Why leave Spotify?

There are multiple reasons that have built up over time until finally being tipped over the edge to put the effort into leaving:

• The treatment of artists. They take in a LOT of money but pay only a tiny amount to artists who actually make the music.
• Escalating costs. The plan prices keep ramping up.
• Losing focus. They started doing podcasts, audiobooks, etc. I just wanted music from them.
• Paying hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to Joe Rogan for his podcast, repeatedly. Then promoting his podcast widely, building a massive audience. Rogan uses the podcast to spread racism, sexism, misogyny, disinformation, far-right propaganda, and conspiracy fictions. Media Matters analysed a year of the podcast and the findings were deeply troubling. Yet Spotify keep bundling up our subscription dollars and sending it to him by the truckload, and pushing his podcast as widely as they can to new audience members.
• Hosting and promoting a misogynistic 'Pimping Hoes' training course podcast about how to manipulate women into sex work, from the Tate brothers who are under criminal investigation in multiple countries for sexual offences. They only took this down after a backlash from users, media and their own staff.

Alternatives to Spotify

I searched online, and asked around on Bluesky for tips about alternatives. Here's what I found...

Choosing to own music again

Many people are choosing to buy music again, rather than stream it.

This is attractive to me as I love listening to albums in full, like having the physical 'thing', and like supporting the artists.

I'm no hipster, so this'd be on CD rather than vinyl.

Other streaming music services

I looked around to see what my choices were for a more direct replacement of Spotify:

• Apple Music: I already subscribe to Apple TV, iCloud storage, etc, so actually converting to an Apple One subscription that gives me Music too wouldn't change price. It also allows Family Sharing. It's easy to make and share playlists. Main downside is it locks me into Apple even more.
• Youtube Music: A few people said they like this, but in my evaluation (a) I didn't like the user experience; (b) it's expensive; and (c) it has many of the same problems that I'me leaving Spotify for. I think this'd be out of the frying pan into the fire.
• Tidal: The ethics of this one are great, as is their focus on sound quality. Testing found quite a few gaps in the available artists though.
• Qobuz: I'd never heard of this, but someone replying to my Bluesky thread recommended it. It's based in France, so extra points for not being American, and being firmly under GDPR. They also seem to invest a lot in editorial curation of music recommendations rather than just algrorithms.

I started out by evaluating Apple Music and Tidal, but once Qobuz was recommended I switched from Tidal to that.

Migrating my favourites and playlists from Spotify

I researched the options and chose an iOS app called Songshift.

There's a free option but I paid £6.99 for the pro option for a few months to contribute.

You connect it to your music services and can then choose to migrate playlists and favourite artists, albums or tracks from one service to another service.

I migrated mine from Spotify to my test accounts.

This was fairly easy, though there was a bit of manual matching. Often just for minor differences like 'and' instead of '&' in a band name, which was frustrating.

Anyway, it was much much easier than rebuilding the lists and favourites manually.

The result

I started buying more CDs again. Initially this is building up a bit of a back catalogue of some classic albums, but I'll be more ready to buy new albums I like too.

I did consider simply going without a streaming service — but I found that I do like (a) the convenience of music being with me on my phone when out and about; (b) the ability to discover new music easily; (c) being able to make playlists and share them with friends.

But I'm stuck on deciding which streaming service:

• Apple Music is good for sharing playlists with family and friends.
• But Qobuz is AMAZING for music discovery, which is one of my main uses for streaming services. They have put so many artists and albums in front of me that I'd never have found otherwise, and I've found some absolute treasures in just a couple of months. I like their app. I also like that it's European.

So, for the moment I'm running with both.

And I've cancelled Spotify, and am very glad about that.

Album recommendations

Because Qobuz is so good at album recommendations, I'll share a couple here that I've really enjoyed that I wouldn't have found otherwise:

• La femme aux yeux de sel, by Gabi Hartmann
• Poems for travellers, by Emil Brandqvist Trio
• Get Sunk, by Matt Berninger