I suspect one reason the browsing and search experience is so slow and horrible on these services is that they don't want to present straightforward lists that

I suspect one reason the browsing and search experience is so slow and horrible on these services is that they don't want to present straightforward lists that would allow people to scrape their catalogs and put them head to head. Mainstream tech reviewers seem to have extremely mainstream tastes and insist that you won't notice the difference between the catalogs of YouTube Music (the smallest major service with about 60 million songs) and Apple Music (the largest with about 90 million). Even I noticed YouTube was missing a bunch of my favorite albums and I don't think any of my favorites could be called "obscure" unless you have a really liberal definition of that word. It would be interesting to see a list of the most popular artists missing from each service, or a venn diagram of record labels and rights groups, but I haven't found anything more detailed than isolated anecdotes and media coverage of individual artists trying to push Tidal and/or getting mad at Spotify.