As a music lover, Spotify was a godsend when it first started. Most of my listening is to newly-released music, which I constantly cycle onto and off of my Current Rotation playlist, and I love having access to so much more music than I would if I were limited to buying albums or even downloading music off of Napster and Limewire as we did back in the day (I still buy albums on Bandcamp, but not everything I listen to).

But Spotify has become more and more reprehensible. Lately, there has been the problem of their running ads for ICE and giving millions of dollars to Joe Rogan. But what finally put me over the edge was this excellent post by Los Campesinos! in which they break down their album revenues from all sources. Going over the list, I saw that Tidal paid out almost triple what Spotify did. Still not enough, I know. But so much more – presumably because Tidal is not wasting money on podcasts and audiobooks and everything that Spotify has added in the past few years.

I checked the pricing and, while we paid $20/month for our family Spotify plan, the Tidal family plan was only $3 more per month. When I set up my trial account, they had a tool that seamlessly transferred all of my (extensive) Spotify playlists over to Tidal. I don’t use the library feature on Spotify, but it would have transferred that too. The big test was making sure Tidal worked with our extensive home Sonos system, and it did, no problems. The Tidal interface and app were very intuitive and similar to Spotify. My only issue was that some of the very obscure bands I tried to find were missing, but I can find those tracks on Bandcamp – and they are few and far between.

So I made the permanent switch! It felt good to finally let go of the guilt of funneling money to Spotify. If you’re considering making the switch, I hope this post helps encourage you! If you do it, here’s my profile if you want to friend me.