Leaving Spotify to start a personal music library

When I started my Spotify journey, my goal was been to get closer to friends through music. In the process, I also gained the goal of having a personal music collection I can turn to while working. Yet, I'm more and more convinced that Spotify is not the best tool to achieve either goal—so this September, I finally made the switch and cancelled my Spotify subscription after 4-5 years of listening to music there.

Spotify offers three main features: you can listen to a vast selection of popular music, you can explore friends' playlists and listen to music together with them, and you can find new music through automated recommendations.
Yet, even for just those three simple features, Spotify comes in with a lot of ugliness:

• Even though Spotify boasts a ton of the music available, I've had a few pieces get marked "unavailable" after I had added them to my regularly-looped playlists—and that always felt like I was losing a piece of myself, as I still remembered how the music sounded, but could no longer hear it.
• Spotify's recommendations felt fresh at first, but gradually became stale: the algorithm never quite "learned" the specifics of my taste, so it kept recommending things that I didn't enjoy, over and over again. (If it were a friend recommending those, I would have listened to learn more about that friend; but as it is an algorithm, there isn't a gain to listening to songs I don't not like. For the curious: the music I enjoy best is alt rock/metal with clearly articulated lyrics.)
• The related artists lists, too, quickly turned out to be a poor way of discovering music: there were clusters of artists related to each others, and it was hard to escape a cluster by browsing around. With real artists recommending other artists, at least you get more diverse recommendations, as established artists tend to spotlight lesser-known talent.
• Spotify's Jam feature—which lets you listen together with friends—is awfully janky, and I'd expect better from a company this large. The "Jam host" has much better access to the current queue, while others have to pray that adding a song would actually add it to the queue and would not completely replace the whole queue, plus it would randomly disconnect or desync every so often. I bet I can make a better-working queue sync in a weekend.
• The Spotify Desktop client takes up way too much CPU, which in my line of work, causes music to glitch and freeze whenever I run compilation jobs. I did manage to avoid that by streaming the music from a phone over Bluetooth, but even then, it's hard for Spotify to beat the convenience of a plain old mp3 player.

And that's not even getting to the philosophical reasons to avoid Spotify, things like Spotify using DRM (which is evil), Spotify not paying artists as well as other streaming platforms do (which, as usual, hurts the newly-starting-out, low-profile artists the most), or even Spotify adjusting recommendations to direct people to "ghost artists" that they pay even less royalties to.

Plus, all the cool people like Joel have been leaving Spotify too!

So... with all those reasons against Spotify, me leaving Spotify was pretty much a matter of time.

The final trigger to leave came when I got together with the very friends that had convinced me to join Spotify, only to realize I still don't know the music they regularly listen to—I could guess the melody, but had no idea of the lyrics or the meaning. This shattered the last bit of "usefulness" I felt Spotify had, so when Spotify raised their price afterwards, I promptly reconsidered if streaming music was even worth the price, compared to the alternatives.

The alternative: buying albums

The main alternative to streaming music, I would say would be buy-once-use-forever albums. The main flavor I'd consider are DRM-free albums—as found on the CDs you can buy at various stores, as well as in digital downloads at various online music retailers. DRM-free means that there are no technical measures put in place to forbid you from copying the songs to a different storage medium—though of course, there are plenty of legal measures (copyright, licenses) that forbid you from sharing copies with others or playing them publicly.

In terms of utility, having a DRM-free copy of music is far superior to having that same music on a streaming platform—you can take your copy and use it on a variety of devices you own, with or without an internet connection, with any application you want, and, as long as you stay within your "personal, non-commercial use" license, potentially even modify or analyze the music, if you so desire.

Convenience, instead, strongly favors streaming—it's much easier to queue up a track in an app, compared to having to stop and think before buying an album somewhere else—worse, if buying involves going to a physical store of some kind. Still, we aren't here for the convenience of listening to music, we are here for the meaningful listening to meaningful music.

Discoverability of good music is a feature that neither streaming nor digital downloading provide, in my experience. Instead, I'll be experimenting with asking friends to recommend a single album to me, which I will then listen a ton to, and see if that works out better overall.

Finally, comparing the price of having a personal music library, streaming wins in the short term, but loses out in the longer run. A Spotify subscription costs about $12 per month in the US—and for the same price, I can buy one or two albums, depending on the artist. Assuming that I listen to music for 6 hours every day; that means listening to ~1800 tracks per month. However, those are not unique tracks; I'm likely to cycle through music I like most of the time—so let's say I only need 900 unique tracks (actual number might be as low as 450). In that case, by buying one 12-track album each month, I should fill out my library in 6 years—at which point, I would have a personal music library I can listen to anytime, on any device, in any way I wish (by myself/non-commercially), without needing to pay an on-going subscription for it.

And finally, in terms of meaningfully engaging with music, I believe one-time buying albums wins out over streaming—as I would be able to sit down and get to know the music I just got, without the distraction of the many, many tracks available out there. And in fact, that is exactly what I've been experiencing so far, with "The Silent Force" by Within Temptation and "Unknown Streets 2012 / Непознати Улици 2012" by Mary Boys Band—the first two albums in my music collection. ✨ But—more on that, in a later article! 😁

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