In a similar boat but switched to Apple Music. I tried Tidal for a couple of months but it seemed like they are more interested in promoting Beyoncé and other friends of the owner than to help me discover music I love.

Haha I also complained about that on their support forum. They claimed it was a recommendation.

Coincidentally this is the reason I quit Tidal after just a couple of months: they would push commercial hip-hop artists everywhere even though I am not into that.

I would bet that on Spotify most people discover music by listening to personalized generated playlists and not by waiting for ads to guide them. Have you ever used Spotify?

After trying to find an app with something even close to Spotify Connect I gave up and switched to Apple Music and replaced my speakers with newer Denon that have Apple streaming support.

It was the choice between letting Spotify fuck me over again and again and spending a few hundred dollars on new speakers. Annoying but fuck Spotify and their relentless upsells, ads, podcasts, books, etc

(I feel pretty strongly about that because I used it daily since they released their beta version close to two decades ago).

That’s an odd take. You are conflating completely different things. It costs close to nothing for artists to get their music on Spotify ($25 a year for several releases if I remember correctly).

There is no promise from Spotify that they will guarantee discoverability. Tens of millions of releases are uploaded to Spotify annually, how do you surface that to users?

Paying for promotions is ads. Artists (or their labels) are fully responsible for buying ads. They are advertisers. They spend money because they want to become more popular.

Users, on the other hand, buy a paid product. When they become the product it’s not by choice and it’s not because that improves user’s experience.