re: sayonara spotify

It’s officially been a year since I decided to say sayonara Spotify, and go back to collecting MP3s! My Navidrome instance has been doing good, flo is nice, and I even got myself an iPod Classic 6th gen running Rockbox.

As you may have read in the last post, I wanted to get some ridiculous analytics for Spotify Wrapped. Well story cut short, I didn’t get a wrapped this year as I’ve not been using it enough, but! I downloaded all my data and imported it into ListenBrainz. I “successfully listened” to Hamburger Song by Big Willy Status about 1422 times lol! So my statistics is looking kinda weird, but that’s fun.

While we’re talking about stats, I kinda like the album collage / art creator that ListenBrainz generates for you. It makes me not miss and feel left out of the Spotify Wrapped “mania” lmao. I’ve seen some other alternatives as well, like the one Tom MacWright built for Bandcamp, or how taylor.town document their album ratings and stitch all the album covers of the years top rated albums into one image.

Regarding new music, I currently browse on one of the platforms below. These platforms help me with finding new artists every day.

• Mirlo
• Bandcamp
• iomoio
• Discogs
• qobuz
• Radio Garden

For example, I discovered one of my new favorite artists - Ca7riel y Paco Amoroso - on these platforms! For my old, and new, favorite artists, I’ve started following their Spotify (I haven’t yet looked for other alternatives for this yet) or Bandcamp RSS feed to watch out for whenever they post new music. Yet again, RSS is the savior for me when leaving all the Big Tech platforms. I started using it for podcasts as well, ditching the old Podme app. I’m using Anytime Player on iOS now.

What I’ve also noticed, like mono and marblethoughts, is that I’ve become more of an album listener. I still have, and make, playlists, but my typical day mostly consists of listening to the full length of albums back to back.

Otherwise, I’m so in love with my iPod and can’t wait to mod it even more. I’m currently saving up to buy a moonlit classic connect 2 kit - it’s an all-in-one kit that modernises the iPod. I love just plugging in in the iPod when I get home into my vinyl setup, with the aux-to-rca cable, to keep listening to the album I’m currently listening to.

Last, but not least, I’ve finally moved my familys subscription over to another family members account, and deleted my account. So I’m officially not longer on Spotify :party:. I used Exportify to get my playlists over in csv-format, so I can add these to my ListenBrainz playlists later on.

The fact that I’m becoming more and more of a digital packrat lately is feeling somewhat good. I like to own my stuff, becoming more digital sovereign, and not be subscribed to a ton of services. It makes me think more about what I buy, and requires me to be more intentional with my digital curation of different medias.

Oh also, on an actual last note. I had to try out agent-driven vibecoding, and decided why not create a Rust CLI app to sync my hosted music on Navidrome to my iPod? NaviPod is what came out of it. It also lets you scrobble to your ListenBrainz account from your iPod, if you have the last.fm log-setting enabled.