I think a few apps do this if you don’t open them before take off to verify you have an active subscription
Apple Music.
I still predominantly buy music digitally so I use my iTunes Library as my primary way of listening to music. When I want try new stuff AM is right there and it’s considerably cheaper to have it rolled in with my other subscriptions rather than pay another service separately. I guess that’s how they get you.
I also just really fucking hate Spotify as a company, and especially hate Daniel Ek.
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For anyone confused by this statement, some of the spotify threads on here are worth a read
Especially this one
Yeah I’d agree with all of this. I’m on iOS rather than android so
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last fm scrobbles do work! But unlike Spotify, if you have no/poor signal, it doesn’t store them until you do. But it’s mostly fine. 7/10
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the app is an absolute storage hog - this is well documented by users, basically it never lets go of downloaded content even if you tell it to. I did a fresh install in January and my app is currently taking up about 70gb (!!!)
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if you delete something from a playlist on the mobile app, it sometimes comes back. Right before your eyes! If you delete things on the desktop, sometimes other things will disappear.
I would say it’s got broadly better since I started using it in early 2024. It doesn’t seem to freeze up as much. But it still isn’t great, and stuff with the company (multiple rounds of redundancies) doesn’t give me a lot of faith in the future.
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On the storage bit, if you uninstall the app and then reinstall, is all that downloaded data still there?
(thankfully I’m blessed with a lot of storage space as I definitely got a much larger HD on my phone than I paid for by mistake, so not too much of an issue but I don’t like thinking it’s taking up that amount of storage space)
I use Qobuz and have done for around six months now. I’m an Android user.
It does cost more, but I’m in the fortunate position that the few extra pounds a month isn’t an issue to me, and I don’t mind paying extra for fairer payments for artists.
Generally I’m pretty happy with it, there are aspects of the UI I much prefer to Spotify. It also seems to sync up to last.fm without any issues, although I don’t spend much time combing through my account.
There are a few artists missing from the library that I could get on Spotify because I listen to a lot of Russian music and a few metal artists I also struggle to find on there. On the flipside, some of my beloved albums are there which aren’t consistently on Spotify (Cannibal Ox’s Iron Galaxy springs to mind).
I wish the desktop app synced more nicely with my mobile app. I have lots of albums downloaded on my phone which don’t appear on my laptop, I’m sure this wasn’t an issue back when I was using Spotify. I don’t use my laptop for listening that often, so it doesn’t bother me too much.
There is also supposed to be some curated content, but my weekly playlist doesn’t seem tailored to me, really at all. Maybe it needs more likes and favourites rather than raw listening data? There is a small part of me that misses aspects of Spotify’s recommendations, even though at the time I felt like AI was being increasingly overused and making it kind of weird and broken.
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No, it goes away. But as there’s no “clear cache” option within the app, and iOS doesn’t offer one in the settings (unlike Android), it’s the only way to free up the space.
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I’m not on any of them at the moment - I have a huge physical media collection and I also get to hear lots of new music through other sources. However, if I did subscribe to a streaming service then I’d probably go for Qobuz because of the sound quality and the impression of fairness that they bring to the business. I’ve also met one of their curators who seems to have good taste.
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It kind of does, in that Replay (their Spotify Wrapped equivalent) feature works year round and breaks down by month - I just had a look and I could see my top artists, albums and songs for each (completed) month so far this year.
I like AM for its integration with the rest of my music library - all my rips, dodgy bootlegs, Bandcamp purchases etc are all in the same app with my streaming.
There are also, on mobile at least, a variety of third party apps that are basically skins for the Apple Music player - I use one called Marvis which is ultra customisable for appearance and functionality.
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Apple Music.
The app itself is fine. Not great for new music discovery, but I quite like that. I find enough new stuff on places like DiS.
iTunes Match the killer feature for me. Have about 35gb of music uploaded that isn’t on streaming that I can access in a sort of private cloud.
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Spotify - I used to love it but no escaping how evil a company it has become. So a couple of years ago I changed to…
Tidal - Sound quality is great. I never had an issue with the UI and I don’t cast so never had an issue with that either. The curated playlists/daily mixes are the best thing about it - you basically get playlists based around the songs you’re into roughly organised by genre, and they add in songs you haven’t heard before. It’s really well done. Having said that I have recently done a trial and subsequently committed to…
Qobuz - The sound quality is somehow better than Tidal to my ears even though they both claim to be lossless. The UI is good and you can break down your library by record label and the awards albums have received which is novel. You get a magazine with new album recommendations and integrated biographies of artists/album reviews. And they pay the artists the most as far as I’m aware. I’ve only been using a month or so but the only downsides so far are the extra cost and the lack of daily mix that Tidal has. I’m going to stick with it I think.
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Tidal does this (I think).
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It does not (I used to make extensive use of them on Spotify.)
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I definitely made a folder to put all my daughter’s playlists in very recently. Is that not the feature that was asked for?
I can’t check anyway, deleted the app.
Edit: no I didn’t!
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Ah the question was about folders within folders, which Spotify allows and Tidal doesn’t. I don’t think Apple Music has them either.
Ah ok, then Tidal cannot do that (confirmed). Sorry @jack_on_fire, as you can tell my playlists folder is like the Wild West.
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I wonder it there’s a way we could start building platform agnostic tools that make you a playlist on your platform of choice? I’ll have a dig into this. Maybe it’s something I could “vibe code” with AI 
Fantano weighing in…
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Daily mixes are coming for Qobuz, they’re already in the beta app
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