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.