Bye Bye, Spotify

The day has been coming for a while now. One week after eliminating the last two social media platforms left standing in my world — Facebook and LinkedIn — I have said so long to my Spotify Premium subscription.

I have a feeling I will miss it about as much as I miss Netflix, which I got rid of this past January.

So hooray for me.

I’m not sure what it was that finally made me push it over the edge of the cliff. I wasn’t dissatisfied with their service, which I assured them of in their exit questionnaire. After, all the music I could ever want was at my fingertips.

It wasn’t the latest dollar per month increase either, I had weathered those before and I think by now we all realize it’s just par for the course with these things.

It wasn’t that I was overwhelmed by the business model, which requires — like all other social media and subscription based apps — that I buy into the illusion of endlessness of content, such that even if I give 24 hours a day to it, I could never possibly get to the end of it.

It wasn’t because I had finally come to my senses and taken a stand over the way they pay artists for plays on the platform. I was interested in the inequity that it involved up to a point, but not really being able to do anything about it, eventually just sort of shrugged my shoulders over it.

It wasn’t even that I really had stopped using it, in the past half a year either. I think the whole operation works on the same premise as gym memberships: 20% of customers use it a lot, 60% use it enough and 20% forget they have it and continue to pay for it each month.

That last group is the sweet spot with things like this.

No, it simply has to do with the fact that Spotify is not the way I want to listen to music anymore.

My legion of readers will know that at the start of the year, I made the switch back to buying and collecting vinyl and it has been an unmitigated pleasure.

A Strong Opinion, Loosely Held: The Case for a Triumphant Return to Vinyl

There are many ways to listen to music. And that’s a good thing.

Going to stores and finding what you find is a great way to spend an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon. Especially when you didn’t even know you were looking for it. Especially when it leads to a chat with the guy behind the desk about the album and he says, “Let me show you something else, wait right here” and comes back with an original copy of Born to Run that went to radio stations. Same photo, different font. You get why that’s interesting, he gets why that’s interesting. And most importantly, you connect with each other over it.

Spotify doesn’t offer that.

The Best Time to Go to the Record Store is When You Aren’t Really Looking for Anything

And that’s what makes these places great.

Getting an armload of records home and deciding which one to put on first, Spotify doesn’t offer that.

Finding the alphabetical space where they are going to find their new home on the shelf, Spotify doesn’t offer that.

Going through the process of flicking through your records at home, deciding what to play, pulling the album cover out of its protective plastic sleeve, pulling the disc and the liner notes out of that and then leaning the album cover against the wall in a “now playing” sort of formation, in case someone comes and wonders what this is, Spotify doesn’t offer that.

Putting the needle down and letting the whole side play, in the order which the artist intended, Spotify doesn’t offer that. Well, I guess it does, but it’s too easy to skip a song you don’t like. That extra few steps of getting off the couch and carefully lifting the needle and putting it back down to get to the next song is usually enough to make me not do it.

Asit turns out, unsubscribing from things that I’m not paying for is a real joy too. I don’t think I’ll ever get to inbox zero, but every time I get an email from a craft brewery in Denver that I had to give my email address to use their wifi, every hotel newsletter I get from a place I stayed years ago, every travel website that thinks I need to know the best places to get breakfast in Albuquerque, I unsubscribe from. It’s one less thing that will demand my attention tomorrow.

The New York Times sends me at least ten different newsletters a day. I know I signed up and am paying for all of them, but I can never get through them all. The NYT has survived my latest cull, but who knows for how long?

I’ve come to realize that there is something even more valuable to these entities than my money. It’s my attention; they are all clamouring for it and searching for ways to get me to engage, which is a more polite way of saying getting me to keep my eyes glued.

But we don’t need it. We don’t need to know all this stuff all the time, we don’t need endless access to endless content.

I can’t be the only one who is really getting tired of that word and with that, I think it’s time to put on a record by someone who would never have described what they do as content creation.

And just let it play for a while.