Recent news revealed that Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has been investing heavily in military tech companies, which adds another ethical layer to a platform already criticized for how little it pays musicians !
Spotify only pays artists about $3–5 per 1,000 streams, using a pro-rata model that directs most money toward major stars... By contrast, Qobuz (≈$18–20 per 1,000 streams) and Tidal (≈$12–13) pay far more fairly!
However Tidal is far from ethical. Most of its revenue is controlled by private investors and founders and small artists still earn very little...
More fair-minded platforms like Bandcamp, Resonate, Ampled, or SoundCloud’s fan-powered royalties prioritize musicians over investors.
With these more ethical alternatives available, why do we keep using Spotify?
Why?
Lack of Feature Parity
Stickiness of library transfer
Stickiness of social network effects
It's still better ethically than Apple Music or YouTube Music, which behave anti-competitively
1: I've tried out Quobuz, it's pretty good, but it does not have the Jam / Group Session feature which me and my friends use constantly while gaming remotely. It also does not have an Xbox app which I use while playing games. I find Spotify's recommendations somewhat underwhelming, but Quobuz has a noticeably worse recommendation engine, at least for my genres and tastes. Those are the features that lack parity that matter to me, but for some others, it's things like amplifiers having built-in Spotify, or there being a Roku or Playstation app or something.
2: Quobuz uses a third party service to automatically transfer your library, which worked pretty well, but did require jumping through a bunch of hoops and subscribing to a trial subscription that I then had to cancel. It also did not find matches for some songs. Could I make it work if I had enough reason to switch? Yeah, probably, but the lack of feature parity (/roadmap that includes them) is enough to dissuade me from really trying.
3: In addition to friends on Spotify all using Jams, there's also an inherent niceness to just being able to text people Spotify links, especially since there's no cross platform linking service that would otherwise make sharing music easy.
4: Supporting Spotify may not be great, but its still better than supporting trillion dollar anti-competitive corporations like Apple and Google.