Table of contents

• Why
• Roadmap
  • Useful links
• On desktop
• On mobile

Thoughts and decisions about quitting Spotify

Quitting Spotify is hard.

It’s very hard, not only because it’s convenient and easy to use, but mostly because almost everyone else uses it; thus creating playlists, sharing music and interacting with other music lovers becomes way harder without it. For these reasons, quitting and finding another tool to listen to music isn’t enough: it’s necessary to substitute the playlist creation and sharing workflow of Spotify while keeping it accessible and easy to experience for anybody.

Quitting Spotify is one of the steps of the path to Internet Freedom, and it follows the “Quit and switch” philosophy.

Why #

Reasons to quit Spotify

• Criticism of Spotify on Wikipedia
• Stallman says this
• It costs a lot, and it grants musicians only a tiny share of the overall revenue
• I prefer not to be tracked and I’d prefer for my listening preferences not to be used for advertising purposes.

Closing the account means deleting all playlists, thus the account can't be closed, but it must be kept with free subscription.

Roadmap #

1. Evaluating other ethical streaming services
2. Copying Spotify playlist on other FOSS alternatives
   • OpenWhyd
   • Radio4000
   • Audius Music (not a valid standalone option, it has its own limited music selection)
   • Bandcamp
   • Soundcloud
   • Open.Audio
   • Resonate
   • YouTube (obviously from an Invidious instance)
   • FreeTube, open source and private desktop YouTube client
   • ?
3. Exporting liked songs?
4. Importing liked songs in the new service?
5. Spotify account deletion consequences:

Useful links #

• Quitting Spotify and moving to NewPipe + FreeTube post on PrivacyTools Community

On desktop #

Use a combination of the alternatives above, since none is as complete as Spotify.
The purpose is to differentiate as much as possible all of the streaming services to value competition and avoid monopolization. The most promising software is FreeTube.

Ideally, the best way would be to download and store locally all of the music I listen to, as I did up to 3 years ago, but I have to admit it’s not convenient at all, from every point of view.

On mobile #

1. Find the optimal NewPipe configuration.
   • How to listen to whole albums
   • How to like songs
   • How to import Spotify liked songs
   • How to improve bitrate (it’s limited to 128kbps)