So ive been on the Spotify train since pretty early on in its existence. I used to pirate a lot of music, but I also used to buy a lot of albums too, but once Spotify came along that was it, the rest sort of fell away.
I was listening to a band called Funkyverse on Spotify and it wasn’t bad but there was something off about it. Something didn’t feel right. It was too safe or something, and psychedelic music isnt usually particularly safe.
I investigate a bit, first thing that caught my eye was on Spotify the attribution was something like, “music by funkverse, arranged by [Redacted Name]”. Note it was a real name on Spotify. No mention of AI anywhere but the arranged by thing set alarm bells ringing in my head.
Noticed then they were suspiciously prolific, with countless albums released since 2022. No mention of AI anywhere except one of (if not) their oldest youtube videos with something saying “i know its AI but its pretty good”. I presume the references to AI were removed as the music started making money and sentiment turned.
Sorry that was a long preamble, but basically this whole thing has left me feeling a little violated by Spotify. They were feeding me slop, thank fuck my brain recognised its wrongness.
So how do I de-spotify? Last time I was in this position burning CD-ROMs and using slsk was the top of the musical tech stack.
I am happy to pay for music, in fact im happy to pay a lot more than I was paying Spotify. An order of magnitude more, but I will definitely miss Spotifys recommendations and radios etc.
How do I fill that gap? Give me the low down on the 2026 “fuck spotify” train.
Thanks in advance!
For me its Musicbrainz (listenbrainz.org) on android use spotube it has musicbrainz plugin so it will scrobble to your account on listenbrainz. listenbrainz has recommendation playlists like weekly discover, weekly jams which i think are much better than Spotify in my experience. on pc I use linux so i have made a custom tui which scrobbles to listenbrainz using their api and streams music from youtube using yt-dlp (its vibe coded). https://codeberg.org/mobsenpai/lb-tui
There are other apps as well but for my needs i had to make my own. Now you should definitely try it for yourself see how it works for you, listenbrainz also has a youtube integration so it will play songs in mini player, also with musicbrainz you can easily add any songs missing from the platform but in my experience I was able to find 90% of songs and artists i listen to.
I dont like ripping or keeping offline copy because i have roughly 4000 songs in my playlist and its not easy keeping it arranged and move it to other devices. and i need music discovery too hence this combination works for me, although not perfect.