The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#Music Promotion #Music #Music Marketing 7 social mentions

2

Last.fm

I switched to https://qobuz.com, mainly for the high audio quality (it goes up to 192kHz 24bit, which is worth it for me as I have the necessary equipment to make use of this), but it also supports "Spotify quality" i.e. Mp3 quality/320 kbps, but I stayed for the experience. It does not really have an algorithm, there is one playlist "My weekly Q", which updates each week with songs that you could like. The only other algorithmic thing they have are song/artist radios like Spotify has, which also work relatively good. Their front page features handpicked songs from people at Qobuz and songs that are trending on qobuz (these won't look at all like Spotify charts most of the time, as the audience is different). But you can customize the front page by filtering the genres you want to see. But as mentioned I stayed for the experience, and this includes for some (by far not all) albums you can download the whole PDF of the CD inlet or see a description/history/backstory about an Album provided to you by Qobuz, also the choices that Qobuz handpicks are very often excellent picks which I immediately add to my favorites. And as these picks are not some algorithm that decides this, I don't end up in a rabbit hole of recommendations like on Spotify, but more often discover really new things that I would've never through Spotify. They also have their own magazine https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/magazine. You can also buy songs, and they will be yours to keep forever, as you can get the songs directly as FLAC, WAV, ... Without DRM and whatnot. There is also an unofficial qobuz downloader, which is against their ToS, but works. Though I still have not stopped using Spotify, as I'm in a family plan and don't pay anything for it, and sometimes Qobuz does not have some songs. FWIW I also use https://last.fm for recommendations, and Qobuz can automatically scrobble to it. All in all Qobuz has more of the "sitting in a Living Room and listening to vinyls/CDs vibe" rather than the TikTok/Instagram vibe that Spotify gives to me.

#Music Streaming #Music Online #Music 2621 social mentions

3

EchoesApp.io

UX def sucks. I don't understand how a design-focused company that invests so much into its design teams (www.spotify.design) can create a user interface so cluttered and hard to navigate to find music. After years of using it, I've recently discovered (on mobile) that they've hidden the search and sorting on top of the playlists. My home page is full of things I'm not interested in; there is no way to customize which are displayed. And enough of pushing podcasts. I've created a (free) web app using Spotify API, Echoes, with a simple interface to see your top artists and songs, it also has a New Discovery section to generate playlists based on your listening algorithm. https://echoesapp.io.

#Audio & Music #Music #Music Tools 5 social mentions