When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
Could you give me some examples of alternative services? I’m paying spotify right now, but i’ll love to ditch it.
Sure, although keep in mind this will vary by region due to licensing issues.
Deezer is probably Spotify’s best direct competitor. They are priced equally (depending on region) and now offer high-res streaming as default instead of a paid extra. They’ve been expanding with new features such as lyrics, collab playlists, song identification, and they recently improved their recommendation system. They also offer a discount if you buy subs yearly instead of monthly so you can save if you like the platform.
Apple Music is also an option now that Apple has put in some work to make the platform easier to use on non-Apple devices such as the recently added Windows app. It’s not as feature-rich as Deezer but if you don’t use those added features anyway then it is an option. I personally would phrase it as “has less bloat”. If you own any Apple devices already then it will have tighter integration with them.
Tidal is the old favourite of audiophiles and music appreciators. They have been expanding their platform with new features and music and, somewhat recently, have also lowered their prices. High-res streaming is now included in the base sub tier. All of these alternatives pay artists more than Spotify but Tidal has one of the best artist payouts.
Qobuz is similar to Tidal and is a premium platform with a focus on quality. They are a newer service and are still expanding their regions, so I don’t have personal experience with them as they only recently opened up to my country. Their price and feature set looks competitive, though, and their UI does look slick. They also have better artist payouts.
Amazon Music apparently has better payouts for artists but Amazon is a shit company so I’ve never looked into them further. I’ll include YouTube Music here as well which has shitty payouts and is a shitty company.
I invested heavily in the Amazon Music ecosystem, I bought hundreds of albums on there, and the platform is now very nearly unusuable. I cannot even listen to the songs that I paid for without also having to listen to ads. And the Android app now hides the downloads in some hidden folder so I can’t even download them and listen to them on another player. It makes me furious.
I’ve actually gone back to CDs, if you can believe it. It’s kind of nice sometimes, especially for full album plays, but I do miss a nice big playlist of my favorite songs from all artists.
I can believe it. I still have multiple libraries of physical media, and I pretty much never buy anything new that I can’t likewise physically own. I might rip and make MP3’s or transcode or emulate, or whatever, for convenience, but sometimes it’s just nice to be able to stick the disk or cartridge in the machine and have it just work without any of the associated modern ancillary bullshit.
Everything wants to be a service now. I just find that so irritating.
Apple Music also has Dolby atmos and much higher quality audio files compared to Spotify.
The only thing Spotify has on everyone is excellent playlists. I just use SongShift to copy the playlists over.
Tidal is okay but I prefer Apple Music since it has a better UI, cheaper price and is more user friendly for my non-audiophile family members.
if you use Apple Music and have a desktop/laptop look into Cider 2. Incredible streaming music player. https://cider.sh/
Just looked into these. It doesn’t look like any of these have official Linux apps :(
Apple Music has a web based player
What’s the USP of Deezer over Apple Music now that the latter has lossless streaming as well (and live lyrics for longer)?
None of these have good app support compared to Spotify, sadly. Not supported by my car, nor my Linux desktop, or home speakers.
Oh and Deezer pays even less to artists than Spotify.
I’m enjoying Tidal
Thanks for the recommendation, I was worried they would be missing some of my artists but they had 99% of my music. Can’t wait to ditch Spotify.
ETA: dear lord the sound quality is so much better. I had no idea what I was missing.
Yeah, happily using Tidal as well. Haven’t missed any music that wasn’t also missing from Spotify, so…
Does Tidal have a lightweight Linux client that’s kept up-to-date?
Tidal on Linux is a crap shoot, which sucks because pipewire is awesome for HiRes music since it can change sample rate on the fly to match a source. Best bet is Firefox and their web player, and using the middle tier “high” that’s blue colored, and letting pipewire play @ 44100
As an Apple hater; Apple Music. Cheaper, good cross-platform frontends, more equitable to artists (though by no means satisfactorily so), has a Wrapped equivalent (though who actually cares). Maybe Spotify added something it doesn’t have in the several years since I switched but, I doubt it
Apple Music is on Android?
It is, but the app is frustrating. It has a mind of its own sometimes and, subjectively, basic UI functionality was an afterthought. Also no support on a galaxy watch.
That said, it sounds great and has a solid catalog (except the DJ Krush/Toshinori Kondo collab, Ki-Oku. Grrrr)
Yup
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=apple+music+android
Qobuz/Tidal/Deezer?
Napster pay decent artist royalties and offer a Spotify migration service for your playlists etc. as well as lossless music.