It feels good to reduce unnecessary weight. I was stuck with many digital “defaults”, but this summer I have left:
- Gmail — replaced with Hey
- Spotify — replaced with Apple Music and Bandcamp
- DistroKid
- Slack — replaced with Ableton Live
- RP Hypertrophy
- …
It’s so trivial that I don’t really want to write about it, but at the same time it had an impact on my daily life. Plus I have to address the Ek in the room.
For each thing that I’ve left or replaced there are trade-offs, nuances, alternatives to consider, etc. I don’t want to get into any of that here.
North star
Reduce weight. Reduce input. Reduce performative parasocial “relationships”. Get bored. Don’t support companies that you don’t want to support. Don’t use things that you hate. Like reels/shorts/tiktoks are a fucking poison. And then there’s Spotify…
Spotify and DistroKid
When I started making music, my thinking was:
- Make something and see if I like it.
- Make more and release it as an album on Spotify.
Releasing an album on Spotify was validation. And it offered a sliver of a shadow of a chance that maybe enough people will like what I do that I will earn some money. Not a lot, but maybe enough in a year to pay for a plugin or two. Spotify wants you to think that musicians earn money. Meanwhile, they’re trying hard to pay artists as little as possible, preferably nothing.
Spotify is co-founded and ran by Daniel Ek. Ek has invested hundreds of millions of euros in weapons.
One can’t upload music to Spotify directly. I paid for a DistroKid subscription to do it. Ek/Spotify are investors in DistroKid.
There’s more and I had background awareness of some of it, but seeing it all at once in a Red Means Recording video, was the drop that overflowed the goblet of bitterness.
I have removed my music from Spotify, stopped using them as a listener, and stopped paying for DistroKid. Leaving DistroKid had a side effect of removing my music from Apple Music. Get it on Bandcamp.
PS If you are a Spotify subscriber, you’ve read this far, and you still feel an urge to give money for music software to a Swede with an intriguingly short name starting with the letter E, consider choosing Ess instead.