Moving streaming services

In light of the recent Spotify stuff—including their predictably poor response: people are rightly looking to move streaming services. I’ve not been on Spotify for a while—I found the relentless plugging of podcasts super annoying on a “music” platform, so I moved off before things got as bad as they are. I also, personally, found the quality of streaming sub-par, at best.

I moved from Spotify to Apple Music. I really like the service, although integration with Last.FM is difficult. The audio quality is really decent most of the time and they’ve ironed out a lot of the problems they had in the early days. If you’ve already got Apple services like iCloud storage and whatnot, you can get it cheaper with the Apple One subscription.

One thing I also like about Apple Music is that it works pretty good with my existing local collection of music. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. I found players like Roon bloody awful to use. Bring back winamp!

An outlier, but very good service is Tidal. Their “master quality” streams are bloody good and very warm sounding. They’re very close to a good quality local FLAC file. I like that Tidal pay the most to artists per stream, too (nearly 10x more than Spotify). It is still pittance though, being less than a cent… You can read about those royalties here.

What’s my setup now?

I try to buy as much music as possible—be it Vinyl, CD, cassettes or digitally with Bandcamp etc. You can check out my physical collection here.

I’ve been on Apple Music for ages now, but I’m actually trying out Tidal again. I moved stuff around stuff really easily with songshift too, so definitely give that a look. I tend to share music links via song.link (AKA odesli) too, so regardless of platform, people can get access to recommendations easily. I track with Last.FM too, which again, makes moving platforms a non-issue. It’s also a pretty wholesome service, even all these years later! I use it to generate that little latest track thing on the bottom of the page.

I hope this little run-down helps if you are on the fence with streaming services.