In this corner, weighing in at 165 pounds, we have Hall of Famer, Grammy winning Neil Young, clocking in at a spry 76 years old.
And in this corner, weighing 194 pounds and clocking in at a sturdy 54, we have Joe Rogan, backed by his 11 million anti-vax Spotify listeners.
It was a David and Goliath moment to be sure and Goliath was the victor.
Wait, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. God damned Spotify.
But here they come, over the hills, like the calvary in an old politically incorrect western who ride in at the last minute. Only this calvary are canceling their accounts in droves along with a few other big name artists who have joined Neil Young and asked to have their music removed from the Music behemoth.
Joe Rogan must have been a little concerned about his image taking a hit because he “apologized” and said that he would have more mainstream people on his show. Then four hours later he promptly posted more misinformation on Twitter. Yeah, he’s a twat.
If you want to show your support for Neil Young, along with Joni Mitchell, Nils Lofgren, Brene Brown, Wendy Zukerman & Blythe Terrell, India Arie, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills (aka Crosby, Stills & Nash), Mary Trump and Roxane Gay here’s what you can do….
“CANCEL” YOUR SPOTIFY ACCOUNT!
Since I’ve already done so myself I thought I’d give you a few tips.
First off, I put “cancel” in quotation marks because you can’t actually cancel your account. What you can is change your plan from a paid plan to the free one.
To do this
1. Log into Spotify
2. Click on your name in the top right corner and choose Account
3. Choose the Available Plans tab
4. Select the Change Plans button
5. Choose the free plan, they will make you confirm it like three times
They give you an opportunity to tell them WHY you are changing to the free plan. I said it was because I support Neil Young and that Spotify isn’t doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation.
Spotify is pretty shitty for not letting people delete their accounts but at least this way they won’t be getting your money.
There are other streaming services you can use instead of Spotify – Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, etc.. Here’s a list of options. Admittedly, I don’t think any of them have everything Spotify does (which is why it has become the most popular service), but you need to make the decision – which is more important, bells & whistles or your principles?
Before I cancelled my account I hesitated because I had put so much work into creating my playlists. Then I found out I could easily transfer my playlists and changed from Spotify in the flash of an eye.
Turns out there’s an app for that!
I chose Songshift but there are other options that most likely work equally well. I chose this particular app because I’ll be able to use it to share playlists with people even after I’m done transferring my playlists from Spotify – which makes the investment worthwhile (I’ll explain in a moment). AND if by some miracle, if Spotify does a huge overhaul in how it runs its company, I can easily move my playlists back.
Now, if you don’t have a lot of playlists you could probably just use the free version of Songshift but I had about 25 of them so I could to subscribe. Subscription (I think it’s $4.99/month which I can cancel at any time) gives me the ability to transfer multiple playlists at one time. Otherwise it will only do one at a time. So, like I said, if you have 5 or 6, the free version will probably be fine, much more than 8 or 9 and you’re probably going to want to make the investment, at least for one month.
It also gives me the ability to share playlists with anyone on multiple music streaming services – Pandora, Amazon Music, Apple Music, just to name a few. I’m curious to see how that works.
Anyway, transferring is super easy – you sign in to both your Spotify account and whatever new music streaming service you’ve chosen then you selection one service as the one you are transferring from and one that you are transferring to and that you choose which playlists you want to transfer. (Like I mentioned, you need the premium version if you want to do more than one at a time.)
It wills start the process and look for matches. A lot of the songs will match without problems but some of them you will need to approve and some of them you may need to help find matches for. You can choose to ignore songs that your new service can’t find a match for if you don’t want to spend the time looking.
Once all the songs have matches you hit the “Confirm Matches” button…
Once it has “shifted” all the songs you will see that it has finished and you need to hit the “Continue” button.
After that there’s one more button to hit and you’re finished with the process.
I moved to Apple Music because I used iTunes for so many years. I had a bunch of playlists there already so I merged the duplicate playlists together. (More decluttering!)
Hope this helps those of you who want to drop Spotify but have been hesitating.
Do it! You’ll feel better. And remember, Spotify is not a music company, it’s the Netflix of audio.
Addendum (2-2-22)
A friend of mine (thanks Ann!) shared this post with me. If you are having a hard time making a decision on which music platform to go with this may help you out…
I wanted to make sure I was reading this correctly. Basically it’s saying:
if P!nk had a song streaming on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the song would have to be streamed 128 times on Apple Music for her to earn a dollar, the song would have to be streamed 315 times on Spotify for her to earn a dollar, and the song would have to be streamed a whoppin’ 1,250 times on YouTube Music for her to earn that same dollar.
I’m not familiar with Tidal Music and I didn’t even know Napster was still around but seems to me that, of the options I was considering, Apple Music is the best deal for musicians. I’d definitely avoid YouTube Music and Pandora.
And if you are still hesitating, here’s one last article to read.
Oops, for real, now this is the last article. It seems that India.Arie left Spotify because Rogan used the N-word 24 times.