After 6 months of painstakingly moving all my accounts from gmail to tuta, I finally deleted my google account today! No more google, meta, or apple in my life. Its crazy how much my relationship with technology has already changed. Deleting Spotify was probably the biggest change so far. Its insane how my music taste has expanded. I was so afraid of discovering less music without Spotify, but the opposite has happened. Before I had a relationship with the algorithm. Now I find music organically, looking through peoples bandcamp purchases, SoundCloud likes, and soulseek folders. I’ve found myself listening to albums much more and developing relationships with artists and their work rather than the algorithm! Music is everything to me, but I didn’t realize how dedicating time to managing a digital library and purposefully seeking new music would transform my relationship with it. It feels like one of respect and reciprocity rather than overwhelming scrolling and recommendations and feeling like I’m in a pigeonhole.
I’m excited to see how getting rid of Instagram and the YouTube algorithm will effect my psychology. I defiantly have an addiction to the numbing that these algorithms provide. I’m sure I will replace these numbing agents with other forms of distraction, but I’m hoping they’ll be at least a little less toxic. I’ve been reading the arch wiki a lot and thinking about picking up a new hobby…
How has this process been like for y’all? How has it impacted your life and the way you see the world?
Ugh. YT on tv via Smart TV has got me. Without the logged in algorithm it’s trash.
Spotify also has me to. I just want to press play and have music.
But there the last two to go and not linked to the same accoint. So that’s something.
I feel you! Getting rid of Spotify took me a long time. The thing I discovered that changed the game for me was multi genre tagging for my music. Cause, at least for me, that’s what I really liked about Spotify: opening the app and clicking a recommended playlist which normally centered around a certain genre/vibe.
When I first starting building up my digital music library, having to make specific playlists for each mood felt like way to much work. But now I use Auxio on my phone and use mp3tag on my computer to add genres to new music that I download (+syncthing to sync my library from computer -> phone). Some are less then accurate but reflect that desire for certain vibes. For example I use a ‘nostalgia’ genre tag which for me just means 2010s recession pop that I listened to as a kid.
The real nice thing is that now songs appear in multiple genres. So if want to shuffle 'sad piano ballad’s that include a rihanna song, I have that with one click, but I also have that song in my ‘nostalgia’ genre!
It does take a fair amount of work to tag, but now that I have about 1500 songs all tagged the way I like, I don’t miss spotify’s convinience at all!
edit: also, metrolist is a great app I use when a friend recommends a song and I want to stream to see if I like it before going through the effort of buying / soulseeking it
From the 80s to now has been a wild ride for music fans. I never gave up my CD collection, but the last 15 years haven’t seen a lot of additions. Streaming just made it so easy. Then during COVID, I went hard on vinyl and did that for a few years. Then last year, I decided to start bringing my media back in-house. I spent weeks ripping CDs. I spun up a Navidrome server. I found Symfonium. I started buying CDs again.
Symfonium has a “Track Mix” feature, so I get in the car, hit that, and it just plays random shit. My collection is currently at about 25,000 songs and I have no idea what might come next. It’s great. There are some things I’ve probably only listened to once before, 20 years ago or something.
Then at home, I hit the Random Albums tab in Navidrome while I’m working and just choose something from there to listen to.
It has helped make my listening more meaningful again and brought me back to my love of physical media.
I still have YT Music and I use it to listen to new releases each week or for the odd song I think of that isn’t in my collection (yet).
i think it’s actually better when the addicting algorithm is trash.