this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer. All of them are cheaper than Spotify. Just saying.
I've started using the Qobuz store to slowly build back up my digital music library. Every month, I take what I would have spent on Spotify and spend it on flac files instead.
If you want your Spotify library ported over. Qobuz offers a free tool to transition.
Where do I find this? This article convinced me and your comment pushed me toward Qobuz to replace Spotify, but now I have no idea where this tool could be lol. I admit I've only been here (web and app) 5 minutes but I'm lost at where else to look.
Here's their help article about how to do it
You can actually buy albums on Qobuz. Buy and download, always yours, legally!
Tidal is better than Spotify for music enjoyers. The quality is clearly labeled on each track and the UX has a focus on well, music. There aren't any podcasts or social features and other crap.
I tried Tidal but they didn’t have a bunch of the music I listen to. Like for instance at that time they were completely missing most of David Arkenstone’s discography that Apple Music and Google Play both have in totality.
whoa another David Arkenstone fan!
well at least I liked some Tibetan style album of his, never listened beyond that, but still, cool to be reminded!
If you like his work I definitely recommend you check out some of his earlier stuff like Valley in the Clouds and In the Wake of the Wind!
Tidal currently has both! And a crazy amount of his other albums as well!
They're all (EU-)based, too
I did the Deezer free trial and it was cool. I just ported over my music from Spotify via some web tool. But I prefer piracy for now.
Just to make sure you don't change your mind and go to Deezer, here's my (from another account) post about how no one should use Deezer:
https://lemmy.world/post/33642043
Soundcloud also exists. I tried all of your mentions but switched back to Soundcloud for different reasons. Deezers ownership being one. Btw. all oft these sites have tools to move your playlists etc
Can you download from any of these? Spotify seems to be pretty locked-down., even on something like Firefox on Linux.
From what other people are saying, Qobuz allows you to buy to own and download.
Pretty much all of them have some sort of store offline mode for their mobile app, but that would obviously be in a DRM'd format.
orpheusdl and similar downloaders are able to extract off of tidal, qobuz, deezer, etc
Not officially but this exists: https://github.com/yaronzz/Tidal-Media-Downloader
Qobuz sadly has no Linux app, so you have to use wine or the like. And the web Version lacks the features i use in the app quite regularly. (e.g. radio around a song, daily mix). But they apparently (recently ?) added the feature to control the web Browser Version via the app, so i can select the radio on phone and tell him to play it in the browser. Its a workaround for sure, but its good enough for me :P
It works pretty well with Bottles tbh
Qbz worked really good for me https://github.com/vicrodh/qbz
Indeed it works great. It has support for DAC passthrough and it's a native app rather than another electron app.
That's the one feature I'm still waiting for Tidal to add. Otherwise I'm very happy with it.
There's no question that Spotify still holds an edge in terms of features, but in the end I decided I was willing to put up with the loss of some conveniences to actually support artists, and take my support away from a company that keeps behaving so shittily.
I tried to move to Qobuz from apple music, and it just never 'clicked'. I fed it my am played songs, + last.fm so like 2 decades of listem history, and it just... didn't use the data for playing music or artists I would like.
I remember tidal being kinda similar but that was, jeez, 8 years ago? And I stuck with tidal for like a year. Qobuz was out before the second month was up.
Shame since if it could ingest and actually use data, it seemed pretty good with features I would like.
People actually want their music service to determine what they listen to?
I like Apple Music because it basically acts as a music library where I can add every album I want to my collection. I pick what I listen to myself.
Apple Music has radio stations too. And yes some of us don’t have the time or the wherewithal to sit and discover new music and artists all the damn time.
I don't like a ton of music. If it's top 500 charts mainstream and it's not 20 years old, or so new that hipsters don't even know about it, I'm probably not interested.
So finding new music that isn't popular and isn't shit is annoying. I basically use 'discovery' systems that are 98% the same things you have listen to the last 5 years on repeat, but sometimes it'll slip a song I don't know by an artist I've never heard of that's metal screamo and I'm like WTF HELL YEAH. Then the next song is Vanilla Twilight by Owl City.
I'm using deezer right now. It's decent but still not quite up to the Google play music radio for recommendations. Even Spotify was a bit better. But at least it's not funding that kind of assholes
Yeah Qobuz recommendations are ass lol
Qobuz’s daily/weekly automated playlists aren’t great. The radio stations feature is pretty good now though.
They’ve been working on their For You tab and it’s getting better.
Their curated ones are a nice way to discover more music too.
FY was what I was most interested in, but again it didn't seem to grab my play history, only the songs I had played. For like 18 years. And there was no weight between them so something I listened to once in high school had the same chance of trying to pull me in a direction/genre as a song I have 5k plays of. And everything, everything was favorited. That might have been the import systems fault, but they are partnered with them so...
Yeah, it’s not the best.
I listened to some Spanish songs and got Mexican or Tejano music for over a month after. Same with listening to K-pop — so much K-pop!
They’ve got work to do for sure, but in the last year they’ve released a lot to try and improve.
Maybe I sympathize though, as I work in a small tech company now and I don’t get nearly the time I want to build out our algorithms.
I would still say try out the Radio feature, it works well. And of course I’m in favour of supporting a more independent tech company outside the US.