Quitting Anti-vaxxer enabling Spotify

If Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are quitting Spotify because of the platform offered to anti-vax truther Joe Rogan, then so am I. But how can I replace it, and save my carefully manicured playlists?

I put out a call on FaceBook, and well-informed friends talked me through a few options. I don’t want to support Apple, Amazon or Google. A techie pal who I trust recommended qobuz.

It’s a French/French-Canadian service which offers ‘lossless’ streaming of a much higher quality than Spotify. Spotify compresses its files all to hell; Qobuz has files of CD quality or higher. It seemed to outrank Tidal in online forums, and to be less suspect in its practice. It also pays a higher royalty to artists than any other streaming service.

I read a few reviews, and checked that NeilYoung and Joni Mitchell are available on qobuz. They are, at a much higher sound quality than on Spotify And you can buy high res tracks too.

So I decided to go for the Qobuz free one month trial.

Sound guys Review here.

I searched for some favourite artists, (Prefab Sprout, Donny Hathaway, The Lovely Eggs and Mr Ben and the Bens) and was instantly impressed by the sound quality, which is noticeably better. Searching was easy; I set up an experimental playlist; that was easy too.

Qobuz is more expensive than @Spotify – £13 pcm rather than £10 for #quitspotify. It takes up a fair amount of bandwidth, and the range offered is slightly smaller and a little less eclectic. But it has no Qanon shits.

I used a playlist transfer app to replicate my playlists from @spotify. This costs £4.50 pcm, but you can cancel anytime. It was easy and intuitive.

I first transferred the Radio Free Radnorshire playlist. It had 2035 songs; 1937 transferred successfully, a loss of 4.5%. Most of the stuff that didn’t make it across was either local files (which Qobuz doesn’t support) or Kpop, sadly – Qobuz isn’t yet available in Korea. I can always listen on Youtube.

There appears to be a limit of 999 songs per playlist, so Qobuz split this unfeasibly large list into two.

It also appears easy to release material through Qobuz.

I downloaded the app onto my smartphone, and played Qobuz through a Bluetooth speaker; once again, the sound quality was much better. Informative screens too.

I downloaded a few songs onto my phone. It’s slow to download, and the files are large, probably not helped because I downloaded the two huge playlists, which might be asking a lot. I’ll make a driving playlist with 500 songs, which will be easier on my storage, and adequate for a long drive.

And then, because I’m a nutter, I made my wife drive me around at 11pm last night, so I could test how it sounded in the car. Fabulous, is the answer. Really very much better than Spotify.

And so, I am done. My next Paypal payment to Spotify has been cancelled. I’ve still got two weeks of paid-for time; in a fortnight, when Spotify don’t get their money, I’ll delete my account.

Because I will not give my custom to a platform that prefers Libertarian Trump toad-eating Qanon enablers to Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.