First, a caveat to all of this: I know full well that streaming music isn't great. I am very aware of the ever-dwindling payouts from streamers, and further aware of the way streaming has changed many people's relationships with music. As an individual who met my co-blogger in part because of our then-Tuesday treks to our respective local Newbury Comics locations to drop money we didn't have on four-to-five new releases a week, I also know that the previous model was unsustainable and I'm glad that there's something out there that replaces the sort of Napster / Limewire reality that threatened to kill the industry entirely.
With that said, I now listen to 40-50 new releases a week now, as opposed to the four-to-five I could afford in a given release week. For every teenage girl listening to nothing but Taylor Swift or mid-30s dudebro on whatever mainstream country playlist he has on shuffle, streaming for me has become a vehicle for musical discovery that simply did not exist 20 years ago. It's part of why I spend so much time listening to new releases and writing about my favorites: I can't hand you a mix CD anymore, after all.
So why am I breaking up with Spotify? Why now? Truth be told, Spotify is the default. I signed up almost immediately after they launched in the United States, and it was a great platform. It had everything I listened to and more, it gave me an opportunity to give streams to and rediscover music I had purchased in the past, and made it easy for me to share playlists and music with friends. The dream was alive! I didn't have to give you a mixtape or hope you'd remember the song I told you about, I can just shoot it over to your Spotify inbox. New releases directly in the app? New songs from favorite bands in release playlists? Discovery options that found more stuff I like? Win after win after win.
The problem is that it turns out Spotify really and truly hates its customer base. I can't stress this enough: Spotify seemed really focused on listener experience and that focus absolutely eroded over time. It's not quite the enshittification problem, but it's close enough for rock 'n' roll:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die...
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
Spotify followed a lot of these things. Killing the "bell," which gave us notifications on new releases. Killing the inbox and removing the most useful social music sharing option on the market. Closing up the API to make it more difficult for cool options from the open web to interact with the platform. The last one still kills me the most; as someone who loves the open web and will more often than not opt for the open source alternative for an app, Spotify's outright disdain for such access became a dealbreaker ages ago, and it just took until now for me to finally do something about it.
Spotify definitely knows the money isn't in music anymore. They make their cash on podcasts, as seen via its pushing podcasts as a primary service ahead of music. The questionable curation activities (I don't care that they have Joe Rogan on there, but a lot of people do) and inconsistent behavior are maddening, and the app UI only gets worse and worse. Let's make it so you can't easily find your saved albums anymore! Let's not tell you when an artist we know you keep going back to has a new release out. And don't get me started on the AI stuff, particularly their crappy DJ and their AI music problem. It's a mess.
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So what now? Some of these problems are inescapable, but others are not. If I'm going to stream music, I may as well go to a place that doesn't seem to hate its users (so Apple Music and YouTube Music are out), and doesn't seem to hate musicians (so Amazon and Spotify are out). While Bandcamp is the spiritual successor to eMusic, it doesn't generally have major label options and it's also owned by Epic, and if you've seen Epic Games, well...
At the end of the day, there was only one option left, and it was a good one: Tidal. It's had an adventurous history, to be sure, but the things that are at least still true now: they lean more heavily on the open web (particularly in their increased use of FLAC for streaming), they push the envelope for better audio (as primarily a headphone listener, the difference is significant), Jack Dorsey is not the craziest of tech bros and Square is a decent experience, and Tidal payouts are better than most, and that's before factoring in how Spotify functionally won't pay the smallest artists at all but has no problem continuing to increase our prices. Especially as someone who cares about local / regional music, I often struggled to justify sending any of my money toward Spotify anymore.
This is not to say Tidal isn't without its problems. The UI for the app is far from perfect, and Spotify still has a larger catalog (although my current listens playlist transferred over with zero missing tracks), but the more open API and better audio quality has paid audio dividends in just one week. Whether Tidal is the best option for music in 2025 or just the least worst, it still works for me and might work for you, too.
No judgement on anyone using Spotify. At the end of the day, for most people, it probably does what it needs to do. Tidal, however, feels like 2014 Spotify, and it's making music discovery fun again. Spotify, it's not me, it's you, and I don't regret the switch.
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