Much like my personal relationship with generative AI, my feelings about Spotify are… complicated.
On the one hand, pay the artists what they deserve, full stop, fuck all the gatekeepers and non-creative rights-holders forever, and stop randomly Netflixing songs on my playlists into faded, unplayable titles no apparent reason.
On the other, that damnably accurate recommendation algorithm has introduced me to countless new artists I might never have discovered otherwise. Many of whom I also end up listening to and following on other platforms that more appropriately compensate the artists on their roster, and/or I see their shows when they come through LA, and/or I buy physical or digital versions of their music from Bandcamp or Qobuz, and/or maybe even some actual merch if they have any really cool shit and I’m in the rarest of spendy moods.
As both an indie artist and a rabid music fan, I’m always torn between listening convenience and solidarity, that is, until the apparently impossible (at least under the profit-driven mass-hypnosis that is late-stage capitalism) occurs, and someone invents a distribution platform immune from exploitation and enshittification. So, basically, almost exactly like Spotify, just not run according to the whims of any of the usual suspects: the seemingly endless procession of boring business majors, grindset tech bros, and greedy industry wankers.
More than a decade ago now (Christ), there was that kerfuffle with Taylor Swift. Now, in our current era of near-constant upheaval, we have the #BoycottSpotify hashtag, which has seen numerous acts (none as high profile as Swift, but not unknowns either) pulling their music from the platform, prompted not only by the increasingly unfair compensation per song stream, but the apparent last straw: the CEO’s personal 0.69 billion dollar investment in a company that makes AI-powered military software and unmanned armed drones. Yikes. (The rich really have completely ceased to care what the general public thinks of them, haven’t they? Might be a good idea to pick up a history book or two while their heads are still attached.)
If you feel like taking a similar stand, but find yourself painfully perched on the fence like me, and/or have spent considerable time curating your collection in one or more iterations of the Spotify app, you can at least use one of the free tools provided by Chosic to extract your playlist data before blowing up your subscription. You can export CSV’s (for importing into any spreadsheet-ready program) or plain old TXT files, and you can do so with any Spotify playlist you have the link for, without having to log in via Chosic.
I’m doing this now because a) trusting your data to any company that charges you a monthly subscription fee to continue to access it is always a losing game in the end, and b) it might make a difficult decision in my not-so-far future just a little bit easier.