After dropping Spotify early this year to seriously test Qobuz, I've recently introduced Apple Music into the mix. A few months into this dual approach, here's how I'm thinking about streaming services now.

Why Qobuz Works (When It Works)

Using Qobuz has—for the most part—been a genuine pleasure. Its narrow focus on high-fidelity music and intentional listening is refreshing in a market obsessed with keeping content streaming at all costs. With a fraction of the resources of major players, Qobuz takes a disciplined approach—they're not chasing growth but aiming for about 1% of the market* while delivering excellent audio quality, paying artists well, and encouraging discovery through human-made playlists and music journalism.

But this focus comes with trade-offs. For someone who listens extensively, creates many playlists, and likes to organize them heavily, Qobuz has friction points. The high-quality files can cause delays and lag, especially when flying through material while sequencing playlists. Basic features like custom playlist covers and folders are missing. Little of this matters when you're sitting down for intentional album listening—which is exactly what Qobuz is designed for.

Apple Music's Evolution

Apple Music is a different approach. After regaining access through a family Apple One subscription, I gave it another serious look and was surprised to find it finally maturing into what it should have been all along.

My historical beef with Apple Music was that it felt clunky and undercooked compared to competitors like Spotify or the late, great Rdio. The basic UX was confusing at best and I often felt Apple took their placement in the OS for granted while the competition hustled for innovation. In recent months I’ve detected a shift; particularly with OS26. It not only feels more natural to use but includes some helpful features I’ve missed on Qobuz: custom art, folders, easy playlist editing, and faster performance.

The app now offers genuine design delight again. One example: you can play and shuffle folders and subfolders within them. I keep "notebook" playlists organized by year in nested folders, and I can shuffle individual playlists, everything from a specific year, or my entire collection. It may be niche, but I feel seen. Also, the introduction of AutoMix between songs is a nice add and alternative to the classic crossfade for playlists. It's impressive when it works and funny when it fails.

The Apple option isn't perfect— they don't pay artists as much as Qobuz† (though they’re reasonably close) and oddly, there's still no equivalent to Spotify Connect for seamless device switching. That said, it's now very good to excellent on most fronts.

The Setup for the Minute

Things change fast but for now I think I'll be sticking with Apple Music for everyday, on-the-go listening and active playlist management. For focused, intentional listening—the equivalent of stepping up to my turntable, I may keep giving Qobuz a go, though I’m not sure how sustainable juggling two streaming main services really is when the catalogues are very similar and I'm already juggling so many other sources—internet radio, apps like radiooooo and records.

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*Dan Mackta from Qobuz talks about their approach in this interview.

†A serious caveat being that payouts are complicated and there is the matter of the paradox of scale vs. rate. It's more ethical to have a higher rate per stream, but if the service doesn't have the user base to offer scale, it may not mean a whole lot to the artists' pocket in the long run. I still consider payout to be a major factor in my selection of a streamer as it represents a level of respect to the artist. At this time, I believe Apple to be a reasonable choice in this regard as it has a subscription base approaching 100m while Qobuz's user base, while not confirmed, is likely in the 200k range.