Out, Damned Spotify!

After a few years of being a subscriber to Spotify, I’ve decided to cancel my subscription. Beyond the general controversy of the day, Spotify’s decision to publish and promote a pretty terrible person despite their purpoted misinformation rules, they’ve never been terribly good to musicians. I’ve been vaguely aware that streaming via Spotify was never a lucrative deal for most of the musicians, which is why I’ve always made efforts to use Spotify only as a vehicle for finding and easily accessing music while supporting the artist more directly through other platforms, but the whole Joe Rogan controversy has brought a lot of other problems with Spotify into the limelight and I can no longer give them money without betraying my conscience.

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The Modern Malaise of Mixed Emotions

It is a brand new month. Not a lot has changed since yesterday when I was upset about being in a tough financial spot (though I’ve crunched numbers so at least I know exactly how much wiggle room I have), but I did get my yearly Spotify stats today so now I’m wondering if I have a music/podcast addiction or if I’ve grown reliant on those forms of media to combat my constant solitude. I spent an average of 7.2 hours a day listening to Spotify, exactly 21% of which was a single podcast.

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The Reassuring Failure of Spotify’s Discover Weekly

First: a follow-up. I wrote yesterday about struggling to obtain an item in Skyward Sword that I need for gear upgrades. During that evening’s video game time, I played Skyward Sword again and killed three enemies that dropped this item and every single one dropped it. Three in a row, right there, staring at me. And completely inaccessible. No way to get them, even a little bit. 100% impossible. Absolutely devastating.

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