Divest from Spotify!

“As Empire restructures itself around intellectual property and land grabs, where the sanctity of private property guarantees corporations indemnity for social and ecological depredations, it is crucial for care activism to not only emphasize labor but also integrate a rejection of private property and its regimes. Private property is the real abstraction that binds together the state, the market, and the family and enables Empire’s matrix of care. We must experiment with transforming private property into a common wealth over the means necessary for fostering a world grounded in mutual interdependence.”

—Pirate Care by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, Pluto Press, 2025

In this (not-definitive) guide we want to share some of our experience moving away from Spotify (or from other Big Tech, and not-so-Big-Tech music streaming services) as music listeners and as publishers.

• Export your playlists from Spotify: spotify-exporter
• Convert Spotify links to find music on other platforms (for example SoundCloud): idonthavespotify
• Smoothen your transition to listening to your local music library by gradually reducing your dependence on Big Tech streaming platforms. During that transition, some music might not be available on your local library. As kind of a compromise, I occasionally use PipePipe on Android, which allows you to listen to music on YouTube Music, by allowing you to bypass ads without a paid subscription, in a pirate manner.

After we started running our tiny home server, we began using Jellyfin, an open source media server. It is mainly designed for films and TV shows, but is equally great for making your own self-hosted music streaming service. There are clients for Jellyfin for practically every device and operating systems, and many third party Android and iOS music apps support adding your Jellyfin music library to them (my personal favorite is Symfonium on Android). What you need is basically a PC, running Jellyfin, which you can leave on all the time at home. Then you can stream your own music library of MP3s and FLACs etc. on your mobile device or your laptop when you are not at home. Navidrome is another open source media server, but it is focused on only music, using OpenSubsonic API. A great thing you can do with Jellyfin or Navidrome is to setup one server and share it with your friends. You and your friends can create different accounts, share one music library, or create separated libraries for each user, making sharing music between friends super easy—much better than algorithmically curated slop-playlists brought to you by Spotify! For how to setup and run Jellyfin, refer to its documentation.

Recently there has been a growing interest in old iPods, with modding community growing and people retrofitting them with flash drives, changing their cases, batteries etc. There are also a lot of really cool new digital audio players (DAPs) being released. This new trend is undoubtedly cool, but it also resulted in prices going way up in the second hand market. If you want to save some bucks, what you can do is to repurpose your old smartphone as a DAP. We came across a social media post by @assortedtapes, where he explains his way of doing this, and it made us rethink our approach too. Here are the steps to turn your old smartphone into a DAP:

• First, debloat your old smartphone. On Android, you can do this with a software on a computer, called Universal Android Debloater, or you can install the app De-Bloater from F-Droid on your phone. This will clean all the unnecessary stuff your phone comes with. This step is for Android users. I personally would also de-Google it as much as possible, if you want to keep the network connection on. If you want to use it just for on-device music files, you can cut the network connection.
• Both on iPhone and Android, you can go to the settings, and disable all the unnecessary things. If you are going to use streaming (for your own local streaming server), you can leave network on. Same goes for Bluetooth. But you can disable location, and even put your iPhone into Lockdown Mode if you want, to disable all the unnecessary stuff.
• On iPhone, you can install an alternative “launcher” called Dumb Phone, to make your home screen look very simple, where you add only the things you use for this purpose. There are similar launchers on Android, but there are too many to list!
• Transfer your music to your smartphone, using either wired transfer, USB drives, SD cards, or your cloud storage like Nextcloud etc. If you want to stream your own music library, you can use Jellyfin or Navidrome.
• Finally, install a nice app to listen to your music on the smartphone-turned-into-DAP. My favorite on Android is Symfonium. There are also AIMP, Musicolet and UAPP for Android, and Pentaton, Doppler and Sonara for iOS. JellyAmp and Discrete are iOS apps specifically for streaming your Jellyfin library. But apps like Symfonium also supports Jellyfin streaming.
• As a bonus, if you want to upgrade the sound quality of the smartphone, you can pair it with a wired or Bluetooth DAC, there are many relatively inexpensive ones from brands like Fiio etc. which will give you nice audio quality when paired with some nice headphones.

Listening to your favorite podcast after deleting your Spotify account is actually super simple. Most people publish their podcasts using available publishing tools which distributes your podcast on pretty much every platform, but more importantly, most podcasts use RSS feeds, which you can subscribe to, without using any platform. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of the podcasts you want to listen to using any RSS reader app, or a more specialized podcast app (which also subscribes to RSS/Atom feeds probably).

A short list of some nice podcast apps you can use after deleting the Spotify app:

• Android: AntennaPod, PodcastAddict
• gPodder (Windows, Mac, Linux), Gnome-Podcast (Linux, GNOME-Desktop)
• iOS: Apple's own Podcasts app if you don't mind

Bandcamp remains one of the main (if not the main) platforms for independent artists to publish and offer their music for sale, both in digital and physical formats. In 2022, the music distribution platform was bought by Epic Games, one of the largest video games companies in the industry. Massive layouts of staff followed their acquisition of Bandcamp, and shortly after, they sold the platform to a music licensing company named Songtradr. Even though it is one of the few platforms where indie artist can find some breathing space, through its “Bandcamp Fridays” for example, where artist receive 100% of the sales revenue, the platform's future is very much in question, and the need for a decentralized and/or collective effort for music publishing is evident. There are a few organizations which are trying to establish exactly that, and here is a totally incomplete list of them:

• Mirlo: A Bandcamp alternative with a worker cooperative model, operated without venture capital money, and offers fair distribution of shares from sales artists generate (artists can decide to keep 100% of their revenue, or give a percentage to Mirlo as much as they want).
• Subvert: Another Bandcamp alternative, also with a coop model. Artists or labels own a share of the platform when they open an account.
• jam.coop: Another worker owned and run cooperative, similar to Mirlo.
• Faircamp: Very cool, powerful and simple static web site generator for music publishing. You (self-)host and self-publish your music, people directly buy from you (needs Kofi or Librapay or another similar service for processing payments). There are user-initiated webrings for discovering music on Faircamp.
• Fairplayer: Amazing initiative to make a platform-independent streaming solution. Currently supports music hosted with Faircamp, will add more platforms/services soon. Addresses the challenge of music discovery on Faircamp, and aims to create a truly decentralized streaming service.
• itch.io: An interesting way to use indie video game publishing platform itch.io as a music streaming/distribution tool.

— Well Gedacht Publishing 2026/05/20 20:10

Pad link for the MP3Hangout at Refuge Worldwide on 21.05.2026:
https://pads.offline.place/p/divest-spotify