this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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What's the best alternative? It's been a while since I used any of them. I checked Tidal recently and it looked like they have an AI slop problem too.
Bandcamp and/or Navidrome.
I use Qobuz now, and they are great, with human-curated playlists and suggestions. So far, I love it.
Hmm. Sadly not available in my country yet (and while I'm sure I could pull some shenanigans to subscribe with a foreign address, I'm going to assume that also means none of our local music labels will be covered, so that's a non starter.)
I'll keep an eye on it. But in the meantime, I also gather it doesn't do podcasts - anyone have any recommendations on where I could be migrating podcasts, from Spotify? Non-US companies only (which for avoidance of doubt, absolutely definitely excludes Apple).
I listened to podcasts on Antennapod for years. It's open source and free, but there are many other podcast platforms. Used Pocket Cast before too, very good, licensed under MPL 2.0. Those services don't have Spotify exclusive, but have all others.
Edit: corrected mistake about Pocket Cast.
Pocket Casts isn't proprietary, it's licensed under the MPL 2.0
Thank.you for the correction! I'll fix it in my comment too.
No worries!
Thanks! (And I should say, it was a genuine question :-)). I'll take a look at them; I don't listen to any Spotify exclusives (yay!), but there are one or two that I subscribe to their supporter schemes and at the moment I do that through Spotify. I guess that's my next task, work out if there's a way to subscribe directly and use something like Antennapod.
New workers'-day-weekend project dropped...
I buy music (mostly from Bandcamp). Now I have a big library and no subscription fee.
I haven't had it be an issue with Tidal. Tidal doesn't have a strong autoplay algorithm so it tends to nudge users toward more custom curated Playlists. It has a buggy app, make it difficult to block songs or artists, and no duplicate filter which is frustrating, but I don't agree that AI slop is a very big issue currently. They seem proactive in fighting it and have always been one of the most artist friendly services.
Download your own music and set up navidrome. For music discovery, go to shows and find out about bands from the scene.
Or set up a listenbrainz.org account to get weekly recommendation playlist, check the accounts of people who listen to similar artists, and click through those addictive spider web charts that show you a bunch of artists who are similar to the one you're listening to.
There's also Rate Your Music, which I don't have an account at but it still seems pretty good.
I've always used Pandora. I don't remember exactly in what way, but it's significantly different from Spotify. I prefer it, though, but I know that's just because it's what I used first.