Home
Music
Videos
Now
I grew up in the 2000s with two brothers who were deeply interested in music. Both of them spent hours every day collecting, organizing, and sharing music files, and spending time in their rooms exposed me to a lot of punk, rock, and EDM from the era.
I really didn't start listening to music on my own until I was 13. I liked some songs, but it was only what I had heard my family listening to. Mid 2013 was when I started adding particular songs I liked to now long-lost YouTube playlist, which was my first attempt at keeping track of music I liked. This was quickly followed by my 14th birthday, when I bought myself a 9th gen iPod nano. Suddenly my walks to and from school became a lot more entertaining. A year and a half later, I got my first phone which I mostly just used as an iPod. I kept up my music library across several phone upgrades four another 3 years.
In May 2018, I rather lately found out about Spotify but very quickly gave it a shot. Of course, from a first time user's perspective, Spotify seemed like a dream; Instant access to basically every song I've ever heard of and millions more. On a dime, my local music library became obsolete and, with it, every song that wasn't on Spotify sadly exited my rotation. A few times I tried using the local files feature but that never worked well in my experience. Songs would either never download to my phone or would randomly disappear sometime after they had successfully synced.
For non-downloaded songs, the instantaneous syncing between my PC and phone was amazing. Adding songs to my playlists on PC and having them instantly on my phone was like magic. Playlists themselves were also pretty much a brand new thing for me. I made tons of them for different moods and genres, and started making monthly lists to keep track of what songs I was into at the time for more focused listening.
My issues with Spotify started cropping up pretty quickly, but weren't common enough to truly annoy me off the platform (yet). Certain features would stop working seemingly at random, like being able to sort playlists by song length (circa Dec 2019), or the "Appears on" section at the bottom of an artist page disappearing for a time (circa May 2020). I also did not appreciate Spotify automatically saving new Drake and Kanye albums and adding their singles to my playlists. Maybe they hired the same guy who put that U2 album on my iPhone...
Another issue I had with Spotify was it's recommendation algorithm. It was unfortunately too good... Discovering tons of new songs was really cool at first, but honestly began stressing me out. I'm the type of person who loves diving deep into a band's discography, and every new band I discover is another rabbit hole. This meant that I was actually discovering new music too quickly and I couldn't keep up anymore. I wasn't choosing the rate I found new music, which bothered me.
Over time, I also became more of an album listener. I starting enjoy full album experiences more than shuffled playlists. Partially because I started buying records, but moreso because I started becoming attached to certain full albums rather than individual tracks.
One of the final straws was the large UI overhaul in May 2021. Overall the UI became way more spacious which meant way less information was being displayed. Every element was inside a rounded box with copious padding surrounding it. In fact it pissed me off so much that I made a video rant about it.
Then, in June 2021, I cancelled my subscription and quit Spotify. I decided to go back to downloading my own local music library that couldn't be taken away without notice. A common complaint of streaming services is the ephemerality of its content. Songs (or movies and shows) can permanently disappear without notice. While I definitely take issue with this, I thankfully only personally experienced it a handful of times.
I still had my old .mp3 library from years ago which I used in conjunction with my liked songs on Spotify to form a massive list of what I needed to redownload. This time around I went with a .flac library, as I had recently learned about the benefits of lossless audio. iTunes was replaced with MusicBee (and Poweramp on mobile), after several hours of researching different programs available. Since then, I've maintained this library and have outgrown several microSD cards. Currently, I've nearly filled 500GB. I suppose ironically, I do occasionally prune my library of music I don't listen to much, which also keeps the total file size in check.