itshalfempty

Once upon a time, I owned a Zune. Yes, the “too-little, too-late” MP3 player launched by Microsoft that never even made a dent in iPod sales. I had a 2nd gen flash Zune, which in my opinion was a pretty solid product. That said, what I really found most valuable was the Zune Pass.

The Zune Pass was a subscription service that arrived in the early days of subscription music. I think it cost something like $15 a month, and came with both the ability to download and play an unlimited amount of music on your Zune. It was pricey, but what I thought made it worth it was that it also let you download and keep 10 songs each month DRM-free.

I was a Zune Pass subscriber for a long time. It turned out that the Zune software was a really great platform for music discovery. Every month I would scroll through new releases, artists similar to the ones I already listened to, and recommendations in an attempt to find tracks worth spending my 10 free purchases on. I found a lot of artists I really enjoyed who were pretty small or niche - many of which I still listen to today. Like The Grates, Tokyo Police Club, and The Sounds.

At some point though, Spotify entered the picture. It was cheaper, had basically the same (or a larger catalog), and more. But more importantly it worked on a smartphone and Zune did not. You didn’t get to keep some music DRM-free with Spotify, but I thought “music streaming is so cheap, is it even worth it?”

Fast foward 10+ years and I’m still paying for Spotify. I hate Spotify. The shuffle sucks. The search feature sucks. The recommendations suck. Randomly losing access to albums or tracks sucks. As a music discovery platform, it’s awful, and I constantly feel like the platform pushes people towards promoted artists.

Even worse, from a cost perspective, it’s also bad – at least for me. Ballparking at $10/mo for 10 years, that’s $1200 for listening to music. I primarily listen to entire albums and I realized that I only add around half a dozen albums to my collection a year. If I had spent my money instead on buying albums, I’d own all of the music I listen to, would have spent less money, and would be able to use whatever software I want to listen to music. I’d never lose access to music I bought, and I’d be much more directly supporting the artists I enjoy listening to.

About a year ago, I decided to build out my owned music catalog. I set a monthly budget to buy music and over time purchased albums that I listened to heavily. I’ve got a long list of music that I want to eventually own, but I prioritized albums I listen to a lot and albums from smaller artists who are no longer together.

I set up Plex on a spare computer for listening to my music. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for now. PlexAmp on mobile is decent - though offline functionality needs a lot of love. And I like that I can use the web interface for listening when I am on a computer, like I would for a streaming service. I like being able to view a filtered collection of albums, and to sort them randomly or by plays.

I’ve got a handful of things I’d love to see changed about Plex. But really, what I have come to value is that:

1. I’m not paying a random tech company for the privilege of listening to music. Instead, I can purchase music from anywhere (including directly from the artist) and listen to it how I want to.
2. I will never lose access to music I’ve purchased. What I listen to also doesn’t depend on the platform having a license agreement with the artist/publisher.
3. I’m free to switch software for organizing and listening to music. Like Jellyfin, Kodi, or even just a basic DLNA server.
4. This is less of a concern for music streaming specifically, but there are all sorts of data ownership and privacy concerns that a self-hosted solution resolves. What I listen to, when I listen to it, where in the world I am listening from, what is in my playlists, etc.

Ultimately, this shift has really kicked-off a desire for me to divorce myself from tech platforms in general. Once I started down this path, it became hard not to recognize enshittification in many products I use, and that my reliance on those tech products give a lot of power to a relatively small number of tech companies. I plan to share more about my journey to reduce my dependency on big tech platforms in the future.