Survey reveals your favorite Spotify alternative

Spotify is the first name in music streaming, but from an increasingly jam-packed app interface to concerns about artist payout and leadership conduct, it’s not hard to come up with reasons a music fan might want to consider alternatives. It’s a crowded field, filled with heavy-hitting alternatives like YouTube Music, Tidal, Deezer, and more. In a recent poll, we asked which of a few other options you prefer — and there’s a clear winner.

Given the choice between Bandcamp, Deezer, SoundCloud, Tidal, and YouTube Music, Google’s music app came out ahead by a wide margin. Nearly half of survey respondents preferred YouTube Music — taking out the “other” option, YouTube Music got more votes than all the other options in our survey combined.

Tidal came in a distant second with about 17% of votes, followed by Deezer at 11%, with Bandcamp and SoundCloud trailing at about 11% and 8%, respectively.

Which of these Spotify alternatives do you think is best?

“Other” picked up more votes than either Bandcamp or SoundCloud at nearly 9%. Comments on our post containing the poll point to popular options like Amazon Music and Apple Music, as well as smaller players in the space, including Pandora and Qobuz. A couple of options I’d never heard of also came up: offline music player Musicolet, and iBroadcast, an app that lets you upload and then stream your own audio files like Google Play Music used to do.

I’m not too surprised to see YouTube Music in first place here, though I wouldn’t necessarily have expected it to nab half of all votes. What do you think? Does this distribution make sense to you? Are you using a different app we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments.