I met Teo at one of my Patreon meetups here in Berlin. Everyone had a phone and the green app. He had a brick: a digital audio player with his whole library on it, all of it in FLAC. He is 22. He had Spotify, like all of us, and he quit.
We sat there, the rest of us with our subscriptions, talking about how bad the music industry is and what we could do better. And he had just done it. No speech about it. He cancelled and built his own library.
Five seconds later I realised how unimpressed I was with my own side of the table. I was still streaming. So I invited him for a conversation. This is that conversation, and it is a long one, on purpose.
What we talk about
This is the why, not the how. The how comes in the next video: my own music server at home, streaming my library to my phone from anywhere. It looks like Spotify, it feels like Spotify, but it is mine.
The why has more layers than I expected when we sat down:
- Why Teo left Spotify. Not a protest. He looked at what he was actually getting and decided it was not worth it.
- How you actually get your files today. Bandcamp, labels, buying from the artist, and what a monthly music budget looks like when it goes to people instead of a platform.
- What Spotify became. A discovery machine that discovers for you, until you stop choosing.
- Active listening is a skill. And like every skill, you lose it when you stop using it. That part of the conversation changed how I use my evenings.
- Respect the music. The player, the shelf, the physical thing. Why it matters that music takes up space.
Why this matters to me as a producer
I grew up with a CD player in my hoodie and five tracks on a Sony Ericsson. Somewhere between then and now I stopped choosing music. I just let it play. That is the opposite of what I do in the studio, where every decision is deliberate, and it slowly leaks into the work. If you consume passively, you start producing passively.
Since the meetup I went the full way. I found a tape deck on the street and a copy of Nevermind on cassette a week later. There is a CD player, a turntable, speakers, and no TV in the living room. It is not about the gear. It is about a room where listening is the activity, not the background.
This is the third piece in a line of thought that started with [[digital minimalism]] and continued with the idea that [[your environment is your art]]. If you want to wander, [[come get lost]] in the rest of the Signals.
Watch it
The full conversation is below. Grab a coffee. Chapters are in the video description, so you can jump to the part that hits closest to home.
Next video: how I built the server, and how you can do it without being a sysadmin.