I'm Done with Spotify
There are no shortage of good reasons to leave Spotify behind in 2025. Just a few off the top of my head: their recent decision to run ads for ICE, Daniel Ek’s serious investments into AI powered defense and surveillance technology, their decision to give Joe Rogan insane sums of money to power his misinformation machine, and the fact that artists are getting paid peanuts for every stream of their work. The first three things there are bad, but I want to focus on the fourth.
A while ago, I saw this post from Tumblr user toskarin:
It got me thinking. I know there’s a lot of people who like to wax poetic, justifying why piracy is always good and moral and ethical, and plenty more who rebut that pirates just want things for free and should be less full of themselves. I think the topic is fairly complex and has a bit of nuance to it, and I don’t want to spend a couple thousand words retreading this well-explored ground.
That said: I agree with the post.
It’s important to pay attention to what the post really says - it isn’t an explicit endorsement of piracy, it’s an indictment of the state of streaming services.
It’s the end of the year, so Spotify is showing its users their “Spotify Wrapped”, a retrospective on the year that is honestly a brilliant marketing campaign, getting everyone to post and share their top artists and listening statistics, all with a Spotify logo attached. I took a look at mine and did some quick math. In 2025, I listened to 10,824 minutes of Spotify content. Most of that was music, but there were a few podcasts and like half an audiobook sprinkled in there. Let’s be as conservative with our math as possible and pretend that all 10.8k minutes were music. Let’s assume every song I listened to was three minutes long (I listen to a lot of Eurovision entries so three minutes on the dot might actually be the median and mode song length). That gives us 3,608 songs streamed this year. Spotify doesn’t publish numbers on how much artists earn per stream, understandably, different artists and rights holders have different deals but some Googling and perusing of Reddit threads where people try and compile some data indicate that artists can expect between $0.002 to $0.004 per stream, or $2-$4 per thousand streams. Since I was responsible for 3,608 streams this year, that means somewhere between $7.22 and $14.43 moved from me to musicians via Spotify over the last 12 months. That is… not much. Christ, I’m paying something like $11 a month for this service. I get it, a lot of what I’m paying for is the ability to just find new music (although their recommendation algorithms have been getting worse and worse lately) and the ability to just look up a song and play it instantly, as well as the overhead required to keep the lights on and the servers running. Still, this doesn’t feel right.
So, what am I going to do in 2026? First of all, in case it wasn’t clear, I’m leaving Spotify. There’s a handful of free online tools that can export all of your playlists to other services or to your computer as a CSV, so I went ahead and downloaded those in case I want to recreate any of them, even though I’m not much of a playlist person. When it comes to listening to music in the new year, I already host my own Jellyfin server for my movies and TV shows, so I’ve already got the infrastructure for a music server. To test things out, I’ve added a handful of albums that I’ve bought DRM-free downloads of over the years, and then set up Feishin on my desktop and Finamp on my phone. So far, things are great.
The bigger question, though, is where am I going to get my music to put on the server? I think the number one source is going to be Bandcamp. I’ve bought a number of albums from various artists here over the years, and it’s a wonderful system. Artists get upwards of 80% of the money spent on their music, so lots of them have a “pay what you want” system for their albums. After all, if I pay $1.00 for an album, the 80-ish cents the artist gets off that is almost certainly more than they would have gotten from my streams on Spotify. Plenty of artists have set costs for the music as well, which frankly I am happy to pay - I rather like owning a copy of the music that’s DRM free and I don’t need to worry about disappearing due to rights issues down the line. Bandcamp also supports artists running storefronts to sell merchandise like shirts and physical releases of their work, which is pretty cool. From my experience, most artists will include a free digital copy of the album if you buy a physical release, so that’s nice. I’ve even been surprised by this when buying new vinyl at a record swap - I opened it up and it included a code which could be redeemed on Bandcamp for a digital download of the album. Finally, they have charts full of cool music and articles (actually written with care by a human being) to help you discover new music. In short - I like Bandcamp quite a bit, and my $11-ish a month will go a lot further towards actually supporting artists here. Check out this snippet from Bandcamp’s about page for some numbers:
Outside of Bandcamp, I’ve got plenty of options. My car has a CD player, and I have a Blu-Ray player that can play CDs, so maybe I start taking advantage of my local library’s 6000+ CD catalog. Maybe I start buying CDs at vinyl and CD swaps. Hell, maybe I start buying cassette tapes again - I’m a fan of Dungeon Synth, and in that world the albums can’t be TRUE CVLT unless it’s being played on a crackly old tape player, or something. I can also just listen to podcasts - I have an Audiobookshelf server running to make sure all of my favorite podcasts are archived on my NAS as soon as they’re released, so maybe I keep working through the back catalogs of Knowledge Fight and Well There’s Your Problem.
Or maybe I just tune the radio to the local college alternative station and call it a day.
