I switched to Tidal and have been pleased so far. It's not perfect, but it is focused on music, has a pretty good interface, and pays artists better than Spotif

I switched to Tidal and have been pleased so far. It's not perfect, but it is focused on music, has a pretty good interface, and pays artists better than Spotify does. Reasons I was unhappy with Spotify: - They went all in on podcasts at the expense of the music interface. Too many little design choices trying to steer me into podcasts when I'm there for music. - Their podcast strategy relies on leveraging their market position instead of adding value to the market. - Trying to replicate Patreon - Buying up a catalog of exclusive podcasts - Not going to respond to any comments about this point, but the Joe Rogan thing left a sour taste in my mouth as well. In addition to other aspects of that debacle, it was not a sound business strategy. The podcast app I use (PocketCasts) is generally pretty good, but it has enough annoyances that I thought I might as well try to switch and get all of my podcasts on Spotify. I couldn't get special Patreon feeds because Spotify doesn't support them. The reason is they want to roll out their own Patreon-like podcast payments mechanism. But as of when I left, they had not rolled it out across the board, and the podcasts I listen to were not supported. I'm not sure what their value proposition to podcast producers is that would get them to switch from Patreon to Spotify, but I imagine that has something to do with the trouble rolling that out. I don't recall the details, but I wasn't all that impressed with the Spotify podcast functionality as a user either. If they spent money on paying musicians more instead of podcasters, made a podcast app worth using, and played nicely with the podcasting sphere, I probably would've stayed with them. They got big because they solved problems. Then they shifted their strategy to leveraging their market position instead of solving problems. A sure sign a company has lost its way.