Wildly disrespectful to any artist that ever lived. I’m all up for sharing alternatives that are good/better towards actual artists. Still evaluating my choices, but meanwhile this seems like the only and rather easy signal the streaming community can give as to spread the word if they agree (next to stopping your own subscription). Context: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/spotifys-ai-bet-more-of-everything-less-of-what-you-want/
Spotify was never any good. That fact that people even use it just help demonstrate how stupid the average person is.
I’d have to actually use Spotify for that. No thanks.
I’m all up for sharing alternatives that are good/better towards actual artists.
- Tidal
- Qobuz
- Deezer
- Apple Music
Literally everyone pays artists more than Spotify. Even fucking Peleton, apparently.
Tidal seems to be the best option overall. Deezer pays artists less initially than the other services (but still more than Spotify), but the royalties increase for tracks with at least 1,000 streams from 500 unique subscribers each month. Popular artists with more play make more royalties. You benefit Deezer, they benefit you, which makes sense to me.
Qobuz seems to pay highly to artists, but their library is a bit more limited compared to Tidal and Deezer, and their radio functionality is utterly shit.
Apple is the only one I don’t have much info on. I’ve used all four at various points, but Apple Music the least because I don’t like my options being limited to playing it on my Apple TV, and Apple devices are limited to 24-bit/48khz, and Apple has weird EQ that pushes vocals way forward in my experience. I don’t like the music fucked with, just play it without DSP and let my equipment to the work, okay?
Currently subscribed to Qobuz and Deezer, and seriously, fuck Spotify.
Isn’t… literally anything but Spotify better? There are dozens of streaming services, many of them great, and websites to export your playlists.
I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to unsubscribe.
You’d be surprised at how addicted the kids are to their brain rot. Look at how much hate YouTube gets, and yet- they’re more profitable than ever.
Stockholm Syndrome of the modern tech world. And it gets so much worse from here.
Because then I lose all my playlists
No you dont, every streamer from spotify to apple music to qobuz and deezer allow for a full import. I switched to apple music and it pulled everything.
It is a worse service though which says a lot, spotify does suck but AM has a terrible and boring UI and UX
My wife and I ditched streaming for just owning music through bandcamp or CD. We’ve exported her Spotify playlists. If anybody has a link to a tool for generating local playlists from exported Spotify JSONs (for tracks you own, and a list of tracks you need to complete them), I’m all ears.
Oh interesting. Except I hate apple and never heard of the others
Qobuz is awesome, still growing though.
Spotify has always been the music streaming service for people who love music but hold disdain for artists.
So basically, you can self host something similar to Spotify fairly easily or just keep your music on your phone (if you aren’t a die hard quality guy and don’t have millions of songs).
There’s spot-dl to mass download your playlists from YouTube. Granted, YouTube doesn’t have everything. Then you can support your favorite artists directly by buying merch from their website, their albums on Bandcamp, etc.
The thing is you can stop using the app but it will still keep generating playlists for you. By now, it knows you pretty well. So you can just go back periodically to download more songs and abuse of the algo without actually giving them money and ad revenue. From what I understand, it’s the discovery feature that is missing from most open source apps.
Would prefer to support Google as little as possible. Why use YouTube?
Because you can’t really grab music as easily anywhere else. You aren’t using YouTube really, just downloading the song once through them.
There are torrents but the scene isn’t the best from what I understand, most songs are missing the moment it isn’t a classic. It might have changed since last I checked.
Hmm, I grew up with the pirate stuff back in the day but am kind of at the age where I don’t mind paying a little more for things I appreciate. I’m into self-hosting and all, but would love for there to be an ethical and legal alternative to recommend 😅. I think I would miss the jam-feature the most on such a route, as sharing the playlist/queue wherever you are from a huge catalog with friends is difficult to maintain. It seems that convenience is always the way they keep you locked in ☹️
Please boycott Spotify* there that is what the title should read
The sentence could’ve ended after Spotify…
Yeah, so… if them supporting ICE wasn’t enough to make people stop supporting that rash, AI isn’t going to do it either.
It’s years since I last subscribed to Spotify, their app is an annoyance that’s try to push shit like podcast and advertising that i don’t like.
