Ditching Spotify Has Been A Bleak Experience To Say The Least

After months of meaning to get around to it, I finally pulled the plug on my Spotify subscription last week. There wasn’t any one reason I wanted out, just an ever-growing collection of back-breaking straws: the CEO’s support of genocide was a big one, but you can throw in everything from its poor artist pay to layoffs to, well, the fact the whole company just seems pretty terrible.

A major factor in delaying the decision wasn’t because none of that mattered to me–it all did!–but because having used various streaming services for almost 15 years now, changing them felt like work that I just didn’t have time for. I had so many playlists and liked songs and albums to move, and the last time I’d done this–when I’d left Google Play Music for Spotify, after the former rebranded to YouTube Music and became a worse service in the process–it had been a disaster, involving a ton of messing around and a ton of lost music.

But every man has his limits, and so last week–maybe it was just seeing everyone talking about their Spotify Wrapped, which sucks–I finally pulled the pin, remembering it was just the latest in a succession of moves in my life where I’ve tried, however I can, to start putting my money where my mouth is. In the last couple of years I’ve installed solar on my roof, I’ve moved both my banking and superannuation (which is roughly an Australian 401K) to more responsible providers and sold two gas-powered cars to buy a single electric vehicle. If I could do all that, I could move a fucking music service.

The act of cancelling my Spotify subscription itself was the easy part; the only speedbump ended up being the fact that, having been on an all-encompassing family plan, my daughter (who uses it as a kind of social media platform with her friends, exchanging playlists, etc) didn’t want to budge. So we got her an individual membership and cut her loose from our plans; I’m not the kind of parent who is going to force my kids to go along with an ideological decision they can’t fully grasp, so she can make the call on her own time as she gets older and, hopefully, a bit wiser.

I found myself not looking for the best streaming platform, just trying to find the least worst.

The hard part was choosing what to replace it with. Especially since I had some pretty stringent requirements. Spotify had worked for everyone, everywhere, so its successor needed to factor in that it was going to be providing music for me, my wife and my 12 year-old son, all of whom had different use cases. I have a Pixel, my wife has an iPhone, I listen to music on my desktop PC a lot, she prefers the kitchen speaker, I listen to a lot of music that might not be in every service’s library and she doesn’t, and our car runs on Google’s Android Automotive, which has a limited selection of native music apps.

Given that last point, our first stop was YouTube Music. As YouTube Premium subscribers–you have to watch so many videos in this line of work that if I had to sit through ads I’d have lost years of my life–I already had access to YouTube Music, and it was also installed on my car. I quickly found that in the five years since I’d stopped using it little had changed: the app sucked shit, and the music quality was even worse, so it was almost instantly struck off the list.

Next was, uh, hrm. I’d read through Brian Merchant’s excellent guide to cancelling Spotify earlier in the week, and had also put out a call on social media for replacement suggestions, so had more than a few options to consider, but all of them seemed deeply compromised in some way. I just wasn’t feeling Deezer, Amazon Music can go to hell and Tidal, while doing some things I liked (like paying artists more, and offering welcome sound quality options) had an app design and sharing features that just didn’t sell me on it either.

It felt like every platform I was considering was either owned by the worst people on Earth, run by the worst people on Earth, looked like they weren’t going to be around much longer or had huge holes in their offering that made them substantially less useful to me having just come off Spotify’s ubiquity. Free of a contract and only now surveying the music streaming landscape in its entirety like this, it was bleak! This is what we’ve come to, this is the point these platforms and the economy driving them have led us to, a point where I found myself not looking for the best streaming platform, just trying to find the least worst.

Things seemed so bad that I considered making the next logical jump altogether, which was ditching streaming entirely. Maybe I could just start running a media server, put all my Bandcamp purchases and rips on there and go back to how I listened to music in 2007. If I was really worried about principles, I’d realise streaming as a concept is inherently fucked, that even in best-case scenarios it’s all exploitative to artists, and that I needed to cut that cord completely.

But I am an imperfect man confronting a difficult situation: my whole family is now hooked on the convenience, on the recommendations and new release updates and playlist algorithms. Even if I could bring myself to make the break, there’s little chance I’d be able to convince my wife and son to start screwing around with a media server and plugging a thumb drive into one of our car’s USB slots.

So, streaming platforms it was.

Taking price, cross-platform compatibility, family plans, sound quality, artist pay, company ownership and user experience into account, and excluding the platforms I’d already dabbled in and struck off the list, I ended up with two services to pit against each other for my money: Apple Music and Qobuz.

Qobuz seemed great on paper! The folks there seem to genuinely care about music and artists in a way no other service (aside from maybe Tidal) do, and on average they paid artists way more than Spotify. But man, in AUD terms their pricing for their top tier (the one I was interested in) was steep. I realise the hypocrisy here of someone who regularly begs for money on the internet saying this, someone who fully understands you can’t pay other people properly unless you yourself are paid properly, but the AUD$37.49 per month Qobuz were asking for was just too much when I’ve already got that YouTube Premium subscription (and my daughter’s Spotify) on the books. I also thought the mobile app, where I’d be using it a lot, wasn’t great.

Which left me with one last option to try out: Apple Music. The cons here were enough to give me pause: my personal devices are almost all Google-based, there was no native car support (though there wasn’t for Qobuz either), no podcast support within the same app and Apple, while not as genocide-friendly as Spotify, were still run by a guy who has repeatedly embarrassed himself bending the knee.

The pros were that Apple paid artists twice as much as Spotify, offered some lovely high-quality formats and the design of their app is lightyears ahead of the competition. So I took the plunge, installed it on a bunch of devices, kicked off a family plan and so far, so good.

The lossless audio sounds incredible on my car’s sound system (even if I have to plug in my phone and use Android Auto to enjoy it). I love the desktop app, and the mobile app is beautiful. In a very Apple way everything is simple, clear and just works. Compared to YouTube Music’s woes and Spotify’s bloat, it’s been a genuine pleasure opening up Apple Music and just…playing some music.

The best part though, and this would apply to anyone moving to or from any major platform these days, is that in the years since my last transition the process of transplanting your library has gotten a lot easier. I paid $5 for a one-month Soundiiz membership, hooked it up to both platforms and within 10 minutes I had copied my whole library over–albums, playlists, the works. My music collection in Apple Music now looks exactly like it did on Spotify without skipping a beat.

Actually that’s not quite true; my library had been improved a little, with two of my favourite albums of all time now back in my collection (King Gizzard had pulled both Infest The Rat’s Nest and PetroDragonic Apocalypse in protest over Spotify’s military investments).

The whole experience ended up being much more painless on a technical level than I’d been expecting, but then, it had also wound up being more depressing than I’d bargained for. It feels like my move to Apple Music isn’t the permanent one I’d been hoping for; it’s more convenient at the moment, but it’s far from a perfect situation. I know, in my heart, that I need to go back to just buying music off artists, ditching convenience for something that actually helps the people making the music I love so much.

The problem is that, like so many other things that are easy and ruinous in our lives at the moment–Netflix, Game Pass, etc–it’s just too easy. I can’t give up hours-long feeds of lo-fi electronic music while I work at my desk, or the luxury of being able to skip through entire artist catalogues in my car whenever the fancy takes me. Even though I’ve now made a slightly more palatable decision on where to spend my money, I am still part of the problem.

How to quit Spotify

This Black Friday, here’s a guide to finding the best Spotify alternative