Elliot Jay Stocks | The search for a Spotify alternative

The search for a Spotify alternative

Published

08 July 2026

Tagged

#streaming-music

#music

#software

#design

#apple

#spotify

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About six months ago, I realised I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable paying for our Spotify Premium Family plan. The company had hiked its prices yet again. It had changed its policy to remove any royalty payments to artists with under 1,000 streams a year — despite already taking the number one spot for the worst-paying streaming service (already a low bar). And Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is investing the huge personal profits he’s made from these tactics into AI-powered weaponry. So I decided, like quite a few folks have recently, that it was time to look for an alternative streaming service.

And in those six months, I’ve been trying pretty much all of them. This post is intended to serve as a non-exhaustive list of considerations for anyone else of doing the same. (Because it was exhausting, believe me.)

But first, a caveat: this post is about choosing a streaming service, not about if they could or should be used in the first place. I’m a lifetime Plex user and I love it. My Plex library is loaded with all the music that’s not on the streaming platforms, most of it purchased from Bandcamp. But, for better or worse, streaming is a must-have in our household (and switching or remaining on a service is a four-person decision), so going Plex-only isn’t an option.

Second caveat: as an artist, I have no intention to remove my music from Spotify. Although I’m not so active with releasing new music these days, taking my music off the platform would just be shooting myself in the promotional foot. So that’s a consideration for another day.

Lastly, a warning: please don’t do what I’ve done, which is pay for multiple services for six months while I attempt to make my mind up and write this bloody long blog post. Oh, and here’s another tip: TuneMyMusic is what I used and (temporarily) paid for to move my library to and from the various services — although it’s worth Qobuz has Soundiiz integration built in for free.

Oh, and: all of these views are my own, obviously.

Apple Music — it should be the best, surely

The logical first choice in a search for a Spotify alternative was Apple Music. We’re already paying monthly for Apple TV+ and extra iCloud storage, so upgrading to an Apple One family plan would only be a couple quid more a month. Easy decision. I’d tried out the service about a year or so ago and not got on with its design, but guessed that in that time, things must’ve improved. Surely they would’ve finally found a way to get around that legacy confusion between Apple Music, iTunes, and the iTunes Music Store, right…?

Conceptually, it feels like the service is still unsure about what it wants to be, and this manifests in a variety of UX inconsistencies.

Try searching for an artist: you can filter your results by ‘Your Library’, ‘Apple Music’, and ‘iTunes Store’. That seems logical enough, except that Your Library is actually a mix of music you’ve either purchased or loaded into the-library-formerly-known-as-iTunes, plus any music you’ve saved from Apple Music.

Left: an artist page within your library. Right: an artist page within Music.

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.

Left: an album within your library. Right: the same album on Music.

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...