Listening to music in 2025 as a Music Goblin
February 2nd 2025
Alternative title : I finally cancelled my Spotify subscription!
This is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, given the state of music streaming nowadays. The main problem is obviously the looming knowledge that the money I give every month to a streaming platform barely ever goes to artists, but every single one of them also seems to have a quirk that makes me reticent to use them : Deezer is terribly designed for personally uploaded songs, I hate how Youtube Music isn't separate from Youtube, and Spotify is Spotify.(The most evil of all! Also, what kind of music app doesn't let you see the songs that already played from your queue??)
Given all of that, the idea of downloading my music is the most logical one, although with its unique challenges for me. First of all, at some point I listened to super long lofi playlists, which would cost so, SO much money to buy. Then there's the main problem, which is that I listen to music like a goblin, dropping shiny individual song after shiny individual song into extremely mismatched playlists. It makes for a frustrating experience when you want to buy your music digitally, between artists who only sell full albums on Amazon Music (also evil) and artists who only sell physical media (very cool, but I don't have a CD drive at home yet). And then I need to find the right app with the right UI so my brain will tolerat using it to listen to music, preferably free and open source.
Well, as per the alternative title, I did find a solution to those problems! Here's a list if you want to get inspired to also drop you streaming subscription :
- First of all, for the technical side of things, I found a combo that seems to work pretty well. The first part is Syncthing, which I use to synchronize files between my computer and phone. It lets you configure specific folders, which lets me have a dedicated syncthing music folder on my computer to put music in, linked to the Music folder on my phone. It does need a bit of setup, and your devices need to be connected at the same time for the transfer to work, but this comes with a bonus : it means that nothing goes through any other server.
- On top of Syncthing, I use the Metro app for Android. It unfortunately hasn't been updated in a while, and you do need to get it from F-droid instead of the app store, but for me it has all the right features.
- A big reason why I have made the shift now is that I haven't been listening to that much music lately. For my lofi needs I have the game Spirit City(Running on my second screen as I write this!), and for the rest I've been listening to mostly two albums, both available on bandcamp. This let me get a good starting library so I could cancel my Spotify subscription, which means now I can use that money as a monthly budget to buy music.
- As an alternative to that, if you listen to much more than that or if your favorite artists don't have digital downloads, you can use a tool to download music from youtube (or other places) at first. I do encourage you to pay for your music(We don't want to be like Spotify, do we?) at some point though! This can also be part of your monthly budget.
- Something which I did not get to yet : external CD/DVD drives that you can plug in a USB port seem to be between 20 and 50 euros. Practical for the artists who don't do digital download, and also for getting CDs in flea markets! There's even an added bonus : you will be ready when you want to start doing the same thing with movies ;)
