Why?

1. Lack of Feature Parity

2. Stickiness of library transfer

3. Stickiness of social network effects

4. It’s still better ethically than Apple Music or YouTube Music, which behave anti-competitively

1: I’ve tried out Quobuz, it’s pretty good, but it does not have the Jam / Group Session feature which me and my friends use constantly while gaming remotely. It also does not have an Xbox app which I use while playing games. I find Spotify’s recommendations somewhat underwhelming, but Quobuz has a noticeably worse recommendation engine, at least for my genres and tastes. Those are the features that lack parity that matter to me, but for some others, it’s things like amplifiers having built-in Spotify, or there being a Roku or Playstation app or something.

2: Quobuz uses a third party service to automatically transfer your library, which worked pretty well, but did require jumping through a bunch of hoops and subscribing to a trial subscription that I then had to cancel. It also did not find matches for some songs. Could I make it work if I had enough reason to switch? Yeah, probably, but the lack of feature parity (/roadmap that includes them) is enough to dissuade me from really trying.

3: In addition to friends on Spotify all using Jams, there’s also an inherent niceness to just being able to text people Spotify links, especially since there’s no cross platform linking service that would otherwise make sharing music easy.

4: Supporting Spotify may not be great, but its still better than supporting trillion dollar anti-competitive corporations like Apple and Google.