21
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.
What I do nowadays is buy on Bandcamp and manage my own local music files. What I can't get on Bandcamp, I, uh, obtain in a roundabout manner. Often through YouTube. It pains me to not support everyone I listen to but I'm not stable enough to spend willy-nilly on media when I can avoid it just yet, and subscriptions lead to waste. Anything other than Spotify doesn't have everything I want to listen to anyway.
I use Sayonara Player on my computer and Musicolet on Android. For tagging, I also use MusicBrainz Picard. I have it set to sort anything it can into artist -> album folders.
I was thinking I need a way to synchronize my collection between both devices, so I may set up Syncthing to do that sometime.
I manage my own files and services for almost everything else in my life that is not music. I care quite a bit about separation between data and interface, since I want to use a nice interface (that someone else wrote! lol) while retaining ownership over my stuff. It’s been challenging to do that for music, but your setup is what appeals to me about Bandcamp.
Sayonara looks great, but unfortunately I remain locked into Apple’s operating systems for the time being. I don’t see that changing soon; my daily drivers for mail, calendar, TODOs, etc are all unfree software that I haven’t found alternatives to on Linux. Still, I think Apple’s base music player might be sufficient for my purposes if I buy the music files off of Bandcamp.
Personally I use Plex as my music server and Plexamp as my player. It's available on all platforms, is very pretty and performant, and works super well. It's a really good overall music experience, in my opinion!
My approach is to purchase albums through Bandcamp / Qobuz, use Picard for tagging/file structure, rsgain for volume normalisation and then stream using Gonic. For playback I use Supersonic on my macOS device or Ultrasonic on my Android devices. It all works great!
Up until recently I only purchased from Bandcamp and used other means to obtain music not available there. But I've been finding lately that a lot of artists are moving into Bandcamp, and if not there, it's usually available in Qobuz.
For what it's worth, foobar2000 is available on Mac and it's very well recognized. Highly customizable. I used it for a couple years on Windows and while I prefer simpler, cleaner options today, it's the real deal.
If the only thing keeping you on Mac is the software, by the way, maybe we could help with that? There's viable options for all of the things you named. They might not fit your exact need or be your preference, but they could!
I've resisted streaming for as long as it's been a thing. My digital music collection has been curated over the last 25+ years. I will never trust that one day the obscure stuff I prefer wouldn't be available on a streaming platform. Especially when it comes to music I'm staunchly for digital autonomy.
I recently had to get a new android phone, so I choose one of the few I could find with an SD card slot. I sync my collection between my phone and my computer. I also have a raid backup on a raspberry pi.
...please don't tell me they don't do SD card slots anymore? Huh??? How are people expected to store things?
Not having SD card slots IMO is a way to force people into cloud storage, streaming, etc. That's how my cynical brain reads it.
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.
Actually, this is one of the reasons that I did a double take on Apple Music. I really prefer to avoid one-company lockdown, but I’ve already conceded to Apple for their hardware and operating systems.
Their support for alternative UIs for a base library is actually a huge plus for me because there exists some separation between the actual library and the UI. That’s also true of Bandcamp, since they distribute DRM-free.
As /I/kfwyre pointed out, Apple Music also supports uploading your own music. So your bandcamp library (or other library) can coexist with Apple Music songs. Uploaded music is a first class citizen, so you can play it from any device, stream it, download it, and it shows in the exact same way as other music.
His comment reminded me of another really cool feature that it also supports: you can change the metadata of Apple Music songs. I’ve been listening to the kpop demon hunters soundtrack recently, but for some insane reason, the order of the songs is all wrong. I thought I was going to have to pirate it and upload my own copy of it with the correct metadata. But I was able to go in (on my Mac) and just change the name and song order of the existing library.
I’ve been annoyed since Google play music was cancelled. YouTube music is an awful simulacrum of GPM. I actually payed for Spotify and YouTube music (for YouTube premium) for a while because I refused to use YouTube music. Apple Music is the first service I have found that is a worthy successor to GPM. And, to my surprise, it ended up being way better than GPM.
I use Marvis Pro when listening to singles/playlists, and Albums when listening to albums. I love both of them, and I like that I can trade off between them without one affecting the other (i.e. listening to something on Marvis doesn’t lose my place on the album I was listening to in Albums).
Another underrated feature of Apple Music is that you can upload your own files to your cloud library (like Google Play Music’s “music locker” feature back in the day). Its implementation is unfortunately limited: uploading only works on Apple Music desktop, so you can’t do it from your phone, and if you run Linux instead of Windows or macOS, you’re out of luck.
Nevertheless, if you fall under those parameters, it does work, and you can upload your own files that get seamlessly integrated alongside the streaming stuff in your library. Even though you can’t upload from your phone, you can listen to whatever you’ve uploaded from mobile just fine.
I’ve got a good amount of uploads that I added to my Apple Music account to fill in some of the gaps from streaming (I cannot live without the Jet Set Radio and Katamari Damacy soundtracks, for example).
+1 for Marvis on top of Apple Music. I love that I can customize my Home Screen to be exactly what I want. Marvis has the ability to create smart lists of albums, artists, songs, playlists, etc. and then you can decide exactly how those lists display to you. Another neat feature is that the configuration settings are export/importable meaning you can try various setups that other folks have made and then tweak things from there without doing everything from scratch. I took a few setups I liked as inspiration but ultimately made my own and now my music player shows exactly everything I want!
This reminded me of another fun Apple Music frontend I found recently: Univershuffle. It’s a super simple interface that just does one thing: shuffle all the music. Not all of your library, all of the music on Apple Music. It’s a really fun way to find new music. I think it can also hook into a Spotify subscription as well.
Is this also applicable for local music without a subscription, i.e. files that you manually sync from your computer, as opposed to stream from Apple?
I think so, but I can’t confirm for sure. I think the Apple Music apis are just an extension of the existing local music apis. I have never done this setup on my iPhone, so I can’t say for sure.
One thing I want to add to counter the Apple Music rec for anyone who wants to integrate it with their own music library is that you should be very fucking careful how you do that if you tend to buy new music that you may have already added to your library via the streaming service.
If you don't want an endless stream of duplicates and annoying download errors, have a specific workflow for how you add new music to your library and stick to it, but make peace with the fact that sometimes stuff will be buggy and broken anyway. I'd also recommend making sure you don't use/enable iTunes Match, the old, non-streaming way Apple sync music. Sometimes I wish I could travel back in time and smack myself for ever turning that on.
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).
I’m surprised no one has mentioned YouTube Music yet. It comes bundled with YT Premium but is its own app. It pulls in, if you want, all of the niche content on regular YT and presents it in an organized way alongside a given artist’s albums. I have used it every day since signing up. Just please get it directly from YT’s website if you are on iOS so you don’t pay extra.
I use YouTube music, it's not perfect but for the most part does exactly the same job that Spotify used to do for me (minus the endless app bugs that finally got me away from Spotify).
The discovery process works reasonably well for me, android auto works well, offline music works. And I don't get most adverts on YouTube.
I mostly use YouTube Music because the Youtube Premium is worth it for me anyway, but imo it also has much better discovery than Spotify. idk specifically what's different about their algorithm but it's much better at finding new songs I like than Spotify's was.
I have been using YTM for about 10 years, it works great for me. Another bump from a former Spotify/Pandora user.
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've recently switched from Spotify to a mix of self-hosted (with navidrome) and Qobuz, and I didn't anticipate how much the editorial approach of Qobuz would push me to discover new artists. I used Soundiz to migrate my playlist, and it worked mostly fine. Occasionally when something is not available on Qobuz, I listen to it on YouTube, but I'd say it has been maybe a couple albums only so far.
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:
I'm a user of Deezer and Bandcamp.
The later being my principal one, and I've attempted to use Quobuz recently for its streaming service (was using it to buy FLACs 10 years ago, still have them available to stream/download).
I can say I vastly prefer Bandcamp to listen and discover new musics, because you can not only follow artists, but labels and users also!
And you receive one email for each new release of the artists/labels you follow, plus a list of the recent purchases the users you follow made.
Its a great system to have an automatic recommendation system that doesn't feel like an algorithm and still will propose you music you would never find yourself.
But the problem is that artists that produce their albums through labels not present on Bandcamp will not have their albums there.
So you still need to have another service to discover them.
I use Deezer for this purpose (not much in my case 513/7,823 tracks apparently in 2025, but depending what you listen to, you will have to go there a lot or not at all).
And also when I want to listen to the same album more than 3 times (6 times if you use the incognito trick) before buying it on bandcamp.
I want to use another service for it to better remunerate artists in these rare cases, so I've tried Qobuz from this video of Benn Jordan.
But the problem is smaller artists that want to publish their work on streaming platforms uses online distributors that are supposed to upload them to all streaming platforms, but their "coverage" vary a lot from one to another.
I have a list of random tracks that I keep in a playlist on Deezer, and when doing a proper search of all artists/tracks names on Qobuz (transfer playlist websites don't work very well).
I found that ~10% of my tracks were not available on Qobuz.
I would like to try the Soundcloud paying tier, since I go there sometimes to find mixes and random remixes, but their sound quality for the paying tier is not even 320kbps mp3, so I never dipped into their paying tier.
YouTube Music!
Probably the most extensive library on any of these platforms that you’ll find and it includes a lot of remixes and different version you won’t be able to find on Spotify or Apple Music. Search is great since it’s just YouTube’s search.
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.
This seems like a great setup. I’m pretty sold on Bandcamp, but the work to move all my music over there seems pretty frustrating. Apple Music looks like the service I should use for my streaming purposes, based on several comments here.
Thanks for your detailed explanation of searching. Both sound sufficient for my purposes. I think I’m just nervous since the last time I tried Tidal, their search function was pretty bad.
more nerd-techie skills required, but there are some bandcamp downloaders too, especially helpful if you self-host your library. I have a docker image called bandcampsync which can pull down my fully legal purchases from my account and nothing else. I like this because it is automated and I can script out some post-processing of the download to my library folders to have them imported and sorted or positioned for manual sorting.
separately, if you have navidrome, I also recommend the android app https://symfonium.app/ as a listening app
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.
I’m in the process to swapping to Deezer from Spotify. The main driving force was increasing AI generated music being recommended to me on Spotify. Deezer doesn’t recommend AI generated music and marks albums with AI generated music as such which I found very helpful.
I have found the app completely fine.
I didn’t like Apple Music app as it keeps opening and playing when I do t want it to (like when I connect to the car, and always that same album I bought 15 years ago), and overrides other things in its preference (like audible) because it’s an Apple product.
Does anyone have a preferred tool to migrate my Spotify library to Apple Music? I'm happy to use something from GitHub. Would love it if it could import to Apple Music in the order I saved the albums in Spotify, but not a dealbreaker - accuracy would be the most important.
Apple provides a tool.
If you have an Apple device, go to Settings > Apps > Music > Transfer Music from Other Services, and it will open https://apple.songshift.com/.
TIL. Thank you!
I'm a big YouTube Music user, and have been since they transitioned from Google Play Music. The search is tied to the main YouTube app so even if a song isn't explicitly available as a song on YouTube Music, you're able to just stream the audio portion of a YouTube video and add it to your playlists as if it were a far. I've actually had some good luck finding niche songs and artists on YouTube, especially because it plugs into normal YouTube and some songs are only uploaded there. YTM's discoverability is the main reason I continue to use it. Spotify and Apple Music's algorithms never really worked too well for me but YTM seems to really understand my tastes and gives me a lot of good recommendations.
One thing I would warn you about with YouTube Music is the offline mode is a bit rough. While it is functional, the app always prioritizes connecting to the internet and locks you out of interacting with a lot of the app while it tries to connect. As a result, it takes a short while before it gives you a little sheet saying "Looks like you're offline, go to downloads?". It's been this way for over a year at this point so it certainly isn't a priority for them.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned artist payout as a reason to recommend one streaming platform over others. Or if yall have, I missed it — sorry!
None of them pay the artist enough but with that understanding…
Tidal pays the most to the artist but as others have mentioned they may not have the niche artists and their recommendations aren’t as good as the other major platforms (as far as I’ve read; no personal experience with Tidal). Apple Music pays the next highest amount (I’ve used it for 6 years now I think), with Deezer third and then Amazon Music and YouTube Music after. Some pay varies on region and a minimum amount of overall plays.
Bandcamp is always the first recommendation from me but Apple Music would be second. Apple Music would be the simplest transition from Spotify as well. I will say that I don’t think Apple Music’s recommendations are quite as good as Spotify but it’s gotten me back into being more intentional with listening and spending less time letting the algorithm decide my tastes.
Some sources -
Comparison 1
Comparison 2
IIRC, all except one of the major streaming services (Deezer?) pay out a percentage of the revenue they make from you. Spotify and Apple Music pay out the same* percentage, but Spotify has a free tier that Apple doesn't, dragging down the revenue/stream numbers. As a paying user though, you wouldn't be impacted by that.
* I had heard Spotify added podcasts and audiobooks specifically to carve out a user's monthly payment into non-music so they could say less of the $12/month or whatever is earmarked for revenue sharing with artists.
It is not the cheapest or simplest setup, but I use Roon with Tidal to allow me to mix local albums and streaming. Roon is a bit of an acquired taste but I appreciate how speedy the search and filtering of your library is in the app.
I switched from Spotify to Apple Music at the start of the year and have been enjoying it!
I use SoundCloud, but I also listen to a lot of sets rather than albums, which aren't available on most other platforms.
So far I've been very satisfied with the app/website
I used to self host my own streaming service. Setup a jellyfin server on my own domain then use a free cloud flare tunnel to access it over the Internet. For the server I used vultr as a VPS, overall the cost came out to roughly $3 a month for the VPS. I tried to do it on one of their free servers but it just wasn't powerful enough to transcode the high quality audio.