For a tl;dr, here's a zine on why one should ditch spotify, and a zine on alternatives.

There's also multiple guides online on people's own position on why and how to quit spotify. Here's an example and here's another one. This website represents the viewpoint of a few individuals who love music, as of December 2025. Nothing on this website should be taken as legal advice.

Why Should I Ditch Spotify?

1. Promote ICE recruitment ads and defended their position
2. CEO invested hundreds of millions into AI war technology through Helsing
3. Terms/conditions allow Spotify to use music and content to train internal AI
4. Major labels own >7% of Spotify, account for 80-90% of editorial playlists, but only take up ~40% of total catalog
5. Actively push AI artists and music
6. Royalty rate one of the lowest of all streaming platforms and refuse to pay artists with <1,000 streams
7. Payola with their Discovery Mode, 30% less royalties for being bumped in recommendations
8. Buys stock music and push these songs and artists in playlists and search cues to dilute royalty pool
9. Streaming quality is worse than top ethical and equitable alternatives
10. Price increases in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia with plans for 2026 in US and Canada

Ethos

On Rejecting Convenience

Finding alternatives to streaming music is not just about “how do we not give money to entities that do bad thing”. It is also about embracing possibility. Sure, Spotify and Apple Music are convenient in that you pay a small monthly fee to have access to one of the largest music collections on the planet. But what about the music that is not on those platforms? How will you seek them out? Do you feel confident in your skills to do so?

And even if you are not interested in supporting or experiencing the artists outside of platforms, why not use this opportunity to practice curiosity, or patience? If you can get off of large platforms, what is stopping you from doing things like washing the dishes? Adding a few hours to meal prep? Checking out that restaurant or club you’ve been meaning to? A few minutes to picking up that old hobby? A few moments of discomfort to listen to a community member, and lend them cash?

It can feel like you miss out on a lot when you leave a platform, but consider what you might gain from not having it take up space to begin with. If you can learn a new music sharing tool, frequent a new music source, or learn to describe what you want to listen to without an algorithm’s suggestion, what is stopping you from making other small changes in your life?

Discovery

Searching and browsing music can be a lost art in this recommendation algorithm-oriented world. You can get song recommendations by asking friends or strangers at parties. But how does that information actually come up? And how does that process translate into digital, solo contexts?

First, think about “collections”-- where do people put music, for others to listen to? What does it look like? Sometimes I search things like “[genre] music archive” websites, or “media/music collections”. You can also find digital libraries, or check out your school or public library’s media collection website. Examples I like are:

- Internet Archive’s Audio Archive
- Free Music Archive

To navigate a collection of music, I think about “description”--how is each track/album/artist etc. in this collection described? What categories or fields does it use? What names are used to describe itself in relation to other music? (i.e., genre, label, chronology, etc.)

Use those names to find artists in a collection. For example, if one of my favourite artists, Steve Lacy is described as “funk‘, maybe ill search the Discoggs catalog collection for the funk term under the “genre” field. I could also do more advanced combination searches by adding “style” to my search. Try to mix and match below!

Remember Radio?

If you want a mix of serendipity and curation, you can also listen to Radio, and even Online Radio Stations. I like using the free, Radio.garden as it gives you a map of its collected radio stations around the world, letting you tune into one of them. The “Balloon Ride Radio” feature is cool too, as it takes you to a random radio station, then slowly zooms out so you can gradually browse other stations nearby. Radiooooo has a selection of songs from the whole wide world and different time periods.

College radio stations are cool too. Most college radio stations have a dedicated website for streaming. I went to Rutgers University, so the station I listened to a lot was the community oriented one, called 90.3 the core.The URL I use to listen to them is http://thecore.fm/listen/"

Something you can do is look up [name of state college/school/university nearby] radio station. You can also search [State] University Radio website. Odds are, they have a web streaming page where they display each song being played as it airs.

Disentangling from Spotify

Saving your Spotify Playlists

There’s different services that allow you to easily save your spotify playlists metadata. You can then use that data to reconstruct your collection.

Here’s a few of them:

spoticach
exportify
chosic

Once you’ve saved your playlists, you can delete your spotify and nothing else will be lost. You can also reconstruct them from scratch and leave everything behind.

Cancel your Spotify

Just do it! And delete the app.

Spotify Alternatives

Other Streaming Services

The authors of this website are not particularly interested in moving to another streaming service that might end up problematic for other reasons (see above: On Rejecting Convenience). This guide delves deeply into the options (tl;dr Qobuz is probably the most ethical alternative right now.)

Buying Directly from the Artists

Bandcamp! CDs (which you can rip into digital files for your own collection)! Also buy merch to support them more!

Piracy

The r/piracy subreddit has resources for all sorts of piracy. Use it as a starting point or to check what the current meta is when your favorite website is down.

r/piracy

Below are specific piracy methods and resources.

Torrenting

Torrenting is very different from direct downloads or streaming sites in that it operates on a peer-to-peer file sharing network. Basically, you download files from multiple other people who already have the files on their computer. Make sure you use a VPN when torrenting to avoid trouble with the law.

overview/guide to torrenting

Torrenting is suitable for downloading collections of popular files because speed is based on how many people are already sharing it, e.g.: a specific David Bowie album.

Soulseek

Soulseek, like torrenting, is peer-to-peer based but only happens between two users at a time. It’s in general considered less risky than torrenting but a VPN is still recommended.

Soulseek
Soulseek tutorial on the subreddit

Nicotine+ is a popular user-friendly alternative to the base soulseek app.

Nicotine+

slskbatchdl is a tool to bach download a lot of songs at once, for example using a saved spotify using one of the tools above. Link and tutorials:

Reddit Tutorial
Reddit Tutorial 2
slskbatchdl


Soulseek is suitable for download more niche albums and songs that only some users might have. You can usually find pretty high-fidelity files on it.

YoutubeToMp3

There are tools to download youtube videos as mp4 or mp3s. You can find some easily if you just google it.

The following tools can automate downloading spotify playlists as youtube mp3:

spotidown
spotdl

Organizing your Music Collection

The following tools are useful to do things like editthe metadata of your music files (aka the individual artist/album/genre etc. of each song) or organizing your files into folders by album/artists/etc.

picard
mp3tag
covers.musichoarders
beets

Making your own music server

If you want to get the closest to replacing what you get out of spotify and interested in getting into a fun project/rabbit hole, this might be for you!

Making your own music server means curating your own local music collection, streaming it over the internet and then being able to stream over the internet on your devices from anywhere in the world, as well as share it with friends.

Here’s an overview of the systems that might be involved:

1. To manage the music collection, there’s a few different tools/APIs some of which may be more involved than others:

Navidrome is a popular choice based on the Subsonic API.
Navidrome Subreddit
Navidrome setup guides
Airsonic Advanced is another one based on Subsonic.
There’s also Jellyfin and Plex, which people use to also stream things like movies and books.

2. To host your server, you can use an old laptop, a raspberry pi, or a remote server like Pikapods.

3. The music collection itself is curated by yourself, using one or more of the methods listed above.

this is a client-server application for soulseek
tutorial to get nicotine+ on your raspberry pi

4. You can then set up something called port forwarding or reverse proxy to stream your music on the internet.

5. You can use compatible apps to stream it on your phone, laptop, etc. For example:

Tauon on desktop
Symfonium on android
Play:Sub on ios

6. Somewhere along the process, especially if you’re using a Linux based system like with a Raspberry Pi, you might need to use a system like Docker or Yunohost which acts as an intermediary or virtual machine for the programs listed above, or a file sharing system like Samba.