I quit Spotify for Qobuz. I wish they'd help me make it stick.

I shouldn't have to tell you that Spotify sucks. They pay artists terribly; most don't even qualify to get paid. If you're small enough, they just get to stream your music for free forever. They pay podcasters who actively make the world worse. They profit off AI dreck masquerading as new music. CEO Daniel Ek is plowing his ill-gotten gains into AI murder machines.

And if all of those real-world reasons aren't enough, Spotify's generated playlists feel like a godsend until you notice the feedback loop that traps you within some embarrassingly small musical niche, and its flagship "Wrapped" feature offers less and less to get excited about each year.

So I said "enough" and started looking for alternatives. I was drawn to Qobuz, a streaming service notable for its considerably better royalty payments to artists and its superior sound quality. It's noticeable. If you're listening to streaming music on pretty much any kind of headphones the depth and clarity of Qobuz's high-res audio roundly beats the budget-fidelity audio Spotify pushes your way.

I was even able to migrate nearly everything from my playlists and "liked" tracks to Qobuz using third-party feature Soundiiz. (Qobuz offered me a free trial, but I had already paid to migrate everything.) Qobuz's library has broadly the same things available. A few real obscure tracks were missing from some playlists -- generally things self-published by bands and put up on bandcamp. But there were plenty of things Spotify didn't have, too. I was thrilled to see Tzadik, home of jazz great John Zorn and associated acts, while Spotify never had it. The band Deerhoof is on there -- not so for Spotify, from which they withdrew their music owing to Ek's AI military investments.

But the switch isn't without some pain points.

I was pretty excited when some Christmas-time streams of The Vince Guaraldi Trio didn't lead to the classic algorithmic blunder where it assumes I want to listen to Christmas music all year round. (If you've ever bought a vaccum cleaner or any other one-is-enough type item from Amazon, you've experienced this. You bought a vacuum cleaner? Would you be interested in 30 more vacuum cleaners?) You'd think this meant the algorithm was smart enough to identify one-off binges against larger trends.  But what if it actually meant there wasn't much of an algorithm at all?

Despite importing an utterly gigantic history of liked tracks from Spotify, Qobuz's "Weekly Q" playlist doesn't seem to have any idea of what I want. Looking at this week's, we've got Ellie Goulding, Talking Heads, Killswitch Engage, Cage the Elephant -- all fine for whatever they're going for but nothing like my listening history. And this is the one playlist they assemble for me each week, contrasted against the multiple daily lists from Spotify. Those Spotify lists may fall into feedback loops and needlessly pigeonhole themselves into some micro-niche, but they know generally what I want.

Its integration into Android Auto/Car Play feels half-baked as well. The big attraction for Spotify and what had me going back for one month (until Ek announced investing in militarized AI), was that with Google Maps up, I could use voice commands to say "Okay, Google: Play my Playlist 'Goth Stuff'" or whatever other playlist I wanted at the moment. Android would know to fire up Spotify, find my playlist with that title, and get going. Not so with Qobuz. I can still play music through the bluetooth connection and even switch tracks with steering wheel buttons, but anything I pick has to be picked while stopped or by a passenger, because I can't be fiddling with the search function while driving. That's not trivial! Thus far, Qobuz's answer seems to be that I have to get a newer car. Not encouraging.

I want to stick with Qobuz. I want them to give me more reasons to. The sound quality really is impressive and while there may be no ethical consumption under capitalism, it feels infinitely less evil to hand my money to them than to Spotify. Some of it even makes it back to the bands I love. But I need help so I don't sound like a Linux evangelist or something recommending this stuff to people who stick with an evil product because it frankly just works.