You Should Cancel Spotify (I Should Too)
There are a lot of good reasons to cancel Spotify:
- Their CEO has made more money than any musician in history.
- They continue to raise subscription prices, with the latest increase seeing them raise prices 30% over the past 6 years.
- They are not artist friendly in any regard.
- They proudly platform content creators like Joe Rogan and sell advertising to ICE, which to me is really reason enough.
A broader question is: is the streaming model for music sustainable? Spotify claims to pay out 2/3 of their revenue in artist royalties. The fact is streaming cannot replace record sales for artist revenue.
Alternatives to Spotify for Streaming
Besides Apple Music and Youtube, which probably have as many ethical concerns as Spotify, there are a number of alternatives out there to explore:
- Deezer. I used Deezer for several months a couple years ago and really liked it overall. I eventually switched back to Spotify because I wasn’t discovering as much new music through it. People like to complain about the Spotify algorithm, but I actually have discovered a lot of great music through it.
- Tidal
- Qobuz
- Napster, which (somewhat ironically) returned as a legitimate streaming service.
Self-hosted Alternatives
An alternative solution is to purchase your own music files (you can still buy mp3s!) and host your own streaming service. Of course, there are illegitimate means of procuring music as well, but I won’t delve into the details of that here. Self-hosting is really appealing to me as a solution, I just need to bite the bullet and set it up so I can properly test it.
Services to Replace Spotify
This is where things get complicated, as there is no easy drop-in replacement for Spotify in the self-hosting world. You really need to piece together multiple services to handle streaming + curation + metadata + discovery. I’m still researching this area, but here is what I have gathered so far:
- Navidrome handles the streaming server side of things.
- Symfonium is supposedly a great client for Android, although there are plenty out there to explore.
- Lidarr can handle curation of a music collection. I’ve used Lidarr in the past however, and I can’t say I was a huge fan of it due to issues with how it handles metadata.
- MusicBrainz Picard works to manage metadata. It identifies songs based off the acoustic signature of the track, meaning it can identify music and populate the metadata even if there is no metadata to begin with.
- last.fm is not a self-hosted tool, but it does handle scrobbling and music discovery.