On the day Spotify announced its first fiscal year of profitability, I canceled my paid subscription. My action was not in response to that news but in recognition that after a month of using TIDAL as my primary music streaming service, I didn’t miss the world’s most popular audio app enough to continue paying for it.

I switched to TIDAL at the beginning of 2025. I’m trying to live a more intentional digital life, and the question of the most ethical way to listen to music online led me to the service. It has been a fantastic replacement for the things on Spotify I had become too dependent on and less enamored with over time. 

The music on TIDAL sounds great! I can hear the difference in audio quality, especially when using my high-quality speakers and headphones. TIDAL has fewer algorithmic bells and whistles than Spotify. However, the service still values human curation by music aficionados. It is obsessed with the people who make music rather than celebrities or hyper-personalization. Those subtle shifts mean I am not overwhelmed by their homepage when I select my next listen. TIDAL forces me to be a more active music selector, which has led to an increase in complete album spins and artist-centric radio stations. It has also led to me listening to more music overall.

Spotify Wrapped and Last FM’s Yearly Listening Reports tell me I am a high-volume digital music listener annually. I’m generally amongst the top 5% of all users on those services in spins. I listen to about 80 songs a day every day. My consistency is a crazy outlier. 

In January, I pressed play 3900 times from over 960 different artists across nearly 1400 different albums and over 2400 unique songs. From what I saw in other people’s music listening wrap-ups for 2024, that might eclipse their digital streaming totals for the year. I’m a terrible customer of an audio streaming service. All that streaming means they likely are paying out all my monthly subscription payments in royalty distribution. I’m the kind of power user that subscription services have to mitigate in some way if their costs are variable by consumption, and I’m sure they do. Based on what I know about the digital subscription business, there’s a significant portion of dormant or extremely low-consumption users whose subscription fees have little to no royalty implications most months.

One of the reasons I switched to TIDAL was to get music artists and publishing rights owners the highest royalty payment I could. My spins in January could account for about $50 in royalty payouts or five times the value of a monthly TIDAL subscription. By comparison, those same listens on Spotify would equal $12, or about the total cost of their monthly premium tier. That’s what I intended to do!

My top five artists of the month should all earn at least a dollar from my listening, with Kendrick Lamar nearly making $2. On Spotify, that would be about 45 cents. Over time, I will likely generate the cost-equivalent royalties for my most loved albums as a digital or physical media purchase. 

This is the way.

There are other benefits to this switch. My New Arrivals playlist isn’t overrun with bedroom producers (or fake artists) gaming the algorithm like Release Radar had become on Spotify. Social sharing from TIDAL is service-agnostic. I’ve returned to Pocketcasts as my podcast-listening solution—a service for which I have a lifetime, no-cost membership. I had already given up on Spotify’s audiobook offering, having found the limitation of listening by time rather than by the number of titles nonsensical.

I do miss some of the more serendipitous discovery features that Spotify offers. And I’m spending much more time updating metadata on Last.fm. I’m not sure this is a negative, though. Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I enjoy data cleanup. It also is a better time suck than doomscrolling.

TIDAL’s lack of intelligent app switching is annoying. Not being able to have my current listening jump from device to device was a bit of magic on Spotify. So was Smart Shuffle. 

But I can feel confident that the creators are getting their rightful share in exchange for these missing features. At the same time, I listen to their work at the highest quality available and support music curators who have taste. It’s a more than fair trade-off.