#fair pay

First, I need to acknowledge that for all of Spotify's flaws, I cannot deny that they are still the best in the space for accessibility. You can publish on Spotify from anywhere, with almost no barrier to entry, and anyone can listen without paying a thing from any platform they choose. I think this strength, though eroding, is still present and the overall experience still makes for strong competition against others.

This has become especially apparent even when using services from members of the industry that have held a firm grasp on digital music sales/streaming for about as long as it's been possible. But, let's get on with the alternatives that exist and their general strengths.

This is a short-list. You can refer to Wikipedia if you want to get overwhelmed. I'm also focused on English-first services because that's what's relevant to me. These services may not be suitable for content published in countries outside of Canada/USA.

How to Choose

In order to qualify for consideration I had some basic criteria:

Pays artists a fair wage per thousand streams (I consider $10 USD the minimum for this)

Accessible between devices and platforms

Minimal use of AI (AI is not a replacement for curated recommendation algorithms)

Ease of migration (Provides a tool or third-party service to import Spotify library)

These requirements may not seem like much but the first two really narrow down the search. I also had some nice-to-haves such as:

Lossless/HQ Audio

Lyrics

Qualifying Options

That more or less left me with the following options:

Apple Music

Qobuz

Tidal

Oh...well that's not much is it. Hm. And what's a Qobuz?? We'll come back to that. Technically Amazon music also qualified for the list too, as it barely breaks the $/stream threshold but I have plenty of other moral qualms with Amazon to want to pay them for...anything really. Especially not a service I plan to use long-term.

Apple Music

Easily the biggest competitor, it feels natural that Apple would have a robust streaming platform with a massive library. They're responsible for the mass demand for MP3 players and in the wake of Napster's demise they capitalized on the demand for easy access to digital music through iTunes. So why in the hell does Apple Music suck so fucking bad?

On paper this service should be excellent. I'm actually using it right now, listening to Madde's "Non-Photo Blue" while I write this. It's got:

A massive library

Well received tools for transferring playlists

Integrates with existing iTunes media

Has similar discovery tools

Supports lossless playback

Synced lyrics

But right away I learned only iOS users get the privilege of easily migrating their music. An app called "Playlisty" is available for a one-time $4 purchase. To the app's credit, it does a great job and there were only about 300 songs that didn't make it over. Unfortunately this app isn't available for Android, nor as a web-based service. It almost certainly could be, but if the devs asked themselves "Who would bother if they're not already an Apple user?", they were probably right to do so.

The Android app is decent, but the web player is abysmal. The native app for Windows sucks, so you pretty much have to use iTunes, except be sure to uninstall Apple Music or Apple TV first otherwise you're not going to be able to use the music features of iTunes. Why? Because Apple says so. Even then, you need to make sure iTunes is set to "Direct Sound" for its output otherwise any kind of lossless playback skips like a DiscMan out for a jog.

With that out of the way, I still have my problem of Linux playback. I'm only able to use the web version of Apple Music here, and Apple hasn't put any time into making lossless audio work, so one of its strongest features falls off a cliff. The web app also lags like hell on first play, and none of the available applications support casting. As a bonus, there's no synced playback, so you're not going to be able to pause from your phone if you have something playing on a computer or TV that isn't a Mac or AirPlay enabled. Spotify put a lot of time into making things seamless in a way that feels like it should be Apple's bread and butter but instead they've taken the 8 years of development time Apple Music has had to improve and not thought to address this.

Did I mention the Apple Music app for my TV also isn't available in Canada but I had to go through the trouble of downloading it and signing in twice before it wanted to tell me that? What an absolute mess. AirPlay works fine though.

Okay, so maybe Apple Music isn't for me.

Qobuz

Pronounced "Ko-buzz", this is a French streaming app you probably haven't heard of. It's also a pretty massive music store offering DRM-free, lossless quality music through what feels like nearly every label under the sun. Their library might not be as big, but they're certainly a compelling option if it works even slightly better than Apple Music.

Qobuz has a few selling points:

Averages $18 per 1000 streams

Uses Soundiiz to facilitate the transfer of playlists for free

Lossless audio works in-browser

Easy to access "Buy" option next to every album/track

Request system for missing music

No lyrics

Immediately, there are some downsides. Soundiiz only caught about 4/5 of my music library. On the upside, they provide an export of the whole transfer and you can pretty easily figure out what didn't match. It also got a bit confused about some tracks and seems to have substituted in tracks I never had saved. This hasn't been a major issue though.

Qobuz playback is snappy, it sounds good and there's no reliance on an app to handle DRM. Similar to Apple Music though, there's no real way to cast to my TV without an iOS device to provide AirPlay options, as Roku doesn't support Google Cast. It also doesn't support synced playback between the web player and local devices, but it does seem to know when you're using it on another device so I have to think that's in the pipeline. For now though, unless you're casting, there's no way to pause from another device.

I will say that Qobuz at least feels like the people developing are people who love music, and want to share it with others. This platform doesn't have a free tier, it's entirely driven by subscriptions and as a result maybe there just isn't that same kind of monetization culture that relies on ads. It also features some more unique features like the ability to explore entire catalogues from labels, solving a long-standing issue I've had with Spotify and trying to listen to Monstercat releases.

Overall, this has been a pretty pleasant experience and has had the least friction. Things I can and can't do are clearly communicated, and the open ability to report music that isn't available is something I'll certainly exercise. There is a lack of discovery tools outside of basic "Here's songs for people who have never heard music before" type exploration playlists.

Tidal

Tidal's an odd one. It's been around for more than a decade, but has seen some pretty slow growth. Originally an "Audiophile" grade streaming service, it was a small library and far more expensive, facing scrutiny for some rocky decisions. Now, prices have come down and they seem to be leveraging label partnerships to market to DJs and pop-heads.

I actually had some help from a friend for this one. I had more or less already ruled this one out for myself since it couldn't capture even half of my music library, but Tidal's always generally had a greater focus on pop/r&b, which aren't my typical listening categories. The following is his experience.

Tidal's selling points:

HiRes/FLAC audio (Lossless)

Average $12 per 1000 streams

Partnered with TuneMyMusic for playlist transfer

And that's about it.

My friend's library is about 1200 songs, most fitting into the library of music Tidal offers, so there weren't many missed tracks. There was some fiddling about, because apparently TuneMyMusic does also like to add duplicates when it's unsure about song versions. It may also add entire albums if the song name matches an album name. A clean and re-import did seem to fix this though. Overall, it seems like a similar experience to Qobuz, with lossless available in app or browser.

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