I dumped Spotify and you should too
Let’s support tech companies that care about artists and users.
I’ve subscribed to Spotify for at least a decade. A couple of months ago, however, I decided to switch away from the platform and try Qobuz, an excellent service with an unfortunate name (don’t ask me how to pronounce it). Here’s why I made the switch and why others should as well.
Spotify’s “ghost artists” scandal
Journalist Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, recently wrote this article in Harper’s Magazine exposing Spotify's practice of allegedly padding its instrumental playlists with filler tracks produced by disreputable labels that use software to mass-produce generic music. Doing so allows Spotify to save a buck by paying these music-mills lower royalties than they would have to pay actual artists. Spotify, in turn, steers unwitting users toward this paint-by-numbers music by promoting it in their playlists.
Some of these tracks’ listed artists have become known as “ghost artists” because the labels create fake names and backstories to suggest that the tracks are produced by genuine artists. As someone who listens to ambient and classical music — and who had assumed that Spotify’s playlists were curated based on user tastes or editorial judgment, not profit maximization — I find this practice an appalling betrayal of users’ trust.
Audio quality
Qobuz (like Tidal, another solid alternative) offers significantly higher audio quality than Spotify. Qobuz can stream lossless audio, and even its lowest setting is CD-quality. Spotify’s highest-quality setting, by contrast, is still MP3-quality; MP3s are a lossy format, meaning that some sound data is lost when songs are converted into MP3 format. Audio quality might not matter for casual listening on low-end speakers, but I can hear the difference when using good equipment.
Fair payments to artists
Streaming services exist because of artists, so they should pay artists fairly. Spotify doesn’t. Its average payout is as low as $0.00318 per stream. Amazon Music and Apple Music are only slightly better, and YouTube Music is even worse.
Qobuz pays over $0.018 per stream — more than five times Spotify’s rate — and Tidal pays over $0.012 per stream. These differences matter to artists.
The best way to support artists is to buy directly from artists’ websites or platforms like Bandcamp. (On Bandcamp Friday, the service waives its revenue share and passes funds directly to artists & labels.) I’ve started doing this more often, but streaming services remain indispensable for convenient listening and discovering new music. But everyone can help ensure that artists are compensated for the value they create by skipping platforms that use exploitative royalty models.
The Qobuz alternative
Qobuz isn’t perfect. Its name alone probably limits its market share, (though it has been around since 2007 and has a base of committed users). The Qobuz app has some flaws. Its catalog includes some metadata errors and missing tracks, especially for lesser-known musicians. Still, it lets you stream lossless audio, pays artists more fairly, makes it easy to transfer playlists from other services, and — this is astonishing these days — has a responsive customer service team. I recently emailed the company a few bug reports and feature requests, and they replied within a day.
Don’t let tech companies take you for granted.
In a world where tech giants are increasingly unaccountable, unresponsive, and politically manipulative — and where their products mediate nearly every aspect of our lives — it’s refreshing to cut ties with the worst offenders and switch platforms.
If enough people change their usage patterns, platforms that habitually ignore users’ concerns — or are owned by toxins like Elon Musk (dump Twitter/X and try Bluesky instead) — can eventually be rendered irrelevant and replaced by healthier alternatives.
Ryan McCarl is a partner of the business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For tips about legal writing and argumentation, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.
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