Moving to Qobuz and Bandcamp
December 23, 2025
I've been in the market for a new music service to subscribe to seeing how Spotify pays out among the lowest of the streaming services, is promoting AI generated music while artists leave the platform, and whose CEO spends his earnings on advancing AI war efforts. There are plenty of ethical reasons to leave Spotify and now seems to be the best time to do so.
I also have more and more friends I'm getting to know in the Portland music scene who I want to succeed. Not only because I consider them friends but because their music has been some of my favorite to listen to this year!
In my research I've tested Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, and Qobuz. Each has it's pros and cons. For Apple Music, it was a tough sell as I'm an android user and when I installed their app it crashed my phone whenever I wanted to listen to music. Somehow their persistent music notification was buggy and caused massive stability issues with my phone even though their UI was preferred over the other options. I had Tidal for a bit, but their music selection didn't quite hit for me, especially when it came to the more local artists I like to listen to. It wasn't because the local artists were not on the platform, they certainly were. But Tidal's artist disambiguation left a lot to be desired, often merging completely unrelated artists with the same name together making a challenging listening experience. YouTube Music definitely has a lot of artists. It's UI is a little.. odd? I kinda just want a music player and not have videos in my experience at all. I've also learned from past experiences to not trust Google keep any, even popular, service around for long. Rest in peace Google Music. I didn't want to put my eggs in that basket again.
I've ultimately settled on Qobuz for a few reasons important to me. They have better than most payouts for artists, although lets be honest, it's no where close to buying a record or merch at a show. But Qobuz does let you purchase DRM-free songs for your collection which I've been making it a point to do when I am able to. If you sign up for their Sublime subscription tier, you even get a discount on your song purchases which has saved me some money collecting my favorite artists music. They also have a partnership with Soundiiz at the time of writing which lets you import all of your playlists to Qobuz for free.
In addition to Qobuz, I'm also a fan of supporting artists via Bandcamp. Many artists have a pay what you like model for their music with the option to pay more if you want to cover some of the fees that Bandcamp has. Like Qobuz, you also get DRM-free downloads of your purchases. One thing I appreciate about Bandcamp is that they will let you stream songs for a limited number of times before you actually decide to buy them, giving you a taste of the music before going ahead with your purchase.
Anyhow, support your local artists, especially in person, and if not in person at least through better companies than Spotify.