it's spotify wrapped season again, which means i need to do my due diligence and present some alternatives:
consider:
buying music on bandcamp!
it's the absolute best way to support artists, periodically has 'bandcamp friday's where artists get 100% of the cut on album sales, and is a great way of getting a line out to artists you love. you can follow their releases, get newsletter updates if they happen to post, tag your favorite track & leave a kind word on their album page. there's live-streamed shows & listening parties. it's great! please use it if you have the means to do so. make an account & keep all your music in the highest quality possible. it's yours! you don't need to forfeit it ever.
there's been a lot of awful mismanagement by their corporate overlords, but the core team is still there trying their best for artists & they deserve the support to keep the service going and persevere in the face of awful union busting & asset sales
using another service!
not all of them are great, but i will put in my two cents for qobuz. wtf is qobuz you ask? yeah i hadn't heard of it either, but after looking into them this year, i am very enthusiastic about the platform. specifically: artists reportedly get 4 CENTS (whole-ass cents) per stream, so it only takes like... 25 streams to make that artist a dollar. if you're listening to an OST that has, say, 60 tracks (like the chicory OST, which is on there), streaming the whole thing will generate ~$2.40. that's wild!!
another plus is that qobuz actually lets you purchase music in FLAC and even mp3s are at the highest quality provided by the distributor. in an age where very few services let you actually purchase music anymore (and itunes users having to do ridiculous contortions to get the files in the format that you actually want) this alone is a big selling point. you also don't have to subscribe to their streaming service to buy music, but you do get a discount if you do.
the main negative i've noticed is that literally every soundtrack on the platform is labeled 'film soundtrack' despite being for, say, tv, or games, or anything that isn't a film. hopefully they add more genre diversity to their categorization system.
anyway, this is not sponsored in any way, but with spotify on track to make their payouts even WORSE for small artists soon, i really would love everyone to look into ways to migrate off their service.
