If you're in the market for a replacement service, I can recommend Qobuz. Switched to them a while ago and they're great, and apparently pay the artists really well.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2025
214 points (96.9% liked)
Music
10427 readers
147 users here now
↳ Our family Communities:
➰#Music
Music.world - !music@lemmy.world
Jazz -!jazz@lemmy.world
Album Art Porn - !albumartporn@lemmy.world
Fake Album Covers - !fakealbumcovers@lemm.ee
Obscure Music - !ObscureMusic@lemm.ee
Vinyl and LP's - !vinyl@lemmy.world
Electronic Dance Music - !edm@reddthat.com
60's Music - !60smusic@lemmy.world
70's Music - !70smusic@lemmy.world
80's Music - !80smusic@lemmy.world
90's Music - !90smusic@lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Just switched and i an liking it so far.
Qobuz app also works on Linux nowadays. Has a couple issues that you have to fix, and one minor annoyance I haven’t figured out how to solve.
EDIT: Here's a guide on how to use Qobuz on Linux. With a newer version than the one used in that guide, the Qobuz app (including the installer) opens minimized to system tray. I don't know if this is a feature in the app itself or something with Wine. But other than that it works great.
There's also a fantastic third party Qobuz client for linux. It's CLI, but if you launch it with --web it launches a local web client that's point and click. You can choose any audio quality up to 24bit/192Khz.
I have it hooked up to my hifi system and connect through ssh to control it from my laptop or phone. Works great.
Qobuz apps/players can also be controlled with other Qobuz apps. For example, if you have Qobuz running on your computer, you can control it with the Qobuz app on your phone.
That CLI player is probably better if you just want a remotely controlled headless player, and don't need the Qobuz integration.
Cool, I wasn't aware of that! Might be worth checking out.
I'm the unfortunate owner of a few Sonos speakers, and Sonos controls are not well integrated in the Qobuz app yet. But I think I heard rumours that better integration being on its way - this is where I would really benefit from being able to control with the Qobuz app. (right now I'm using noson, which is at least much better than the official Sonos app)
I think they released Qobuz Connect earlier this year. Sonos doesn't seem to be included, though.
Thanks!
And here I've just been using it through a web browser...
Just earlier this year it wasn’t possible to install Qobuz on Linux. I guess the Wine team implemented something that fixed the problem.
I tried Qobuz and the sound quality was great, but I primarily use the “radio” feature off of a song for new music discovery, and their radios were wack. Also they were missing about 7% of the music I tried to transfer. No other complaints, pretty solid otherwise.
So far Tidal hasn’t given me any issues. Hopefully they pay their artists and don’t do horrible things, because I don’t have the energy to jump services again this year.
I've heard good things about Tidal as well with respect to paying artists. Glad it works for you!
How do the voice commands work with this app? Similar to Spotify? I use Google speakers currently.
I've recently switched off Spotify to tidal and now qobuz and the voice commands haven't worked for me.
As far as I can tell it's not a native app to the Google home and won't work. I may be missing something however, so your results may vary. You can cast to it from a phone, but again qobuz seems the weakest on that front.
Can't say as I haven't tried, but as another commenter mentioned, they have cross-device control similar to Spotify. The Android Auto app works well too, so I wouldn't be surprised if it supports voice control as well.
Spotify also records fake music for their platform. So there is another reason you should have ditched them sooner.
Explain?
Not recorded per se as that would require actual work, but they both push and produce AI slop, demonstrating an uncompromised willingness to piss on the graves of some of my personal heroes.
Qobuz and piracy both offer more ethical alternatives to Spotify. Spotify are not just not paying artists, they are actively sabotaging them and investing their riches in weapons and disinformation.
Fuck Spotify. Make sure to set up your Qobuz account before deleting your Spotify account—that way you'll be able to keep your playlists.
I’m not referring to AI. I’m talking about actual music that was recorded and released on the platform under the name of multiple artist and song titles to trick users into believing they were listing to a real recording artist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_on_Spotify
Oh wow, it goes back even further. Incredible.
Yeah I've switched to Tidal when I read about it. It's a shame, in terms of usability Spotify is definitely ahead, but I would rather use an inferior product than pay nazi supporters
Wasn't Tidal started by Kanye?
Edit: nvm, Jay Z.
No. At one point it was owned (partially? majority? don't recall) by Jay-Z, who sold most of his stake later on to a different company that has its own problems, but as far as I know isn't nearly as bad as Daniel Ek and all the AI generated music and "fake" artists issues plaguing Spotify.
As another user commented, it was started by JayZ. It is still American, so I also tried Soundcloud, but it had too many things missing sadly, especially in terms of soundtracks. So Tidal will do for now.
If you are willing to curate your own collection and have a little techical knowhow:
You can set up a Navidrome server and enjoy high quality music streaming with no subscription costs
I managed to get a pretty decent collection going, accessed through Navidrome and have to admit I wasn't a fan. Artwork missing, multiple profiles for the same artists, the inability to remove albums that were no longer on the server. The whole thing just felt like a struggle.
Then the disk my collection was on kicked the bucket, and hadn't gotten around to setting up backup, so I'm starting over from scratch 😅
Bit miffed Navi is still what people are recommending 😔
Sucks that this has been your experience and admitted it does take a bit of work to set it up nicely.
The documentation of how artwork is detected and ways to fetch it automatically from online sources you can find here
The multiple profiles thing happens Because Navidrome is very tag dependent to understand music. I have a few collections where the band slightly evolved their name/spelling where this happened.
The difference between “artist/albumartist” and the “compilation” tag need to be set correctly and uniformly for that to be fixed, which depending on the source can take some work.
My own strategy is to start with a small server And gradually expand it. Make sure the tags are ok, the art is correctly named in the right spot.
I still have a lot of music i haven’t processed
For the music that did get processed, things are stable and reliable as rock, require no maintenance and performs very well.
The removed albums thing Is a weird one though, using the full rescan off all files and data button I have never experienced this.
Thank you for the suggestions! I'll give it another go, see if I can make it work 👍
I was using Symfonium as my client on Android, maybe that was part of the problem.
I used Beets for processing/tagging, which was also troublesome; never could get it to do anything on its own, had to manually initiate every session, and lots of stuff needed handholding to get tagged correctly. Never could get Picard to work at all, neither in Docker nor on my desktop.
I fairly recently set up a NAS with Jellyfin, replacing google photos and Spotify have been on my to-do list for quite some time but they've been pretty far down on the list. Replacing Spotify just got bumped up. I'll check out Navidrome.
replacing google photos
Immich makes replacing Google Photos pretty easy. The UI is very similar and the desktop and mobile apps are pretty solid. Multi-user support is excellent if your friends or family also wanted to try it out.
I wish Navidrome (and more self-hosting apps in general) didn't assume you were the only user on the service...
Yep I've done a little testing with immich, that's what I'm planning on using, just haven't gotten around to fully setting things up yet. My NAS is just running on a Raspberry Pi 5 so I'm not planning on any multi-user stuff at this point.
Since you already have jellyfin, try it with music using the beta finamp client. Works like a charm and will save you having to spin up another service.
Bandcamp has a great app.
Is this a joke?
I love bandcamp and it has been my primary source of music for 10 years at least but in that time the app has not changed, not improved and is still fucking shite.
The only thing they have changed in that 10 years is adding a playlist feature.
Don't even get me started on how you cannot access the messaging system via a browser and can only access it in app.
I find it works fine for playing albums, and that's usually how I want to listen to music.
I now have a Qobuz subscription which does all the other discoverability stuff when I can't be arsed to read the Bandcamp curations.
For the most part it will play albums fine until it doesn't and won't load the next track getting stuck in a perpetual loading loop and requires being restarted. That is my experience anyway and whilst it doesn't happen all the time it is often enough to just be a little annoying.
For the most part though playback is decent and so if that is your primary use I can see that it would seem like an OK app.
If however you do a lot of your discovery and new music listening on there as I do your opinion would probably be quite different. The search function is dog shit and navigation is horrendous, there are so many illogical decisions. Also the fact that if you click a bandcamp link within the app itself it opens it in a browser rather than opening it in app is absolutely infuriating and has been that way forever.
Unfortunately qobuz still has a some what lack lustre library for my specific niche genre choice but it is getting better and I keep checking it so hopefully soon it will have caught up, although their search is a bit shit as well clumping artists that have the same name but are certainly not the same artist together as one.
Annoying that our experiences are so different. Makes it hard to recommend since there might be hardware issues.
I won't discount hardware issues but my experience is consistent across 6 different phones now so make of that what you will.
All of this aside I still wholeheartedly recommend bandcamp, I still think it is best for both variety of things available (particularly for niche genres) as well as artists actually getting paid.
The app still works absolutely fine I just would never describe it as "great" personally, it is just annoying because a lot of the issues I have could be resolved fairly easily and have been present for many many years at this point.
There are a lot of reviews that say the app is garbage, but everything works fine on the website.
I switched to Deezer a few months ago. It is also European, but is not unethical as far as I've been able to find. Sadly, almost nobody uploads their podcasts on there though.