I’ve used digital music services for a looooong time. It started with Apple iTunes back in the days of “buying” tracks and then getting screwed when their DRM got confused and blocked me from my own music. Then Amazon Music, which was DRM-free but just not very inspiring. I ultimately settled on Spotify as my default streaming service. It has been a great research tool for finding and auditioning era-specific music for plays and for creating unique pre-show music playlists. But the underlying ethics of Spotify are very troubling – lowest payment rate to artists, AI music slop as a way to avoid paying artists at all,a lack of actual interest in the customer, etc. It’s time to get out of there

I’m using the 30-day free trial of Quobuz. It is absolutely wonderful. The sound quality is amazing, which is one of their big selling points. A little research shows that they pay artists 4x the streaming rate of Spotify. There’s very little AI presence and they are very transparent about it. And there’s lots of human-based curation of playlists/suggestions.

Speaking of playlists, it’s the primary trap that streaming services use to lock in users. More specifically the siloing of playlists. These are really the investment we make as we curate our favorite music. The difficulty in duplicating or moving these playlists is a competitve tool to keep existing customers. Quobuz has thought this through and provides an excellent utility called Soundiiz to export and convert existing playlists (from Spotify for example) to a Quobuz playlist. I have several hundred playlists. The conversions can be batched into a single action – just push go. Results are about 95% complete and there’s a built-in utility to help find replacement music selections.

I’m officially done with Spotify. Out! Out I say.