spotify burn in hell i love my ipod
Growing up in an audiophile, music-loving family, it's of little surprise that we boasted a humble collection of iPods throughout my childhood. My first "phone" was an iPod touch (3rd Gen, so no camera yet, but it did have Doodle Jump which was decidedly more important). My childhood iPod Nano stopped working around five years ago much to my dismay, though no music had been loaded onto it since 2012. Since I grew up with a preloaded iPod with all of my childhood favorites (Flight of the Conchords, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Marina & the Diamonds, etc.) I had never actually attempted uploading music to one myself. So when I found my dad's iPod Classic sitting in a drawer in perfect working condition, I took it upon myself to finally try.
One of the reasons I'm excited to have an iPod again is to get away from Spotify. For political and moral reasons, I've been desperately inching myself further and further away from the platform for years, though my attached music library has only grown. I could always try replicating my playlists on YouTube, but the convenience of Spotify made it difficult for me to make a clean-cut switch. I knew that if I had a dedicated music-listening device, it would take a few inconvenient hours to upload all of the music I wanted for the eventual convenience of having my library separate from the Spotify corporate overlords, or any corporate overlords for that matter.
After uploading my first few songs into playlists and using the device for a few days, I have a few thoughts to share. For starters, I find myself listening to music with my undivided attention far more frequently than was possible with Spotify. On Spotify, even if all I'm doing is listening to music, I'm scrolling through the lyrics or the artist's page, looking up things on Google, or checking other apps. I'm never just listening to music. After loading some of my favorite songs onto my iPod and making an effort to use it every time I want to listen to music, I've found myself craving the act of sitting down, plugging in the iPod, and just listening. I've found that I feel more intensely when I want to hear a particular song, as though the convenience of having the song at my fingertips through streaming dulled the specialness of the very act of listening to it. After using the iPod for only a few days, I'm reminded of why the songs from my childhood stand out to me even now. And I'm sure it was not only the songs themselves (though they deserve some credit), but the way I was listening to them.
Spotify in recent years has drifted away from being solely a music streaming platform, inundated with distractions and video and media that detracts from the listening experience. After using it for nearly a decade, the platform had actually tricked me into believing that to listen to music, I had to know an artist's monthly listener count, biography, likeness, and liked songs. Stepping away from that for even a few days has me wondering... who cares? Would any of us really care about a few fun facts and a photograph if they were taken away? Not to mention Spotify's abysmal treatment of artists, given the pennies they throw at them and call streaming revenue. I would do an artist more monetary good buying their album off of Bandcamp one time than streaming it for an entire year. Isn't that insane? Isn't it time we all get more mad about that?
There's also something to be said about the security of owning my music library as files on my computer. Like I said, I had never actually loaded songs into an iPod myself before this, so this has been my first experience with having a real music library that I can do whatever I want with. And if Spotify goes down tomorrow, I won't lose all of my media for those few hours I spent converting everything into mp3.
Basically, Spotify, burn in hell. I love my iPod.