Life Without Streaming: An Update

A month ago, I canceled my Spotify subscription. Here's when I regretted it.

After a decade as a Spotify user and five years as an employee, I recently canceled my Premium subscription.

I still have a free account, because I didn’t want to lose my playlists, but I deleted the app from my laptop dock and phone homescreen.

For a few days, my brain still routinely looked for the green logo – then it resorted to the new default.

But last week I suddenly regretted my cancelation.

I wanted to play some music in the house while doing chores. Remembering one of my old playlists, a 500-song mix of feel-good Balearic tunes, I whipped out my phone to connect it to a Bluetooth speaker.

Let’s use the free account for this one, I thought. How bad can it be?

Using the search function to find the app, I started the playlist.

Just a couple of songs into it, the first ad started playing. It was extremely intrusive. The commercial even seemed louder than the actual music.

I felt reminded of a moment in the summer, when we were staying on a Polish campsite. Some younger families occupied a couple of bungalows close to us. In the evenings, they were playing local music while preparing dinner and eating outside on picnic tables.

While I didn’t mind their music at all, I did mind the ads that popped up every 15 minutes.

Apparently, I’ve become very sensitive to ads. I haven’t owned a TV in a decade, and I’m not on social media. Listening to ads at home is just out of the question.

So I felt strong relief when the first ad finished – but a second one started right away. Frustrated, I stopped the playlist altogether.

For a short moment, I contemplated reactivating my Premium account. Then I decided to play an album from my own digital library instead.

I haven’t used my free Spotify account ever since.

This was the only moment during the last four weeks when I missed my Premium subscription though. Apart from this incident, I have to say I’m very happy with my decision to quit streaming.

I’ve bought loads of new and used CDs recently and listened to them on my old-school hi-fi stereo system. It has become a night routine to sit down, pick a record and listen while reading the booklet, a magazine or a paper book.

In addition to physical records, I’ve also assembled a sizeable library of digital albums from Bandcamp to tap into. I’d started buying them a couple of years ago, when I first noticed that I was slowly tiring of streaming – and that I still enjoyed owning my music instead of just renting access to it.

My digital library is now my default option for listening during working hours and on the go, as it is sync’ed with my phone.

For my work as a music writer, I also listen to many digital promos I get sent by artists, labels and publicists.

I don’t think I’m listening to less music as in total listening hours, but I’m probably listening to a lesser amount of artists.

I’m fine with that though. While I might be missing out on the latest hype that everyone has forgotten about in three weeks, I’m building a deeper connection with the work of artists I love. Instead of being on top of things, I’m getting to their bottom.

When I started publishing critical thoughts on music streaming here, I received a lot of positive comments from like-minded people.

I got some push-back as well though. One particular commenter sounded quite upset, asking me if I actually remembered the pre-streaming days and stressing what an achievement it was to have the history of recorded music at our fingertips, which he wouldn’t want to miss.

While I’d agreed with him a couple of years ago, I’m not so sure about this logic anymore. There are downsides to this level of accessability.

I’m old enough to have spent my entire adolescence without digital music. I truly believe that not having access to the world catalogue until my early 30s led me to a deeper connection with my own music library.

Why do I know every single song from most of my favourite 100 albums?

Because I’ve listened to them countless times, from front to back, when there wasn’t a constant stream of billions of songs readily available to tap into at any given time.

Buying an album, I made the commitment to spend time with it; to listen to it repeatedly, even the songs I might not enjoy at first. Sometimes those songs would turn into my favourites. I might have been disappointed with an album I’d bought, only to realize after some weeks that it’s an outstanding body of work – it just needed some time for me to process it.

We don’t give music that time anymore. If we don’t enjoy a song immediately, we skip it – and the algorithm learns from that data, serving us even “better” the next time, so that we experience as little friction as possible.

Great music is often challenging though. It’s mostly not easy listening. It’s not a frictionless soundtrack of our lives, but an expansion of our horizon.

When we restrict ourselves to our existing tastes and preferences, we miss out.

The lack of context in streaming also leads us to a feeling of detachment from the music and its creators.

Listening on a streaming service, you don’t connect with the artists and their vision. Without any information or stories attached to it, music is just some ephemeral set of data in some cloud we rent temporary access to.

“In a sense Spotify is too good as a service,”

Thomas J Bevan

recently wrote on Notes.

“That near infinite amount of music at your fingertips for that price point turned music into an abstraction, into endless surface level background noise.”

After just a week-long Spotify trial, Bevan felt the “deadening and devaluing of music as a thing happen to me in real time.”

His solution? He decided to go “back to the old, physical, finite way of purchasing and listening to music.”