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The Most Loved Digital Audio Streaming Platforms.
(cdn.statcdn.com)
I am surprised that people know what amazon music is.
Qobuz is good: reasonably priced, you get the best quality audio (actual high resolution, not the MQA nonsense Tides was doing), a good catalogue and a decent UI, and it pays the artists a bit more than Spotify and others, and they offer a free migration tool. Plus they have actual full credits and even CD booklets and notes for the albums. And they do their own artist descriptions and reviews. It really feels like they're making an effort to be good, not just throwing some record company catalogues online and waiting for the money to roll in.
Spotify is still a bit better for recommendations and automatic playlists.
Qobuz has been amazing. I tried almost all the music streaming platforms during the pandemic and thankfully found Qobuz!
SoundCloud: I was a long time user and a paying customer since 2016 and big advocate. Unfortunately things went downhill around that time as they started taking a lot of remixes and mixes off the platform. Then they introduced some arbitrary limits on the number of songs you could like/add to your library per day, and I kept getting banned from SoundCloud during the pandemic.
I kept threatening soundcloud support that I would cancel my plan but they didn't care, it was a blanket decision and they accused me of making the community unsafe by liking too many songs. I didn't care about their stupid social media aspect, I just wanted to discover new music and listen to what I liked by hitting the Like button to save songs to my library.
So eventually SoundCloud drove me off their platform and I ended up on Qobuz.
Even thought the Qobuz selection is more limited for the genres of music I listen to, its been an amazing few years on Qobuz with HiFi listening and I like how I can discover more music from the artists and labels that like or discover.
Qobuz migration progress: I found 1000 songs so far. I didn't find 500 songs, mostly smaller artists or remixes. I still have another 1500 songs to sort through. But the great part about this journey is moving to high fidelity listening, and the process of discovering more music from my favorite artists or other artists on the same labels.
I ended up getting a bunch of gear from Schiit, DAC(Modi, headphone amp (Magni), speaker amp(Rekkr), desktop speakers, and a Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro. Been in HiFi heavenly bliss ever since getting pushed off soundcloud.