Choosing A Music Streaming Service

Doug Smith
technology

I’ve been using Spotify for many years. Prior to that I used Deezer, and recently I have taken out trial subscriptions in Apple Music, Tidal, and Qobuz. There are five primary things I’m looking for in a music streaming service:

  • Direct connect to Sonos
  • Lossless playback
  • pay per stream to artists
  • gapless playback on my Wiim Pro streaming box
  • music recommendations and available content

Music Recommendations

This one is really hard for me to quantify. I sort of feel like Tidal and Apple Music the best. I’m not sure about Deezer yet and Qobuz. For content I think Spotify and Apple Music are the best for me. Qobuz isn’t the greatest for electronic music. I copied my Spotify playlist to Qobuz and managed to only save 72% of my tracks. Copying to Deezer was almost 100%. I think Deezer is pretty good. Apple Music has a really nice additional feature, an app called Apple Classical Music. It’s an alternative app/interface that assists with classical music in terms of recommendations, notes, etc. It’s pretty great. It is free and requires Apple Music.

Lossless Playback

I’m not entirely convinced I can hear the difference between something like 356 kps mp3 and lossless FLAC. In any event, these all do lossless playback except for Spotify.

Pay Per Stream

It’s a bit hard to compare these but here is what I’ve learned. At the most basic level, Spotify is the worst. Apple Music and Tidal pay about twice as much, with Tidal more than Apple. Deezer pays less than Apple. Qobuz pays the most, almost three times that of Spotify. However, most of these services use a sharing pay model. A percent of every stream, no matter the artist, gets shared out to other artists. Deezer is different though. All of an artist’s streams go to that artist. This may push Deezer up as the best service, but I’m not sure.

Gapless Audio, Lossless Audio and Direct Connect

This one is pretty annoying to me. I have an Android phone and for a generic streaming app, this means that music is streamed from my phone’s app to my Wiim Pro stream or my Sonos speaker. When I do this, I do not get gapless playback. if I were to use and IOS device, it would use Airplay. Airplay does allow for gapless audio, but it will only stream at 256 kps aac, and not lossless. However, some apps use “connect” or “direct connect” to talk to streaming devices. Spotify and Tidal do this. Through their native app, they will stream to the Wiim or Sonos directly, without changing the bitrate and will do gapless. Qobuz does this as well (apparently), and so did Deezer. However, Deezer announced two days ago that they are no longer support direct connect in their app.

There is one other way to stream lossless and gapless. Both wiim and Sonos have their own apps, and if a “direct connect” music service is supported on their app, lossless and gapless will be supported. Of the services I am looking at, only Spotify and Tidal have direct connect on the Sonos. On the Wiim, each of Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify are suppored. Apple Music is not suppored on either of them.

Decision

If Apple Music had direct connect, I would go with it. I like the Apple Classical Music, their catalogue, and their support of musicians. Qobuz just doesn’t have the music I want, otherwise they would be in the mix. Spotify has the best connections but pays the worst. This leaves Deezer and Tidal. I wasn’t blown away by Tidal’s interface when I used it for a month. I’m going to test Deezer a bit more because I haven’t used it for like four years or more.