New Year’s Resolutions: How and why I am leaving Spotify in 2026
How are you meant to go on when somebody who has been an integral part of your everyday life for years on end becomes unrecognisable? Having committed a multitude of inexcusable actions and, if you’re really being honest with yourself, treating you like dirt, there comes a time when it’s simply time to go your separate ways. I am, of course, talking about Spotify.
Despite being the dominant force within the realm of music streaming and most likely the predominant method in which people listen to music in 2026, it has become increasingly difficult to justify Spotify over the past few years. Controversy after controversy, and all the while paying artists peanuts for their discography, there has to be a breaking point eventually.
It has been many months – years, in fact – since I first tried to rid myself of Spotify for good, but it isn’t such an easy task. Virtually every song, album, and artist that I have encountered and adored over the past nine years has been rigorously catalogued on the app; it has accompanied me through many a car journey, failed attempts to get back into jogging, and endless studying sessions.
At the same time, though, the app doesn’t have quite the market monopoly it did back in 2017. Today, there are countless alternatives out there, and with Spotify continuing to make a litany of at best questionable, at worst morally reprehensible, decisions, it has become harder and harder to justify forking over £12.99 a month, so my main resolution for 2026 was to can it for good.
For the uninitiated, you might be asking yourself ‘what exactly is wrong with Spotify?’ and the answer to that question is far more multifaceted than you might expect from a simple music streaming service. For starters, the platform is notoriously bad for musical artists themselves, paying out a tiny fraction of a penny for each stream and making it nigh on impossible for artists – particularly smaller, independent artists – to make a living from their work.
Seemingly, though, the money that Spotify doesn’t use to pay artists isn’t being used to pay its employees a fair wage, either. In fact, back in 2023, the company sacked 1500 employees (around 17% of its entire workforce) in an effort to cut costs and maximise profits, something which billionaire owner and CEO Daniel Ek unconvincingly described as being “incredibly painful for our team” at the time.
On top of all that, Ek used a portion of the colossal profits he has generated from Spotify to invest in the AI-based weapons and defence company Helsing, and the Israeli company Riverside, both of which have – albeit disputed – connections to the Israeli state and the ongoing genocide being carried out in Palestine.
None of this information is particularly novel, of course. Back in 2022, if you cast your mind back, the likes of Jodi Mitchell and Neil Young – among various others – joined the growing number of artists and creatives removing their material from the platform, although that boycott did lose some of its power when Mitchell and Young quietly put their material back on the platform some years later.
After so many years of this deterioration and artistic exploitation, though, 2026 was the year that I decided I would finally rid myself of this rather ugly dependency on Spotify.
For a while, I tried to kid myself that I could go back to the old days of MP3 players, but carrying around another device doesn’t particularly appeal to me, and the same issue cropped up when I very briefly considered recording all of my former Spotify playlists onto cassette and breaking out my old Walkman. No, if I was going to keep my resolution and say goodbye to Spotify forever, another streaming service must take its place.
That decision brings up a wealth of other problems, namely the abundance of choice. The likes of Apple Music, Amazon, and Tidal have been hot on the heels of Spotify for a while now, and Apple Music even offers higher audio quality and around double the royalty rates of its Swedish counterpart. Then again, switching one evil company for another seems to defeat the point of my new year’s resolution.
Another contender in the early days of my plans to switch was Bandcamp, both for the amount that it pays out to artists and to the fact that I have been steadily amassing releases on there for some years already. The only major drawback, of course, is that a lot of the ‘classics’ aren’t on Bandcamp, and it’s difficult to imagine Paul McCartney sitting down to upload The Beatles’ back catalogue to the website anytime soon.
In the end, the French platform Qobuz was my choice, both for its incredible audio quality and the fact that it pays more to artists than any other streaming service at the moment, and now I wish I had made the switch far sooner. The difference in audio quality is immediately apparent, and the app’s usability certainly rivals Spotify’s, except with human-curated playlists and a refreshing lack of artificial intelligence.
Sure, it is not perfect – there are, for instance, a plethora of my favourite northern soul tracks which aren’t available on the platform, and the one version of The Mekons’ ‘Where Were You’ available isn’t the greatest. What’s more, you cannot customise the cover art of your playlists, and multiple different artists with the same name are grouped together on the same page, presenting the obscure indie rock album Miracle of Modern Living by Confidence Man on the same level as the Australian dance masters.
Ultimately, though, my chosen replacement for Spotify has been more than adequate. Not only do I no longer have to worry about my hard-earned subscription fee going towards AI military technology or lining the pockets of a billionaire, but the artists that have given me so much joy over the years are receiving a much bigger cut of their hard-earned royalties.
Spotify is not going away, at least not anytime soon, but it seems that more and more music fans in 2026 are looking for alternatives to the streaming giant, and with good reason too: exploitation of any form can only last so long before something breaks.
So, if – like me – you have been looking to break that cycle of artistic exploitation for a while now, let this be your sign to go for it, and enter the world of guilt-free lossless audio.
