You might think this is going to be a love story about rediscovering the radio or switching back to vinyls. That’s not what happened.
Let’s scroll back a few steps. Why am I quitting Spotify?
Their modest contributions to support artists and their negative impact on the creative landscape is a big part of my decision to pivot to alternative platforms. But their decision to donate to Donald Trump and implement his policies have also raised alarm bells, but wasn’t enough to make me switch. I can, after all, understand why they want to avoid the angry eye of the current mad king.
What really made me really lose trust in Spotify was it’s poor service. It would often recommend me fake artists and low quality music, and it made it very hard to discover truly unique and talented musicians. Over the past years, my music taste had grown increasingly stale, more and more, I was listening to lame radios. I thought to myself: There has to be options?
The struggle to find a relevant competitor
Finding a replacement to Spotify turned out more difficult than I thought. Yes, there are many competitors to Spotify, but few that offer the same range and versatility in artists and songs. You can find almost anything on Spotify.
YouTube premium had just offered me a free three month trial, so for a while, I went over to YouTube music. They actually overcharged my account, gave me a refund, and then offered me an additional three months for free. Boom. Six months of free music. YouTube music was fresh and nice. It was a big corporation, sure, but I care most of all about quality, and it had a lot of aspiring and upcoming artists with creative mixes. I discovered new artists through Youtube, and I enjoyed it.
But when that subscription eventually did go over, and the ads started crawling back, I thought to myself, I can suffer one ad, but one ad every ten minutes, that’s a 100 hours a year of ads? I don’t have time for that. And I’m sure not paying that much for an ad-free experience. Especially knowing almost nothing dripples back to the artists themselves. What am I paying for? 95% for the service and 5% to the creators that make the service possible? Still, I think, if you have the wallet, YouTube music premium is the best music streaming service currently available, and it’s discover features are far superior to those at Spotify.
Back to the radio stations
So back to the radio stations I went. I downloaded apps on my phone and tried out a variety of channels, but quickly grew frustrated. Not being able to select what I listen to and when? Not knowing the name of the song currently playing? Not having control? Often, the music genres I like were not available on the classic radio stations, and when I would default to safe genres, stations would often be genre-disloyal. You’d hear rap music on an indie folk channel, metal on a pop channel, and the whole idea of mood music became impossible.
For me, music is about the human need for beauty. Music enriches experiences, turning work into a fun and productive pursuit, turning a walk into a beautiful contemplative activity, we use music to intensify and enrich meaning. I hold a deep love for the musicals, the contemporary classical composers, for electronic music, jazz and creative expression from alternative and up-and-coming creators. For me, musical consumption is highly driven by curiosity to discover new tracks and artists. Spotify kept playing me the same songs over and over. I grew bored.
Music can at its worst be a lonely pursuit. It can be other people – like the owners of Spotify, deciding what music to recommend in my discovery mix, based on which they can buy for the cheapest buck. It can be cold and unfeeling, made without love, just for the sake of easy consumption, like a fast food meal at Mcdonalds. Music can also be something that connects you with others, like how Swifties find each others, or the One Direction generation. It should connect you with the creators themselves, and the other listeners, bringing people together. Music can also highlight the beauty of any experience or mood. It can remind you of the depth and insight and meaning you can find in painful and sad situations. It can bring your body to dance and turn a boring living room to a disco. So music, as an unfiltered, and ad-free experience is absolutely worth it’s money.
How I Discovered SoundCloud
That’s when I decided to try out SoundCloud. Another Swedish-owned company known for their love for artists, helping up and coming people share new music, and letting you comment right on the beat, sharing your feelings with other listeners. Soundcloud turns the often lonely experience of Spotify mixes into a collaborative and musical experience. It’s selection is almost as good as YouTube and Spotify.
Sure, there are features I miss. I’d love to be able to have something even more bottom-up. I think the long-term aim for the community should be a federated music streaming service, which would allow people to connect with their favorite musicians and stream their work on self-hosted platforms. We could decentralize music and share it together. And the payouts to artists remains miniscule on SoundCloud. My honest thoughts? You can try Bandcamp, but I didn’t find any of my favorite artists there, and I couldn’t live with limiting my listening experience only to one or a few albums. I don’t need to be a part of an infinite music repository. I just need a place where I can enjoy a couple of my favorite artists.
What’s a federated service? It’s a protocol, essentially like an e-mail, you can receive a @gmail or @hotmail directly in your mail browser, and it doesn’t matter which domain it originates from. Similarly, music creators could create their own federated music platform, and choose their terms for listening to their music, and any other music platform could federate with them, and you could create playlists and mixes across these different platforms, as you’d like.
Funkwhale – a federated listening platform
That’s why I’m looking with great interest at a service called Funkwhale, which, paired with the ability to charge for music or some kind of subscription or revenue sharing model, I think it could be a really powerful tool to break up music monopolies. That, and YouTube competitor PeerTube could have interesting options for people that want to share and collaborate on creating cool videos, without selling or giving up their intellectual property to a big company like Google.
You might say “These services are too small – their selection is too limited” – and “nobody is going to switch from YouTube to PeerTube. You’d lose all your views!”
Well, the thing is, not everyone needs to or is looking to be “the biggest” or “greatest” channel. Some creators are just trying to do new and interesting, original things, together with friends or a few other people they like. If you’re a new and upcoming channel, you have a lot to benefit on from choosing smaller creator platforms. First, you own your own music, of course, and secondly, you have first-come, first-serve on connecting with all the new people streaming over there. Because while the available listener base might be smaller, so is competition. And smaller, decentralised services have a tendency to increase creativity and originality, while bigger, larger services, tend to become increasingly uniformistic. Have you noticed that all YouTube creators videos, titles and thumbnails look more or less the same today? If you try to cater to all tastes and interests, your videos end up bland. It’s when you can find a niche audience that you’re really allowed to get creative.
Breaking up the Big Music.
YouTube and Spotify currently observes obscenely high streaming numbers. That’s by design. They want you to listen to and use their services, preferably 24/7. Your attention is hard currency in today’s world. Your attention is ad space for them. They also sell the data of how you use their services, used to train artificial intelligence, or for the music industry to understand customer behavior and preferences.
I’m not telling you to quit – if you genuinely think they’re the best, and worth the price, by all means, stay. You should not have to suffer for the sake of a political or musical revolution to happen. I’m not telling you to make altruistic choices for the sake of the artists. You don’t have to lessen your own experience. You should choose genuinely based on how each platform fits your unique needs as a person – how well you can use the service for curiosity, to connect, and to celebrate art and the artists that you love.
And I think the long-term vision of a truly artist-owned, community driven, bottom-up music platform is well and alive today, and the first meaningful alternative has the potential to truly shake up the music industry and breathe fresh life into creativity again.
