I might be the only person who does not have a paid Spotify account*. The service never appealed to me.
Spotify is saturated with AI-slop, background Muzak, and other fabricated phoniness. It also barely pays artists, typically paying .01 for a thousand plays of a song.
Millions upon millions of people are on Spotify. However, that might be slowing down. I’ve written that buying physical media is on the upswing. Gen Z is increasingly wanting to own media after millennials digitized everything. Combined with collectors and people who care about artists over billion-dollar companies, there is a bit of a movement on the fringes. While nowhere near the physical sales of books, physical music sales are trending up.
Consider these numbers:
- Vinyl records sales were over $1 billion in 2025.
- After plummeting throughout the 2000s, CD sales have stopped falling, and now represent over $300 million in sales.
- The used CD market is growing as younger music collectors look for a cheap way to collect as used CDs are often 1/5th of the price of a new vinyl album.
Despite this, streaming still represents 84% of the 11.5 billion in American music spending.
Meanwhile, I don’t pay for streaming music at all.
How do I, a professed music fan, listen to music? I don’t have a CD player in my car and I no longer have stacks of CDs around my house.
For those new to not streaming, here is how I have sidestepped Spotify.
First, I downloaded my favorite radio station apps (shoutout WRRJ Cocoa Beach and WMNF Tampa). But they don’t play all of what I want to hear all the time.
I used to have an iPod Classic. If you remember those, they were the best and biggest iPod on the market. You plugged your iPod into your desktop or laptop and uploaded your MP3s. Mine held 19,000 songs. But then it died. I needed a phone-based music player. Shout out to my iPod Classic. I miss you.
After the death of my iPod, I re-downloaded all of my CDs. I had over 600. Then I acquired 350 more from my brother. It took me months, but I put all the music on my desktop.
(I should have mentioned, I also own a USB CD Drive. Old media readers are still out there. Buy them now while you still can.)
For organization and meta-tagging, I used MediaMonkey. MediaMonkey is a free jukebox-type player for your computer, laptop, etc. There is a mobile version that claims to sync across devices, but I have never used it. I only use MediaMonkey on my desktop to edit the metadata for albums.
I scanned all the music folder on my desktop in MediaMonkey, edited metadata that needed addressing, then uploaded each album folder into Google Drive. Instead of deleting the files on my desktop, I saved them to a portable hard drive. I like having copies of my music. I did however sell most of my CDs, only keeping local artists, signed CDs, and a handful of my favorite artists. From over 900 to barely over 100.
Once my files were copied into Google Drive, I downloaded an app on my phone called Cloud Player by doubletwist, which plays the music in the cloud folder I point it to. Cloud Player is a 1-time purchase of $12. In 5 years, they have updated once for an additional $12.
When an album is uploaded into Google Drive, I open Cloud Player and hit refresh. It looks in the Google Drive folder and shows the metadata from the album I just uploaded. Ready to play.
Cloud Player is not perfect. Although it has a “Most Played” list, it doesn’t tell me how many times I listened to a song. It is oddly difficult to randomize the songs from a singular artist. While there is a playlist function, the metadata does not list if a file is already in a playlist. I have accidentally listed songs in the same playlist multiple times. And there times where Cloud Player doesn’t read a file right and it skips 5 or 6 songs until it plays another song. I don’t know why this happens. Every time there is an extended break between songs, I pause the player and hit the back button to the last played song. After that, Cloud Player has no problem playing the next songs.
In addition to playing my cloud-based tunes, Cloud Player also has a Magic Radio function that allows users to stream radio feeds from anywhere in the world. Magic Radio is organized by genre, location, or language. Every Sunday, I listen to Bru Zane, a classical music station out of Italy.
Cloud Player is perhaps my favorite, if not one of my most used apps on my phone. Despite a few weird bugs, I highly recommend it.
Even though Media Monkey is free and Cloud Player is only $12, there is a larger cost to this system. A free Google Drive only holds 15 GB. That’s not enough for a music collector. I subscribe to Google One and pay $100 a year for 2 TB of storage. That’s my cloud storage for everything - email, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, saved videos, and my music. I am not even halfway full.
$100 to hold all my important online files and over 35,000 songs that I have curated and can replay whatever I want, whenever I want. Guaranteed no AI slop and no algorithms. Spotify is $15 a month ($180 a year) for far more songs, but a billion dollar company controls the algorithm and contracts to play or not play an artist. I am the owner of music. Spotify subscribers are users of a music service. It’s more work, but I know what side I like to be on.
Of course, I still acquire new music. I still buy a handful of new CDs of my favorite groups on Amazon. On occasion, I find new and used CDs at the local CD store. I also download new music on Bandcamp. If you are not supporting musicians on Bandcamp, you should be. Especially on Bandcamp Artist Fridays, which is a once-a-month event in which all money from purchases actually goes to the artist, not the website. But Bandcamp has to pay the bills and keep the servers serving, so giving them a few dollars isn’t a bad thing.
(There is also archive.org and many blogs that post classic albums for those who sail the open seas, wear an eye patch, and have a parrot on their shoulder. You can find a lot of music at these locations.)
I don’t expect Spotify to go out of business anytime soon. Just like I don’t expect Amazon to go out of business. Spotify has embedded itself as a platform for artists, even though, like Amazon, creators get paid peanuts. But through a mix of free software and one very cool cloud player, I have been able to create a system that allows me to listen to all the music I have collected for over 30 years whenever I want, wherever I want.
If you want to leave Spotify and don’t want to go through everything I do, there are a few open source options. I can’t attest for any of them, but here is a link to list of them.
https://github.com/chayotic/Open-Source-Music-Streaming-Apps
If you are on Spotify, you can listen to my debut novel, Curveball at the Crossroads. I recommend it. The audiobook is awesome.
Full disclosure: I’ve made $15 dollars from Spotify since they started carrying audiobooks in 2023. I make approximately $2 per full listen of my audio book. You can buy a digital download for $10, or you can also listen to the whole 7 hour and 23 minute story as part of your subscription. For that 7 hours and 23 minutes of entertainment, I make $2. Which is approximately 1/2 of 1 cent a minute. Or 2 cents every 4 minutes, which isn’t much, but is admittedly far more than music artists are making.
(I have a Spotify author account. I had a free Spotify music account once, but I lost the password. If I remember right, I wanted to listen to a local artist’s new album, which was only on digital.)
