it's bad

you already know it's bad. spotify is estimated to pay between $.003-$.005 per stream 1. artists with less than 1000 yearly streams receive zero compensation for their art 2. i'm aware this number feels small in the context of our attention-based internet economy, but imagine your song being broadcast on the radio for 1000 people and being told that you don't deserve to be paid a cent for it (in fact, these artists are losing money due to the recurring yearly costs associated with having their music put on streaming services).


spotify takes ICE money and runs their recruitment ads 3, happy to aid the expansion of white supremacist violence in our communities. they collect extensive data on you (including your location) and aren't transparent about what they do with it 4. ICE is able to buy information about you from data brokers without resorting to a warrant5, and spotify is likely contributing to their dragnet.


spotify is increasingly investing in ai, including partnering with chatgpt6 in their efforts to render our planet unlivable 7 as they surveil and financialize every aspect of our lives. their founder and ceo is chairman of (and has invested over $700 million in) a "defense" company that produces ai software used in strike drones 8, furthering the capacity of world powers to commit colonial violence and propagate surveilance on an unimaginable scale.


despite the endless fluff pieces that they've commisioned on "reach" and "exposure", a spotify-dominated music landscape is bad for artists and thus bad for music listeners. much like ridesharing services and airbnb, spotify started with enough capital to operate at a loss for years (they were not profitable until 2024, 18 years after their founding 9) and provided a service at an unsustainably low price to make competition impossible and ensure mass adoption. now that they're dominant it will continue to get shitter, more restrictive, and more expensive. do you want the money you spend on music supporting state violence instead of musicians? do you want to live in a world where music is reduced to "content" and artists have to become indistinguishable from influencers in order to survive?


you should get the fuck off of spotify right now




so what's a girl to do?

even the world's most virtuous music streaming service would still pay artists like shit and contribute to an ecosystem where they are disposable. what i'm advocating for is cultivating an honest-to-god digital music collection. i use a combination of Bandcamp for independent releases and piracy for large label releases and albums that are no longer avalible for purchase, and i'll provide step-by-step instructions for doing just that. we can do this for less than the price of a monthly spotify subscription, and while it's not as effortless as relying on streaming music services (cultivating metadata, for those particular about consistency like me, can be a little time-consuming) it's still quite easy. more importantly, it's worth it.


there is joy and security to be found in cultivating a personal music collection. your favorite independent artist will never dissapear into the ether because their label dissolved and stopped paying CD Baby hosting fees. it feels good to directly support musicians where you can, and it helps them make more of the art that you like. managing your own collection makes individual albums much more tangible than relying on nested playlists, recent searches, or the grace of an algorithim; it makes music that you like easier to remember, keep track of, and form special relationships to.


a music collection is yours, a cumulative hoard of art that you love and that resonated with you at different points in your life. it grows with you, and no company can arbitrarily take it away from you ever. no company can profit off of reducing your engagement with art to data that is sold for pennies and funneled into the hands of police.


piracy guide coming soon

guide will cover: music disocvery (Bandcamp/Soulseek); purchases & piracy (Bandcamp/Soulseek/qBittorent/archive.org); media players, replaygain and metadata management (foobar2000; Mp3tag); self-hosting a streaming music service with your collection (Jellyfin/Lidarr). Debian alternatives will be provided where necessary.