Man, leaving Spotify is a Project.
Before we get into the what, let’s talk a bit about the why, because in many ways Spotify is the trigger for my current mania for deshittification. And it was a really, really minor thing. I was listening to a playlist of my favourites, and suddenly I heard the Beautiful South singing ‘Don’t marry her, fuck me’.
I’m no prude, you fuckers know that, but I don’t actually like the uncensored version of this song. I don’t think it lands on the ear in the same way the radio cut (don’t marry her, have me) does. Maybe it’s just I’m more familiar with that, but I intentionally chose the radio cut for the playlist. And Spotify just unilaterally decided ‘No, you get this one’.
And that got me thinking about the number of times I’ve found a favourite song replaced with a shittier remaster, or where a weird experimental remix has been put in place of the album cut. Or songs that just disappear from the list – my biggest playlist has a ‘ghost track’ rate of about 3% and while that’s not a huge deal it’s also not nothing. And let’s not even get started on how it tries to keep tricking you into putting on its smart playlists. And by the end of this mental rabbit hole I decided ‘this is shittification, and I don’t need to put up with it’.
But Spotify has always sat uneasily with me. It is, at least for now, absolutely fantastic at what it does. Netflix before the great streaming fracture. It is legitimately a place that has a real claim to put all the world’s music at my fingertips for a low (ish) monthly payment. It’s actually the rare outlier – a service that is crushing it. But the Shit has increased significantly.
The initial Faustian pact was I pay a monthly subscription and then rent my music from that point onwards. I was sort of okay with that, even if I’ve been using it so long that I could have bought every album I actually listen to several times over. But you know – that music was available everywhere for no logistical cost. I could have Spotify everywhere, and I did.
But they altered the deal, and I don’t really feel like praying they don’t alter it any further.
First they cranked up the ads, but the service was so good that I was happy to pay for an ad-free experience. But then they put ads on the podcasts (which I hadn’t asked for when they increased the subscription cost as a result of ‘increased end user value’). My subscription is, after all, for ad-free music not an ad-free experience. Then they cranked the price up again. And again. And again. They gave us audiobooks. The Prime model of bundling things I don’t want in order to justify an enforced upsell.
And with all that money and revenue, they treat their artists like shit. My money goes into a collective pool that gets shared out amongst everyone, it’s not localised to my listening. Daughter don’t get an extra penny from my obsessively streaming their albums. Tegan and Sara are not a penny richer because I spent a year listening almost exclusively to three of their albums on a loop. Instead, my money went to – god, I don’t even know. Rhianna? Beyonce? Who is big on Spotify these days?
Oh right, AI Playlist Slop. Yeah, the money I provide gets doled out to those that game the system, not those that make the art. See the great video by Venus Theory on that [1].
So I’m not actually renting my music. My affections don’t translate into money for the artists I like. It translates into a smoothed over stew of compensation that is fractional to the value these artists provide to me. That’s always been the thing that made me feel bad, even if it didn’t make me feel bad enough to stop using it.
Spotify’s relentless focus on tracks led to what I call the Playlistification of music. I consider myself a Taylor Swift fan – not a superfan or anything, but that girl can craft a song like no-one’s business. And most of my listening to her work was through a playlist that an actual superfan crafted. So if you asked me, even of songs that I knew well, ‘what’s it called?’, or ‘what album is it from?’, it’s all ‘Spotify song from Playlist’. I might be able to sing it all the way through but naming it is – at best – an educated guess.
Genuine creativity can’t survive in an environment like this.
Look at how the virality of a few seconds of TikTok music results – at the track level – in what used to be sneered upon at the album level. Which is to say, a terrible album built around a massive single banger of a song. Now we’re down to the level of a shitty track built around a single 15 second banger section. The unit of success has continued to contract and compress until it doesn’t even matter any more. The label-driven cash-in album has become the algorithm driven cash-in track. This is music designed exclusively for metrics.
That’s pretty disrespectful of the art. Add to that the algorithm that constantly churns up things I might like shorn of their context, and it all becomes troubling enough to make a transition. So that’s what I did.
I dusted off all my old MP3s, but they represent an old version of my musical tastes and they also represent a certain kind of hoarder mindset. Box sets (bought ultra-cheap) of artists who had a single album I liked. That kind of thing. So, resurrecting has required me to actually go in and curate what I had. So I went through my archives like a violent enema and picked up only those albums I genuinely loved. I deleted the rest.
Then I went through them all with tagging software to tidy up the inconsistent meta-data that I had – a lot of these are ‘pre-lookup’ Internet, before you could just press a button and download the correct details. Many of them – in fact, the vast majority of them – were hand ripped from CD. So there’s lots of exciting variation depending on my mood:
- Beatles
- Beatles, the
- The Beatles
- Beatles the
- Lennon & McCartney
Etc.
This was all from a time before you had media managers – mostly this stuff was for WinAmp [2]. So it was a filename based system – artist / album / num – artist – title.mp3. It was designed for me as a computer user to quickly narrow down on an album. But nowdays I want things a bit more (less?) structured. I’m using Aonsoku on my desktop, and the excellent Symfonium on my phone.
But God, it seems at some point there was a great schism in tagging software and they started getting really passive aggressive. I made the mistake of using MusicBrainz Picard as a first pass over fixing the tagging, and this was simultaneously a) Awful, and b) Terrible. It is staggering how badly it fucked up my tags, and then wrote a whole bunch of secret tags into the files that Navidrome, my music server, obeys but other tagging software doesn’t even look for.
Seriously, I thought I was going crazy at one point when a single album showed up three times with different tracks, but as far as I could see in the tag editor all the tags were identical.
Anyway, did all that. We’re good. Then we come to the ‘replication’ portion of the project, which is building locally all the stuff I’ve only had digitally since I moved to streaming. And every time I look at the immensity of the job I just want to go to sleep forever.
This is the impact of the playlistification of music – my tastes have become so ‘bitty’. A song from this album, a track from that EP, a single that was never released on an album. It’s like the voracious avarice of a magpie. The job of replacing things is going to be very costly [3] and incredibly tedious from an admin perspective. I can find no one-provider that hits all the important things on the checklist, in which songs have to be a) DRM Free, b) available in decent bitrates, c) actually possible to buy. And since we’re often talking single tracks Spotify lists them as coming from effectively random locations, including the names of whatever random playlist that I searched them up from. Simply finding the source of a song is a puzzle.
This isn’t a ‘sit down and grind through it’ job. This is a ‘put aside an hour every few days and make painstaking, incremental progress’ job. But! I am listening to more albums. And I found that some of my playlists (my classical music one for example) can just be simulated well enough by taking all of my ‘greatest hits of the violin, lol’ type compilations and throwing them all on shuffle. I don’t have that much attachment to particular versions of classical music, and I’ve never been one to listen to them as an integrated piece. I’m a basic bitch as far as classical music works. I just want the good bits of Swan Lake and then a bit of Mozart.
Other playlists, like the one of great video game music, is a lot more intricate.
You can see though the evolution of bittiness in this process – how i went from an album-centric approach to music to a track-centric approach. I think albums are important. I think great albums are dramatically more than the sum of their parts. They are tracks in dialogue with each other. They set cadence and rhythm. They enforce tonality and an emotional journey. Blood on the Tracks isn’t a collection of songs. It’s an epic tale of heartbreak, recovery and redemption. You get something infinitely lesser when you listen to it on shuffle. There are even some tremendous albums (Nebraska) that are made up of largely mediocre tracks. The individual songs – mostly meh. But they’re in conversation, and in the end the album as a whole is a gut-punch.
I did a survey of students at the start of the year and I was actually quite heartened by the results.
I honestly though the art of the album was dead, but there’s still a core – a small core, true – that listens primarily to music as albums. I don’t want the artform of the album to die.
Anyway, I have begun this process and I’m pleased with even the partial results. We’ll see though if my resolve holds. My plan is to get myself back to baseline functionality and buy a few albums every month in the way I used to do it with physical media. I want to be excited by new albums again.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plleJ0Zv0Ww
[2] How great was Winamp??
[3] It would probably be cheaper to buy a CD drive, physical CDs, and rip them myself as opposed to going down the Bandcamp / Quboz route.