Rethinking Music Listening

On this day in 2026, I canceled my Spotify subscription. This was a long time coming, but what finally pushed me over the edge was listening to this podcast on streaming services a couple weeks ago:

How Spotify Remade the Music Industry

I lament the loss of place that music has had in my life over the last decade. It’s probably unfair to say that streaming services were the sole cause of this: aging and changes in circumstance clearly played a role. That said, I don’t think they’ve helped, and I want to try a different approach to music listening with a bit of deliberate friction.

Here’s what I’ve done:

• Revived my archive of music from ~2009, just before I started streaming seriously. Was lucky enough to have an old hard drive laying around (that immediately died after the transfer).
• Bought a bunch of music on Bandcamp that I’d been listening to recently direct from the artist / label, downloaded AAC versions.
• Installed Syncthing to share said folder between my Linux laptop, my work (Mac) laptop and my Pixel 8 phone (cool software!)
• Installed Musicolet on my Pixel
• Installed Doppler on my Mac (much of my legacy CD collection was transcoded to Ogg Vorbis, which iTunes doesn’t support). For Linux, I’m just going to use Rhythmbox for a while and see how it goes.

So far, so good? I’m still listening to music at least. Various one-time expenses incurred for new software and I expect Bandcamp will be an ongoing one (which will definitely exceed what I paid for a Spotify subscription up to now), but feels worth it as long as I can afford it.