I’m declaring the De-Spottification subproject of Deshittify 2026 a complete success now. You may remember from the last update how after moving from Spotify to Navidrome and self-hosted MP3s I set myself some stretch goals after reading the excellent Mood Machine by Liz Pelly. Essentially these broke down into:
1. Eliminate Algorthmification from my listening.
2. Buy music from platforms that actually pay the artists
3. Replace ‘discovery’ with something that isn’t pushing royalty-free slop.
And I think I’ve done all of these now, or at least have personal policies in place for going forward. The tech stack is stable. The music library is growing in pleasing ways. And I can’t remember now the last time I heard a song I wasn’t expecting. It’s real good. But the stretch goals are more complex.
Eliminate Algorithmification
This is super hard to do comprehensively because as with much of Deshittify 2026 this is a vibe based thing. It’s not just about artists, it’s about **art**. There are some prominent, skilled musicians that are still succumbing to algorithmification. There are some absolute hacks who reject it completely. But since I am now album-centric in my listening again, and since I am once again intentional in my purchases and willing to be disappointed by spontaneous choices, I can match the rate of new music to my rate to process and discern. While replacing Spotify has resulted in some upfront investment in buying the music I had previously rented [1] my plan going ahead is to buy maybe four or five albums a month and give them proper time to bed in. At least three full listens each – mindful listens, not just in the background. And then I can let my own intuition guide me to what I genuinely like rather than what would be convenient for Spotify to convince me I **should **like.
Intellectually I’d like to shy away from artists that are tailoring their music to the algorithm but that seems unnecessarily puritanical in reality. it doesn’t matter if I *like* music that was written to encase a TikTok hook. What matters is when I’m being gaslit into replacing intentional listening with music that serves Spotify’s bottom line. Much like with BookTok and the banalification of reading, there are aspects of seeking virality that I find massively offputting [3] but popularity is not in itself a bad thing.
Buy Music From Platforms that Pay the Artists
At the moment I’m using 7Digital as the ‘least of all possible evils’ for buying albums, but I know there are better alternatives, Quboz gives a better artist share, but it also employs that execrable ‘pay us a subscription for access to the real price for what we sell’ model that is so egregious at Tesco and other retailers. I won’t support that business philosophy. To translate into Native Scottish for a moment, ‘that can get tae fuck’. Where I can, I will go directly to the artist websites and buy their albums. Where they don’t have them available and sell instead on Bandcamp I will buy there on Bandcamp Fridays when Bandcamp waives its revenue share [4]. Otherwise, I seek out the platform of minimal ethical compromise. I’m happy to pay more than the minimum if I’m sure it’s going into the pockets of the people who make the art.
I mean, a bit. I’m not willing to pay double or triple the price. But I’m willing to pay a premium to support the artists I value.
I decided early on that the ‘track view’ I had of a lot of artists I like had to be developed into an album level awareness. Which is to say – it’s not enough to know their songs, I need to know how they package them up. Are they making albums as conversations (like pretty much all the best albums) or as compilations. Do their songs come together in a dialogue? Or is it just ‘this seems like a commercially feasible ratio of bangers to binners, let’s call it a day’?
So, as I say – I went with 7Digital as a first step before I move into something with which I am genuinely happy with long term. I bought… a lot of albums. I’m not going to beat myself up over choosing the least bad of my options in the short term. Perfect is the enemy of the good and all that. There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism, etc, etc. Insert your own favourite platitudes here to taste.
Replace Discovery
A student of mine (I guess more than a student, she’s spent a year as a research assistant, another year as my thesis student, and is a co-author and collaborator on a bunch of things I do) suggested something pretty old-school as a discovery mechanism – radio. And while I don’t really want to actually listen to radio over the airwaves, I have begun to flirt quite a bit with Internet radio stations. And they’re pretty good! I can’t get Radio Tay or Wave 102 (my favourite channels when I was in Scotland) but I can get BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio 6. But more than that, there are a bunch of curated stations that serve the kind of things I like. SomaFM has a bunch of stations I really dig. There’s another one called DKFM Shoegaze which contains a lot of the kind of slow and introspective ‘sad emo girls being sad’ stuff that threads through my library like seams of delightful misery. Nightride FM has a chillsynth channel that is outstanding for reading to. To aid in discovery I’m complementing this roster of radio channels with a couple of music websites – Line of Best Fit for example – to broaden out my listening. The key thing is to avoid algorithms in favour of human curation. Any Internet radio channels people recommend, let me know and I’ll check them out. They really are the perfect replacement for Spotify’s lean-back playlist programming. Importantly, they’re not moulded to my listening and their business model does not depend on retention. It depends on their credibility over the long term.
And of course, I’m always interested in recommendations from people who know the kind of things I like. Essentially – if it could plausibly appear on a Life is Strange soundtrack, it’s probably a winner for me. And if anyone wants recommendations on the same basis, just ask!
All of this said, discovery isn’t exactly a huge priority at the moment. Due to my self-sworn oath to familiarise myself with the contours of the artists i love, I have a backlog to get through. 71 albums and counting so far.
That may sound like a lot, because it is actually a lot of intentional listening, but in the first three weeks of May I managed to chew my way through 58 albums, of which 8 were solid gold bangers, 14 were definitely good and worth the time, and 6 were legitimately bad (according to my own erratic tastes). The rest of them were exercises in indifference.
I’m probably not going to keep this rate up – this is the burst of initial enthusiasm before the inevitable fatigue sets in. But getting through an album a day doesn’t seem impossible. Much as with my reading, the key thing is carving out time for it. Leaving some room aside for days when I just can’t devote an hour and a half to intentional listening, I reckon I need to be discovering new music in three months or thereabouts. Or, perhaps more sensibly, instead of seeking out new things at that point it’s the time to allow myself to let the really great albums bed in more deeply.
Pick of the year so far is still Gold Star Baby, by the Aces. Not a new artist, to be fair – I have been a fan for a long time. But still – God I love that album.
Deshittification Rating
Honestly? I think maybe five stars at this point. The tech stack I run does require me to pay attention to it more than I need to pay attention to Spotify, but I honestly have no points of friction any more. I’m listening to more albums, finding more great artists, and enjoying music intentionally in a way I haven’t for a long time. Discovery has become a lot more authentic. I feel less ethically compromised when I buy an album. And the discernment that goes with conscious curation of my own library means I am staving off simply succumbing to algorithmification as a natural consequence of my passivity. Discernment is active practice. Taste is a process, it’s not a mere quality.
I’m not saying this rating won’t be subject to adjustment, but for now – I think I’m done and it’s a compete success according to every metric that actually matters.
[1] And even then this hasn’t been done completely – this is an incremental process [2]
[2] The Today I Learned fact that most surprised me – format shifting was only truly \*legal\* in the UK for like a nine-month period until the music companies managed to quash an amendment made in 2014 that explicitly permitted it. I had been operating for many years (predating 2014 by some time) on the presumption that format shifting was unquestionably legal. It was actually just in an uneasy gray area. Format shifting in Sweden is actually legal because all devices capable of doing it are lumbered with an additional tax to compensate rights holders.
[3] There is nothing that kills my interest more in a book than seeing it advertised under a ‘TikTok made me read it’ banner. Just because TikTok loves it, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad book of course. But that’s sure as hell the basis on how I’m going to place my bets and invest my time.
[4] Even though it’s an American platform and I’d rather prioritise non-American tech in preparation for the inevitable collapse of the American Empire, Or at the very least, the decoupling of European sovereignty from American tech giants.