I apologise in advance for the sloppy mobile behaviour of this page. I'm sure I'll get around to fixing it at some point
I've recently been a bit frustrated with the quality of the recommendations Spotify gives me. While not terrible, I just don't feel that I've been getting the quality of recommendations I'd expect from a company who have as much data on music tastes as they do.
I've dabbled with Tidal and Deezer a few years ago, before Spotify Lossless was a reality, but ultimately returned to Spotify because I just couldn't deal with the relative clunkiness of the apps and integration with Google TV.
But I'm back again to explore the big Spotify alternatives. I've missed out Apple Music here on right-to-repair protest grounds - and also they don't have a Google TV app.
Most of my findings are summarised in the following table.
| Spotify | Deezer | Tidal | Qobuz | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max quality (Android app) | "Up to" 44.1kHz, 24-bit* | 44.1kHz, 16-bit |
Up to 192kHz 24-bit** | 192kHz, 24-bit** |
| Max quality (web app) | 320kbps | 44.1kHz, 16-bit | Up to 192kHz 24-bit** | 96kHz, 24-bit** |
| Max quality (Linux app) | 320kbps | 44.1kHz, 16-bit | N/A | N/A |
| Max quality (Google TV -> HDMI) | 44.1kHz, 24-bit* | 320kbps | Up to 192kHz 24-bit** | 192kHz, 24-bit** |
| Max quality (Chromecast Audio -> Toslink) | 320kbps | 44.1kHz, 16-bit | 44.1kHz, 16-bit | 96kHz, 24-bit |
| Linux app | Native, Good | 3rd party, Good | None | None |
| Android app | Very good | Good | Mediocre | Mediocre |
| Google TV app | Good, except it keeps autoplaying music videos | Basic | Basic, and it acts like you only want to watch music videos (hides music at the bottom of the page) | Good, but lack of animations make it feel clunky |
| Cross-device control | Excellent | None | None | Excellent |
| Transfer-in | N/A | Whole library by TuneMyMusic Liked songs in order |
500 tracks via TuneMyMusic (unless you pay) Liked songs out of order |
Full via Soundiiz Liked songs in order |
| Quality of recommendations | Medium | Medium | Poor | TBD |
| Price for tier that offers at least 44.1kHz/16-bit | £11.99/m | £11.99/m | £10.99/m | £12.99/m |
| Artist's cut per stream according to Duetti, and Qobuz self-report | ~0.2p | ~0.3p | 0.5p | 1.11p |
| Search tolerates misspellings | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Search accepts lyrics | Yes | No | No | No |
| Privacy policy (more below) | Stomach-churning | Not great | Not great | LGTM |
* "Up to" 24-bit, but based on measurements below it seems it's usually 16-bit
** usually 44.1kHz, 16-bit; but can be up to 192kHz 24-bit. Both Tidal and Qobuz have tracks at that rate, but Qobuz have a lot more in my experience. Most are still 44.1kHz, 16-bit though.
My music taste isn't massively broad - mostly 70s and 80s rock and popular soul, and a mix of relatively mainstream modern music. Of my "liked" songs, all were available on all platforms. Deezer and Tidal both had every single song in every playlist (or at least TuneMyMusic claims to have found a match; I didn't dig through it to check every match was correct).
Qobuz wasn't quite as good. Well, or maybe Soundiiz isn't quite as good. Or maybe Soundiiz is more fussy. Around 5% of the songs in my "liked" songs weren't in Qobuz according to Soundiiz - but actually every single one was when I searched for the failed ones manually. 28 of my 189 albums failed to match. Most of these were actually present, with a handful of exceptions that I can live without.
Albums missing from Qobuz:
Soundiiz also adds a crude self-advertisment to your playlist descriptions: "Playlist converted by Soundiiz from another music platform! https://soundiiz.com"
Share "pseudonymised" use, voice, and payment data with third parties. If you think this is truly anonymous I urge you to visit https://amiunique.org/.
They share data "To fulfil contractual obligations with third parties. For example, when we provide pseudonymised data about our users’ listening because we have an agreement with a Spotify rightsholder to do so" for the purpose of "legitimate interests", in which they include "maintaining our relationships with other third parties [...] so that we can provide the Spotify Service"
Share data to some "media companies" amongst others. Relatively unclear, so I think we need to assume the worst.
Share "Marketing data", "Usage data", "Subscription data", and "Device data" with third parties which include "for marketing and advertising purposes".
Seems good but I'm not a lawyer: "Any collected personal, as well as personal data which is later obtained by Xandrie [owners of Qobuz], is used only by Xandrie. As such, only authorised personnel have access to this data."
I measured network traffic to try and understand whether each was actually giving the bitrate it claimed. See results below:
| Spotify (High) (for reference) | Spotify (Lossless) | Deezer (HiFi) | Tidal (High) | Qobuz (CD) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claimed sampling freq*** | - | 44.1 kHz | 44.1 kHz | 44.1 kHz | 44.1kHz |
| Claimed bit depth | - | "up to" 24-bit | 16-bit | 16-bit | 16-bit |
| Uncompressed stereo bit rate based on claimed frequency and depth | 320kb/s | 2117kb/s | 705kb/s | 705kb/s | 705kb/s |
| Measured bit rate | 320 kb/s | 890+/-50 kb/s | 960+/-60 kb/s | 880+/-40 kb/s | 1385+/-600kb/s |
| Compression ratio must therefore be | - | 0.42@24-bit 0.63@16-bit |
~0.68 | ~0.62 | ~0.98 |
| Measured bit rate | 0.14 GB/hr | ~0.40 GB/hr | ~0.40 GB/hr | ~0.43 GB/hr | ~0.62 GB/hr |
| Bit rate avaliable on | Every track I tried | Every track I tried | Every track I tried | Every track I tried, though there are some with much higher | Every track I tried, though there are lots with much higher |
| Buffer loaded | Part of track | Part of track | Whole track | Part of track | Whole track |
It therefore seems that, unless Spotify is achieving a FLAC compression ratio that's 40% better than Deezer and Tidal, most tracks are actually playing at 44.1kHz, 16-bit. Since that aligns with CDs, I believe that.
Therefore, in reality, most tracks are probably the same quality across the HiFi/High/Lossless/CD tiers of all three providers. While Tidal do have a decent number of tracks at (much) higher bitrates, it's certainly not the majority. Qobuz have more, but the majority of tracks are still CD-quality.
It's also worth noting that Qobuz's network traffic was a bit less consistent than the others. The average numbers seem to suggest that they're doing no compression at all on the FLAC files, but the variability makes me think there's something else going on that I don't understand.
*** I was hoping to measure the sampling rate myself using the readout on my DAC, but everything was reading 48kHz. It turns out that Android (and therefore both my phone and Google TV) will currently only output at 48kHz, so I presume Android's audio engine is upsampling almost all of the audio in this test from 44.1kHz to 48kHz. I have no idea whether this has a significant quality impact.
There are no clear winners here, but there is a clear loser: Tidal. Having played with Qobuz all day, I'm keen to give it a proper try for a month. Doesn't hurt to keep a bit of cash out of Spotify's pockets.
At the risk of sounding like a Qobuz ad, I should also point out that Qobuz is one of the very few remaining places where you can buy music. Like actual files you can download and do what you want with.