An Ipod was the most treasured gifts I have ever been given. I had the original iPod Shuffle, green case, built-in USB, and the capacity to play 25 songs. Before that, I had a cassette player in my room, and I would fall asleep listening to Cheaper by the Dozen, or Harry Potter Every night. And before that I had Hitclips, but those were the dark ages of listening to music. I love music, I love the sound, and I am rarely in silence. When I work I have an airpod in, when I read an airpod is in, I sleep with them in, I drive with them in, and the new transparency features have done me so dirty because now I can have conversations with people while softly listening to music. I don’t exist in silence. I’ve gone from using my parent's home sound system to Serious Radio on car trips to burning CDs with my brother in high school… the way that I have listened to music has been in a constant state of flux, but the library of sound I have has only grown… well almost.
You see about two years ago I switched to my fourth computer. Up until this point, my entire catalog of music had been living on a hard drive. That’s right, I had a hard copy of every single song. What iTunes used to let you do is upload your own MP3 files which I would BUY, and then stream them through an Apple Music account. It was awesome, my library would sync directly to my iPhone and I started building a system of complex playlists that I am immensely proud of today. Now I started collecting early. I had inherited the dedicated music laptop in my old house when my dad vacated in fourth grade, and I kept it going for 17 years. I have lost chunks of it over time, but I have been passing a solid 60 GB of music over 4 different computers and almost two decades. I have playlists for everything. I have a playlist for what I used to listen to going up to Cape Cod during my summers in middle school, I have the work mix I used to put on in college working at a little deli, and I have the playlist I used to listen to in LA when I didn’t have a car and skated everywhere. They are little time capsules of my life and they all bring me back to the spaces I created them in. This library is so important to me, but then I transferred it to my fourth computer and we ran into a problem.
So streaming has only existed for about a decade now. Spotify was first created in 2006 but didn’t really start working until 2010 and even that was a proto version of what we understand today. Of course, the iTunes store has been around forever, but that's not Apple Music. Streaming started to get widely popular around 2015. SoundCloud was huge, Spotify was a common tool at every college kickback I attended and Apple Music wanted to get in on this money too. Now to do that Apple had to stop supporting third-party Mp3s. And when I got my newest computer and tried to connect my hard copy of music to iTunes, it wouldn’t support them. That’s right, Apple Quietly got rid of my favorite feature of all time. So now I was stuck with this huge chunk of MP3 files on my computers, all separated into well-maintained and beloved playlists, and I lost access to everything. I can play them on my computer but my computer does not fit in my pocket. It’s a work computer, I can’t bring it anywhere and it is nowhere near the ease of having all my music on my phone. So I got a Spotify account.
Two years into exclusively using Spotify and I have never listened to less music in my life. Spotify killed my love for music. It is a boring, restricting, and impermanent experience using a service that relies on cloud-based streaming. And that might be coming to an end. Vinyls had a solid 30-year lifespan starting in the 50s. After that cassettes were popular between the 1970s and the 90s, and CD sales peaked in 2002 with roughly a 15-year lifespan. Do you see what’s happening here? The period in which these audio formats remain popular is shrinking. And of course that’s to be expected, technology is expanding faster but Ipods, the forgotten generation of music only lasted a very short 9 years. Streaming has arguably been around for just under 10, how much longer can we expect it to last?
The other issue is that there is a major difference between, the iPod, CD, Cassette, and Vinyl waves when compared to streaming and that’s ownership. You no longer own the music you pay for. Now an avid collector of Vinlys back in the day can still enjoy their collection right now. Every artist they love is meticulously categorized and sorted into their milk crates. The same holds true for cassettes and CDs are iffy cause they deteriorate so easily. But the point is you own the product. I need you to understand that when Spotify stops hosting its servers you lose everything. All your playlists, all the artists you love, it will all be gone. You will only have your memory to back it up. That absolutely sucks and has completely taken the fun and care out of maintaining playlists because what’s the point, they’ll be gone one day soon. This is frustrating for me because it has completely altered how I listen to music. The way I used to handle it was that I had sourced music from a wide variety of sources, Vine, Youtube, Soundcloud, friends, anywhere. I would BUY my favorite songs and then download them to a temporary playlist. This would be my main playlist for about 2-3 weeks, with anywhere from 30-100 songs. I would shuffle this playlist constantly and listen to the bangers, when the music started getting stale it would be time for a cleanse. I would sort my temporary playlist into the rest of my playlists, with three general categories: genre, mood, and time. The entirety of the playlist would also be dumped into a yearly playlist that would encapsulate everything I listened to in that year in order to be memorialized. Then I would refill my temporary playlist with fresh new sounds and the cycle would start over again. This let me have a brand new main playlist at any given time as well as playlists that were constantly growing and could be a tone for any occasion. <Cut to Examples> Spotify has stripped my ability to do this because there is no point in making a playlist I might not have access to in the next ten years. Now how I handle music is by sourcing from friends, Tik Tok, and new releases. Everything I like gets funneled into my Liked playlist, and when I go to listen to music I start at the top of my liked playlist and just go straight down. This is really boring for me and I have found that I am really only rotating through about 15 songs at any given time, anything below 15 songs feels very stale to me, and shuffling the entire playlist seems pointless cause it is huge and I am listening to 3 years worth of music when I would normally have segmented it into chunks.
Now I understand I could technically still sort them into user-created playlists but the permanency problem goes beyond just simply not having access to this music when Spotify shuts down. The music itself can be revoked at any second. Say you listen to an Indy artist who distributes via Distrokid. When you stop paying Distrokid, it removes your music. Not to mention any artist who has a solid label behind them can go in and change the music at any given point. How many iterations of Donda did we hear? Not to mention there is so much music out there that can’t be uploaded to Spotify. Freestyles, mix tapes, samples, remixes, and leaks. If there is copyright infringement at all it cannot go on Spotify. So many small artists can’t exist on there because they are sampling. So many rappers have their best verses on radio freestyles. So many electronic artists have incredible sets that just exist on YouTube. Like I am sorry but no one can convince me that the Spotify version of Mac Miller’s Faces sounds the same as the original mixtape I have on my computer that I had to make Mac a digital sandwich to download back in 2014. You are missing out on the existence of so much music if you use Spotify or Apple. YouTube is the closest thing to having full access to any song under the sun but at $20 a month that is too expensive.
Now this video was not made to convince you to delete your Spotify and go off-grid like some weird audio prepper. Spotify is a tool for seeing what you like. There is no way I am going to the store to copy Drake’s new album at a premium price only to enjoy one track off of it. I use Spotify to listen to whole albums, discographies, and sometimes specific artists’ radios. I know some people swear by the community playlists but I’m sorry Rap Cavier sucks, and the Ai DJ bullshit thing is annoying. There is no sense of time and space when listening to auto-generated playlists cause they are constantly changing. The cold algorithmic robot touch is too palatable. Spotify is nothing more than window shopping. And this is something we as consumers need to be aware of as we drift further and further into a rental society, in which our movies are streamed, our music is streamed, our houses rented, and our cars leased, we own less and less every single day. So I implore you to find alternate ways to listen to music. Go to your local record shop and parous the aisle. Buy a CD Burner and swap mix tapes with your friends. Go to local shows and see if they sell cassettes. There are a million ways to make sure your media does not become lost. And that’s why I ended up going back to an iPod, because I feel for iPods what others feel for Vinlys and Cassettes, and I refuse to let my 17 years' worth of memories evaporate up into the cloud. I hope you find ownership again too.
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