Bye Spotify (for good)

When I was in high school, I thought Spotify was awesome, like, the coolest thing, a great service that was worth paying for!

However, there was a problem… I live in Mexico.

I got myself a patched APK from some random website, with the limitation of online-only playback, and I was somehow happy with it. Since I really didn’t go out at all, playing music at home or wherever I had Wi-Fi was enough—I didn’t even have a data plan back then.

Honestly though, I just downloaded music locally at the time, I didn’t particularly care about the quality of the files, but some albums like Daft Punk’s or so I did get in FLAC format pretty early on. For the rest, I just looked the albums up and got them from whatever websites had them, I would then edit the metadata inside the music player itself if needed and call it a day.

Back in the day I loved Phonograph, an awesome music player that still exists today! It was one of the first super cool Material Design apps that I discovered, it was a joy to use.

Anyway, at some point, even though I had an ever growing collection of decent local music files, I wanted to move to Spotify “properly.”

A friend of mine set up a Family plan, and invited me over. For a few years I was finally able to download music and play it while walking to school, it was epic! When they started to do Spotify Wrapped, I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

However, over time, Spotify just got more annoying to use. I have to say, I don’t really have a problem with their Podcast ads in their Home screen. I pretty much exclusively used the Library section of the app, I don’t usually look for new things and when I do I just swipe down to the bottom of a playlist and hit the “Add songs” button, and if I liked one of those suggestions, it was enough for me. But the app was so heavy and slow, that was enough for me to not use it much anymore.

Eventually I got out of the Family plan, someone else wanted to be on it so I just gave them my place. For some reason a few months later I started to pay for an individual account. Although I was being very dumb, since I was already paying for Youtube Premium at this point.

Why did I decide to pay it? I think it was for something really dumb, like preferring Spotify Wrapped over YouTube Recap, or being lazy about moving all my playlists over. Whatever I was thinking, I no longer feel any attachment to it, so it was time to move on.

After all, Spotify was just a music player of downloaded music for me. Except that it was slow to open, filled with features I don’t even use, and of course, didn’t even pay musicians properly, while giving millions to people who aren’t worth it at all.

So yeah, I finally cancelled my subscription to it, and as soon as I’m done moving my playlists, I will nuke the account for good.

This is day 37 of #100DaysToOffload