Leaving Spotify after 15 years
I first paid Spotify £9.99 in May 2010. Since then I suppose I have paid them around £1,800 for all of my music listening in that time.
I have had issues for sure, but mostly it has been good. The worst by far has been that saved albums would disappear without a trace from my library - not good at all. I raised this with customer service more than once with fairly concrete evidence but they denied that anything would disappear from the library. Since 2022 I have a playlist that I would add any album I "saved" to, a pain in the neck but that was their suggestion to keep track in case anything "disappeared" again, which they did.
Anyway - although a nuisance it was not a dealbreaker. The increased financialisation, dubious CEO behaviour, attempting to "walled garden" Podcasting and price rises for features I don't want were the dealbreaker.
I joined Qobuz recently and am up and running on there now, I hope it lasts because it seems good! My only bug at this time is when downloading music the app can become quite laggy on iOS (almost unusable) but I won't be downloading music all that often after I am initially set up.
I used soundiiz to move over playlists and filter through 1,000+ albums I had saved on Spotify to port over - I ended up keeping about 400 albums so it was a handy tidy-up. You get a license through Qobuz to use the service. Intriguingly there were many copies of some albums, which is not possible to do in Spotify but I think lines up with the "disappearing" albums problem - clearly there are some weird things on the back end.
A big surprise with Qobuz is how much better it works with poor cellular coverage - Spotify would struggle in the car if I tried to stream something that wasn't downloaded, or even simply browsing what was downloaded - Qobuz by comparison just seems to wait for the signal to come back and then show me, a significant improvement over "an error occurred" kind of situations!
I just looked at my final Spotify Wrapped, not sure if Qobuz do something similar but we'll find out next year. Morgan Wallen is a guilty pleasure so it's a little embarrassing to find it as Number 1. In the top 2% of listeners, ahem.
The albums are similar but a little different:
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