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Music streaming is a mess, so here's how to use Spotify somewhat privacy-consciously

2024-09-01

As a part of my privacy journey, I migrated away from Spotify years ago - mostly because I wasn't really into listening to music back then and it didn't bother me much. But even then with low demands, finding suitable alternatives wasn't easy and I switched services quite a few times. So let's talk about my journey, why I think music streaming is a mess and how to use Spotify somewhat privacy-consciously, which is what I do again right now...

Even for myself it's quite unbelievable, but I initially cared so little about music that I just searched for some online radio stations playing nice electronic tunes and settled on listening to them with basic platform-native clients ( Rhythmbox for desktop and RadioDroid for my phone). On that note, I can recommend some channels from SunshineLive , N-JOY (especially their formats N-JOY Club and N-JOY Residents ) as well as SomaFM . About two years ago, I had enough of it though and wanted more control over the music I listen to, so I started searching for a privacy-respecting music streaming service. Long story short, such a thing just doesn't exist, but YouTube Music allows you to stream pretty much anything without having to register. This makes for a solid base of privacy-focused frontends like ViMusic , which is a native Android application with lots of features and even the ability to store songs locally on your device.

Therefore, ViMusic is what I used for well over a year with what I would call a passable experience (considering it's free maybe even a good one). The app itself was well-developed, but YouTube continuously changes their internal APIs breaking third-party applications like this one in one way or another (songs won't play, album or artist info won't load or the search function would just stop working). This leads to a constant game of cat-and-mouse that the developer maintaining such an application can't possibly ever win and thus the primary dev of ViMusic abandoned it (probably being exhausted and tired of the unproductive changes required to keep it running). Once several features (most importantly the search) began to break, I had to look around for an alternative and luckily there was a fork called RiMusic available that happily accepted my fixes for some broken functionality and even implemented a vast majority of new features. I have to admit that due to the constant changes it isn't quite as stable as ViMusic, but it allowed me to simply migrate my existing music library over and continue listening, which is a fantastic thing by itself. Sadly, it's frequent bugs, the lack of an easy to use and well working music recommendation/discovery feature as well as the manual sync required to listen to music on my desktop have eaten up my patience and I just wanted something more convenient, which put me right back at the beginning of this journey.

After reassessing the current music streaming options, I just have to say that the whole market is an utter mess of privacy-invading anti-consumer products . Despite paying a monthly fee to listen without ads (which on its own seems fair to me), all of them still track your activities and engage with third-party services to exchange their collected data. Also, virtually none of them provide a robust library export locking you into their ecosystem and enforcing the concept of only providing a service with you as the user owning nothing - not even your curation of content. The only real option to remain entirely unbound is to buy all your songs on CD or as MP3 and host a streaming software on your own hardware, which is quite a bit of work, expensive and out of the question for me, as I'm locking for a more convenient solution. Thus, I made a deal with the devil and decided to switch to Spotify, since they make it quite easy to create an account without providing any personally-identifiable information (PID) as mentioned in this Reddit thread , the data they do gather seems reasonable , they have an excellent music recommendation algorithm and honestly most of my friends use it. Just follow these steps to use it somewhat privacy-consciously:

Of course, even with these practices Spotify still isn't a perfect solution, but most if not all of their data should be meaningless since it can't be correlated to your real identity. That's a fair tradeoff between privacy and convenience in my mind, at least right now. With that said, I hope you enjoyed reading the article, ideally it was helpful to you and we'll hear from each other next week...

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