I had tidal for about a year and was happy with it. Sound quality is nice, app is clean, tidal connect is nice. Recommendations were not great and discovering new music I liked was a bit of a chore.

I have qobuz now (had it in the past too, for a while). App is more to my taste, very little clutter. Qobuz connect is now here and it works, so I can stream music over wifi to my stereo system. Finding new music is a lot better than spotify or tidal (imho) Recommendations are better, the magazine and editorial stuff is super nice and they have one simple feature that makes a world of difference to me: you can click on the record label of albums and see what else is on that label. So simple, but it’s by far my favourite way of finding new stuff.

I’ve tried both and prefer Qobuz over Tidal. Qobuz has daily and weekly discovery playlists and staff curated a lot of lists. I found Tidal to be less responsive and the recommendations worse.

use Soulseek instead

I’ve been testing out Qobuz recently since I’m in a similar ditching-Spotify place in my life. Honestly I think it’s a great alternative. Sound quality is great and it has the multi device sync/status like Spotify.

I don’t know what that feature is actually called but the feature where you can have a song playing in the app on your phone, open the app on a different device like your tablet, and it will show the “now playing” in the minimized player along with the name of your phone that it’s playing (and you can swap it to play immediately on the tablet now instead). That feature in Spotify was a big one for me. Love that Qobuz has it.

I’m still building my listening history so I can’t comment on how good the recommendations will be. But the suggestions I’ve gotten in the last few weeks were spot on.

Not sure what people are talking about with the app ui. It’s a good app. Maybe it was bad in the past and they have made improvements? But coming from Spotify I think you’d have no issues using it.

Give the free trial a shot.

Lol. Signed up for Qobuz (super annoying they block all of Proton’s email mask domains), and within 10 minutes I get an email from Spotify that my monthly price is increasing.

Use the free trials with both and see what you prefer!

For podcasts, if you’re on android, check out AntennaPod

edit: Adding some more information

• The podcast format was designed to be decentralized and open. Most creators still do direct distribution, so you can follow your favourite podcasts without needing a centralized entity like Spotify to collect it for you
• The exception is the platform exclusive paywalled stuff that Spotify produces themselves. Joe Rogan is one of those iirc, but I don’t think that affects the majority of people here
• If you listen on multiple devices and want to synchronize your listening history, see here: https://antennapod.org/documentation/general/synchronization

Qobuz

I’m planning to stop using Tidal. I get too many errors when playing.

Qobuz wouldn’t allow me to sign up with a proton alias. I also tried deezer but they wouldn’t stop sending spam. Out of the two I’d recommend deezer.

One more vote for Tidal. High quality and large catalog, I’ve been using it for years.

But in all seriousness, I’ve been using Tidal through USB Audio Player with an Audioquest DAC on an Android phone for the past five years and listening to music with this setup feels like an effing privilege. Would I have chosen today, I might have gone with Qobuz because it’s a European product, but at this point, as long as I don’t find out that the people at Tidal are monsters, I don’t think I will switch to anything else.

I tried Deezer and tidal for a month each. They were both alright, however their offline download for bigger playlists straight up sucked, so that took some sanity out of me and I had to switch back to Spotify ultimately.

Please keep this in mind if you ever consider switching.

I tried Qobuz almost a year ago because I was ditching Spotify and wanted to stay with a European service, but it had awful recommendations. There was no algorithm involved, it would recommend completely random tracks that had nothing to do with my music. It made finding new music extremely difficult. Too bad because I liked everything else about Qobuz.

I use Tidal now and love it. The recommendations are different from Spotify’s but just as good. No podcasts is actually a plus IMO and I haven’t noticed the AI slop that’s all over Spotify (although I’m sure there’s still some of it).

they all look and feel the same. all comes down to the content. do they have all your favourite artist? are there any cool playlists?

i wouldnt be worried about the podcasts, if you only listen to them on one device. its just an app.

Is there anything wrong with Pandora?