Tidal pays more for the artist and has a higher quality streaming option if that matters to you. Qobuz is another good artist friendly stream that historically paid the most to artists but it has a bit smaller catalog than Tidal.

Tidal is great for selection and quality, but not usability like Spotify where I can control it from any device. Tidal works on my receiver and Amazon devices.

Like many home/IoT services, Spotify uses mDNS to enumerate and announce its peers when they are L3 local but they are also controllable remotely by dialing-home to their API albeit with a slightly longer delay. Spotify is hilarious when playing from the Everywhere group (all devices) where desktops, tablets, phones, the thermostat, stereo receiver, and Amazon Echo devices all insist on playing out of time like a crowd of teenagers singing a song.

On a slight tangent, mDNS had turned into an absolute nightmare for me. I must have tried 5 different FOSS Raspberry Pi streaming OSs, none of which did the Spotify cast integration actually work on, until I finally figured out it's because it's using mDNS and my router (despite being purchased in 2023 for $200) didn't support mDNS. There's also a bunch of other services (like Home Assistant) that just assume you have working mDNS and point everything to <appname>.local

I finally figured out where the service file was, and changed it to IP, and now it works.

I use Audials to aggregate internet radio. For curated music I mostly listen to KCRW and some Soma FM channels. Also, I use internet radio for news in German and Latvian to keep my language skills from rotting completely away.

I don't know how recent the feature is, but I recently stumbled upon YouTube Music's parameter-driven personal channel feature "Your music tuner." One of the parameters is how much music outside your favorites it will find for you. That works really well in my limited experience.

I've used Pandora for years but I'm switching to Spotify. Pandora's catalogue is tiny in comparison. And I don't care if they sponsor "questionable" podcasters (A.K.A Joe Rogan). In fact, that honestly makes me want to invest more in Spotify. I can listen to the latest obscure NYCHC and know that my music provider isn't being censored by CISA.

In ATX, but I don't give a shit about Joe Rogan either because he's a moron hit in the head one too many times which somehow translates into a celebrated champion of anti-intellectualism. Censorship, by customers or a platform, is cure worse than the disease.

Another example: Pluto TV (run by Paramount) hosts as much hate as AM radio in the form of OAN, Blaze, Newsmax, and (previously) RT America, OTOH they have Scripps, Cheddar, and Sky News.

Moral purity is the privilege of extremists appeasing their tribe through conformity to closed-mindedness and foot-stomping that they must live in a voluntary intellectual and reality apartheid. The American right and left are both guilty of this, perpetuating a division that was artificially introduced for profit reasons by grifters and widened by different flavors of mass media that promote these spheres of influence.

Qobuz. Amazon's insistence to push podcasts in my face, including in search results, have finally overcame my customer apathy and I switched, just like Google's insistence to push Youtube Music in my face pushed me to go to Amazon Music.

I've seen claims that they pay artists better than anyone else besides Tidal, but I've seen no official statements.