DE-SPOTIFY

As the number one streaming service provider, Spotify has proven to be profit driven at best and hostile towards users at worst. This includes investing in drone warfare, as well as having the lowest paying streaming royalties out of all the providers.

For these reasons abandoning the service has beneficial impact far beyond yourself.

The following actions can be taken alone or all started at the same time. Remember the goal is small atomic changes that can be sustained.


EASY

The simplest path to act now would be to change service providers. One that is more artist-centered, like any of the following:

  • Qobuz - Artist first platform.
  • Tidal - Quality focused, but don't know much more than that.
  • Deezer - Just heard about this, cannot vouch but internet seems to think it's okay.
  • Napster - Back from the grave?

Disclaimer - We stream music we own using the ADVANCED path below. We recommend more research on these services as our assumption is they are only marginally better than Spotify.



INTERMEDIATE

Purchasing digital versions of your music will allow you to own your music and also support artist directly.

Bandcamp is an okay facilitator for the time being and has physical media as well.
There are alternatives we are anticipating like the release of Subvert.

Although not true streaming services, they allow you to support artists directly and own your music.
In parallel, you can start collecting your own music. Vinyl, CD and Tapes.
Although this can be expensive you can generally find them affordably at:

  • Thrift Stores
  • Consignment Shops
  • Garage Sales
  • Flea Markets

There are also a plethora of devices for extracting data from physical media.



ADVANCED

Hosting your own streaming service is possible and would allow you to facilitate others around you having an alternative.

There are many services that allow you to stream your own music rather easily with some set up. We suggest using Jellyfin because it is open source and free. You can get started setting it up by following this quick start guide. As an alternative, you could use Plex with Plexamp but this is a paid service.

If you're interested in this route and have questions, head over to our community article.
We have a chat server you can join to get assistance!


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