I’d been disappointed for a while in hearing about how poorly Spotify compensates artists, how its business model involves boosting the most mid-sounding music, and how it was starting to use AI to generate “original” music so they didn’t have to pay human musicians. This post from Hearing Things sealed the deal for me. When the CEO invested in AI weapons I realized I could take my monthly subscription fees elsewhere, so I did.
The big streaming competitors that seemed to have the largest music catalogs are Apple Music and Tidal. Their costs are the exact same as Spotify. I didn’t want to give Apple any more of my data, plus my nephews, who are on my family plan, don’t have Apple devices. So, Tidal won.
The primary thing I needed to be able to do to make this switch was migrate playlists. I had about 50, but my wife had over 200, and she is extremely careful about protecting the integrity of her playlists. For a one-time fee of $11.50, I was able to move over all of our playlists from Spotify to Tidal using TuneMyMusic. TuneMyMusic also offers playlist migrations to/from many other platforms. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
I was worried that Tidal wouldn’t have as big a catalog as Spotify. When I migrated my playlists and favorite artist lists over, I had about 98% coverage, which was enough for me. If coverage had been less than 95%, it probably would’ve been a dealbreaker. (For context, my wife and I were both college radio DJs and we still like to listen to weird shit in addition to our more popular faves.)
One of Tidal’s differentiators is its focus on high-quality sound. I had really forgotten what it was like to hear high-fidelity, lossless music from my streaming service. It made me sad to think of all the years I spent listening to super-compressed music on Spotify. It is truly a joy to listen to music at my desk, in my car, and in my headphones, and I feel like I’m rediscovering the same tunes I have been listening to over the years.
A couple things Tidal doesn’t have: podcasts and audiobooks.
I’m not really a podcast listener, but I had occasionally listened to podcasts on Spotify. I realized I already have an easy-to-use podcast app on my phone that could fill the gap. It’s called…Podcasts. Yes, I know. Please clap.
For audiobooks (which I admittedly listen to even less frequently), I’ve been checking out audiobooks through my library’s Libby app. For future book purchases I’ll be checking out Libro.fm.
I’m sharing this information with y’all because it’s a reminder that moving to new digital services doesn’t always have a high switching cost. A lot of the time, it just takes a few minutes, maybe a few bucks, and a commitment to doing the thing. I feel relieved that I’m spending my money in a way that feels more in line with my values and I am grateful that I am still able to enjoy my tunes.
Similarly, I’ve made some other changes in my tech-life to reduce my reliance on single vendors, to keep specific companies from having so much of my data, to avoid AI defaults, to improve privacy, or to avoid bloatware.
Other tech stack switches I’ve made recently:
It’s never too late!
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