I currently have Spotify, mainly because I signed up a while ago and never really bothered to explore alternatives.

I pay €13 every month these days which I feel is quite a lot. I was already thinking of getting a few friends together and sharing a family plan, which would make it cheaper. But if I’m doing that I might as well take a proper look at my options.

What are some good, hopefully ethical, European alternatives? I know Spotify is from Sweden so good in that regard (?). Deezer is French, but also mostly owned by some American investment firm. If I can believe what I read they pay artist a bit more, which sounds like a good thing, but I don’t want my money to mostly go to American investors…

Any advice is highly appreciated!

  • Vogi@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    10 days ago

    Ive been using Qobuz for about a year and while there are a lot of things to applaud and it is nice to be able to hear music with peace of mind.

    It is really annoying that they do not seem to bother working on some really low hanging fruits like having folders for playlists and custom covers. Their catalog is also not that big and a few songs are simply missing. I can actually see past that for the most part, i guess its a lot of work to get all the suits to agree and I suspect they are fairly small team. What I do not understand however is that the smaller catalog is riddled with inconsistency, AI slop being linked with unrelated artists and wrong info. Even that would not be as bad if they simply have and easy access report feature but they do not. They are also not really talkative on their forum either, where a lot of users point out those flaws.

    Its really unfortunate as they are handed quite a lot of customers for free simply because others their competition shoot themselves in the foot. I feel like it would make a lot of sense for them to drop the music snobbery act and make fit for a more mainstream audience. (While still keeping the hand picked curation I do love the more manual approach there.)

    Still would not go back to either Spotify or Apple Music, before that I will simply buy my playlists as MP3 and listen to web radio :)