Ditching Spotify

DitchingSpotify.md

Transferring Your Spotify Playlists

What We're Leaving Behind

Spotify has concerning business practices when it comes to artist compensation, privacy, and the use of AI ¹,²,³. From a consumer perspective, they do a great job with music discovery:

• Everything is labeled and categorized
• Personalized playlists based on listening habits

These are still features we can use via the free tier, but spending listening time elsewhere will reduce their data, and the quality of recommendations.

Transfer Steps

Cleaning up Spotify Library

First, be careful that everything you would like to export is actually in your Spotify library. This may not include playlists that you have only ever searched for. Anything that's missing may take an hour to show up in transfer tools. If an auto-generated playlist (e.g., "{Artist} Radio", "{Genre} Mix") is important to you, read ahead** before starting the export.

You might also delete anything that could clutter the next steps.

Exporting Playlists

Any export service will prompt you to log in to your Spotify account so it can access your library. I recommend...

1. Exportify.net - provides a straightforward button to export all playlists to csv spreadsheet files, which will download as a zip file.
2. Soundiiz.com - provides a more visual interface, and can transfer playlists directly from/to any another service. Their free tier only allows 1 playlist at a time. Or $5/mo for premium features.

Soundiiz does not capture auto-generated playlists**. To transfer these, you can either...

1. Making a new user-generated playlist...
   1. Going to the playlist
   2. Selecting "..." -> "Add to Playlist" -> "New Playlist"
2. Using Exportify to...
   1. Download the csv.
   2. Loading the csv files into Soundiiz with the "Import Playlist" button

Importing Playlists to Another Service

If you're simply moving to another streaming service, you can use soundiiz to transfer playlists directly by ...

1. Clicking the box next to each playlist
2. Selecting the first button at the top, "Convert"

For other services, I recommend Qobuz because...

1. High quality audio
2. Better artist compensation (per 1k streams)⁴,⁵
   • Qobuz: $18.7
   • Napster: $19-21
   • Tidal: $12.8-13
   • YouTube Music: $3-15 (avg. $7, more from 'premium' users)
   • Apple Music: $7.8-10
   • Deezer: $6.4
   • Amazon Music: $4-6
   • Spotify: $3-5

The downside to Qobuz is..

1. No free tier - only paid subscriptions
2. Lesser quality discovery algorithms

Downloading Music Locally

Without auto-generated playlists, we can fall in love with albums again.

Don't be Unethical

An unethical person might either:

1. Use YouTube as a browser-based ad-free alternative.
   1. Use soundiiz (optionally via Exportify) to export to YouTube Music
   2. Export that playlist to YouTube
   3. Use Firefox with the following extensions:
      1. uBlock Origin - to block ads
      2. Privacy Badger and Ghostery - to block cookies/trackers
      3. SponsorBlock - to block sponsored content
      4. Unhook - to block distracting UI elements
2. Download YouTuble playlists as audio files, following the first 2 above, and then
   1. Set the playlist to 'Public'.
   2. Download the YouTube playlist using a service like yt-dlp

Such an unethical person ...

1. In the former case, would not be contributing ad revenue to content creators.
2. In the latter case, would be violating YouTube's terms of service, and potentially copyright law, risking legal action and/or fines.

So definitely don't do these things.

Ethical Alternatives

Smaller artists will feel a direct impact from purchases. Consider downloading music from:

1. Artists' websites (indie artists)
2. Bandcamp (smaller labels)
3. Services like Qobuz (larger labels)
4. Archive.org (public domain)

Unfortunately, I could not find a service that would allow bulk purchasing of songs from an exported playlist, so this process will be manual.

Organizing

Tagging: To keep your collection managable, consider using Picard to tag files with metadata and album art. This tool will auto-fetch info about the track from a large database.

Syncing: To keep your music available on mobile devices, consider using Syncthing to automatically sync music folders between your computer and mobile device over Wi-Fi. This prevents the headache of adding items manually, and then forgetting to refresh updates.

Playing: If you're used to genre playlists, consider tagging items by genre in Picard, and then using a media player that can organize by genre, like Musicolet.

Footnotes

1. NewSchoolFreePress on costs ↩

2. CNBC on CEO's investment in defense tech, and stepping down ↩

3. CBC on artist boycotts. ↩

4. RebelMusicDistribution cross-platform comparison ↩

5. LabelGrid on YouTube Music ↩