but to subscribe to four of them — YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. In the next several paragraphs I'll explain why.

YouTube Music- The advantage of this service is that the amount of music available is staggering, as it not only includes songs that are generally officially available for streaming, but numerous (but not all and increasingly less) YouTube music videos, including some mono 45 RPM single mixes. I also had the easiest time on YouTube Music creating my own playlists. But there have been problems. Those playlists I created sometimes tell me that many of the songs I downloaded can no longer be played, and sometimes I have a hard time finding my playlists once I've created them. Also, some songs stop at the beginning, middle or near end of the songs. Because of that, I sometimes have to disable the app and install it again on my phone, which I recently did. This is not a problem on my computer, though. Also, unless something has recently changed, the only Bryan Adams material on there is mostly his recent re-recordings of his hits, and live material. But the playlist problem has prompted me to switch these days to...

Spotify- I gravitate here on many occasions because, frustrated with how my own playlists don't play all my songs, I've used the Spotify ones created by its users. As a result, I've listened to hundreds of hits from particular years in chronological order. Another interesting playlist features also features hundreds of songs from a particular year, but from numerous genres, including rock, classical, ethnic music, jazz, reggae and many others. Unfortunately, especially when it comes to 20-minute jazz tracks, I find myself losing patience and skipping tracks, and eventually I lose my patience altogether. Then I switch to...

Apple Music: The Apple-curated playlists here are more limited, especially when it comes to particular years of music, but the song choices are usually excellent. For instance, for any year in the 1960s, there are about 50 pop hits, 50 rock songs and 25 country songs. The pop entries have the most variety, as they are usually singles, while the rock entries are primarily several album tracks from classic LPs, so you hear the same artists several times on one list. What attracts me to Apple is the lossless sound for stereo tracks. I hear what sounds like a bit of a treble filter, which expands the range of the song so that it sounds like 3D on my great Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones and rather old but still working Samsung S9 smartphone, set for Dolby Atmos. The problem I have with Apple Music is that its Dolby Atmos tracks sound a little underwhelming on my headphones in terms of a surround sensation (it's okay for a virtual height sensation, though), thus I have to switch to:

Amazon Music: One thing that has frustrated myself and other music lovers over the years is the proprietary attitude of the music and electronic companies. The big exception was when Sony and Phillips collaborated to create the CD. But the lack of agreement on one mode of sound doomed quadraphonic four-channel recordings, and surround sound DVD-Audio discs and Super Audio CDs. Yes, there are now Blu-ray surround CDs, but they are quite pricey on their own or are part of super expensive box sets. Also, I live in a condo and cannot play surround music over speakers. That's why surround sound in headphones was a godsend. The problem is that Apple Music's Dolby Atmos seems to be optimized for Apple headphones, while Amazon Music's 360 Reality Audio and Dolby Atmos are optimized for everybody, but especially Sony headphone owners. Thus, when I want to hear surround music in my head, I have to gravitate to Amazon, where the results are mostly stunning, especially for Michael Jackson's Thriller, Marvin Gaye's Midnight Love and the post-Roger Waters albums by Pink Floyd, or at least somewhat better than what I hear on Apple. Sadly, Amazon's compilers have made mistakes, and have interspersed mono or stereo songs as part of Dolby Atmos albums — prominent examples are the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and the Beatles' Revolver. The stereo sound on their HD and Ultra HD tracks are excellent, but I still prefer Apple in that regard.

One hopes there will come a day when there is one streaming service that combines the best aspects of the four described above. But I doubt that will happen. That's not the way the music and electronics businesses have mostly worked.

After all, there is money to be made.