Quit Spotify

Update: I figured I heve to come to a compromise: Spotify is actually useful and not all bad. Yes, it has its issues, but in the end music listening is one of the few things I want to do e basta, without having to waste time on a better way to do it.
For now, I am sticking with Spotify. If you know other simple, neat, inexpensive, and effective solutions, please get in touch!

Quitting Spotify is hard. It is very hard, not only because it is convenient and easy to use, but mostly because almost everyone else uses it; thus creating playlists, sharing music and interacting with other music lovers becomes way harder without it. For these reasons, quitting and finding another tool to listen to music isn’t enough: it’s necessary to substitute the playlist creation and sharing workflow of Spotify while keeping it accessible and easy to experience for anybody.

Quitting Spotify is one of the steps of the path to [[Internet Freedom]], and it follows the “[[Quit and switch]]” philosophy.

Why

Reasons to quit Spotify:

I strongly suggest you to read the first comment to this note.
Criticism of Spotify on Wikipedia
RMS says this
It costs a lot, and it grants musicians only a tiny share of the overall revenue
I prefer not to be tracked and I would prefer for my listening preferences not to be used for advertising purposes.
Several notes and articles

repercussions of closing Spotify account — Closing the account means deleting all playlists, thus the account can't be closed, but it must be kept with free subscription.

Plan

Evaluating other ethical streaming services
Copying Spotify playlist on other FOSS alternatives
- OpenWhyd
- Radio4000
- Audius Music (not a valid standalone option, it has its own limited music selection)
- Bandcamp
- Soundcloud
- Open.Audio
- Resonate
- YouTube (obviously from an Invidious instance)
- FreeTube, open source and private desktop YouTube client
- Music in the Internet Archive
- Mixcloud
- Fluxblog
- Minna Kikeru
- Fungjai
- ethnocloud
- Microphones in the trees
- netlabelslist
- Said the Gramophone
Exporting liked songs?
Importing liked songs in the new service?
Spotify account deletion consequences

Resources

https://social.linux.pizza/@pmarg/109110668747853766
Quitting Spotify and moving to NewPipe + FreeTube post on PrivacyTools Community
awesome-music-listening, a repository collecting a ton of online services to listen to music
I received a very insightful comment about this topic

Quitting

As of the time of writing, the best alternative is using Deezer with Freezer on mobile and from the web client on desktop.

Up to now, my free subscription is definitely enough, but once Freezer will be closed (it is going to happen, sooner or later) I am willing to pay the premium Deezer membership.

One thing I am going to actually miss is the weekly email with new releases from Spotify. I am managing to replace this with a future-proof system which uses RSS-Bridge to generate a feed for a Discogs list. Discogs is great as a database, but it does not have very little known music.

On desktop

Use a combination of the alternatives above, since none is as complete as Spotify.
The purpose is to differentiate as much as possible all of the streaming services to value fair competition. The most promising software is FreeTube.

Ideally, the best way would be to download and store locally all of the music I listen to, as I did up to 3 years ago, but I have to admit it’s not convenient at all, from every point of view.

On mobile

Find the optimal NewPipe configuration.
- How to listen to whole albums
- How to like songs
- How to import Spotify liked songs
- How to improve bitrate (it’s limited to 128kbps)