Featured in Farrago Magazine Edition Six 2026

The state of the music industry looks pretty bleak at the moment. According to the UK Musicians’ Union, music streaming, which makes up close to 85% of music consumption, only accounts for about 5% of a musician’s total earnings. Platforms like Spotify pay artists a truly pitiful amount, a maximum of $0.003 USD per stream. Better yet, Spotify has done next to nothing to address the rampant issue of AI-generated music, offering little more than an optional “AI Persona” tag for these “artists” to disclose their status as, well, not artists at all. Human art seems like it’s slowly becoming less and less of a focus for the platform—shortly after King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard removed their music from Spotify late last year in protest, they were briefly replaced by an AI impersonator in the form of “King Lizard Wizard”, a nonexistent band that uploaded hastily-generated versions of the Naarm-based band’s extensive “Gizzverse” discography. It’s no surprise that an increasing number of bands and artists have been pulling their music from the platform: King Gizzard were quickly joined by bands like Hotline TNT and Xiu Xiu, with major acts like Massive Attack asking to be pulled in future as well.

It was at this point, sometime around the end of last year, that I, as someone who endlessly consumes and engages with music, started to stress about my own relationship with streaming. I’ve always been a fan of physical media, of making myself listen to a vinyl album all the way through, but it was just so easy to put on a Spotify playlist that I only half-knew the contents of and just let myself check out. It had gotten to the point where, unless I had chosen an album beforehand to listen to in its entirety (which, admittedly, accounted for about half of my listening anyway), it didn’t feel like I was actually listening to the music, the platform’s musical recommendations filling in for my own taste and removing any real need for conscious choice. It was convenient, sure, and made for good background noise, but I noticed before long that most of the features that the platform offered were ones that were actively hindering my enjoyment of the music—especially with how increasingly difficult it was becoming to ignore the incorporation of AI—and absolutely didn’t justify all of the ethical issues I had with it.

The main problem I hear people worrying about when they think about leaving Spotify is a fear of inconvenience. The sheer amount of music all in one place is staggering, and it’s a difficult thing to let go of. Especially as a music student, finding recorded versions of pieces I’m learning and performing is difficult—it’s tough out here for fans of weird contemporary saxophone compositions—making the evil monolith that is Spotify pretty unavoidable much of the time. That being said, I knew that there was a world of music to be found in other places, and I decided that even if I couldn’t fully part with the convenience of mass music streaming, it was becoming more and more necessary to let myself go through some much-needed inconvenience, letting me engage with music much more consciously AND supporting the artists I love at the same time.

First, though, I had to get past the question of where to start. Much like a 2024 Mic the Snare video (a YouTube channel I highly recommend checking out, he’s hilarious) in which creator Nick Canovas only allows himself to listen to CDs for a month, I wanted to do something drastic, only allowing myself to listen to music that I had bought somewhere. I’d been a bit of a record collector for a while, so listening at home was all well and good, but vinyl isn’t exactly portable, and I wanted a way to build up a library of music that I could listen to while I was out and about. I was considering looking for a tiny portable CD or cassette player at an op shop somewhere, but it didn’t seem like a particularly great idea to start spending money on another physical music medium (don’t worry, we’ll get to CDs later!), and I quickly found myself losing hope.

All was not lost, however! It dawned on me quickly that a few albums I owned had come with little codes thrown into the album sleeve, which allowed me to download an MP3 copy of the music. I had initially ignored them—why would owning an MP3 copy of an album mean anything, I must have assumed, in a world of streaming?—and it seemed like the people selling the albums had too, with many of the codes no longer being supported (including, in a heartbreaking twist of events, my code for Big Thief’s UFOF). Regardless, between the codes that still worked, I was equipped with a respectable little handful of some of my favourite albums: Alvvays’s Antisocialites and Blue Rev, Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee, Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher and Black Country, New Road’s Ants from Up There. Once I eventually figured out how to import the files into my phone’s Apple Music app (downloading iTunes onto my laptop, manually writing out the music’s metadata, and transferring them onto my phone through a USB cord), I had at least some idea of how my streaming-free experiment was going to go.

The main problem was that this pool of music was just a little too limited, and, as I approached the start of the uni semester, and began writing reviews for Farrago, there was a lot of music I quite desperately needed to get my hands on. It initially seemed like the solution was buying digital albums through Bandcamp, a fantastic online platform for music that, refreshingly, is really quite good about paying artists and ensuring that they’re not platforming AI “creators”. On Bandcamp, I managed to find Way Dynamic’s Massive Shoe in time to write about it, but it quickly became clear that the platform is reasonably limited in terms of the music that actually makes its way onto the website, which is also quite difficult to navigate. It also had its fair share of little errors: I was forced to go to the iTunes Store to purchase Grace Ives’ Girlfriend in order to write about it due to an error in which the album was priced at USD$10,000 rather than $10 on Bandcamp.

Additionally, I was having no luck whatsoever finding any of the music I would be playing for the imminent uni semester. In some cases, I had to simply look for YouTube recordings and accept defeat. In others, though, I found a much more fun solution: combing through op-shop CD sections, which are frequently full to the brim with classical and chamber music, then using a positively ancient family Mac to rip the music and transfer it onto my phone. Preparing for the conservatorium saxophone ensemble’s performance of Rhapsody in Blue was made much easier by the presence of a $4 George Gershwin compilation album I found, and, after a brief period of being obsessed with composer Astor Piazzolla last year, I was able to delve much deeper into the world of classical tango music through thrifted CDs. Figuring out this fun secondary, slightly strange use for CDs opened a world of doors: they’re the perfect thing to buy at merch stands at gigs (I ended up grabbing Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess at Laneway, and Water From Your Eyes’ It’s a Beautiful Place at their Night Cat gig), and perhaps most excitingly, I had the absolute delight of combing through my parents’ long-unused CD collection, finding some absolute gems that I never would have thought to listen to otherwise. Who knew just how good the selections on So Fresh: The Hits of Summer 2014 + The Best of 2013 were? Listening to the feel-good cheesiness of Haim’s “The Wire”, Pitbull and Christina Aguilera’s “Feel This Moment” or One Direction’s “Kiss You” for the first time since I was a kid was an absolute blast, one that I wouldn’t have experienced if I hadn’t decided to torture myself by committing to my experiment for a couple of months.

Is this form of consumption sustainable in the long term? For me, probably not: I can’t really afford to buy every new album that comes out, and as long as I’m studying music it would be great to be able to find actual recordings of things. The use of Spotify is, in my opinion, always going to be marked by ethical issues and a general feeling of guilt, but I understand that for most people, it’s unrealistic, whether because of price or accessibility, to exclusively deal with alternatives. What I’d advocate for, then, is stepping out of that little bubble of convenience temporarily and trying to engage more deeply in whatever little way you can—practically any other form of monetary support does more for artists than streaming revenue. Buy an album on Bandcamp, pick up a CD, go to a friend’s gig, support local talent, put together your own little library of music. There’s a world of engagement with human art that big platforms like Spotify tend to stifle, and you can do so much more for yourself and the future of music than simply throwing on an AI-generated playlist and calling it a day.

Photography by Saria Ratnam