[sedatk]

I stopped my Spotify subscription and gave Apple Music and Youtube Music a try for a few months. I'm now again a Spotify user, despite that Youtube Music is still included in my Youtube Premium.

The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.

Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.

Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.

My Apple Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2mvmybjr225

My Youtube Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m5ms6fxsrs27

[temp0826]

A few of my favorite artists have dropped from Spotify (for great reasons that I agree with) and I want to switch to something else. I gave Apple Music a try but the interface is just unbelievably bad. Also I am a Linux user and the lack of a native app is brutal (and Cider, a 3rd party app, is a no-go for me). Tidal seems decent though and I'll probably give it another shot eventually.

The other thing is I actually do get a lot out of the suggestions and daylist of Spotify. I guess there are some 3rd party recommendation systems out there now (pulling in data from last.fm scrobbles) but I'm not aware of something that would be as easy and have such an integrated result.

[sedatk]

Apple Music has a native Windows app (and surprisingly not Electron), but it's quite unstable and laggy, and makes me deal with "authorize this computer" or whatever every week. So, practically equivalent to having no native app.

[temp0826]

I went down the rabbit hole with it and even briefly tried it out via wine before giving up. Pretty unfortunate that there isn't even an electron app. The web gui is just painfully slow and clunky (plus not being able to download/cache songs is the biggest bummer).

[soiltype]

Tidal and Qobuz are good, if you need a streaming service, although Qobuz is much less oriented around "pick a vibe and press play". They might not have exactly the things you like about Spotify, but as far as sacrifice goes, if you feel Spotify should be abandoned for ideological reasons, it's trivial.

[nsteel]

Tidal seems less obsessed with breaking everything all the time. They have a decent API and while they want you to use their playback SDKs, they're relatively less hostile to the various 3rd-party playback libraries (they don't actually encrypt their media, so once you have a valid bearer token you've got everything). I've not tried their Tidal Connect solution but I have heard it's a bit rubbish.

[DerArzt]

Have you heard of Tidal? I swapped to them from Spotify back when Spotify did a big round of layoffs. Tidal had the music I was looking for (generally higher quality recordings) for the same monthly cost of Spotify.

[hutattedonmyarm]

Apple Music on i(pad)OS can be used with third party apps. There's plenty of better players out there than the built-in one