the one in which jack says bye to streaming

i don’t like needing to be online. i don’t really like algorithms to drive my music taste (lots of good curated playlists or DJs online, no matter what you like. listen to the dot radio). i also don’t like my money going to AI warfare genocide machines.

so before the start of my internship i got rid of my Spotify subscription, and i can’t say that i have been missing it. i made a list of the good albums i wanted to keep around, and routinely add new ones as i discover new artists i want to learn more about. selfishly, the process of making and updating this list makes me feel good: i am purposefully and deliberately logging what i like, trying to log why i like it every time i do. it helps me make sense of my music taste and it’s a lot of fun.

the setup right now

• if i find a new album i want to listen or give a try, i’ll find it somewhere (legally as much as possible, bandcamp is great), and in the highest quality, not because i have the best listening equipment, but because i can affort the extra disk space and am planning for the future.
• i add the album to my 1TB external ssd, in the folder specially dedicated to music. i’m at ~20 albums, mostly flac or high quality mp3, and it’s sitting at around 10GB (good enough for me).
• that folder is synched by hand regularly to my phone, a pixel 6a, running foobar2000. the ugliest software ever that is unfortunately really good at what it does, and it’s free. handles every codec and has all of the necessary features, without ANY bells and whistles.
• the music is played through nothing bluetooth earbuds whenever needed, aka ~9h a day.

the setup in the future

this works really well for me. I intend on improving the flow for what i intend to do with my life:

• replace the reliance on my phone with an external, offline device, either an old android phone or a dedicated listening device.
• invest in better listening equipment to see if it actually does make a difference.
• investigate better and more organic flows for music discovery and logging.

some are more actionable than others. we will see which stick and which don’t.

words of advice

my advice for anyone wanting to leave:

your account doesn’t really have to go anywhere. i still have my original account with all of my playlists. in particular, i really want to keep my liked songs playlist as it not only logs what i considered good, but also where. i like knowing that 2018 jack loved bad lo-fi hip hop. i tried a lot of archiving software, but none that would preserve that information. one day i’ll get around to writing my own (hopefully before spotify servers close forever) but before then, my data still exists out there somewhere.

[updated in the future with more advice.]