Last year I quit Spotify. I had been using Spotify off and on since it first launched in the USA in 2011. In the beginning it was a somewhat reasonable way to find and listen to music, comparable to listening to the radio. I mostly used it to play EDM kinds of music with minimal vocals as inspiring background noise while working at the computer.

As time went on I grew more and more annoyed at the way music discovery worked there. Everything was about playlists and algorithmic recommendations. There was a lot of music to discover but it seemed like every “recommendation” was tainted with ulterior motives that I didn’t fully understand. It felt like what I imagined the old payola radio days were like [1].

Spotify did help me discover vaporwave. So that is something I guess. But I’m not sure if it was possible to miss the trend in the 2015 era.

The real reason I quit was that I started to get the feeling that my own musical tastes were being strip mined. All the meaning and authenticity was being drained out of music and being replaced by… something. I didn’t fully understand what was happening but I didn’t ignore the feeling. Later I learned the truth; Spotify was directly stuffing popular playlists with “ghost artists” who made tracks as works-for-hire [2].

After I quit Spotify it got even worse. Amazingly, Spotify doesn’t pay most artists anything [3]. This is because 81% of musicians don’t have more than 1000 streams and Spotify only pays out if you cross that threshold. Then I learned that the founder directly supports AI powered flying death machines which is not something I choose to support [4].

My solution these days is Bandcamp. The company is not perfect but you can at least find artists, pay for their music, then download the tracks to your computer to play them. Kind of like how music used to be before streaming.

On Bandcamp I have found lots of good artists. Some have been making music since before I was born. Others just released their first track. The main thing I look for in music is a deep undercurrent of meaning and the communication of an authentic human experience. Luckily I find it in droves just waiting to be discovered.