Leaving Spotify for Deezer

Six months ago I decided to leave Spotify after 10 years as a paying customer. The straw that broke the camels back was the appearance of a lot of AI created music on the platform. For years I had heard the same thing about Spotify not paying artists fairly, but the switching cost always felt too great.

I mentioned I was doing this on my Instagram story and got way more interest than I expected. It turned out that a lot of people were having similar thoughts but didn't know how to go about it.

So, I ended up posting a bit of a 'how-to' and saving it as a highlight (you can watch it here).

The product I decided to move to was Deezer. Mostly because of their public stand on AI use on the platform.

6 months of Deezer

Honestly, the product is fine. It turns out, for me anyway, that I don't use a lot of the functionality that Spotify had, so Deezer wasn't missing anything.

Sorting Liked Songs by Most Recent

One very annoying issue that I had was that while I was able to copy my ~5,000 liked songs over easily, I was not able to order them by most recent. Which is primarily how I use that feature. I like tracks and then open the Liked Songs every day to get more familiar with them. After a couple of weeks, it was fine, but might be an idea for Deezer to look at.

Overall App Performance

Deezer is slow. Very slow. Painfully slow if you do not have a good connection. This means I have to turn off my wifi in the mornings to load the music before I hit the elevator, otherwise I won't be able to load my music until I'm out the door. Again, a small thing, but it makes a big difference to daily use.

Offline Mode

Clearly Spotify had done a lot of work on not only how to handle offline mode, but also how they deal with internet connectivity. I would almost always be able to listen to songs I hadn't turned to available offline between subway stops. My guess is they take the most recent few tracks and just assume you will be playing them so download them without asking. The result is that you can move in and out of 5g connections fairly seamlessly. Deezer would be a disaster if you were commuting on the subway every day.

Vibes & UI

Deezer hired Koto to do their brand. I like it! It's fun and the type and animations are nice. But, I don't think the team has translated it well to the product, or rather, they have leant too much on the brand. Products should be useful before they are beautiful. Of course, they should be both, but at times (Playlists, Explore) the product feels like it's screaming Deezer too much and not giving me the solutions I need.

Final Thoughts

A few years ago, I put my iPhone in a drawer and spent 3.5 weeks with a dumb phone. I wrote that the only things I really missed were a touch keyboard, Maps, Camera and Spotify.

Music streaming apps are, for most people, one of the few non-native apps we truly use daily. And they are also not entirely utility either (compared to iMessage or Email). There is room for curation and exploration and discovery. This presents a challenge that I find super interesting.

Can you strike the balance between reliable, trusted music utility and clever curation and recommendation engine?

Can you make a product that feels like Questlove riding the L-train?

Is the L-train the best reference for reliability? Maybe not, but it's definitely not the G-train.

...

Spotify feels like it's losing cultural capital. Switching is annoying, but not out of reach. I think there is room here for Deezer, Tidal, etc. to make moves, but you have to meet them on performance and product experience and then out-perform them on everything else.