I used to be a Spotify Premium guy for two years, but deep down, I always knew it was pretty terrible in many ways. So in 2019, I finally switched to Apple Music… and never looked back.

However, last month I decided to give it another try for 30 days, and to make this painful experience easier, I took advantage of its one-month free trial. My only purpose was to see if it had gotten any better in these 7 years.

Spoiler alert: It's actually worse than I thought it was.

I then went on Reddit and X to see what people think of it, and did some research here and there. Eventually, the results validated my opinion about the green app.

I know some of you are still die-hard fans of Spotify. Maybe some of you probably spend half your day defending it on Reddit to strangers. But the numbers don't lie.

The harsh truth is that people are leaving Spotify, and they are leaving for incredibly valid reasons.

In 2026, the music streaming landscape is an absolute bloodbath, and Spotify is the one holding the leaky bucket.

To make matters worse, they recently hiked up the prices for Premium across the board. The student plan is now up to $7 a month. The individual plan currently sits at a hefty $13.

If you are sharing your account, Duo and family plans are now $19 and $22 a month, respectively.

Sure, an extra dollar or two might not seem like a massive jump to your monthly credit card statement. But it seriously adds up over the course of a year.

And when the competition is generally priced lower, you really have to stop and evaluate your life choices. You need to ask yourself what exactly you are getting for your hard-earned cash, unless you're earning it from shady means.

Surely, Apple Music has also raised its price from $9.99 to $10.99 a month, but it offers a ton of exciting features to compensate for the price hike.

Unlike Spotify, Apple Music hasn't been stuck on the same boring dark UI and vanilla music player since Infinity.

I used it for a solid month, and the entire experience just felt mentally exhausting. So allow me to explain what pushed Spotify toward its downfall and why everyone is quitting it in 2026.

How Spotify Got So Popular in the First Place

I have to give credit where credit is genuinely due. Spotify didn't just participate in the music streaming market; they built the damn thing from the ground up.

From its launch all the way back in 2008, it effectively pioneered the concept of unlimited music streaming as a subscription service

That was 7 years before Apple followed suit and rebranded its iTunes-based Music app to Apple Music. I seriously don't understand what took Apple so long to pivot. Oh, wait, it was profit. Silly me!

Anyway, think back to those dark days. We were either paying $0.99 per song on iTunes or risking our family computers by downloading shady files from LimeWire.

At the time, Spotify effectively became the anti-hero of the music industry. They were the ultimate legal weapon to combat digital piracy.

It certainly didn't happen overnight. But by negotiating complex deals with record labels themselves and utilizing a ton of marketing power, Spotify basically turned into a household name.

Today, Spotify sits at around 750 million monthly active listeners globally. Out of those massive numbers, 280 million are actual paid subscribers. That is roughly 32% of the entire global music streaming market.

Those are completely insane statistics. And there are genuine reasons why they achieved that level of sheer dominance.

For starters, their discovery algorithm is still terrifyingly accurate. It's arguably the absolute best in the business.

If you are a hardcore music enthusiast who likes exploring incredibly niche corners of internet subcultures, Spotify actually understands what you are into.

It understands what you are currently obsessing over. It even knows what obscure tracks you will probably like before you even see them coming.

What really made Spotify even more special was when its unique feature, 'Spotify Wrapped,' turned into an annual social media trend.

So, they clearly built a solid, functional foundation. But unfortunately, somewhere along the way, their executives and developers became too lazy and greedy at the same time.

Instead of stealing meaningful new features from Apple Music and making the app more exciting, they focused on improving the algorithm and avoided the necessary R&D expenses

The Reason For Its Downfall

Let's get back to my miserable one-month trial for a moment.

On day 1 itself, I started noticing the glaring software issues that normal Spotify users have just blindly accepted as normal.

First, let's talk about the audio. Spotify finally rolled out lossless audio into premium at no extra charge. If that sounds like a good thing to you, let me prove you otherwise.

Most of you haven't noticed this catch. Its lossless tracks are not actually high-res at 24bit/44.1 kHz FLAC.

In reality, it's just a microscopic step above the old 320 kilobit Ogg Vorbis playback that Spotify had as its top-quality option prior.

Sure, if you are sitting at a desk on a decent wired setup with a good DAC, a dedicated amp, and studio headphones, it yields a noticeable improvement in clarity.

But let's be completely real here. The vast majority of normal users out there do most of their listening with standard Bluetooth headphones anyway.

Bluetooth naturally limits the quality, so the update is basically entirely lost on most everyday people.

Now, this also applies to Apple Music, but as I previously mentioned twice in this article, Apple Music has a bunch of other cool features to compensate. Spotty, on the other hand, hasn't added any major new features for everyday average users.

And even for the hardcore audiophiles, the technical execution for Spotify lossless is just not as aggressive or impressive as Apple Music.

Apple Music actually offers higher-res lossless playback at up to 24bit/192kHz on a good number of tracks, and is literally cheaper than Spotify.

Now, the mediocre audio quality isn't even the most annoying part of the experience. The application itself has become an absolute, unnavigable mess.

There is simply no getting around the cold, hard fact that the home screen gets cluttered entirely too fast

Spotify constantly keeps introducing completely random other verticals to their platform. They aggressively push video content, random podcasts, and audiobooks.

Why? Because their executives need to artificially add perceived value to the subscription so they can comfortably charge us freaking more money.

Let's say you want to briefly break your habit and go slightly off the beaten path for some different, fresh music recommendations.

Your natural, human instinct is to slowly scroll down the page.

But when you actually do that on the default home screen, you have to painfully navigate past a giant pile of content you never asked for.

I absolutely do not care about the latest true crime podcast. I literally just want to find a new Eminem track to work out to.

This is coming directly from someone who mainly uses Spotify strictly as a music platform.

Maybe someone who is incredibly heavy into podcasts and audiobooks sees the actual value here. But for the rest of us, it's just exhausting digital noise.

Moreover, everyone is making podcasts these days. Literally one dude from every block is a podcaster with zero credibility. Don't even get me started on that.

Now, coming back to Spotify, I've been complaining a lot about it not having meaningful new features. Apparently, Spotify fanboys would like to introduce me to a feature called 'DJX'.

For those of you who have no clue what that is, it's basically Spotify's fully-voiced AI radio DJ, trying hard to give you a personalized radio station feel.

Initially, I honestly found it to be a pretty fun, quirky concept. I will definitely give it credit for being a novel idea.

But if you actually sit down and scrutinize it, DJX has a terrible, consistent tendency to wander way too far from your actual musical tastes.

Even with the software tools they've desperately added to manually reel the AI back in, it still throws massive curveballs that completely ruin the current vibe.

I am clearly not paying $13 a month for a robotic AI voice to unnecessarily talk over my favorite tracks.

And finally, we absolutely have to talk about the deeply uncomfortable topic of ethics in the music industry.

Anecdotally, Spotify has been widely known to not pay independent artists super well compared to other competing platforms

I am personally not entirely convinced that the extra dollar or two that millions of users are paying every single month is magically translating to artists getting paid more per listen.

This really makes you sit back and wonder where all of this massive extra cost is actually going.

As a massive publicly traded company, they legally have to look out for their bottom line in order to make their rich investors happy.

They will happily and intentionally make the user experience slightly worse for the end user if it means their stock price goes up a fraction of a percent.

But thankfully, as users, we absolutely do not have to put up with it anymore. There are better alternatives in the market.

Why Apple Music and YouTube Music Win Over Spotify in 2026

To save us from getting ripped off by Spotify, the competitors play an important role of superheroes in our lives.

Now, there are plenty of streaming services to freely choose from, but let's strictly talk about the two most popular ones that actually make financial sense right now.

Starting with the obvious choice, Apple Music. It's that app which I'd gladly defend even in my afterlife.

"But Mr. Geek, I use an Android phone. Do I need to switch to an iPhone for Apple Music?"

You should switch to an iPhone in general, let alone for the sake of Apple Music. But since we're specifically talking about Apple Music here, you don't have to own an iPhone to use Apple Music.

Not many people know that Apple Music is available for download from the Google Play Store, just like any other app. Also, it has a decent Windows client, if that concerns you.

As far as the overall feature set is concerned, it simply offers way more value for less money.

Apple Music currently sits at a very reasonable $10.99 a month for individuals. That's $2 cheaper than Spotify's monthly price.

It perfectly covers the basic fundamentals. It basically has the exact same massive library as Spotify these days.

Now, I will admit, the automated recommendations and discovery algorithms might not be quite up to par with Spotify's terrifying accuracy.

But it isn't objectively bad by any means. You get cleanly notified when new singles and highly anticipated albums come out from artists you follow.

The best part about Apple Music is that it keeps improving with every major iOS update. Recently, it added Playlist Playground features, which let you create playlists using Apple Intelligence, saving you a weekend's worth of time.

I've already mentioned this before, but Apple Music significantly outperforms the competition in terms of raw audio quality.

They set a much higher technical standard, with high-res, lossless files for a growing share of their tracks.

On top of that, Apple Music natively lets you listen with spatial audio and fully supported Dolby Atmos if you have the right hardware, such as AirPods Pros, and other Dolby Speakers.

They even have a ridiculously fun built-in karaoke feature cleverly called Apple Music Sing.

It uses intense device processing to intelligently strip the vocal track from popular songs, leaving just the raw instrumentals for you to loudly sing along with, using scrolling lyrics.

Now, let's quickly look at the second major competitor that everyone seems to ignore: YouTube Music.

This is a really cool, underrated product, and a surprising number of people are already paying for it without even realizing it.

If you already pay for YouTube Premium to get ad-free playback, YouTube Music is also included in that plan

It features the same massive music library that easily rivals both Apple and Spotify on any given day.

But it has one massive, completely undeniable added benefit that forever sets it apart from everyone else on the market.

It natively integrates user-uploaded audio content from YouTube at large.

This means that you can seamlessly play audio-only versions of acoustic covers, rare live performances, and fan remixes perfectly in the background.

You can instantly add them to your personal music library just the same as you would with expensive official studio tracks.

As someone who's getting increasingly deep into superhero background music and anime covers, this is an absolutely huge feature.

Because of highly strict licensing reasons, those creators can only upload covers on their YouTube channels. They can't upload them directly to Spotify or Apple Music.

Now, to be completely fair, there are some noticeable software trade-offs.

The UI layout for YouTube Music is probably the absolute worst of the three

The main homepage feels like a total, unorganized mess compared to Apple Music's cleanly organized approach.

Also, the discovery algorithm is heavily influenced by your regular YouTube viewing history.

But thankfully, just exactly like Apple Music, they make abandoning Spotify incredibly easy.

YouTube Music has excellent migration tools built right into the app via a service called Tune My Music

It fully supports pulling your entire library and playlists directly from Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon, and even Soundcloud. Also, this service is free.

At this point, I'm glad I was thinking ahead in 2019. Switching to Apple Music back then was certainly one of the best decisions of that year.

Also, looking back at Spotify felt like hooking up with that ex who has aged horribly due to bad eating habits.

Anyway, what's your take on this? Are you still composing with Spotify, or have you moved on to a better service? Feel free to express it in the comments.

Now, if you've found this article insightful, it'd be great of you if you could give it a clap. It would mean a lot to me!

Likewise, you can also follow and subscribe to receive email notifications as soon as I publish a new one. Thanks for reading!

It's time I delete Spotify from my phone and apologize to Apple Music with a diamond ring.