Streaming music sucks. It’s this great powerful vortex of tech miasma reaching out to swallow all culture. It’s this great context destroyer, where everything is instead simply reduced to content. It sucks! I hate it!

Like so many musicians online I’ve made a measly $20 from years of streaming, where in the same time I’ve made over $500 from having my music on Bandcamp.

So, I finally let my Spotify subscription lapse a few months ago. There have been some struggles with people sending me a playlist or something only for me to have to disappointedly reply that I cannot listen to it. Unfortunately I have not yet trained my friends to bring me a steady supply of mix CDs, yet.

Instead I have been playing around with every alternative way to listen to music I can find. I’m a music lover through and through, it’s what I spend several hours every day with. So here’s a quick rundown of every alternative I’ve tried over the last few years and how they stack up, organized from easiest to most difficult to get into.

Piracy

The halcyon days of Limewire and Napster arrive to us again, like an old friend who we only remember for their silky voice now that their face has weathered with age. Soulseek is the first port of call nowadays, where a good majority of whatever you’re looking for can be found so long as you can wade through some locked down download listings and other small hurdles.

Pirating your music and building a local digital collection can feel very freeing. Especially if you can find a private tracker or community of music sharing enthusiasts, who ultimately are music fans first and pirates second, you have much in common with them.

Do you feel freedom from curating your music collection in this way? Sure it may be local, but ultimately isn’t it just moving bits around on a computer or smartphone, just like Spotify does? You can pair this with an interest in collecting digital audio players, or restoring old iPods, if you want to enjoy having your music physically embodied like the other categories on this list.

A great choice for outlaws, but ones that want to do illegality in a small way that they’ll likely never face consequences for. Like tagging the walls of a bathroom stall. You can also go legit and pay $5 for your friend’s indie album on Bandcamp.

Vinyl Records

With the amount of support vinyl record releases have received over the last decade, built out of a grassroots love for the format that was summarily co-opted by major labels to sell a million of the same Taylor Swift record, it’s very easy to find stores in any major city that stock more vinyl records than any other music format. You have so many options across used and new records, almost anything you’d want to listen to.

Unfortunately that’s tied with prices that are probably at least 50% higher than where they should be. Vinyl records really are the playground of your quintessential audiophile, a music fan with too much disposable income (or an outsized ability to spend more of their income than they should on music).

I’ve been collecting vinyl records since I was about 17, when I got my family’s old Pioneer turntable from my grandmother, which has likely been in my family since the late 70s; it’s a prized possession of mine. I recently paired this with an Audio Technica Sound Burger, a new rerelease of an old classic that allows you to take your records on the go with you (so long as you have a flat surface and enough space to listen to them).

There’s a reason people hang their favourite records on their walls, their size makes them a lovely display piece, a great way to appreciate the album art. It’s also what makes them impractical to take with you for daily listening.

Collecting vinyl records is a great experience, but they’re impractical in terms of storage, portability, and cost.

Compact Discs

The future comes to us by way of the laser-based optical media from 1982. This is probably the most practical option for most people. You can find CD equipment for cheap, both home players and portable players that can fit nicely in a purse or backpack. Albums on CDs are often 1/6th the price of their vinyl equivalent.

However the selection is a little narrower. Not every album gets a release on CD these days, and indie bands with merch tables will often sell vinyl records and maybe cassette tapes, but CDs feel more and more rare. However, consider also that each format will often have a large swathe of music available from its heyday for very cheap: for vinyl that was prior to the 90s, but for CDs it was the 90s into the 00s. You should factor this into your format of choice.

The majority of my CD equipment has come to me through accident. It’s still so recent and so popular a format that it’s built into other music devices I’ve bought. Both stereo amplifiers I have in my home currently have a CD player built into them for free. The only thing I’ve bought specifically for CDs has been a portable Sony D-EJ100.

Cassette Tapes

Famously renowned for sounding worse than everything else on this list, many people who lived through the heyday of cassettes are expressing confusion at their recent resurgence. To me the reasoning is simple, local bands make tapes, it’s easy to put your own music on them, and to share them with friends.

New cassette players are being made (I personally own a Fiio CP13 and recommend it) and older decks and portables are readily available, albeit requiring some repair skills.

In order to escape the famously poor quality tape is known for there are a few things you can do. Tapes have been made in a wide variety of qualities and formulations, particularly varying across three main varieties: Type I, Type II, and Type IV tape. To my ear Type II tape always sounds quite serviceable, and if I didn’t know I was listening to tape I probably wouldn’t comment on the audio quality. Unfortunately it’s in shorter supplies nowadays, but to my mind the best way to enjoy tapes are to dub some music you enjoy on to Type II tape and pair that with enjoying all the cheap $5 tapes you can find in thrift stores and at local show merch tables for some variety.

MiniDisc

Don’t do this one. I strongly advise you find any other way of listening to your music.

I love my MiniDisc collection, I love the half a dozen players I’ve collected over the past two years. I love the pre-owned discs that I’ve acquired from various places in the world. It’s been an incredible way to discover new artists and new music that I normally would never listen to. Being a part of the community and taking part in disc swaps has also been incredibly fun.

It has the physical quality of handling a tape deck and dubbing the music yourself, while also having audio quality that approaches that of a CD (it’s equivalent to good lossy MP3 compression; to my ear it’s inaudible except in some edge cases such as very particular hi-hat sounds). It’s very portable, it can make for a fun project to organize your collection, and it feels like you’re living in an alternative future.

So why do I say to avoid it? It’s because the equipment is falling apart slowly, it’s very difficult to repair, and there’s no new players you can get (unlike everything else on this list). Even the discs themselves will cease to be manufactured next month. The reason I own six different players is because the first one I bought ceased to record properly a month after I acquired it. The same thing happened to the next two I bought after that as well.

Being a MiniDisc fan is a moneypit that will lead you to shelling out $700+ for an MZ-RH1 with a broken OLED display. I advise against it.

Death to Spotify

Here’s what you really gain by dropping music streaming services: you’re going to find things that you wouldn’t have listened to otherwise.

You’re going to find a $10 bargain record at a show somewhere that will end up being one of the prizes of your collection, a band that no one else you know has heard of.  You’re going to be handed a box of tapes and told to pick whatever interests you because the rest is going in the trash. You’re going to find new ways of finding new music by sharing physical objects with friends and strangers who want to show you something that they care about because they think you might care about it too.

Your music will take up space in your home. When you flip through your shelves you’ll remember where you found that local indie sleeper hit or that one-of-a-kind EP from a band that played for only two years in the late 00s and then disappeared off the face of the earth. Or at the very least it will sit on your hard drive, for you to share, to burn, to transfer, and to load onto a dying iPod Shuffle from 2016.

At the very least you’ll be to stop giving the artists the indignity of paying $0.001 per stream. Some of the things you can steal are priceless. I’d rather hope my music is priceless than know for sure it’s worth a tenth of a cent.