I’ve used Qobuz for a long time, and it’s been great.
Not Spotify, but I’ve just been using YT Music FOSS alternatives for a while + offline music from CDs I own.
With my headphones, I can’t tell the difference between a lossless FLAC and audio from YTM, so it’s not an issue for me.
I am really liking Qobuz
Bandcamp or qobuz. They actually pay the artists a lot better. Especially bandcampfridays
YouTube music better not be on that list. I have problems with it adding generated music to radio stations all the time (stuff that’s unlabeled but that I know is AI from lists I’ve seen floating around the internet). I went through one ai “artists” whole catalog and downvoted every song they made and still sometimes I catch them slipping.
Tidal, Qobuz, Bandcamp, and Deezer are the ones if recommend.
My biggest thing is discovering new music in line with my broad tastes. Anything do that that well? Then im off.
If self hosting your music you could always go down the route of Listenbrainz scrobbling with something like Explo to autograb the weekly recommended playlist. Same goes for Last.fm. Music discovery is also the thing that had me hooked for so long.
Lidarr, prowlarr, qbit and navidrome do wonders
This, plus if you love a smaller artist and want to support them you can buy their music from qobuz, download it (it’s drm free), and import it into Lidarr.
Have you tried tidal? ATM I’m too broke to be paying for music but in the future, I would like to support the artists
Yeah exactly. Some artist also make their music available for download in high ress formats after a fee. Which I am happy to pay directly to them.
Consider buying your favorite tracks and making an offline library. In my case it was totally worth the effort
Bandcamp is good for this. You can stream stuff you bought on there for free through the app if you want to. I download my purchases and add them to my enormous library that I started in the late nineties.
Yeah, that’s where I get about one third of my music. Another third is from Qobuz and the rest is converted from YT or somewhere else
Something free/open that basically just hit-n-runs YouTube and doesn’t serve any ads.
Examples: Kreate (or a similar fork), Metrolist, etc.
Downside is that YT will push deliberate updates that break these types of apps occasionally and you may have to wait a few days for them to be fixed. It is a cat and mouse game.
Use these apps for music discovery. If you like a particular artist, buy the album directly from them and cache it digitally on your intended listening devices. Or go see a show or buy merch directly from the artists website. The artist makes more margin on those than they will make for thousands of Spotify streams.
bandcamp is all i need. if an artist only sells music on corporate sites, they’re a sellout and part of the problem
Bandcamp is owned by the biggest music licensing conglomerate in the world, how is that not corporate?
I made a video on this topic several months ago.
TLDW: Metrolist and Outertune
(But would appreciate a like to help with the algo if you try these out and like them. Thanks!)
Qobuz bruv. Pays artists more and has easy peasy playlist migration.
I wanted to use it, but a Facebook tracker in the app is a hard no for me.
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/769361/
I need to leave Apple Music. My OG archive of media is good for pre-2014 but anything else afterwards…. That’s a lot of mining to be done online aarrrrr
I have tried: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, You Tube Music, Tidal
I now stick with Tidal. Started by (very rich) artists. They pay musicians 3-4X more than Spotify. Highest sound quality available. Good app and works with smart speakers.
BTW with Soundiiz it is easy to sync you playlists across multiple platforms, so no friction with switching.
Soundiiz nuts
Sorry…
They make you pay if you want to import a playlist more than 1000 songs. that really upset me and prevented me from proceeding with starting a tidal subscription.
Plexamp and a well maintained library.
