I buy on Bandcamp Fridays, but am suspicious of that platform since they changed owners so often without any input from the community or musicians.

I'm keeping my eye on https://subvert.fm/ as a hopefully more democratic option.

It’s worse. My music is on Spotify - while I would no longer meet their minimum for payments, even before that change they refused to pay me or provide stats until I provided a twitter or Facebook page/IG page, none of which I have - despite publishing through an established publishing company who could absolutely handle payments and play stats.

Spotify is cancer.

Old fart checking in ... why not just buy the tracks instead of paying for monthly access that screws artists? I mean, each song is unlikely to be more than $1.49, and then you own it. I don't have a streaming music account and never will because the idea of paying repeatedly for the same thing -- with the option of it being pulled at any time -- is nauseating.

Bandwagon, Faircamp, Love a Brother Radio, The Indie Beat. Probably not what you're looking for, but direct creator support, Fedi powered, all wonder folks.

Can some tell me how Deezer stacks up? I switched from Spotify to Deezer a little while ago, not for any real reason, other than Spotify kept increasing their prices and I don't really listen to audio books or podcasts even. Plus Deezer streams hifi flacs as standard so it sounds way better. I've got no idea how ethical they are tho, but would be interested to learn.

Edit: so I did my own research and looks like Deezer pays sightly more per stream than Spotify, but marginally..

Never mind, I'm beginning to build my local music library and self host it. I buy lots of merch and I go to gigs regularly. Once my library is substantial enough I'll quit the streaming apps

I find Spotify is dogshit to navigate I can't find anything. If I let it autoplay it'll just start playing generic shitty dance music. I don't get it. I've never discovered an artist through Spotify.

I exclusively use Bandcamp lately. Unfortunately, American owned. Looking into other suggestions here.

I prefer to pay artists I like directly either via merch, patreon, or going to their concerts.

for my music? soulseek/nicotine+ on my server.

the problem is Spotify is by far the best streaming platform out there, bar none. I've tried the other's like Tidal and Deezer and what have you and just didn't like them. Amazon Music was absolutely horrible. The only other alternative would be youtube music with an adblocker. How do I find new artists? youtube shorts believe it or not.

But yeah I'd rather pay the artists directly.

Daniel Ek is investing in European defense companies. This is not unethical.

Spotify paying like shit to their artists and platforming Joe Rogan are totally valid reasons to move away though. But the thing is that Spotify is sort of like radio. How much did radio pay for artists for each time the song was played? Genuinely asking.

What I do is I do 90% of my listening on Spotify. Then when I hear something really good, I buy and download their album, usually on Bandcamp and mostly keep listening them on Spotify because it's just so much lesser hassle. Seems like the best of both worlds. Thought about going to vinyls but I'm not hipster enough.

this is an awesome video on why other streaming services are just marginally better than spotify and not a long term solution: https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU

with that in mind i’m trying to transition away from streaming but am using tidal as what i hope is the least bad option for now.

https://leshicodes.github.io/blog/spotify-migration/

I buy stuff on bandcamp during bandcamp fridays (which allegedly gives all revenue to the artist), but you need the artist to be there in the first place.

I'm still on Pandora and honestly have no idea how they stack up. I just use it as a radio station on long drives.

It's the same old reason as always. Most users value their convenience more than anything.

Qbittorrent

Why?

1. Lack of Feature Parity

2. Stickiness of library transfer

3. Stickiness of social network effects

4. It's still better ethically than Apple Music or YouTube Music, which behave anti-competitively

1: I've tried out Quobuz, it's pretty good, but it does not have the Jam / Group Session feature which me and my friends use constantly while gaming remotely. It also does not have an Xbox app which I use while playing games. I find Spotify's recommendations somewhat underwhelming, but Quobuz has a noticeably worse recommendation engine, at least for my genres and tastes. Those are the features that lack parity that matter to me, but for some others, it's things like amplifiers having built-in Spotify, or there being a Roku or Playstation app or something.

2: Quobuz uses a third party service to automatically transfer your library, which worked pretty well, but did require jumping through a bunch of hoops and subscribing to a trial subscription that I then had to cancel. It also did not find matches for some songs. Could I make it work if I had enough reason to switch? Yeah, probably, but the lack of feature parity (/roadmap that includes them) is enough to dissuade me from really trying.

3: In addition to friends on Spotify all using Jams, there's also an inherent niceness to just being able to text people Spotify links, especially since there's no cross platform linking service that would otherwise make sharing music easy.

4: Supporting Spotify may not be great, but its still better than supporting trillion dollar anti-competitive corporations like Apple and Google.

I have been using https://music.inlinestyle.it/ ( https://www.inlinestyle.it/ ). I buy albums by myself so that the full royalties go to the artist and them keep my collection there.

It's also nice to be able to listen to fediverse indie music I didn't know about.

Because Spotify does everything better in every way possible, there is literally no way to argue this fact without baseless opinions spoiling the discussion.

So much so that, short of an angel investor coming from heaven itself to pay billions of dollars with zero stipulations, there is no way for any other company to catch up without being offered an extremely ridiculous lucrative buyout from Spotify that only the dumbest of MAGA cultists would refuse.