I didn't plan on writing about Spotify again. I've done the "here's a playlist app, who cares" post before and it's boring. But this week I actually cancelled my Premium subscription, and I want to write down why before I talk myself out of it, because I have a bad habit of doing that.
You've probably heard the broad strokes by now: Neil Young told Spotify it was him or Joe Rogan, Spotify picked Rogan, and by Wednesday his whole catalog (over 1,100 tracks, I looked it up) was gone from the platform. Then on Friday Joni Mitchell said she's walking out the same door. I'm not going to rehash the whole podcast-misinformation argument here, everyone and their uncle has an opinion on it already and mine isn't more interesting than yours. What I actually want to talk about is the boring, practical part: what it's like to actually leave, eight years and God knows how many playlists deep into Spotify.
The $9.99 problem
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you sign up for a streaming service at 24 and still have that subscription at 34 — you don't remember what your music library looked like before it. I have eleven years of "Discover Weekly" saves, forty-some playlists, a "Songs I Heard At My Cousin's Wedding And Need To Identify" playlist with three songs in it that I never finished. Cancelling isn't really cancelling. It's untangling.
I used a tool called Soundiiz to export everything to CSV first. Free tier lets you do a handful of playlists; I paid the $4.99 one-time fee for the rest, worth it. Takes maybe twenty minutes for a library my size. Then I sat there with a spreadsheet full of songs I apparently loved once and had to decide what to actually keep. Turns out the answer is: not much. Half of it was stuff Spotify's algorithm fed me that I never really chose. That's its own uncomfortable realization, honestly, that I'd outsourced my taste to a recommendation engine for the better part of a decade and hadn't noticed.
What I switched to (mostly)
I'm not going full audiophile-with-a-NAS on this, I don't have the patience or the shelf space. I moved to Apple Music for the catalog and streaming convenience, same $9.99, functionally interchangeable app experience, so let's not pretend this is some moral high ground move. It's a lateral shift, and Neil Young's catalog isn't on there either as far as I've checked, so if that was the actual point I've failed at it. But I also started actually buying albums again on Bandcamp, which I'd basically stopped doing since maybe 2015. Bought the new Alvvet record last night for eight bucks, felt weirdly good, like paying a band directly is a novel concept instead of something that used to just be how it worked.
Spotify put out a statement today (the 30th) saying they're going to add content advisory labels to podcasts touching on COVID and put $100 million toward licensing work from underrepresented creators. I read it twice trying to figure out how those two things are related and I still don't. It reads like a press release written by three different departments that didn't talk to each other. Maybe I'm being uncharitable. Probably not, though.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: the actual worst part of leaving Spotify wasn't the music, it was losing the "on this day" throwback thing they email you. Petty, I know. I liked seeing what I was listening to three Januaries ago. Apple Music doesn't do that and I miss it more than I miss the app itself.
Anyway. If you're on the fence about doing the same export-and-jump thing, Soundiiz genuinely does most of the annoying work for you, and the emotional part (realizing how much of your "taste" was just whatever got put in front of you) is worth sitting with regardless of which service you land on. I don't think this is some grand statement about streaming or artist compensation, I'm one guy with a laptop and forty playlists. But it felt like a good week to finally do the thing I'd been putting off for a year anyway.