2
votes
Alternative to Spotify?
I’ve been meaning to switch streaming platforms from Spotify for some time now, for many reasons. To me, it seems like good alternatives are challenging to find, so I figured I’d solicit some discussion here on Tildes to see how people like other platforms.
My Only Requirement:
- Mobile App for iOS with Offline Capability
I Strongly Prefer:
- Good Search Functionality
- Niche Artist Availability
Alternatives I’m Considering:
- Apple Music
- Bandcamp
- Tidal
- Deezer
- Qobuz
If anyone has used any of these applications, I’d love a review of the pros and cons. I’m leaning towards Bandcamp right now, but am concerned that I will fail to discover new artists because of the need to pay for albums.
Tidal didn't seem like it had a lot of niche artists when I had trialed it, but ymmv.
I'm currently on YouTube Music. It's not perfect, but it does have a killer feature that drew me to Google Play Music in the first place. You can upload your own music and stream it on whichever of your devices. So if you're willing to buy/obtain the niche music that isn't on the platform, you can stream it instead of saving it on your device (seems like all the streaming services have had terrible support for local files for a long time).
Qobuz has been fantastic for music discovery. Their editors have great taste. Apple Music has a shockingly comprehensive catalog. I prefer Qobuz and fallback to Apple Music when needed, which is like two albums max.
I switched to Apple Music a few years ago and I prefer it vastly, even tho I no longer use it because I wanted to get rid of all streaming services.
The artists availability it's more or less the same as Spotify, the search is also good, but keep in mind there's way less playlists there (both curated playlists and user created), so that might be a downside when you want to search a very specific playlist.
But anyways, some of its advantages are:
One plus for Apple Music that many people forget is the availability of third party frontends. iOS has long supported third party frontends to the users iTunes library. When Apple Music started, they continued that support. So there are a ton of apps that change and improve the user experience (although the stock app is quite good). My personal favorite is Albums, which, as the name implies, is an album focused music app. A lot of people love Mavis Pro. I tried it, but didn’t care for it personally. If you don’t love the stock app, try some others and see if there is something you like better.
I moved away from Spotify a couple of years ago due to multiple reasons. I've moved to a hybrid Apple music and Bandcamp combination.
Since, I am already deep in the Apple ecosystem, Apple music was a direct replacement to Spotify and works pretty well. It has lossless, dolby atmos at no extra cost. I use it as my daily "utility" streaming and access to major-label hits.
Bandcamp is when I want to buy the albums you truly love or want to support. It’s also great for discovery, especially for indie, metal, electronic, and experimental genres.
Something I've been doing recently is to download my Bandcamp purchases and drag them into the Music app on my Mac. They sync to all my Apple devices automatically, giving me a "clean" library that supports artists directly while staying within the Apple ecosystem.
Apple Music handles "smart downloads" better than Spotify, automatically keeping your favorites available without you having to think about it. It's search is strong, but can be literal. It doesn't always handle typos as gracefully as Spotify, but it excels at searching by lyrics or specific credits.
Bandcamp's offline capability is cached-based. You can listen to anything you’ve purchased offline, but you have to "stream" it once to cache it. You can listen to anything you’ve purchased offline. It's search is notoriously basic. It works best if you know exactly what you're looking for. However, I find searching by tags is arguable the best in the world for finding specific niche music.
i have both spotify and deezer. both offer lossless music now, which is great. it’s trivial to download flacs from deezer, but the discovery is terrible compared to spotify.
ultimately, if i didn’t actively use both, id go deezer but use spotify to generate playlists that i import (scripted, most likely) — that would kind of be the best of both worlds.