leaving the cloud

or, we cut the cords and filled our hands with air; or, such inconvenient convenience

I’ve been using spotify for about thirteen years. I never paid for it until my wife and I got married and she added me to her paid plan as a family. I never minded the commercials when I had the free spotify version because they were infrequent enough and short enough that I hardly remembered they were even happening.

Recently, spotify increased their prices and my wife and I realized that we barely even used spotify. Truth is, I listen to most music through youtube because I almost always prefer live recordings of songs to the studio versions and youtube has a billion hours of live music. The only time I really use spotify is in the car with my kids because I stream music through my phone. Also, at $22 per month, we may as well just actually buy music.

That’s the price of two albums or about one vinyl per month. An interesting side effect of buying music, especially in a physical version, is that you’re more likely to actively engage with it, rather than just turn it into background noise for your life.

And so we dropped spotify. We dropped netflix too, since we rarely watch anything on there either (though I do miss watching Seinfeld on an endless loop), which leaves us just with Disney+, which comes free with my cellphone plan, and HBO, because I foolishly paid for a year to theoretically save money.

Well, our spotify subscription finally ran out and I have to tell you that the free version of spotify is now the worst experience you can possibly have when trying to listen to music.

Ten years ago, you could listen to an entire album by an artist. You could pick any song you wanted and listen to it just fine. If you listened to an album, there’d typically be an ad after the completion of the album and typically just 15-30 seconds.

But now?

Well, let me count the ways in which I hate this fucking platform.

My two year old son loves this song because he thinks it’s a Winnie the Pooh song because he calls Winnie the Pooh Pooh Honey and this song is called Honeypie which feels close enough, I guess.

So we’re driving along and he requests it the way two year olds do and I relent and open up spotify and click on the song.

Imagine my surprise when what played was not this song!

First, a 30 second ad. And not even an ad for anything. Just sort of a jingle, which was somehow more aggravating, as if it was really just there to annoy me by denying me the song I picked. Then, rather than play Honeypie, it was playing some playlist on shuffle that included Honeypie. And so I had to skip through ten songs before I got to the one my son wanted but when I got there I first had to listen to 90 seconds of ads.

This is obscene.

And, yes, I know, the utter convenience of the thing, etc etc et cetera, but this service used to work better ten years ago. Now, all these decisions and changes to the user experience are designed to force you into paying for a subscription through annoyance rather than anything else.

I wouldn’t mind if the music on the free version was limited. Maybe some artists just aren’t on the free version. Fine! But disallowing me from listening to the song I want to listen to feels gross.

It filled me with rage, honestly, and rather than make me re-up our subscription, I am now convinced that I will never use spotify again.

But it does lead to curious problems. Cars now don’t have CD players or anything like that. Both of our cars are essentially bluetooth only vehicles, which is why we use our phones to stream music which is why we had been using spotify for all this time. But now that we’re moving past it, we come to discover that this twisting towards convenience has now made any alternative extremely inconvenient.

We will be buying physical albums, yes, but if I want to listen to those in my car, I need to rip the CD to my computer, which doesn’t have a disc drive, and then upload that music to my phone. And, sure, that’s not so many steps, but I used to be able to buy a CD and listen to it in my car three seconds later.

And if we buy music digitally, we’ll be using itunes, but that leads to yet another strange issue.

I don’t have access to my wife’s itunes and she doesn’t have access to mine.

Further, my itunes keeps demanding my password and it won’t believe me that my password is my password. Worst of all, because I don’t have an iphone or ipad, I can’t reset my password for some fucking absurd reason. I guess this level of inconvenience is meant to make me finally relent and get an iphone but I’d rather stick a gun in my mouth right now than be bullied into getting an iphone by my piece of shit itunes software.

I mean, this really does just seem like it should be illegal, but alas, if only I had a rope long enough and a gibbet high enough to swing Tim Cook from.

So I can neither buy music right now from itunes or listen to the music I own on itunes because everything is a nightmare, everything gets worse.

One of the last straws for netflix was, curiously, the Mario movie leaving the service. Seeing that it was leaving reminded me how annoying this all is. How we gave up owning everything based on the promise that we could conveniently access it through these services.

When we went to cancel it, my wife mentioned that we wouldn’t be able to finish Avatar: The Last Airbender with our eldest. I immediately looked up a physical copy and found it for about the price of a month of netflix.

And so we bought it. He’ll get it for Christmas.

These services, so convenient and once so affordable, are no longer that way. Netflix is $15-$23 per month, which is the price of buying a blu ray or two every month. Sure, I can no longer scroll through thousands of options before deciding to watch Seinfeld again for the fifteenth time this year, but I can just pick up a movie that I physically own and plop it in my PS4 to watch.

And it’s funny how much better this feels. How much more content I feel just picking what to watch from a growing collection of movies and shows rather than the mindless scroll through terrible prestige TV that comes and goes in a surreal blur.

We own nothing. It disappears seemingly at random, leaving nothing behind.

But you can just buy things. Own them.

Or, better yet, use your library. It’s not as fast as netflix or whatever else but you can learn to be patient again.

You used to just watch whatever was on TV anyway.

And maybe that was better.

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Free books:

• Poetry and Literary Fiction

• Multi-genre stories

• Space Scoundrels

• Fantastic Fantasy

• Dystopian Fantasy

• Best Character Development