I’m staring down the barrel of a fairly lumpy change. Spotify has become irksome. The pittance they pass on to artists rankled, but my discontent has recently been exacerbated by Spotify’s statement they’re only going to pay royalties to tracks which exceed 1,000 streams in a calendar year. Obviously, this hits the unsigned/up-and-coming artists hard because if they don’t reach that 1,000 stream threshold, they won’t receive Spotify’s derisory 0.03cent-per-play payment.
Step forward Qobuz, a French service which, for £10.83/month, is cheaper than Spotify. Qobuz pays significantly more royalties to artists and producers, doesn’t have any kind of minimum number of streams barrier, and seems to have about the same depth of music catalogue. There are utilities which will transfer playlists over to Qobuz from Spotify and (this was a key decider) I can link the Sonos One inbuilt Alexa directly to the Qobuz app, and it will play as seamlessly as Spotify did.
As with any cutover, there are 2 ways of doing this. I’m going for a staged implementation and I’m putting my money where my mouth is by volunteering my multiple playlists for the first cutover run. This’ll be fun!