Spotify offers tremendous convenience, but convenience isn’t everything, so here are some reasons why you may want to cancel Spotify.
I recall when the iPod first launched, with the tagline: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” No longer would you have to carry around clunky stacks of CD sleeves; 1,000 songs was like 100 albums! You could put your whole music collection in your pocket!
I loved the idea. Little did I realize that this was a kind of halcyon day of music ownership.
Yes, people were downloading MP3s, sometime with questionable legality, but they were also ripping their CD collections to take on the go. Those MP3s represented ownership, music that was purchased. Artists that were paid (albeit probably not enough).
But today, most people (myself excluded) don’t carry around an MP3 player. Everyone (well, not everyone) has a smartphone which can hold a zillion songs, but people don’t cart around their ripped MP3 anymore. For most casual listeners, they own no music at all.
Because now we have Spotify.
Spotify is a music streaming service. Want to listen to a song? Type it in the search box and it instantly plays. Want to send a track to someone or make a mix? Create a playlist on Spotify. Audiobook? It’s there too.
It sounds super convenient, and all for the low price of (at the time of writing) of $12.99 a month.
That may not seem like a lot, but I’ll tell you why it’s not only expensive, but also all of the other reasons why weaning yourself off of Spotify is the better choice.
1. It’s expensive
$12.99 a month may not seem like much, but that’s $156.88 a year. After 10 years, that’s almost $1,600 you spent to listen to music. (And that’s assuming the price never goes up, which it surely will.)
And when you cancel, all of that music is gone.
If you purchase your own music, you pay for it once, and no one can ever take it away from you.
I know vinyl is all in vogue, but CDs are stupidly cheap these days, especially used ones. You can usually get one for a couple of bucks. This means that you can buy all of your favorites for a fraction of Spotify’s true cost. How many songs are you really going to want to listen to?
2. It devalues music
Turning on Spotify and letting it feed you music on the algorithm is convenient, but it perpetuates the idea of music as background noise. There’s nothing intentional about the act of listening. And that’s a total shame, because this music was made by artists who put their all into making the best music they can.
While I’m not saying you always have to sit down and be an active listener, it is a way to build a deeper appreciation for it, rather than, say, something to fill your ears as you do dishes.
3. Artists get paid nothing
According to TuneCore, a digital music distribution service, artists get paid an average of $4.37 for every 1,000 streams. That comes out to $0.0043 (less than a half a cent) per stream.
If you want to support an artist, Spotify is not the way to do it.
4. Not everything is on Spotify
Sure, the top bands and albums will always be there in some format. You’re never going to be able to not play The Beatles, for example.
But some music won’t be on Spotify, either because the rights issues are messy, or because the music is not deemed worthy enough (or lucrative enough) to bother. And some music that’s there today, may not be there tomorrow.
So if you only listen to music that is on Spotify, you’ll be missing out on potentially other life-changing music.
5. There are multiple versions of songs
This might be an edge case for some of you, but there are multiple versions of the same song. Songs have been remixed, remastered, even re-recorded!
I remember pulling up a song on Spotify once, a song that I’ve listened to all of my life, and being horrified to not totally recognize it. Was it a remix, or a new version, or what? Spotify didn’t say. That was just the version that Spotify had.
Now, I recognize that I may be the kind of person Rob talks about in High Fidelity:
But I still think that this matters. If you want the music you want to listen to, you want to make sure it’s the actual music you want to listen to.
6. There are other free options
I’ve never totally understood the draw of Spotify, and there’s one very simple reason for that: I use YouTube.
If you don’t care about supporting artists and just want some background music, okay fine, but YouTube is free.
Ads you say? I’ve never seen an ad on YouTube. Why are you seeing them?
Unsubscribe from Spotify
As you can see, there are many reasons to cancel (or just not subscribe to) Spotify. And if you notice, not all of them are about money.
And this makes sense, because the goal here on this site is not to spend less, it’s to spend intentionally. And I think that spending your time intentionally is just as important.
As someone who spent years around the music industry, I have strong empathy for the artists that are making it (or trying to make it) today. It’s not easy. Most bands make money these days from touring, but that can’t be getting any cheaper these days.
All the more reason to think twice before firing up Spotify and listening to whatever the algorithm tells you to.
(Also, a playlist isn’t a mixtape. Rob from High Fidelity would be crushed.)
Leave a Reply