Why didn’t I go sooner? I justified staying by telling myself I’d use Bandcamp to buy the albums and songs I listened to a lot, which I did, while using Spotify for convenience. That, and the same reasons I still use Gmail: I felt locked in (all those saved songs and playlists) and that the costs of switching would be too high (I would surely lose access to countless songs by switching over). But I am here to tell you today that both of those counts are absolutely false.
Small world, a friend just posted on Mastodon about leaving Spotify, and it’s just one of many similar posts lately. I think this time they may really be in trouble.
Great article, love to see others ditching the algorithm. I would have liked it if they’d included stats for SoundCloud, since that’s the one my family is on (mostly it’s for my kid, who doesn’t have the means to collect physically and all that), but instead I’ll just have to look them up myself. I’ve heard great things about Qobuz from everywhere, though, and I may switch to them once the kid has grown.
This article touched on just about everything except for one point I’ve noticed since building my own music library: a lot of people fear having less choice overall, but I’ve found it makes me appreciate the music I do have a lot more. That’s kind of the way we used to do things in the past, but when you’re not getting new songs everyday, it stops being background noise and and you get to really know your library a lot more intimately. I keep thinking back to the point I heard about Spotify saying that people don’t want “good music,” they want a “soundtrack” to the things they’re doing each day, and it just really rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t want to tune out most of the music I listen to daily, I want to know it really, really well. I don’t want it to be cheap and replaceable, and I don’t think the artists who make it want that either.
I hope that makes sense–I’m a bit cloudy and haven’t finished my tea yet today!
a lot of people fear having less choice overall, but I’ve found it makes me appreciate the music I do have a lot more
Buying a new album used to be an EVENT. I remember lining up outside music stores for midnight releases! Taking the album home, reading through the liner notes, blasting the album on repeat, figuring out which songs you loved and which ones would end up skipped… you just don’t get that experience anymore when you’re encouraged to treat the music you listen to like it’s 24/7 background noise on shuffle.
I may write a longer blog post about this, but IMO, ditching an evil streaming service (like Spotify) for one of the better alternatives Brian Merchant suggests (like Qobuz) still isn’t solving the core issues created by streaming services. I personally try to buy music on CD when I can. When I can’t, I buy through Bandcamp or iTunes (the latter only happens if the artist isn’t on Bandcamp). I only use streaming (Deezer’s free tier) for discovery purposes if I know nothing about an artist I’ve seen recommended.
I just don’t get it when people fret about having “less access” to music if they stop streaming, because they can’t afford to buy 10+ albums a month. You don’t … have to listen to so much new music in a month? We all managed just fine prior to streaming, back when we could only afford to buy a couple new albums a month (if that). We also arguably had WAY more appreciation for the music we listened to.
With the full acknowledgement that I’m an outlier, from a very cursory glance I have 762 songs liked with the majority of them being from different albums. The biggest hurdle for me isn’t so much future purchases as it is that initial “buy in”, so to speak. I genuinely listen to and enjoy a wide variety of music and tend to struggle listening to one singular artist at a time. I also have ADHD, so connect those dots as you’d like lol.
Spotify has also helped expose me to a lot of foreign music that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to experience. Any time the wrapped mentions how many countries the music you listen to come from, I have never been under the double digits.
But, the algorithm has gotten significantly worse in the last few years. Early on it helped expose me to a lot of smaller artists, but now it only seems to play the same 10 songs. So, I’m not even getting the variety that drew me to the platform to begin with. Especially with the way it handles shuffling playlists.
I will disentangle myself from it eventually, but it’s looking like it’ll be a long way down the line. Especially, because I just don’t feel super comfortable buying songs digitally. I prefer physical media, and a lot of the bands I listen to are so small they don’t actually have any physical media.
Only tangentially related, but I hate how the article doesn’t actually link to most of the services it recommended (or at least not in a way that’s super obvious to me). Makes it a lot more tedious to actually check out what they’re recommending.
From an old VC funded streaming service to a new VC funded streaming service. I think people are better served questioning the model here, instead of an individual service.
To wit, this comment on the piece from someone with experience from the music streaming industry:
Low per-stream royalties are usually a signal of a service’s success.
Streaming services commit to paying roughly the same % of people’s subscription money out to rightsholders. When a service is good, people listen to more music, which lowers the per-stream royalty rate. But time spent on the service is also one of the most important indicators of subscriber retention: the less time spent, the more likely people are to cancel their subscription.
This is embedded in all of music streaming. If Qobuz were better at getting people to listen more, their per-stream royalties would drop, but their overall payouts would likely rise, as they’d hold on to more subscribers (!).
The good thing is that people are questioning the status quo at all. I think that eventually there will be room for a service that makes it super easy to play your own music collection across all devices. Kinda like the old iTunes, without DRM and the need for manual syncing.
ive been in the process of quitting spotify in favor of local files but now that its wrapped season i will definitely miss getting a fun summary of my yearly listens… it feels a bit silly that THIS is the 1 thing ill miss
If you sign up for a listens tracking service like Last.fm or ListenBrainz, they can generate the summaries at the end of the year (or in the case of ListenBrainz, whenever you feel like it based on custom time criteria). Here’s mine so far:
unfortunately my mp3 player has no way to track what i listen to and adding them manually wouldnt be as exact since i tend to loop songs a lot (so much so that youtube told me i was in the top 1% of an artist with 4.2M listeners in november just because i looped 1 song for a bit over a week )
i will just have to make peace with not having a recap anymore…
