Tomorrow ends my premium subscription to Spotify. I’ve been a customer to Spotify for over 7 years, and at $10.00 a month, that means I’ve spent roughly ~$900 dollars. Streaming operates on a business model of being slightly more convient than owning your own media. So, why did I cancel my membership?
- Cost
- Media Ownership
- Privacy
- Being a show-off with alt tech.
There used to be a saying in IT,
If a product is free, then you are the product
Funny how things have changed. With Spotify, you pay for the product, and they sell your data. They make money from you, while making money from you.
They also kept removing some of my favorite songs due to licensing issues. I’ll never have to deal with that again.
With all my complaints out of the way, how do I listen to my music now?
What is do is upload all my music to my Jellyfin server, which I acquire in a technically legal manner using youtube download plus, a.k.a. yt-dlp, and convert the file into mp3. With a few scripts, and using musicbrainz picard for meta-data I automate the process and can listen to ANY song I want. Finamp is an opensource client to stream from said Jellyfin server, with features like offline listening. While it did take some setup, overall it’s not that much more effort than Spotify, and I get all the previously mentioned benefits.
Trading your privacy and freedom for convenience is NEVER a fair deal.
Goodbye Spotify, I will not miss you.