Decoupling from Spotify

Motivation

Spotify has been effective at being my one-stop shop for music discovery, storage, and listening for about a decade now. While convenient, I’ve been convinced that there are several compelling reasons¹ to wean myself off it.

Royalties

For starters, it doesn’t pay small artists as much as I’d like; I end up buying albums directly anyway, so I’d prefer to make use of those purchases rather than just treat these digital album acquisitions as glorified tips. Bandcamp is the gold standard in making sure money gets to the people who created the music.

Discovery

I haven’t enjoyed Spotify’s recommendations either. In general, I’m averse to recommendation systems that operate on nothing other than my consumption patterns. TikTok and YouTube have been pretty effective at discerning what kinds of videos I’m interested in, but my musical tastes are far more volatile, and Spotify understandably sucks at guessing when I’m in the mood for novelty and when I’m not. Even when it works, there’s something unpleasant about some other entity deciding unilaterally what I should see or hear, where my own agency is reduced to skipping.

Environmental impact

What makes the failure of Spotify’s recommendation system even worse is how much compute resources go into failing to predict my interests. Alex Ross’s article¹ goes into some of the economics of datacentres, and the amount of power and water these facilities draw is fascinating. While a lot of these places are built with sustainability and clean energy in mind, that only blunts the profound impact they have. As venture capitalists usher in a new age of power-hungry recommendation technology, consumers should question whether all of its costs are justified.

Ownership

The strongest reason is that it makes sense for me to own the music, given that I enjoy some albums enough that I can listen to them for many years, and I’d rather not pay over a hundred dollars a year for the privilege of retaining access to them. There also exists the unlikely possibility of the music simply disappearing from Spotify, due to the caprices of the rights holders or some other dispute in which I would never be consulted. In contrast, I don’t care about owning movies to the same extent, since I rarely desire² to watch a movie after I’ve seen it.

My approach

Discovery

In contrast to the discovery experience of Spotify, I prefer actively exploring

• subreddits³, e.g. /r/indieheads, /r/letstalkmusic, and /r/poppunkers
• blogs, e.g. undrcurrents and some on Bandcamp itself
• critical archives, e.g. RateYourMusic
• small record labels, e.g. The Flenser (dark, experimental) and Dear Life (brighter, folk-adjacent)
• the music section of mainstream publications, e.g. The New Yorker⁴
• IDAGIO, a streaming site focusing on classical music, which is necessary because of the fundamentally different metadata that applies to this genre
• anything non-algorithmic⁵ in nature

all of which are curated sources of new music that I can explore on my own. The user experience is more like walking through a museum and less like feeding at the trough. Each destination allows you to choose the genre and range in time from which you’d like to sample, with as much granularity as you like.

You can still “try out” an album by listening to it on YouTube with an adblocker, the use of which I can justify⁶ in this case because of the possibility that I end up paying the artist directly.

Acquisition

Without streaming platforms like Spotify, it becomes necessary to buy music, which solves the problem of royalties. This alone is a fairly radical decision in an economic milieu that’s inured us to renting everything, but I find that it aligns with prioritizing deeply and thoroughly listening to a single work before seeking novelty, which I’ve always done on Spotify anyway. You might find that it begins to shift you towards looking for secondhand or discounted CDs to rip, as well, which can make for an interesting scavenger hunt.

My preference for acquiring music is to look for MP3s⁷ first on Bandcamp, and then on other digital stores like iTunes or Amazon. I’m opposed to vinyl, which is very expensive for new releases and incurs a significant environmental cost due to it being a heavy object derived from petroleum. Analog storage might have some nostalgic and aesthetic value, but it doesn’t make sense to build a music collection out of it. CDs are a last resort, if I can’t find an album in an intangible digital form. The legality of ripping CDs (which do not have DRM) is not completely decided⁸ in North America, but morally it seems fine⁹, if you’ve done your due diligence in trying to pay for it, particularly within a context of streaming economics.

Hosting

It’s pleasantly straightforward to make your own collection of music available on a self-hosted platform like Navidrome, which gives you streaming ergonomics without any of the costs of Spotify that I mention above. Navidrome is a server that takes care of indexing and serving your music collection. While it comes with a decent web UI, it implements the Subsonic API, which makes it possible to use any number of other clients (including mobile phone apps) with it. I donate $9 to the primary developer’s Ko-fi in lieu of payments to Spotify.

I’m personally not interested in (or capable of) doing all the sysadmin work required to completely host it myself, so I gave PikaPods a try, but I found myself frustrated at the lack of support for anything beyond FTP, which meant I couldn’t use rsync or even scp to move files around. In the long run, the ergonomics of adding music is vital to the whole self-hosting experience. I’m currently on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure¹⁰ free tier, which was decent and not frustrating¹¹ until my free trial expired, at which point OCI deleted my Intel-based VM (and all the music I’d uploaded) without warning. The pain of learning how to use cloud services aside, adding new music is now as simple as running rsync.

My instance is available here.

Maintenance

Maintaining your own collection of music means dealing with metadata issues and backups. Bandcamp is great at providing cover art and reliably-named tracks, but you’ll find that the heterogeneity of sources of digital music will manifest in a similar heterogeneity of metadata, and that some manual care will be required. This is still less work than maintaining a physical collection (hauling, cleaning, protecting vinyl or CDs). A nominal amount of work will also need to go into maintaining digital backups, where the typical advice applies. You should select a backup strategy¹² suited for your personal risk tolerance (again, not possible with physical collections).

Drawbacks

Doing things this way requires some manual work and more upfront costs, due to having to buy music. The effort is the point, though, as introducing roadblocks to discretionary consumption is better for both life satisfaction (slowing down the hedonic treadmill) and the environment.