To Spotify, or not to Spotify
Jan. 31st, 2022 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plonqI managed to migrate all but about two dozen of my 5,700+ music library over to TIDAL yesterday evening. I found alternatives for some, and there were a few that are not on either service now. Moving that many songs over was a bit of a chore, but I found a way to use a third party service to let me over it in chunks over the course of an hour or two (the alternative was to pay for the service - which I would have done if I hadn't figure out a work-around).
There are a couple of songs that I will be sad to lose, but I've made note of them in case they ever show up on the other service.
Having played with both Windows apps, I definitely prefer Spotify - it is more responsive, more feature-rich, and just feels more polished overall. One of the things that Spotify shows is the popularity of a song. That's helpful when I find a new artist and want to get a quick idea of what most people listen to in their collection.
For sound quality, though, I just can't get over how much better TIDAL sounds. Right now we are using it on trial at its highest stream settings, so to be balanced, I backed off its quality to the next lower tier so that I could A/B compare it with Spotify. If we went with this plan, then it would actually be cheaper than Spotify.
As before, I queued up the same song on both platforms and then alternately muted them to determine if I could hear a difference. It was so marked that it would have been pointless to do a blind comparison; Spotify still sounded muddy and flat in comparison. If I learned one thing from this it's that I have better headphones than I'd thought.
If we swap services, we'll go with the higher plan anyway because that sends more money to the artists (and we both have a lot of smaller, indy artists in our listening lists).
In other news, it sounds like Spotify is starting to feel the heat over Joe Rogan as more artists either pull or are threatening to pull their collections. They recently announced that they'll start flagging his podcast so that people are aware that he disseminates dangerous disinformation.
At least they acknowledge now that they are paying him to dispense lies.
In case you couldn't tell from the tone of this post, at this point we are leaning very strongly toward swapping music services.
There are a couple of songs that I will be sad to lose, but I've made note of them in case they ever show up on the other service.
Having played with both Windows apps, I definitely prefer Spotify - it is more responsive, more feature-rich, and just feels more polished overall. One of the things that Spotify shows is the popularity of a song. That's helpful when I find a new artist and want to get a quick idea of what most people listen to in their collection.
For sound quality, though, I just can't get over how much better TIDAL sounds. Right now we are using it on trial at its highest stream settings, so to be balanced, I backed off its quality to the next lower tier so that I could A/B compare it with Spotify. If we went with this plan, then it would actually be cheaper than Spotify.
As before, I queued up the same song on both platforms and then alternately muted them to determine if I could hear a difference. It was so marked that it would have been pointless to do a blind comparison; Spotify still sounded muddy and flat in comparison. If I learned one thing from this it's that I have better headphones than I'd thought.
If we swap services, we'll go with the higher plan anyway because that sends more money to the artists (and we both have a lot of smaller, indy artists in our listening lists).
In other news, it sounds like Spotify is starting to feel the heat over Joe Rogan as more artists either pull or are threatening to pull their collections. They recently announced that they'll start flagging his podcast so that people are aware that he disseminates dangerous disinformation.
At least they acknowledge now that they are paying him to dispense lies.
In case you couldn't tell from the tone of this post, at this point we are leaning very strongly toward swapping music services.
