Spotify is not very ethical. They are the worst platform for artists for getting paid. The CEO Daniel Ek is a billionaire asshole that has called music ~“content without production cost”. They were early to encourage AI slop, including that creepy ass “virtual radio host”, because hey zero production cost content. They are aggressively pushing podcasts and label sponsored content to paying subscribers as covert advertisement income. They also have ancient sketchy history of having clients do peer-to-peer distribution without telling that your bandwidth is used to cut their server costs. In short, Spotify is not a company that cares about music or musicians or even their customers.

I was on Spotify from the early days of invite only until a few years ago when I had enough. I jumped to Tidal that was ok but I was never quite comfortable. They don’t do podcasts but their search function is garbage and pushes selected artists ahead of your search terms. Their overall UI/UX experience is ok but not great and I must admit that here Spotify has got a lot of things right. Tidal pay artists better but I feel like they are aiming for the Spotify business model in the long run.

Now I’m on Qobuz. They are the highest tier in paying out to artists. I was surprised that I noticed a difference in their high resolution quality. While their search function doesn’t push artists like the two above, it’s not great and their recommendations for related artists is not good. Their catalogue is pretty good, though I miss some more obscure stuff, but I guess that’s really up to the smaller labels to make themselves available. I do, however, get the feeling that they care about music more than for money and their developers give the impression to listen to the community. I’m sticking to Qobuz for now and I hope they hire some more devs to iron out the quirks.