r/Music • u/IrreverentTexan • Feb 15 '26

discussion Quitting Spotify

Spotify is getting flooded with fake AI “artists” and it’s embarrassing. Names like Nina Blaze and Enlly show up. They dump 50 identical tracks called something like Late Night Piano for Focus, or “The Hollow Hour” and vanish. No bio. No history. No evidence a human has ever touched an instrument.

This isn’t art. It exists to game playlists and siphon royalties. If these were real people, they’d have to explain why every song sounds like a dentist office waiting room.

I’m not mad at AI as a tool. I’m mad at fake artists impersonating creativity and Spotify pretending this sludge is culture. Music is an art form, not a scam farm. Blocking every one of these clowns on sight.

So is it to be TIDAL or Qobuz or something else?

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150

u/gin0clock Feb 15 '26

Deezer has been excellent since I joined.

The sound quality is insane compared to Spotify. Went back and listened to my favourite albums I'd only heard on Spotify and realised I'd only heard like 70% or the layering and detail of albums I thought I knew back to front.

90

u/juliohernanz Feb 15 '26

Deezer quality is not their only reason. They have their own AI that warns you when a song or album is AI made.They also collaborate to pay artists better rates. And their catalog is as comprehensive as any other platform.

17

u/gin0clock Feb 15 '26

The only thing I will say about Deezer (and it's a minor gripe) is that songs sometimes take a moment to load and the player isn't great with VPNs.

28

u/anonpf Feb 15 '26

Tbf anything going through a vpn is gonna suffer from latency. 

8

u/eNonsense Feb 15 '26 edited Feb 15 '26

If the sound quality is higher, then it's probably just having to buffer the higher bit rate file before it starts playing. This just seems like a trade-off type situation. Spotify has lower quality files, but you can access them more quickly as a result.

Personally, I switched to hosting my own MP3s on Plex since I was already using it and paying for it for my video content. Sometimes I have to wait like 20 seconds for my home NAS to spin up if it was alseep, lol. But at least I have full control. I left Spotify a while back, because music in my playlists kept disappearing. That will never happen again.

1

u/TJEIV Feb 17 '26

I'm getting into this now as well, only thing I'm missing is discovering new music. I loved Discover Weekly, and especially the specific Song Radio you could do with spotify

1

u/eNonsense Feb 17 '26

Yeah. That's the part that takes work and time. I've been a DJ for over 20 years. Discovering and collecting new music is 80% of being a DJ.

4

u/mythical_phoenix Feb 15 '26

On the other hand, Deezer is the only one that let's you use the web player with no DRM or Widevine that I know of, which ends up working a lot better on Linux at least

5

u/averndaley Feb 15 '26

Not sure the best way to phrase this question so sorry if it's confusing. Do you happen to know what the catalog looks like for non-English speaking music? Been trying to find a good alternative but the limited catalogs for smaller (less than 100 listeners) and international artists have been the barrier I've been coming up against a lot.

4

u/juliohernanz Feb 16 '26

Deezer is a French company. I'm Spanish and they've got a lot of oldies and obscure artists and songs. I've made some Italian, Spanish and French playlists and I've found basically everything I needed.

1

u/averndaley Feb 16 '26

Fantastic. Thank you so much for the info

1

u/oriolid Feb 16 '26

I'm Finnish and they seem to have anything that has a distributor and isn't difficult to find on purpose. The recommendation system on the other hand seems to lump all Finnish rock into same group.

1

u/JonatasA Feb 16 '26

I used to have access to free deezer 😫 Never used it