So I decided as well to finally ditch #Spotify. Multiple reasons:
- #JoeRogan
- Spofity CEO preferring Joe Rogan moneyz to being a responsible adult
- Spotify generally being not so good for small artists
Don't get me wrong, Spotify has been great, like technically. Initially maybe 4 or so years ago I was still entrenched with my mp3 collection (still listen to those!) and wanting none of that streaming music business. But Spotify allowed me to find a lot of cool new music I would have not discovered otherwise.
Luckily, these days you have options. And also while you don't own the music you listen to on a streaming service, a lot of it is around on many streaming services. And there are services to move your likes and playlists around. It's not exactly interoperatibility and open API's, but at least it can be done.
I chose to use https://www.tunemymusic.com, it cost $4,5 for a month, handling unlimited amount of tracks and playlists transferred from various music services. About 50% of a beer, so not too bad. It even transferred all the playlists that I just had liked in Spotify, ie not created by me.
The service I tried for now is #Tidal. Out of ̃11K or so tracks as liked or in playlists, around ~280 were not found, which was a pleasant surprise, as I was expecting to lose a majority of my saved tracks. Tunemymusic exports a CSV of the not-found tracks so I can at least follow up on the ones of them later if I want. In terms of features, Tidal seems pretty good. It has all the same daily playlists, recommendations, song radios - all the usual machinery which makes Spotify good.
The really cool thing is Tidal allows paying a bit extra for a larger share towards the artists (the "Hifi PLus - Up to 10% of your subscription is directed to the artists you listen to the most"). Of course I have no experience how this works in general, but at least there is the claim. Anyone know how their reputation is on this?
The bad thing is lack of multi-device sync. Unlikely on Spotify, if I have a web player open and a mobile player open, they don't communicate. Which is a bit of a UX annoyance, but it's not a stopper. Maybe with all the extra income they make off the #DeleteSpotify people they will implement it..
#Deezer seems like something to look at too, so going to do that next, given my migration tool subscription is active for a whole month. Any other services worth trying with a decent enough #music collection? (please don't suggest anything related to Google or Apple, thaaanks).
