---
title: I Have Concerns About My Music Consumption
description: So I decided to slowly start ditching Spotify
publishedDate: 2025-03-04
tags:
    - thoughts
    - music
---
I get through a *lot* of music. Choice of "through" there is intentional - I've been all-in on Spotify for my entire music-consuming lifetime[^4], and I've saved a total of 160 playlists and 8594 unique tracks. I can guarantee that I have no chance of being able to tell you what even half of that is.

I wouldn't say that I don't value a lot of this music - I absolutely have favourites, but there's just *so much of it*, it feels like the epitome of overconsumption. There's so much that I couldn't possibly listen to engage with all of it in any sensible period of time, even if I wanted to.

A lot of this has come around in the past 5 years because, since 2020, I've been keeping monthly playlists of music I've been listening to that month, functioning mostly as a way to keep track of new music I've found. 

Most of the new music I find comes to me courtesy of Spotify's recommendation algorithms (surprise, I know). It's helped me develop my own taste in music, but it's also something I'm becoming increasingly concerned about, since, yanno, I'm basically just listening to whatever the algorithm is ~~shoving down my throat~~ into my ears. The music never stops. I can never appreciate what I've just listened to because there's always more. Infinite playlists, infinite albums. You put something on, listen to all of it, and instead of it ending, you're fed a "mix" of other, similar stuff, to keep you listening. Why???

There's also the separate question of ownership. Spotify is a subscription. Stop paying? Stop listening. You don't own anything you've been paying for. That's crap. I'm sure you've heard other people talk about the subscription problem at length, which is applicable to any of a myriad of mediums (film, TV, music, books, etc.), so I shan't re-hash it. Safe to say, my music is a big enough part of my life that if my Spotify account gets nuked for some nebulous, undisputable "ToS violation", I will be very upset.

---

So! I think it's time for some more mindful consumption and some more control. At the end of the day, music is art that people have poured time and soul into and I want to respect that because Art Is Cool And It Makes My Life Better.

Back when I was a little kid, my dad had a **huge** CD collection. He's always been big on his music, and in many ways, it's something I've inherited from him. He'd buy CDs, copy them so the originals didn't get dinged up, have them in the car, at home, all over the place - going out on drives and him letting me flip through his 2-inch-thick book of car CDs to choose our soundtrack is a fond memory of mine.

In a similar vein to that, I've decided to slowly start building up my music library. Some of it is going to be physical CDs, some of it DRM-free digital downloads, but all of it is going to be mine. All of this also comes with the bonus upside that I'll generally have access to much higher quality encodings of my music too. No more lossy MP3 and [Ogg Vorbis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis) compression for me - FLACs only round here. The difference is audible and makes all the difference, especially since I've got some fairly nice audio gear that I use on the daily.

For years and years, I've had a very small collection of music that I've dragged with me between laptops. 21 albums, to be exact. I don't know where they came from - they're all of good quality, all FLACs, so I can only presume that I ripped them from my dad's CDs at some point in the distant past, but I couldn't tell you when.

Either way, that basis of my dad's music has formed a very familiar basis of music that was around me in my childhood to build upon. The likes of Anathema, The Bluetones, Pearl Jam, Spock's Beard... the list continues. All music that I don't listen to enough, and that I'll hopefully listen to more in the future.

I've also been able to supplement it with my own small CD collection. I've collected some CDs from gigs I've been to in the past year, so those have also found their way into my catalogue of rips, and I've bought some more CDs since making the conscious decision to start building a library[^1], plus some digital downloads where I can't find a physical release.

Right now, the library contains 30 albums. More are one the way. I've given myself a small budget (£10/mo) to go to new music, and we'll see what I end up. I'm excited!

---

Moving away from Spotify does cause some practical problems, though. Spotify, being a streaming service, means you can have music everywhere - from your laptop, to your phone, to your TV[^3], to your smart speaker. That's less easy when your music collection is a set of files on a hard drive somewhere.

.... but not impossible!

I am once again grateful for having knowledge on how to administer servers and web apps and the like, since I've been able to perfectly replace Spotify with my own homebrew streaming service, using [Navidrome](https://www.navidrome.org/) on my main storage server to ingest, organise and transcode my library, [Feishin](https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin) to replace Spotify on my laptop and [Symfonium](https://www.symfonium.app/) on my phone[^2].

I've got my playlists, my albums, my listening history on all my devices, like in Spotify. But it's not Spotify! Woo!! Mission success.

---

I've been using my personal streaming service for about a week at the time of writing, now. I'd say my listening is split roughly 50/50 between my own music and Spotify for the things I don't yet own. I'm not sure I'm ever going to get rid of Spotify entirely; I'm not going to immediately buy new music I discover, and hell, I do still want to discover music *somewhere*. But I am definitely going to not use it where I can.

That said, so far, I've absolutely loved the limited choice. Deciding what to listen to every time I sit down. Listening to whole albums. The silence at the end. Gonna be fun to see where this goes.

More posts about this adventure into owning my own music library to come in the future. I imagine they'll be in a few months to a year, to check in about how it's going once things settled down and matured a bit.

---

[^1]: Including some from a real, brick-and-mortar HMV! Buying music *in-person*!? That's wild!!
[^2]: Symfonium is *well* worth the £5 one-off purchase, by the way. It's goooood software.
[^3]: In all fairness, I've never done this and will never want to do this.
[^4]: If you're reading this and thinking "wtf?? how young is this person?!", the answer is 21. Spotify was founded when I was 2.
