I Broke Up with Spotify and Got Back With My Ex...

May 6

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So, here’s the deal: I kicked Spotify to the curb. I know, I know, everybody has it, and now I'm that person sending YouTube links. But honestly, for $15/month? The algorithm is abysmal, and what's worse, it has ulterior motives.

At first, it was feeding me a limp buffet of bland, mainstream tracks. Fine. Whatever. My taste leans feral anyway. So I took matters into my own hands—curating long, moody playlists with seamless atmospheres, as if they were little mixtape shrines for the day. But then Spotify started adding tracks to my playlists, interrupting the vibe.

AND THEN, mid-workflow, drifting on a Coldcut wave, I heard something so aggressively cringe, I physically stopped. Not my selection, obviously. It was offensively bad, and when I looked it up, guess who the fuck it was? An AI-generated band... MADE BY SPOTIFY.

Wait, what? Yeah, buddy. Spotify has been sneaking its own synthetic creations into people’s playlists. Not only is it desperate and dystopian, but they’re doing it to rake in passive revenue, directly taking airtime (plays = pay) away from real musicians. I was livid. So Spotify, we're done.

I took to the internet and started searching for alternatives. It was worse than I thought. The landscape is a barren corporate swamp. We haven't had a decent music discovery ecosystem since 8tracks. RIP, my beloved.

So I went back. Way back. To the origins of this love affair: radio.

As a kid, I spent many late nights in my bedroom trying to pick up radio waves from across the water, broadcasting from the next province over, where they liked it loud and had thick, "tick" accents. There's just something about live radio. A song might ghost through the air only once and vanish forever. It’s unpredictable, fleeting, and if I didn't understand what radiation was, I'd say it was magic.

Say hello to my new magic god, Radio Garden, an app that lets you listen to radio stations from all around the world. And let me tell you—these people are healing my wounded ears. The interface is super charming, a globe to travel across, drop a pin, and tune in to a radio station at those exact coordinates. And (!!!) there are lists of stations curated by real human people.

I'm back with you, baby. I'm sorry I ever left.

Here are my top 3 stations:

Vintage Obscura - 24/7 stream of forgotten tracks from a team of over 100k music researchers.
Arctic Outpost AM1270 - broadcasting 78's/shellacs from a literal research station in Svalbard, the top of the world.
Pan African Space Station - portal to an auditory galaxy of African diasporic sound—jazz, folklore, cosmic funk, poetry, noise, all.