Stop using Spotify

A brief rant

The first step is admitting you have a problem. You have a problem.

Bob Stanley from the band Saint Etienne has fashioned a parallel career as a chronicler of pop music history. He’s written two epic books, either of which could double as a doorstop. Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music: A History covers recorded music up to the late ’50s and Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music From Bill Haley to Beyoncé picks up where the other one left off.

Bob writes about music on Patreon. Every day begins with a brief song story and a link to YouTube, but otherwise he’s mostly just writing about music that interests him. Sometimes he makes a playlist, and this week he wrote about Petula Clark’s ’60s records with producer Tony Hatch, making the case that the pair is the UK parallel to the USA’s team of Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach.

Clark is not in Warwick’s class as a singer, but Tony Hatch made some incredible pop records and deserves more attention as a songwriter, producer and arranger.

I opened Bob’s Spotify playlist on my desktop computer (new Mac Mini M4, I give it 8 stars out of 5), sent it via a USB C cable to my iFi Neo iDSD desktop DAC and out to my Kanto ORA desktop speakers (with Kanto SUB8 subwoofer).

Petula’s voice sounded brittle and thin on Spotify, so bad that I questioned if those records were as good as I remembered.

Next step was playing the same songs via Apple Music, and the results were stellar. Same with Qobuz, the other service I pay for. It’s the midrange that really fills out at a higher audio resolution, giving pretty much anything more depth.

Some might say that even this sounds better than a Spotify stream.

Granted, my setup represents a much bigger investment in desktop audio than most people are willing to make, but I’d argue that my gear just amplifies the problem with Spotify rather than reveal it. Anyone using an OK speaker or halfway decent pair of earbuds just be able to hear the difference.

Years after promising to offer a lossless (a/k/a “CD quality” or better) streaming option, Spotify is still streaming the same lossy audio it used when it launched.

This week, Spotify revived the rumors that a new HiFi tier is coming “soon-ish” but suggested that the better quality will cost at least $5 more than its current $10.99/month rate.

Guess what? Apple Music (available on Android and Windows), Tidal, Qobuz, and Amazon Music HD already offer everything in lossless quality at a price that’s competitive with Spotify’s basic tier. Plus, all of them offer a substantial portion of their catalogs at a much higher resolution (for people who are using the right gear). Every one of them is a better value.

(Two notes for the haters:

Yes, it’s true that Tidal has not yet migrated its entire catalog from the MQA format to lossless FLAC and that MQA is technically lossy. There are very few people who can hear the difference between MQA and FLAC, and both sound better than Spotify.

Granted, the basic Spotify tier gives access to 15 hours of audiobook listening, a feature not available anywhere else. That’s a compelling option if your taste in audiobooks matches what’s on offer in their catalog. However, news came in while I was writing this that Amazon Music HD has just added 1 audiobook per month to its plan.)

“But what about my dozens of carefully crafted playlists?” you ask. Well, it turns out that I wrote about a solution over at TechHive:

Done waiting for Spotify HiFi? These 5 app will help you switch

If you’re doing a one-time exit, I think SongShift is a good solution. It identifies missing tracks and lets you pick the best solution before export. It’s also good if you want to share a playlist from your new service with someone who uses Spotify.

What SongShift can’t do is keep track of a playlist that you regularly change. You can re-sync a playlist and SongShift will add the new additions to the end of the previously exported playlist. What it won’t do is delete songs from that previous export or keep track of changes in sequence. It’s so frustrating that it may be easier to do updates directly and skip the syncing after the initial export.

All of this gets back to the industry’s fundamental screwup when it comes to streaming music. Rather than fight Napster, the industry would have been better served by building a neutral platform to sell MP3s and later handle streaming.

I’ll grant that there are plenty of people who can’t tell the difference but, if you’ve found your way here, I have to think you care about how your music sounds. Sign up for a trial subscription to any of the alternatives mentioned above and listen for yourself.

I subscribe to Spotify for professional reasons and try to listen to at least one audiobook per month to justify what I’m paying. If they ever offer lossless streaming, I promise to check it out and revise my advice accordingly.

Mono v. Stereo

Industry colleague David Katznelson publishes his own reliably fascinating newsletter The Signal. He’s got A+++ taste and had a daring career in the Warner Bros. A&R department, where he worked with artists like the Flaming Lips, Mudhoney, and the Boredoms.

David wrote a guest post for Why Is This Interesting? where he endeavors to explain the phenomenon of mono and stereo mixes for popular albums in the s’60s and why those differences matter: The Mono vs. Stereo Edition.

If anything, I think David undersells the differences between those mixes. I’ve arrived at the decision that I almost always prefer the mono versions of ’60s records. I first heard the Beatles on stereo reissues in the s’70s and confess that I never truly got it until someone played me a mono pressing of Revolver. The same is true for the Stones catalog. You can hear mono mixes of the Beatles and Stones from your favorite streaming services if you dig deep enough into their online catalogs. Of course, those mixes sound a bit thin if you’re using Spotify.

David also alerted me to the sad news that American producer Shel Talmy just died at age 87. Talmy went to the UK in 1962 on a holiday, got a meeting at Decca and convinced them that he’d produced the Beach Boys for Capitol by waving around some acetates he’d gotten from his friend, the actual producer Nick Venet.

Shel immediately started producing hits, so no one cared if they ever figured out he was lying. There may be no producer who better understood how to make monophonic rock music than Shel, who gave us some of the toughest-sounding records in history by the likes of the Who (“My Generation” ), the Kinks (“You Really Got Me”), the Creation (“Making Time”), and the Easybeats (“Friday on My Mind”).

I made a Shel Talmy in Mono playlist (Apple Music only. You were expecting Spotify?). Hear just how tough his records sound for yourself.

8-Track of the Day