Okay, it took a lot of effort, a fair amount of expense, and a lot of patience but Pauline and I are finally unshackled from Spotify. And I couldn’t be happier at this point – I think this move has worked great.
So, here’s the basic overview:
- Running Navidrone off of my home lab, which serves my MP3s through an open protocol
- All my old MP3s have been catalogued and cleaned up. Many have been purged for no longer being relevant.
- My desktop systems stream this music through an application called Aonsoku which is essentially like my own private version of Spotify.
- My mobile devices get Symfonium, an excellent app that you can just pay for without it being software as a service.
Stats for what we’re talking about – 674 albums (a minuscule number in the grand scheme of things but these are all my favourites as well as an increasing number of speculative purchases). This comes to 265GB of storage space, which is actually incredibly reasonable. Over the past few months I’ve spent more than a few thousand crowns buying up digital files and I am now pretty much 1-for-1 with what I had on Spotify with a few exceptions. I started buying up albums based on what I’d been renting via Spotify for the past decade, although I confess that making this a fully legal collection is an ongoing process for now. I’m not even sure that all my MP3s still count as legal even though they were ripped from originals. I got rid of the CDs years ago and I’m not sure if they still count as being ‘format shifted’ if I got rid of the ‘ground truth’ version. So I might eventually have to converge on a minimum functionally viable ethical definition which will be something in the region ‘I paid to own this, rather than rent this, at one point in my life’. I’ll focus on what feels right rather than what is legal.
I had decided a while ago to move away from Spotify, but recently I read the excellent book Mood Machine by Liz Pelly and well – if I’d read that earlier on in the year I would have made the shift more urgently. The damage Spotify has done to music as a culturally important act of creativity goes well beyond ‘treating artists like shit’. But selfishly, my real goal here was to move away from the ‘playlistification’ of music and get back into an album centric mindset. And that’s been achieved, even if I still recreated my playlists for when I need simple background listening. I fell though into the illusion of knowledge – I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
The thing that Mood Machine captures that I didn’t realise is how much Spotify is encouraging a ‘lean back’ style of ‘engagement’ with music. Turns out much of their revenue comes from people who just want music to be playing, but who also don’t have any deep interest in the music to which they listen. So many of these playlists are full of PFC (Perfect Fit Content) from stock music libraries and underpaid artists who produce ‘soundalikes’ and ‘tailored vibes’ at much lower royalty rates than the ‘real’ musicians. Suddenly everything Spotify does makes sense – why it’s trying to get everyone onto the playlists, why it’s shifting songs that you curated to songs that they choose, and why it focuses so aggressively on ‘discovery’ and vibe-based genre classifications. It’s because they can serve you much cheaper filler music in the sure knowledge most people don’t care. Actual music from actual artists – expensive (even more so for the major labels) because they have to pay a certain amount per stream. Mass-produced muzak – in some cases it’s completely free to them because they bought it outright for comparative pennies and most people just don’t care that they are listening to intellectual b-roll. It’s the difference really between hearing and listening. People want ‘lofi study vibes’ or ‘chillout music to sleep to’. Spotify’s real competitor isn’t iTunes or Apple Music, or Amazon. It’s the existential dread that comes with silence.
I’d always wondered why Spotify is so hostile to my having an album or artist-centric view of my music collection, and it turns out it’s because it makes me an expensive irritant in their algorithms. They don’t want me to have that kind of relationship with my listening. They want me to have a relationslop with interchangeable ‘content’.
Much as with many parts of this project, the most striking impact is how much more relaxing things are when you’re not constantly fighting a platform’s desire to assert control over your life. Navidrome could not give the tiniest shit how I want to listen to my music, it just serves it up without complaint. I don’t need to click through fifteen buttons to find a discography, I just click ‘artists’ and then the name of the artist. It has reduced the stress of wrestling the system to almost zero. What stress remains is technical – for example the minutiae of transcoding in a self-hosted world where codecs are not a universal language.
The real question though is ‘am I listening to more albums?’ since that was my goal. Music has always been important to me, and that’s the reason (initially) I split with Spotify. Gratifyingly the answer is – absolutely yes. In the past month I have listened to, for the first time (and several times each):
- Brat, Charlie xcx
- Girl With No Face, Allie X
- Hit Me Hard and Soft, Billie Eilish
- For Melancholy Brunettes and Sad Girls, Japanese Breakfast
- Masochist, Night Club (proper banger)
- A Matter of Time, Laufey
- Gold Star Baby, the Aces (another proper banger)
- Eusexua, FKA Twigs
- Happiness is Going to Get You, Allie X
- The Baby, Samia
- Black Leather Heart, Night Club (an EP but also a proper banger)
- Si Sombre Ce Sera Beau, Solann
- Middle Farm Session, Daughter
- Blue Angel Sparkling Still, Quiet Light
- Confession, Carla Del Forno
- Graceland Way, Mikaela Davis
- Singing, Gia Margaret
- Rise, Melissa Etheridge
- Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa
- The Dream of Delphi, Bat for Lashes
- Happiness Now Completed, Soft Cell
- The Writer, Tsar B
- The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Chappell Roan (omg, another absolute banger)
- Fickle Friends, Fickle Friends (another banger)
- Phoenix: Flames are Dew Upon my Skin, Eartheater (fantastic title, bad album)
- Soft Landing, Art School Girlfriend
- With Love From, Ally & AJ
- Humaness, Adore
- The Inbetween, Poesy
- Everybody Works, Jay Som
- Can’t Lose My (soul), Annie and the Caldwells (would be great if every song wasn’t at least 75% too fucking long)
- A Quieter Life, Hollows
- Everything in my Back Pocket, Mariae Cassandra
- It is Lighter Than you Think, Silver Liz
I didn’t listen to this many new albums in all of 2025. I might not have listened to this many new albums since starting using Spotify. As I discussed in a previous post, Spotify made my listening very ‘bitty’ – plenty of new tracks, new artists, but nothing contextualised into something as awkwardly intentional as an album. But now I’m actually looking for albums and not simply new music. And it’s better. It really is. The best so far is Gold Star Baby which is a concept album in the old style, and while many of its songs are great in and of themselves they come together so well as a kind of queer tribute to disco. An album, as I said before, is not just a collection of songs. It’s a conversation between songs. Not all of these albums are great. Some of them aren’t even good. But I don’t resent buying any of them because this is part of the journey. A relationship with music is defined as much by what you exclude as by what you include.
This would have been the termination point of the Spotify sub-project of Deshittify 2026. I would have rated myself five stars deshittified, as per the previous post, on this specific axis of the project. That is if I hadn’t read Mood Machine. Now I’ve got some stretch goals here. Realistically I’m still at four and a half stars.
One stretch goal is to scour ‘algorithmification’ from my listening – I wrote about that in my last Spotify update, how music is now often written ‘hook first’ and ‘song second’ to appease the listening habits of TikTok. And increasingly playlists are full of ‘ghost artists’ and ‘soundalikes’. So I want to make sure I keep that out of my music library as a priority. Sadly that also means probably putting a soft cut-off date for new music too. I know it’s a cliche for old men like me to say ‘all music these days is just noise’, and indeed there is science to back up that cliche. But this isn’t a case of saying new music sucks – I don’t think it does, I’ve listened to a lot of fantastic stuff from the past few years. But it is increasingly tainted by serving the algorithm over serving the art.
The second stretch goal is not just to buy music, but to buy it as far as is possible from the artists. I have bought a lot of new albums through online services, but Mood Music makes it clear how much better it is to support independent artists directly. So I need to start doing that, especially for those artists I can endorse as fighting the algorithms rather than capitulating. That though is difficult because it’s so fractured. I want DRM free. I want the creators to get the biggest proportion of the money. I don’t want to support American platforms if I can avoid it, and I want to just pay from my bank account without going through a third party. Not all of those are deal-breakers but even with a bit of ethical flexibility it’s a difficult needle to thread. Not all artists have their own storefronts that serve digital albums. It’s a problem still to be solved.
One thing that I’ve lost in this transition is access to ‘discovery’. The good news is Mood Music showed me that I didn’t actually lose anything I’d weep to lose by abandoning Spotify, but it’s still going to be difficult to find a discovery regime that works given my eclectic and yet stubbornly fixed tastes. In this, I’m prepared to pay for disappointment – I’m willing to roll the dice on albums being bad in the hope I’m occasionally surprised. Perhaps I’ll aim for buying 3-4 albums a month on little more that vibes and just seeing where I land with them. Realistically I am now a fan of so many artists across so many genres and decades that I could just buy each of their new albums and not run out of new material, so maybe I don’t actually need discovery. Maybe I need a kind of constrained polyphonic polyamory – loyalty to a set coterie with no need to look outside for gratification.
As I occasionally do I did a survey of my students to ask about their music discovery. Results attached.
They’re interesting. Bad news for music media really – I was the only one who answered that I use it, and I’m an indifferent consumer at best of Pitchfork / Under the Radar / etc. The days when I’d excitedly come home with a copy of Melody Maker or NME are long over. I was pleased to see TikTok didn’t perform overly strongly. Mainstream media (by which I meant things like radio, pop charts, etc) doesn’t seem to be driving much. Bandcamp and live performances – also no. What we see instead is a strong vote of support for word of mouth, Youtube and Spotify discovery. And, supplementary addition that it was, ‘movie and game soundtracks’. And, of course – paying attention to favourite artists.
I also asked how important music was to them – 20 votes, 90% in the top two boxes (55% very important, 35% somewhat important) with only two people answering ‘not important at all’. I think maybe that’s reflected in the answers regarding discovery.
I listened to a podcast a while ago called Search Engine, hosted by PG Vogt who was once one of the hosts of the excellent Reply All. He interviewed a NYC music journalist and asked ‘How do I, as an old person, find new music’ and the journalist essentially asked ‘Why on Earth would you want to do that?’. His point was that journalists like him have to listen to new bands all the time, but the average person already knows what they want, what they like, and how to find it. Maybe that’s what I need to embrace and just let occasional serendipity guide me to songs by new artists.
In conclusion, fuck Spotify.