How to Stream Music Better

Just before Christmas I decided to organise my Spotify library to enable me to quickly find music for the whole family to enjoy to on the long drive to France. Strangely my wife doesn't approve of me scrolling on my phone on the autoroute, looking for that Fatboy Slim album we all loved a few summers ago.

Two hours and several howls of frustration later, I began researching Spotify alternatives, something I was already considering as a component of a new year media audit and subscription belt-tightening exercise. And to be honest, on top of the clunky, bloated interface that makes it painful to navigate to anything other than the most recent additions to your library, there are other reasons why someone disgruntled with Spotify might consider looking elsewhere.

For a start it is pretty much the most expensive music streaming option out there while simultaneously offering artists among the lowest per-stream royalty rates of them all. An individual account on Spotify costs £12.99/month and pays artists between $0.003-$0.005 per stream. This means that to earn $100 for an artist, a track would have to have gained around 25,000 listens - quite a challenge when they are competing with more than 100million other tracks.

For comparison Apple Music and Tidal both cost £10.99/month while paying artists roughly 2 to 3 times more per stream while Qobuz pays artists an industry leading $0.0136–$0.022 per stream, meaning that an artist only needs 5700 listens to earn that same $100. Of course Spotify rightly claim a huge audience and correspondingly massive number of streams per hour, but unless you are a top performing globally recognized musical artist, Spotify's huge reach is unlikely to make a meaningful difference to your streaming income.

Then there is the question of AI, where again Spotify has a case to answer. Most of the streaming platforms use some AI to help generate algorithmic recommendations, suggesting artists, albums and playlists that listeners might like. But Spotify seems to have a major issue with AI generated music, especially on algorithmically generated mood-based playlists. Last month Spotify rival Deezer flagged many tracks and albums by popular neo-soul artist Sienna Rose as computer generated. On Spotify Sienna Rose is a 'verified artist' with nearly 4million monthly listens. That's $16,000 a month that human creators are missing out on.

And lastly there is Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's controversial €600million investment in military tech firm Helsing which prompted artists including Massive Attack and Deerhof to boycott the platform in protest.

Happily, music streaming services are numerous and while none of them might boast the vast catalogue and ubiquitous sharing options of Spotify, some of them are cheaper, pay artists better, filter out AI slop more effectively and are not run by CEOs with ethically questionable investment strategies. After a little research I've currently settled on Qobuz, a French owned business offering human-curated, CD-quality audio while paying artists considerably more than Spotify. I used their Soundiiz integration to move a few albums and playlists from Spotify and found that nearly all the tracks I had saved there were also available on Qobuz. So far then, so good, though for now I will be keeping a free Spotify account open for social sharing purposes.

Obviously the best way of paying musicians and ensuring that you always have access to the music you love is to own it. Bandcamp is a favourite for indie artists, who get 85% of the purchase price of the high quality digital downloads available there. But their catalogue is niche and buying two albums a month will cost you more than an all-you-can-stream subscription. At least with Bandcamp purchases you do actually own the music you buy and you can feel smug about your support of struggling artists.

If you love music, of course you want as much of it as possible, as easily accessible as possible. But if you really love music, you'll want to support the people making that music so that they can make more of it and in that case, you can definitely do better than Spotify.