How do you switch over from Spotify to another music service? What are the options? And which service pays artists the most?
The ongoing controversy over Spotify’s flagship podcaster Joe Rogan, whose vaccine misinformation has led to musicians pulling their music from the platform, has also caused a lot of listeners to look for alternatives. Spotify reportedly accounts for 31% of the total music streaming market, more than double its nearest competitor – Apple Music – at 15%.
Whether you’re motivated by joining Neil Young and Joni Mitchell in their boycott, or you’re just interested in seeing the alternatives, it can seem daunting to make the switch after years of being with the service.
But it is really easy. Streaming services tend to not have lock-in contracts, so if you’re looking to switch to another service, the first step would be cancelling your existing subscription.
Unfortunately, Spotify doesn’t make it possible to cancel through its phone apps, so you’ll need to log in via a web browser and cancel your premium subscription through the account settings function. Depending on when you subscribed, you’ll be able to keep the premium features until the next payment was due.
So what are the options?
1. Apple Music
When Apple Music launched, it felt clunky and limited. But it has come a long way in the past few years, with vast improvements to its functionality, music selection (75m songs), radio, playlists and other features like music videos which Spotify doesn’t have.
The user experience now seems much closer to Spotify. Apple also has launched lossless and spatial audio for a better quality of listen. Lossless audio is something Spotify promised in 2021 but has not launched.
If you’re already in the Apple ecosystem this is definitely the best option, but there is also an Android app.
Apple offers three months for free to new users but after that subscriptions are A$11.99 (£9.99) a month or A$119 (£99) a year, with family plans at A$17.99 (£14.99) a month. There are also bundled subscription deals with Apple’s other services, such as iCloud storage and Apple TV+.
2. YouTube Music
If you pay for a YouTube premium subscription – A$14.99 (£11.99) a month – you get YouTube Music for free. It has about 60m songs and you get access to YouTube videos along with it. The audio quality is reportedly not as good as other services but it does have playlists and radio stations and other features you would see elsewhere.
As with Apple Music and its ecosystem, if you’re already an Android user, this is an easier option for you.
3. Amazon Music
Australians paying for Amazon Prime can already access a limited version of Amazon music (2m songs in SD only), or it’s A$11.99 a month for the full service. In the UK, it’s £7.99 a month to add to Prime, or £9.99 a month for non-Prime customers. It has lossless and spatial audio tracks, 75m songs, podcasts, playlists, and integrates with Amazon’s other technologies. Young has been promoting an offer with Amazon for four months of free music for new sign-ups to the service this week.
If you want to avoid giving three of the largest tech companies your money, though, there are a growing number of other options.
4. Tidal
Tidal has always been pitched as the service that compensates artists the best and offers the best audio quality. It has a catalogue of 80m tracks and a free tier that operates similar to Spotify’s. Up from that are A$11.99 (£9.99) and $23.99 (£19.99) plans, the latter of which rewards the artist you listen to the most each month with 10% of your subscription fee.
In addition to high-quality audio and all the expected features, Tidal has more than 350,000 videos and concert live streams.
Other non-major companies offering streaming services includes Napster (yes, the former peer-to-peer file sharing service has gone legal), Qobuz and Pandora.
Transferring playlists
The biggest issue for people looking to switch is transferring your long-curated playlists. This is made easier through third-party services. If you want it to be fast you’ll have to pay but if you don’t have many to transfer or have the time, you can usually convert one playlist at a time for free.
The most popular is the app SongShift (although it is only available on iOS) and Soundiiz (which runs in a web browser). You’ll need to give whichever app you choose access to the accounts you are switching over but you can remove access once you are done.
The services will usually flag if a song on the playlist can’t be found. Sometimes it’s as simple as a mismatch with the exact name of the song and it can be found as a different mix or title.
How well do the services pay artists?
The companies tend to keep the information about how much they pay artists for each stream a closely guarded secret but a report from Tricordist in 2020 gives us a picture of the rough payments artists can expect.
According to the report, Spotify pays US$0.00348 a stream, Apple Music pays US$0.00675 a stream, Amazon pays US$0.00426, Google pays US$0.00554, and Tidal pays US$0.00876. Surprisingly, the fitness company Peloton comes out on top of the list, paying US$0.03107 a stream. Napster also rates higher than others at US$0.00916.
It’s all still shockingly low for artists but the best option would probably be Tidal. In addition to the streaming rate being slightly higher than average, Tidal is also directly paying artists 10% of its upper-tier plan for each user – depending on which artist the user streams most.
But if you want to support artists more directly, you can buy vinyl, or digital copies of the music through iTunes or similar services, or pay directly through Bandcamp or Soundcloud.
Remember, if you buy an album from bandcamp, it's around the financial equivalent to the artist of you streaming their music every day for 3 years.
— Posthuman (@posthuman) May 4, 2021
