on breaking up with spotify
OPT OUT!
this could be you ;)
As of April 11th i have:
10,805 photos on my phone camera roll
13,176 ‘liked songs’ on spotify, amassed over years of being passively ‘subscribed’ to that streaming platform
I am thinking about these numbers as i contemplate the digital weight that i exert upon the world, through a lifetime of internet usage.
Below are a collage of thoughts about the gimmicky ick i’ve been getting from Spotify (plus alternatives), and slowly trimming back my online presence
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This Spring, i've been really leaning into digital spring cleaning.
I’ve been trimming back my social media presence on instagram (archiving / deleting photos). IG is a whole other beast I won’t go into here, but I’ve had many convos over the past years with kin about the desire to de-platform and remove ourselves from the GRIP ig and social media spaces have on our energy and attention.
Part of my interest in practices that move towards divesting attention from my digital spaces is my sense of being compelled towards ways of being that are quiet.****
“We are receiving so many downloads with intricate codes of creation that assist us within every aspect of our lives and in a World that has gotten exceptionally LOUD with everyone’s opinions, reactions, political views, etc., it can cloud that soft guidance from Spirit and our Teams of Divine Light. As it gets louder; get quieter.”
Natoya says it perfectly here ^ in her April Vibrations Forecast (i recommend her Mother of Starkeeping monthly vibrational forecasts)
I am trying to trim back the space I take online as I re-negotiate how i want to be in relationship with these human made devices and tools.
It feels GOOD to opt out of services (ESPECIALLY paid ones) that don’t resonate, or whose values are questionable. To unsubscribe feels like taking a lil bit of my power back from places where it has been leaking.
I know we are in an attention economy, and to reclaim our sovereignty is to become aware of the dance of our attention, moment to moment. It’s my belief that there are forces that want our attention stripped and hooked into their news cycles, tuned into patterns of mindless consumption. There are people (and entities) that benefit from keeping us distracted, disoriented, away from our spiritual center, + out of touch with our discernment tools.
THE BREAKUP
A few weeks ago I told my partner, sort of conversationally out of the blue, that i wanted to leave spotify by the end of this year. He was shocked in a good way. He’s been on a journey of deleting his online presence for the past 3+ years (an outcome of the pandemic / ego death journey if you will). He’s the only person I know who is off meta + google (he’s switched to proton mail for emailing). We challenge each other to think about the things we are attached to, and we think critically together about the troubling direction the internet is heading in. After moving away from Toronto, he simply did not want to be perceived in the ways he used to be, especially online, no longer resonating with who he was / what he was known for in Toronto. He told me today that he even reached out to any online spaces who had an archive of his work, requesting for it to be deleted, so you can no longer find pages of related articles when you search his name.
Letting go is a healthy and necessary growth practice I think, one that motivates me to delete/undo/opt out of stories and spaces that no longer resonate, to give space to become something different, something new.
ANYTHING UNALIGNED MUST GO
I am more easily attached I would say; while devo can let go of objects (physical and digital) without a second thought, I stumble. I’m a lot more sentimental about things I think, and if I am honest, I am more attached, more involved, less willing to let go of what I’ve gathered / collected (could be unpacked as something to do with being diasporic / of recent immigrant pathways, but we will save that for another time). As I write this I think of the foundational principles of Buddhism; written into the Four Noble Truths is the knowing that attachment = suffering, and “the cure is letting go”.
For years I have wanted to leave spotify, pretty well as soon as I learned how little artists are paid per stream, but I was simply attached! Attached to my playlists, and hooked into my patterns of use. I’ve been hesitant to leave, fearing the time it would take to re-build my digital collection of music. A sign of laziness. Even after dropping my premium subscription, I found myself still clicking on the app when I would open my phone, out of habit. It took a few weeks for this auto-pilot pathway to be rewritten.
After telling devo about my intention to go, I shared my breakup thoughts with a friend around a fire late one night. His reaction was also one of surprise, which was interesting information for me (he uses spotify, and we often share music w each other). He said that if I did it (leave the app), he would too! His response made me realize that sharing my thoughts around the spotify break-up might inspire others to opt out, which is a really good thing. When i shared news of the spotify breakup briefly on ig, a lot of folks reached out saying it was something they’ve been contemplating for a while too.
Krishnamurti on attachment: K: “Wait, wait. Look, listen quietly. Somebody says, 'I depend on something because I am lonely'. I depend on something because that something fills my emptiness. I depend on knowledge, books, because that covers my emptiness, my shallowness, my stupidity - so knowledge becomes extraordinarily important. I'm an artist, I talk about pictures and the beauty of pictures because in myself I depend on that. So dependence indicates my emptiness, my loneliness, my insufficiency and that makes me depend on you. Right? That is a fact isn't it? Don't theorise, don't argue, don't say - it is so. If I am not empty, if I am not insufficient, I wouldn't care what you say or do. I wouldn't depend on anything. Because I am empty, lonely, I don't know what to do with my life. I write a stupid book and that fills my vanity. I go back and write about ancient Sanskrit rot, and I say 'By Jove'. So I depend, which means I am afraid of being lonely. Right? I am afraid of my emptiness. Therefore I fill it with cloth, or with ideas, or with persons. Now wait - now aren't you afraid of uncovering your loneliness? Right? Have you uncovered your loneliness, your insufficiency, your emptiness? And that is taking place now, isn't it? Right? Therefore you are afraid now. Right? You are afraid of that emptiness now. Now what are you going to do? What is taking place? Before you were attached to people, to ideas, to all kinds of stuff and you see you are depending and that dependence is covering your emptiness, your shallowness, your petty little, shoddy little mind…
So now sir, you have uncovered your fear now, uncovered through attachment, which is dependency, and the dependency, when you look into it you see your emptiness, your shallowness, your pettiness - you know all, the rest of it - and you are frightened of it. Right? Which means what takes place then? Proceed, sirs. What takes place?
Q: Try to escape.
K: You try to escape, which is trying to escape through attachment, through dependency. Therefore your are back again in the old pattern. But if you see the truth, the fact that attachment, dependency, emptiness, if you see that fact, you won't escape, will you? If you don't see the fact of that you are bound to run away, you will do all kinds of things. You try to fill that emptiness in other ways, before you filled it with drugs, now you will fill it with sex or you will fill it with something else. So when you see the fact of that, what has happened? Proceed sirs, go on with it. I have been attached to the house, to the wife, to the books, to my writing and becoming famous - you know the people who want to be famous ought to be kicked in the pants - so I see fear arises because I don't know what to do with my emptiness. You understand? Therefore I depend, therefore I am attached, on that which I depend on. Now what do I do when I get this feeling of great emptiness in me?”
We yam on and on about the failures of the system, the oppressive violent quality of capitalism, but we continue to feed it! To opt in, to sign up, to hoard.
REASONS TO UNSUBSCRIBE
Disturbing to me is the effect streaming platforms like Spotify have on my creativity and my listening. As a teen and throughout my 20s I was a pretty avid hunter of music; reading music related blogs and magazines to find new artists, going to shows and festivals and organically finding music in that way. Digging for rare to come by sounds on youtube. I started to notice a few years ago that I became more musically complacent, happy enough to be served an assortment of songs that the algorithm provided. There is something a little dystopic about living in a small town, and hearing the same spotify created playlists circling at every cafe.
Spotify also has mid audio quality (don’t believe them when they say its good), and it pays artists the least of any streaming platform???? Fuck that. The increasingly gimmicky expression of Spotify also turns me right off. Every Spotify Wrapped I see shared around year’s end feels embarassing to witness. What really solidified the need to leave was the introduction of their “song psychic” feature: "Your questions answered – with a song” *rolls eyes. The visualizers, the moving features, the new new new being dropped on that platform (and on ig too, let’s be real - you see that new ASK AI feature they just shared?) — it is increasingly obvious that they are working dilligently to keep our attention hooked and our subscriptions ongoing. The new tantalizes the lazy mind. It reinforces a lazy mind, slowly strips us of Choice, represses creativity.
It was only a few days after sharing my intention to unsubscribe with my close peeps (with the fire as a witness too) that I opted out. It was honestly easy. It didn’t take a year, it just took me saying it out loud to finally make it happen.
ALTERNATIVES
Since I’ve opted out of that subscription, I’ve joined my mom’s family plan on apple music (free for me) and signed up for youtube premium, which comes with youtube music. You can play tracks that are only on youtube, close the app and still listen, + skip the ads. Youtube ads are so heinous these days, the $15 monthly fee feels worth it, plus I appreciate that for the most part, youtube + apple music are simple and haven’t changed too much from what they used to be. Apple music, as far as I can tell, does not algorithmically feed you songs based on the data it has mined from you through your listening. It either loops what’s playing, or stops playing completely.
Some other alternatives I’ve seen:
Buy Music Club: https://www.buymusic.club/ a place for creating and browsing lists of independent music purchasable on Bandcamp.
Bandcamp Fridays; music purchases made on that day go directly to the artist
Hunting for cds vinyl tapes, new/used
Local, independent radio!!! Nelson, we are lucky to have Kootenay Co-op Radio
Online radio like ISO, NTS, etc
Mixcloud mixes by your favourite DJ’s
Supporting artists directly by going to shows + buying merch (end of this month we head off on a 9hr drive from Nelson to Portland to see Mk.gee, a favourite sonic wizard in our household)
The combo of Apple Music + Youtube Premium has inspired me to get back to digging, to more creatively search for music like I used to, instead of passively receiving sounds the algorithm thinks I should hear based on the data it has collected from me
Going back to basics = more creative use of my memory and of the platforms available
