How to bail on Spotify

We were just chatting about music services and tracking at this week’s Homebrew Website Club, and I shared my cynicism that Spotify purposefully makes the experience of listening to music you own hard and shitty. Add in my thinking about listening to albums more and Spotify’s doubling down on misinformation, and it sounds like I need to give my music setup some thought.

I have over 600 playlists, so I need a service that will import them as well as possible.

I also need something that scrobbles with last.fm.

And I need something to manage my owned music library, which may be a second piece of software.

I have bought a lot of music through Amazon music over the years because they sold individual tracks DRM free, and they ‘give you’ digital copies of most physical albums you’ve bought. (Convenient since I don’t have a CD-ROM to rip CDs anymore.) So they may be a logical option.

I never expected Spotify to take Joe Rogan off the air — they have gone all in on podcasts and he’s their biggest bet — but I do feel like there should be some conversation about disinformation, and what a platform’s responsibility is to disallow misleading falsehoods during a pandemic (and also let’s talk about undermining democracy), and how that could even be practically feasible on an audio medium. Instead, Spotify said nothing about misinformation, not even the shitty line that they’re just a publisher and have no responsibility for amplifying a message of harm to 200 million subscribers.

We need to talk about it, and I know why they don’t want to, and I know they don’t want to take any responsibility, and I know they don’t want to get into the info verification game, but FFS, even Twitter and Facebook realized that some things are too dangerous to let go completely unchecked.