Can someone give me the rundown of Deezer vs. Qobuz vs. Tidal? I've been using Tidal and I like it well enough but I'm curious about the other lossless options.
I'm pretty sure I've read Qobuz has the highest payout of any streaming service, plus you can actually buy music. Also afaik Qobuz never jumped on the mqa scam train. Tidal wasn't even giving you lossless music when you asked for lossless music for the longest time.
I haven't tried to use Qobuz' customer support, so I can't comment on that. As for paying the musicians directly vs paying the label; that's good to know. I hadn't thought about the fact that labels like to take massive cuts; so even if the cut is larger, the fact that it's being filtered through the label means the artist themselves gets a smaller cut.
As far as MQA, I've heard that's kinda half-true? Iirc, if a song had an MQA version, then Tidal played the MQA version when you asked for lossless. However, if it didn't have an MQA version, then you got true lossless. I've heard they've fixed it now, but when I was looking at streaming services a few years ago it was just after the MQA controversy erupted, and the MQA thing took Tidal off my list of services I was interested in so I never actually tried it out. I might check it out again at some point and see what the library is like.
I like Deezer. I've been using it and telling people about it since Spotify was insistent about being focused on chasing a politically charged content (over) investment instead of delivering quality, behavior driven content based on their algo.