I broke up with Spotify — it was hard work with a huge payoffI’ve been ready to leave Spotify for years, but like a bad relationship, I limped onto my subscription for far too long before finally calling it quits. For me, the signal to finally abandon ship came with the recent wave of artists pulling their music off the platform in a boycott of founder Daniel Ek’s odious investments in AI weaponry.
I took the leap. I broke up with the troubled platform. In a flash, the sum total of all recorded music disappeared from my devices, and I was left to date around with some alternative streaming providers. Questions swam around my head, had I made a mistake? Could I really find anything that replaces the weighted blanket of personalised algorithms and infinite content? Should I go crawling back to my Swedish music masters? Just thinking back over Spotify’s many controversies gave me the answer I needed.

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The red flags that pushed me to make this drastic change were obvious long ago. Spotify had spent 17 years running its business at a loss; the company had been found guilty of commissioning no-name generic music for its curated playlists; Daniel Ek repeatedly insulted music makers; and the vast majority of artists are unable to make a living off Spotify’s payment model.
Then there is Spotify’s beleaguered interface, which clearly shows, in my opinion, that it is no longer a music-first company. Take the introduction of video clips: at first, there was a natural reason to believe a fresh update to the interface might enhance the music listening experience. For all we know, it could have been a real MTV moment that put music videos back into the limelight. But instead, Spotify followed the herd and implemented a ‘carousel-of-clips’ style of video playback. It’s entertaining but ultimately feels a lot like the disposable video content you see on TikTok or Instagram.
When I want to listen to music, I don’t want to be flashed with looping videos and graphics that spin and glitch. I want to get to the music I’m looking for without having to duck and weave past advertisements for Countdowns, events or an AI DJ. All these distractions had me questioning if I even owned a premium subscription or if I had somehow been downgraded to the ad-supported tier without realising.
Beyond the interface, there’s also the glut of non-music content. Spotify has increasingly allowed audiobooks to creep into the music app. Believing it to be a lucrative means of making profits, the company has embarked on a hubristic goal to “grow the entire publishing industry”.
The common denominator between audiobooks and music is, yes, audio, but these are two separate industries with vastly different licensing, rights and payment structures. More to the point, and as many critics point out, if you only listen to music using your Spotify premium subscription, you are still subsidising authors like Dan Brown while siphoning money away from the likes of Daft Punk, since they’re both bundled in the same plan.
As if the publishing industry wasn’t big enough to chew, Spotify has now partnered with the screentime behemoth, Netflix, to bring popular video podcasts to both platforms. A smattering of non-music-related offerings in the field of True Crime, Pop Culture and Sports will be available in the app, with exclusive in-house productions in the pipeline. If Spotify wanted to become an ‘everything’ app, then I’d rather jump ship with all the other artists who are leaving.
The process of actually leaving the platform, however, was itself an obstacle course. There were screens asking if I was sure I wanted to leave. There were reminders that I would be bombarded with advertisements once I was no longer Premium. There were even thirsty discounts on offer if I would just stick around one more month. And after finally convincing Spotify that I really did want to go, I was rewarded with a meme-worthy playlist that informed me, ‘If you leave us now, you’ll take away the biggest part of us,’ alongside an AI-generated image of a sad dog. How cute.
A free agent at last, I began shopping around with a few aims in mind: I wanted high-quality audio, better payouts to artists and a clean conscience that I wasn’t supporting ethically dubious financial investments on behalf of the company or CEO. On this last point, I was sick of giving any more money to Jeff Bezos, so that ruled out Amazon Music. As for quality, Tidal and Apple Music are strong contenders, both offering lossless audio formats and resolution rates of up to 24-bit/192 kHz. In the end, however, I opted for Qobuz, a company that combines high-res audio with royalties payouts that are roughly five times higher than the market average, and, particularly important for me, a very strong focus on human-curated playlists and music discovery.
After signing up, however, a funny thing started to happen. No longer content with just streaming music, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done since my early 20s: buying albums. Partially, this was down to the gaps in Qobuz’s catalogue, which doesn’t feature some of the indie acts I want to support. Patching over these gaps in my music collection led me to the doorstep of online music stores like Bandcamp and Beatport, and to offline music players like the revitalised Winamp and my favourite lightweight option, MusicBee.
Building my offline digital library required careful strategising. First and foremost, I prioritised buying obscure albums that I couldn’t find on my music streaming app. Knowing that underground artists receive next to nothing in royalties made it even more important that I buy their records and send the profits directly to the artists. There’s also a big difference between paying a subscription and buying the music outright. Similar to buying a book instead of loaning it out from the library, purchasing music felt more meaningful. Knowing that I owned these tracks forever gave them a non-disposable quality; I listened repeatedly and deeply, and gave them a special value in my day-to-day life.
I didn’t make my life easier by leaving Spotify. It’s a lot harder to search for music in multiple places and switching between streaming music and offline collections – across multiple devices at that – is not what anyone would call seamless. But nor is it easy digging through record crates, yet it’s something that still gets music fans up early on record store day, to hunt through piles of music, for hours on end. There is satisfaction and joy in buying music, collecting, and arranging tracks in your library, and discovering new music through other humans, as opposed to accepting the suggestions of sterile computer algorithms.
I take one look at my imperfect, janky, music listening system, cobbled together with constituent digital parts, and I feel connected to the music community in a far greater way than I ever did before.
Was it frictionless, easier or cheaper? Absolutely not. In countless ways, large and small, I have to work harder to be a music fan. But was it worth it? Absolutely. I now feel like I’m doing right by the artists I care about and not tacitly endorsing the schemes of billionaires for market domination. I regularly discover brilliant new indie artists, and there’s no soulless AI steering my music tastes. So, in the only way that Spotify seems to understand, let me say it through a playlist: breaking up is hard to do, but it was time to get away. I don’t love you anymore, so, walk on by, because we are never ever getting back together.
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