Navigate through your library to your artist of choice, and suddenly it’s gone all iTunes-like again, where no artist names are links… unless, that is, you go via the Albums tab in the sidebar, and then they are links from those album pages… which now look somewhat more Apple Music-like again.

It’s a frustrating experience because this inconsistency leaves almost every interaction feeling like a guess. And it’s even more infuriating because it feels like Apple should’ve fixed this stuff years ago. Not just fixed — nailed it. It’s Apple. They can and should operate the very best music streaming / purchasing / collecting experience there is, especially on their own platforms. Even with the superior design of the iOS app over its macOS counterpart, the conceptual heart of Apple Music is, in my opinion, still too muddled to be usable. Most of my friends who’ve moved there from Spotify seem like they’re putting up with it rather than enjoying it. (One thing I do like about Apple Music, which more services should support, is making the record label a link to all releases from that label.)

In fairness to Apple, one of my additional strikes against the service was because personally I just like dark interfaces for music apps. I’m sure this is because Spotify has accustomed me to it over the years, but the fact that Apple Music in black can only exist if you change your whole system to Dark Mode feels like an unnecessary restriction. So, with a dark interface as a criteria, my attention to turned to… well, pretty much any other streaming service.

Deezer — great, but let down by one huge bug

Deezer wasn’t originally on my list because when I’d last looked, its design looked pretty dated, but hold on, what’s this? Deezer now looks, in fact, rather lovely! Who knew? (Okay, lots of people knew — their brand refresh happened in 2023 and was handled by none other than Koto, and the brand’s bespoke typeface, Deezer Sans, was designed by the wonderful NaN, so of course it’s gorgeous.) Anyway, yes, this won Deezer lots of points in my book. I’m a pathetic, shallow, aesthetics-focussed designer, after all.

First impressions were pretty good. Deezer’s got a friendly interface with lots of customisation options (made dark instantly, of course). It’s kind of odd that the playlists sidebar only shows some of my playlists, but I can live with it. Slightly weird that clicking on the track titles does absolutely nothing: unlike every single other service, which effectively treats the whole track area as a button, you need to explicitly hit the play (or pause) button next to the track. Why is this? This hit area decision can’t be intentional, can it? It’s fine, though. I can live with this, too.

There are some lovely touches, like being able to pin artists, releases, or playlists to the ‘Quick access’ sidebar. The overall design and behaviour of the apps won me over: I decided Deezer was the one to switch to. Time to start the move!

But then something very odd happened.

I was on the profile page for Recondite, an electronic artist whose album Hinterland (released on Ghostly International in 2013) is one of my all-time favourites to play in winter time. But this album was nowhere to be found.

Worried that it might not be in Deezer’s catalogue, I searched for it and found it. Phew!

But why wasn’t it appearing on his artist page? In fact, why weren’t any of his albums showing up on that page? After all, they do show up on the search results page for “Recondite”.

Going the other way, clicking the artist page link from the album page, demonstrated it was definitely connected to the correct artist, so I assumed it must be down to some inconsistent metadata. Oh well. Annoying, but not a biggie.

Except that then, it happened again. And again. And again.

These next examples were for more mainstream artists, and it started to seem pretty strange that the albums weren’t showing up on these artists’ pages. And it couldn’t be bad metadata — on every other service I tested, the releases were present on the profiles.

A quick bit of Kagi-ing revealed two things: firstly, that I wasn’t going crazy (what a relief); secondly, that this has been a known issue for years. Just take a look at the number of people questioning it on Reddit or even on Deezer’s own community pages (where several admins mistakenly claim that the issue is fixed). This came as a relief, but it’s also baffling: how can a service as mature as Deezer have such a fundamental flaw with its catalogue?

For folks questioning why this might be a problem, it’s worth remembering that exploring an artist’s discography is a vital part of the process of discovery — you find a new band you like and you want to see what else they’ve released — and therefore it’s a vital form of potential revenue for the artist. The money made from streaming is pitiful, whatever the service, but 10 streams of an album’s tracks that then convert to 100 streams of their other albums is clearly better than a one-release dead-end.

Tidal — nice, but not immune to metadata muddles

Deciding that this well-known and oddly unfixed discography bug made Deezer usable for me, I turned my attention to Tidal. Despite perhaps looking a little too much like Spotify, I immediately felt at home, and the inclusion of high-quality audio for a monthly price that’s a good 20% cheaper than Spotify’s seems quite reasonable. There are some nice unique features, too, like being able to group playlists into folders.

Unfortunately, Tidal isn’t immune to weird metadata bugs. I’ve come across a few instances of multiple profiles for an artist or band, with the releases spread across both, often with one very clearly being the official, label-managed page.

I noticed some of these being fixed. Even over the course of writing this post, Tidal seemed to consolidate Spiritbox’s profile to include all of their releases. But then I discovered Vower and found their discography split across two profiles.

This actually highlights a problem with metadata as a whole: if you want, you can upload a release (via a distribution network), put in whatever metadata you like, and effectively break the system. This is exactly what’s happening with all the AI-authored slop being uploaded to the streaming services, credited to ‘real’ artists — and therefore receiving a tonne of streams from devoted fans keen to hear their new releases — when in fact the only thing shared by these nefarious tracks and the legit artists is the value in a cell in a metadata spreadsheet.

However, this is an issue with the way streaming services work rather than Tidal specifically. And Tidal does at least seem to be attempting to fix these things. So it looked like Tidal could be the one. Some slight weirdness, but no outright showstoppers like Deezer.

But then I got in the car.

Our Volvo XC40 has Android Auto. I can use CarPlay if I plug the phone in, but my wife and kids prefer something more instant, especially when you can just ask the car to play music. We’ve always used the Spotify app without issue, but for some reason both the Deezer and Tidal apps are more basic: searching for an artist and then tapping on that result simply plays their top track. Digging into any discography is almost impossible unless you ask for a specific release name. And the CarPlay apps aren’t actually much better because you’re forced into navigating via Siri — still the most useless assistant out there.

With frustrating apps getting in the way of a decent listening experience, maybe it was time to look again at some more alternatives?

YouTube Music & Amazon Music

YouTube Music: Around the time I started this experiment, YouTube had offered me a one-month free trial of YouTube Premium, which includes full access to YouTube Music. Or, to put it another way, your YouTube Music subscription will remove ads from your videos — and that’s a tempting offer. But I quickly decided against this service: the lack of a dedicated macOS app and a catalogue overstuffed with bootlegs made YouTube Music a no-go for me (even with its dark interface).

Amazon Music: Apparently — and I think this’ll come as a genuine surprise to just about everyone — Amazon pays artists better than some of the other streaming services. But even a very quick test of it proved that it was missing vital albums from my favourites. It was a consideration for about half an hour of testing.

Back to Apple Music via DaftMusic (and Albums)

Frustrated by Deezer and Tidal, and put off almost instantly by the alternatives, I was encouraged to see the release of DaftMusic — a UI for accessing Apple Music without any of the, well, Apple Music UI. And it’s nice! It manages to get around the iTunes-like ‘Collection’ weirdness and there are a load of customisation options, too. Plus, I love supporting indie developers.

Unfortunately, the need to manually import playlists to the app (rather than them being synced from the Apple Music itself) is a pain when using multiple devices. I’m excited to hear that an iOS app is on its way, though, and how this might change things.

I also briefly tried Albums after my mate Jon Hicks’ recommendation. The iCloud-powered syncing across Mac and iOS is great and, again, yay for indie devs. But my family love their playlists, so an album-only interface is never going to fly.

Is anything as good as Spotify?

About two months ago, I was getting ready to hit ‘publish’ on an earlier draft of this post that ended with a disappointing conclusion: that, because every other streaming platform I’d tried has a range of issues — in some cases, bugs that hamper basic everyday use — it was impossible, right now, to replace Spotify.

Yes, it’s still susceptible to the metadata issues and abuses I’ve detailed above. Yes, it’s bloated and full of podcasts and audiobooks and videos you don’t want. And yes, Daniel Ek’s investment choices — but it does so much well. Custom-sorting for playlists feels like such an obvious feature and yet it’s missing from the competition. And Spotify Connect — being able to swap playback between devices seamlessly (something we do a lot in our house, especially when one iPad dies, or even to see when someone’s playing something in the car while I’m at my desk) is something I missed while trying every other service. But most importantly, it… just works. There are no weird bugs that stop me from discovering an artist’s discography or outright stop me from playing music. It’s far from perfect, but it comes a lot closer to perfect than the competition.

So I was about to end this experiment by cancelling all of the subscriptions I’ve been testing and decide, reluctantly, to continue paying for Spotify — a conclusion I wasn’t at all happy about. This prompted me to give one last service a try: Qobuz, the one billed for audiophiles and fans of Classical music. I’d dismissed it based on its marketing materials, but figured it was fair to give it a shot.

And I’m so glad I did.

The surprise twist: Qobuz is pretty damn good

I’m very happy to be publishing this blog post with a conclusion that feels morally right: I’ve cancelled our Spotify Premium Family plan and moved us over to the Family plan on Qobuz. It’s not perfect, but it does get most things right.

To be honest, it’s not the high fidelity sound (Qobuz’s main selling point) that really interests me; it’s more the thoughtful approach to the service as a whole. Plus, it’s customisable, and this is important because I must admit I’m not in love with its design out of the box. But modified to use the Qobuz Theme v1.3 by Jon Hicks, the desktop app is subtly but significantly better.

Please note that the screenshots that follow all show this customised version, sporting Jon’s CSS. Is it fair to compare the other services to a version of Qobuz that isn’t actually representative of the company’s own vision for their product? Probably not, if I’m being honest. However, the fact that it is theme-able, and that you can get this UI with very little tinkering required, is one of the many benefits of Qobuz over the others.

Here are some things that stand out to me about this service over the others:

Qobuz Connect: Working exactly like Spotify Connect, you can move your music between devices with ease. It’s a little buggy in that one of my work Mac seems determined to return to the in-built speakers when I’ve paused music for a while, but it works well enough. I can’t understand how it’s only Spotify and Qobuz that have this output-swapping functionality — it should be on every single music service.

Releases: Qobuz calls them what they should always be called: releases. You can’t group all music as ‘albums’, as so many services do, despite them being EPs or singles or compilations. Okay, it’s a small point, but these things add up to show that they care about music.

Record labels: like Apple Music, they’re all clickable, which not only takes you to a label page, but also means they can be saved to your library, so they exist on the same hierarchical level as artists, releases or playlists — and can be followed. This is such a great way of discovering music.

Magazine: With a strong focus on editorial content, Qobuz’s own digital magazine is built right into the experience. I didn’t see the benefit of that at first, but when magazine content related to artists started showing up on their profiles or on release pages, it all made sense.

Catalogue vs. library: If you’re on a release page that’s been saved to your library, and then click on the artist name, it’ll initially only show you releases from that artist in your library, and my first reaction was this is bonkers! Why would anyone want that? but then realised that you can then toggle to view the full catalogue, and this makes so much sense. This is exactly the approach Apple Music should’ve taken to overcome the confusion around local files, treating the release as the primary object, with metadata attached to it, rather than the other way around.

Of course, Qobuz isn’t immune to metadata weirdness, and actually this is the only service I’ve noticed this on: all music ever made by Dominick Fernow is attributed to his main alias Prurient, rather than to his respective monickers, such as Vatican Shadow (Muslimgauze-esque techno) or Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (dark ambient). It might seem like a nitpick, but I’m sure it’s not what the artist would want, given that he uses those distinct identities to release music across totally different genres.