Recently switched from [music streaming platform that pays artists less] to [music streaming platform that pays artists more]. Just some stray thoughts.
I’ve been talking about doing this forever but felt locked in, inertial about it. I can’t leave! All my stuff is here! This mostly turned out to be a fake idea.
Also I was increasingly annoyed at my learned behavior around how I used Spotify. Essentially opening it and hoping the robot presented me with something good to listen to. I got very used to it despite the fact that it rarely ever worked, at all. I don’t care as much as you think I do about my favorite songs from 2023, robot. I don’t care about the Top Songs on Spotify, robot, and I never want to listen to Lady Gaga ever! And liking to listen to MY music late at night is not the same as wanting to hear auto-generated whale music every night, ffs. The robot refused to change their behavior, so who was really trying retrain who’s brain here, if you think about it.
Anyways.
I had tried to switch to Apple Music a while back, but it ended up completely bricking my phone. Something about Apple Music not being able to distinguish between what I wanted on my phone and what I didn’t. I try not to be a person who has a lot of opinions about Apple online but jesus fuck Apple can absolutely suck it these days.
OK so once I started an account on the Qobuz it dumped me into a service called Soundiiz (these are all good names actually) to transport over my playlists. This was free, easy, quick, and worked 85% amazingly.
Not everything transferred, but it showed me very clearly what did transfer and where it had trouble matching things up between the platforms.
I’d guess overall about 5-10% of the songs didn’t travel. Of those, about half I was able to find and add to playlists manually afterward, something about the differences in how songs are tagged and named between platforms.
The other half is just not there, which kind of sucks, hopefully as this platform gets more popular, it shows up, who knows. It’s nothing obvious or glaring, some random b-sides by indie k-pop artists, essentially.
Annoying but not a terrible price to pay assuming I’m deriving more value/pleasure/whatever overall on the new platform.
But this also afforded me a good opportunity to clean up my playlists. I had a lot of junky playlists from 10 years that were collecting dust and it was fine to just delete them. Love to clean house a bit.
Qobuz bills itself as having really high quality audio and they talk about this in the app a lot. This may be true but nothing about how I listen or how well/poorly my ears work indicates any noticeable difference.
They give me a light daub of algorithmic suggestions, in the form of daily and weekly playlists. Pretty straightforward, a mix of stuff I like and stuff that’s similar to stuff I like. Nothing that’s trying too hard.
The upshot is that I have definitely had to think more actively about what I want to listen to. This could be good or bad depending on your attitude toward life in the modren era.
Qobuz feels more album- and label-oriented. Not as much “Here are your randomly generated moods” as Spotify, more “Here are classic albums you might want to check out.” Classic according to whom you might rightly ask, but it seems pretty diverse, better than you’d get from a Rolling Stone listicle anyways. There’s nothing to indicate these albums have been chosen specifically for me, it’s more like: OK yes it IS weird I’ve never listened to that Patti Smith album maybe I should give it a chance.
So thinking more about what I actually want to listen to has resulted in me thinking more about WHO I want to listen to, and I’ve discovered a few no-brainer albums that Spotify absolutely should have pushed my way, but never gave me any clue even existed, like recent stuff from Tokimonsta and Gillian Welch. So that’s been fun.
What else. The desktop app isn’t quite up to snuff and lacks features of the phone app. Also one time my son called me while I was listening to music on my headphones and the music didn’t stop during the call, and then when I hung up everything completely stopped and I had to close out and restart everything to get the music to play again. There are wrinkles.
My kids are not interested in any of this and do not want to switch. They are on their own journey, except to the extent that they want to be on my paid family account.
Overall, interesting experiment. Not mind-blowing enough for me to insist this is the one way forward for everyone. Not bad enough that I have regerts or see myself returning to Spotify anytime soon. Seems possible I keep exploring and try something else down the road? Who can say. Overall a relief that it doesn’t seem to be that big a deal either way.