Moving to MP3

Sunday, January 18 2026

Recently, I’ve been making the move away from streaming music. Despite using Spotify loyally for six years, I’ve recently felt a general discontentment with the company and their failure to properly compensate artists. For one reason or another, be it FOMO or inconvenience, I’ve allowed myself to excuse away the possibility of getting off Spotify for too long. With increasing subscription prices, a leniency around AI-generated music, and a CEO who invests in war drones, I’ve finally found the motivation to make the move… to MP3!

I’ll explain why I chose MP3s in a moment, but for anyone also considering the move away from Spotify, but unwilling to completely change your music consumption habits, there’s a wealth of other music streaming services. Youtube, Amazon, and Apple Music are some of the more obvious options, though I wouldn’t really want to give my money to those companies either. If you’re also interested in avoiding the giants of silicon valley, I’ve heard good things about Deezer, which is at the forefront of protecting their users from AI, and Tidal, known for their high fidelity streaming and high artist compensation. Despite these other steaming options, I found myself the most drawn to the good old fashioned downloading of MP3s. Despite the medium being less convenient, I find the experience more fulfilling. The Spotify model relies on a personalized algorithm which readily provides you music recommendations and access to hot new tracks. While I love discovering new music, I find the experience pathetically impersonal, with MP3s representing a more album-centering method of music consumption. While I used Spotify, I was encouraged to enjoy playlists of singular songs from unknown albums and artists. While this can be cool, I felt weird having these songs I'd listen to every single day, but not be able to name the title, the album, or the artist. There’s nothing technically wrong with that, and it could easily be a skill-issue on my part, but with MP3s I'm downloading music an album at a time, and I'm therefore generally listening to music BY the album. Either way, my shying away from music streaming services is a symptom of a much larger concern, as well. For example, as the internet and “the cloud” become an increasingly prevalent part of our media consumption, we find our (legal) access to these art pieces impermanent. I’ve started to collect physical media (DVD, Blu-Ray and CDs) and I find a lot of enjoyment in being able to own and display my favorite movies and albums, and downloading MP3s is satisfying for me in a similar way. Long story short, Spotify sucks – if you use Spotify, especially Spotify Premium, I think you could do yourself a lot of good by taking your business elsewhere, but where you decide to go really depends on what you value and prioritize!

Most of my media collection

Listening to music files begins with choosing an app to build your library on. You could just use Windows Media Player – it sorts the music just fine and you can make playlists and burn CDs with it… but there's also more robust, customizable options out there. I’ve used AIMP in the past. It has a variety of themes and pretty detailed menus, though I found it slightly too complex for my needs. I’ve also read about Foobar2000 being good for sound balancing like adjusting treble and bass and whatever else, but I’m not a producer and I’m not a music nerd, so I don't personally see the necessity. My program of choice is MusicBee! It does everything I need, such as ripping CDs, editing meta data, and it even has themes and plugins.

Downloading all the music is the hard part. I found that the Internet Archive has a lot of good albums available for download. If you're into stuff that's known enough to be uploaded, but not relevant enough to be taken down, you can probably find many of your favorite albums on there. For example, they have a great deal of the Talking Heads discography available. It depends album to album though; you can’t find most albums, and sometimes they get taken down. I tried to find To Pimp a Butterfly and found it was removed due to copyright, same with MM.. FOOD. Still yet, there’s other places where you can find music. My trusted friend Joel stated he uses and enjoys the site dab.yeet.su (as of January 7th), which functions like Spotify but offers MP3 and flac downloads – I’ve never used this, so take it with a huge grain of salt. You can also buy album downloads off of Bandcamp, which is especially good if it's an indie artist, (who else is on bandcamp?) My most fruitful endeavor has been the peer-to-peer file sharing platform Soulseek. If you’re unfamiliar, the app is very intimidating at first. To familiarize myself I watched this great introductory tutorial and felt right at home. In my experience, suspect files don’t seem to be common on Soulseek, but as always, you must be cautious and skeptical of any random files you end up downloading. I've downloaded tons of albums off Soulseek, and so far it’s all been dandy!

One thing I was really afraid of missing about Spotify was the Wrapped at the end of every year… but I’ve come around on it being something I'm fine letting go of. I figure I need to pony-up and stop letting them trick me with their poppycock. In fact, I won’t be entirely excluded, as I’ve signed up for Last.fm, a website that tracks your listening statistics! Each play of a song is quantified by the site as a “scrobble”, and it’s a very easy way to keep track of the music you listen to! There's ways to include yourself in the things you're afraid of missing out on, if that's what’s keeping you from making the leap. You can’t let FOMO rule your life.

My swanky little MP3 player

All in all, I’m pretty excited about the change. I even got a pricey little MP3 player for Christmas, the Surfans F20. There’s lots of choices for MP3 players, but I like this device because it has Bluetooth, physical buttons, and a scroll wheel! In truth, this is all a little novel for me because I’ve been streaming music for ages, and I’ve yet to fully incorporate this change in my day to day life. This post represents my transitional process between Spotify and Musicbee, and to get my tried and true takeaway, I’ll have to get back to you in a few months. I’ll probably make a follow up post in the some-what distant future. I hope this has at least been thought-provoking for you… let me know what you think, and thanks for reading!

If you'd like to respond, email me at loldogworld@gmail.com