Thanks! All of the services have a one-month free trial, and Tidal has a two-month $3 trial. I’m currently on the trial for most of them.

I would abolish banana peels. They cause far too many injuries and I think doing away entirely could calm everyone, especially those in banana-rich areas where peels are most common.

Oh you are correct, I was mistaken.

Over the past couple of months, I have tried out all the major streaming services as I moved away from Deezer, so I will give an overview of my perspectives on each.

Deezer

I used Deezer for the past five years, and for most of that time I loved it. In the past year they did a UI and branding overhaul which I didn’t really like, but it was fine. They have recently been getting more into music quizzes and games, which I am not very interested in. There was a big banner for games on the home screen at one point, but I ended up blocking it with UBlock Origin. I ended up leaving Deezer because they removed the option to sort downloaded music in any way. (I think they have added that back now)

Deezer has a fantastic range of curated playlists and radio stations, some of the best out of any service I have used. It has quality generated playlists and autoplay, and good algorithmic discovery.

Deezer seems to favour playlists; Your favourited playlists show in the sidebar at all times and there is no option to change this, I only listen to albums, so I don’t really like this.

They have a public forum for discussing Deezer and reporting incorrect artist catalogues.

In my time of using Deezer, I have noticed many annoying bugs and changes on Android, like when they temporarily removed the option to sort downloaded music and an ongoing bug where downloaded music isn’t playable offline.

I can’t figure out if they have a connect feature. Someone in this thread said they do, but I’ve never seen it.

The unofficial Linux app is just a basic electron wrapper.

Apple Music

Apple Music is a good streaming service, but it was a terrible experience to set up on Linux. I spent six hours trying to create an Apple account only to get stuck at a page where a button didn’t have any JavaScript attached to it, so it didn’t even let me.

Very infuriating, anyways, Apple Music doesn’t have an official Linux app, but the unofficial app https://cider.sh/ exists, and is the only fully-fledged non-website-wrapper app for a major streaming service that I know of on Linux. The app is impressively feature-rich, featuring connect, custom audio profiles, a fullscreen mode and miniplayer, real-time lyrics, and a plugin/theme store among many other things.

While the UI looks very nice and is customizable to an extent, there are many actions that require an extra click, such as favouriting an album, or editing a playlist, as many things are tucked away in menus. This, along with the excruciating account creation process is what led me to not choose Apple Music as my service of choice.

Discovery is good, although maybe not as good as on Spotify, Deezer, or Tidal, and the selection of curated playlists is less then what’s available on other services.

I have noticed UI bugs and inconsistencies, but nothing that largely detracts from the user experience.

Tidal

Tidal is pretty similar to Qobuz, and I don’t have many bad things to say about either of them.

It has all the features you would expect in a streaming service, and it does all of them pretty well. It has good algorithmically generated playlists and discovery, a clean, simple interface, and I’ve experienced no bugs. I don’t think it has anything like Spotify Connect.

The unofficial Linux app is an electron wrapper, but it does have some additional functionality that the official apps do not. Another unofficial GTK app also exists, called High Tide. Tidal is the service I ended up choosing personally.

Qobuz

Out of these, Qobuz is the one I have the least experience with. It seems pretty similar to Tidal in most regards, but seems more aimed towards audiophiles and has less automatic curation, and the manually curated playlists have are focused on a much narrower range of genres and artists, but are far more detailed and in-depth than any other service. The interface may also be nicer depending on your tastes, although it doesn’t have a lyrics view.

Qobuz is mostly known for allowing you to purchase music to download at full quality, which is pretty awesome.

The unofficial Linux app is a basic electron wrapper, but it doesn’t MPRIS support.

Tidal is Australian

Still not a thing. I switched away from deezer a month ago, when they removed the option to sort downloaded music and albums (why would they think that’s a good idea?) I am now on Tidal, and they’re audio quality is even better than deezer and Apple music, and I’m liking it a lot more.

Thankfully I live near the ocean so I’ll be in there a bunch.

This is really funny