woob
dropping spotify might be hard but you can do it. you can learn to listen to an album instead of letting a computer randomly shove music into your head. you can do it
and also - this is wild - if you get mp3s instead of a streaming app you can listen to all of your music when you leave cellular coverage
Additionally: listen to college radio! Let some music obsessed 20 year old humanities major shove music into your head instead. A lot of them have free internet radio broadcasts now too!
What if I have a very specific and sporadic music taste and can't listen to full albums cause I usually just like one or two songs in an album?
yeah like what do people who are totally spotify-dependent do when they're out hiking and stop to take in a view and want to hear a song? are they just screwed? does spotify mobile support any local "save this song/album" caching?
spotify lets you download songs/albums and play them when in offline mode
It does. If you have spotify premium you can save as much music locally as your device will hold, either by selecting individual songs/albums or by playlist (which will update the local copy with any new tracks you add whenever you connect to internet again). I don't know if it's much of a thing anymore, but back in the 2010s there were programs to rip the local proprietary-format spotify files to mp3 so you could throw them on other devices as well.
EDIT: Looks like that is indeed still a thing
FWIW I'm not defending spotify here, just clarifying how it works. I was a spotify user for 12 years because I'm something of a playlist-brained music listener and it used to be great for that. But the past 5-6 years have been a steady decline in user experience not to mention the company's shitty behavior toward artists and musicians. I finally got around to dumping it this spring and haven't missed it all that much (really the only thing I do miss is being able to listen to all my podcasts in the same player as my music, and queue episodes and music concurrently). I shoved my playlists over to Tidal while I work on a longer-term solution to transition myself more completely away from streaming services.
i've been actively attempting to leave spotify for maybe half a year now. (yes, i'm serious. i still have over 1,000 songs in my playlist.) whenever i have spare cash laying around, i try to go through my spotify playlist to find a bunch of songs that i should buy and download. unfortunately, this idea is a lot easier said than done because it is surprisingly difficult to simply buy music today. a lot of the songs i like are straight up impossible to get anywhere except spotify and sometimes other streaming services. it sucks ass, but i'm still trying.
This is a very dumb question, but how do people find new artists? I've never been a huge music person, but something I want to find Something New, and it feels like unless you already know where to look, the only recs you can find these days are the ones that are already well-known.
I quite like SomaFM's radio channels, it's been going since 2000
Another trick is looking up smaller cities in Bandcamp's location search, often turns up something interesting!
E: It seems to be on hiatus ATM, but @community-jukebox also has suggestions from Cohost users in different genres
discogs album recommendations from ones i like, and friends with similar tastes
the way people act and talk about Spotify creeps me out because I still have such a fresh memory of someone telling me about it as a new thing that was going to launch soon, and I never ended up actively using it, I blink and suddenly I watch people needing to be reeducated about what a music file is.
