I cancelled my Spotify plan today.
As part of my broader plans to De-Google my life, today I finally pulled the trigger and cancelled my paid Spotify plan. It was a Family plan I split with my family & friends. My wife will restart the plan under her name and will reinvite the same people back in, without me.
Of course, this means that Spotify still gets the same money overall, but hopefully my spot on the Family plan will replace someone else's subscription, so there's a net loss of revenue for them.
Either way, they won't get any more data or money directly from me.
I had already been decreasing my Spotify usage over the last 12 months, but hearing that the CEO was investing crazy amounts into military AI technology was a big nail in the coffin for me personally. I'd also been concerned about the small amounts of revenue that artists get from the platform, and definitely noticed the artists jumping ship and taking all their music off – Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Massive Attack and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard being some of the biggest announcements.
At the same time, I've been slowly removing my liked songs from the platform whenever I buy or acquire the songs and save it in my personal music collection. I started with about 1200 liked songs and I'm down to 400-ish, and the remaining tracks are miscellaneous single tracks that I picked up via the various discovery methods that Spotify offers. I'll have to work on deleting or migrating my playlists out of there as well, as well as the artists I'm following. I'll chip away at it.
My replacement for music streaming is my self-hosted Plex server, which has a bunch of historical music that I've bought and ripped to mp3, or more recent digital purchases. Once my Plex library was up & running and I put Plexamp on my phone, I found that playing music was far more enjoyable when the algorithmic nature of Spotify wasn't guiding my choices. When I put a playlist or a genre on random, I know I'll get an even mix of tracks, instead of being biased to music I've played more recently.
Music discovery is different for me now, and it has been for a while. It feels more intentional and human-centric, instead of fed to me through a platform. In the Spotify era, it's all too easy to fire up my Discover Weekly and hear some new artists based on what people with similar tastes have enjoyed, but as a result there's no conscious connection to the artist.
Infact, with Spotify do you notice it's never an artist recommendation, it's always about the track, i.e. the commoditised, quantised portion of an artist's output? Cohesive pieces of work (i.e. albums or sets) aren't recommended – it's just the song. You just end up collecting them like trading cards, but your mental & emotional relationship with the songs you like is often surface-level. Looking back at my Liked Songs list in Spotify is looking at a wasteland of single tracks that sounded nice at the time and maybe went into a playlist or two, and never gave me much more than a momentary dopamine hit.
Now my music discovery actually requires exploration. Seeing live music and checking out the support acts (and the band t-shirts the musicians wear!) provides a real-life recommendation that is more meaningful than a result from an algorithm. Reading an album review by a respected critic might deter me from checking out an artist, but it's just as likely to encourage me to try out a record that I would have normally ignored. And how often is it that those little hunches end up becoming some of your favourite artists? Couple that with regular recommendations from similarly-minded friends, mailing lists from various record labels and Bandcamp music feeds (which have no algorithm behind them!) there's plenty of ways to keep abreast of new releases.
To wrap up: how do I feel about it? Well, a small amount of relief, but in practice I had barely opened the Spotify app over the last 12 months and I've been enjoying a more emotional connection with the music I explore, find & listen to – so today is a symbolic change more than anything else.
I may not be hearing every latest single from automatically recommended artists that are right up my alley, but instead I get greater emotional enjoyment of listening to more music from artists that I've directly supported.