Streaming Hate
Spotify destroyed something in my life that wasn’t broken. For years I’d built a practice around owning my media—torrenting indie playlists, downloading anime series through RSS feeds, collecting MP3s on external drives. This was inefficient, and probably illegal, and I didn’t care. I had access to everything. More than that: I had the freedom to keep it, to revisit it, to build something that was actually mine. That’s the kind of person I was.
I wasn’t cool about any of this. I wasn’t cool in school, I wasn’t cool at work, and I’m not cool now. While everyone else listened to hip hop and wore Nike, I was listening to the Chrono Trigger soundtrack and wearing the same Adidas Superstars for fifteen years. But I was ahead of things technologically. When people were burning CDs, I was downloading MP3s. When they were using iPods, I was already there. It was a small consolation, but it mattered to me.
When Spotify showed up, I ignored it completely. Why would I pay to rent music I’d never own? It seemed like the kind of thing everyone would eventually use, but like most trends I didn’t understand, I’d wait for it to pass. My friends in Berlin started getting that dark green logo on their phones. They could stream Kanye West without buying anything. I watched it like I watched every other thing everyone else was doing: from the outside, unimpressed, already there before they arrived.
The resistance lasted until Apple announced Apple Music. Once one of the companies I actually respected started pushing streaming, it stopped feeling like a choice I could refuse. The alternative to owning media had become mainstream. My old way wasn’t just outdated—it was becoming unavailable. Suddenly I was the holdout. Not in a cool way. I was becoming the person who doesn’t have email, who won’t use a smartphone, who insists on keeping his own files like some kind of digital hoarder. That scared me.
So I gave in. I signed up for Spotify, Netflix, Dropbox. I was going to finally be a normal person in a streaming world. How hard can this be?
I thought. Everyone else manages it fine.
It took a week to fall apart.
Spotify’s algorithm is just guessing at who I am. It knows I listen to weird indie stuff, so it serves me Post Malone and lo-fi hip hop beats for studying. Artists I loved were missing entirely. Songs vanished from playlists I’d made without explanation. Entire albums had only three tracks available. I’d find something interesting, listen to it twice, then go back to watching some obscure radio station on YouTube instead. The service works great if you want to discover what everyone else is discovering. If your taste is narrower or stranger, you’re just scrolling through their menu looking for the one thing that won’t disappoint you.
Netflix was worse. I’d spend thirty minutes clicking through recommendations unable to make a decision, caught between rewatching something I’d already seen and trying something new. The anime I actually wanted to watch wasn’t there. I knew it existed somewhere on the internet—I knew exactly where to get it—but I’d made a commitment. I was supposed to be a streaming person now. The whole experience felt like punching your own face.
What bothers me isn’t really the money. The ten euros a month is fine. It’s that these services are designed for a specific kind of taste: mainstream enough to license, popular enough to justify the bandwidth, safe enough to localize without changing much. If you want something outside that narrow range, you either wait for it to show up (hoping someone pays to make it available in your region) or you feel like you’re doing something wrong by wanting it.
I keep thinking about what streaming actually is. It’s not liberation from ownership. It’s the transfer of choice from you to a company. You’re renting not just media but the algorithm that decides what’s worth showing you. That’s the part that bothers me. Not that I can’t own music anymore, but that the alternative is accepting someone else’s curated version of culture. Some company’s version of what’s good, what’s worth discovering, what you should want to watch next.
Maybe this is fine for most people. If your taste is Post Malone and your taste in TV is whatever Netflix suggests, the system works beautifully. You get unlimited choice within a controlled set. Everyone’s happy. But I spent twenty years building a practice around finding the weird stuff, the thing nobody’s promoting, the artist who’s so specific you’d never find them in an algorithm. Streaming didn’t make that impossible. It just made it feel like something you’re not supposed to do.
Some part of me knows I’ll have to adapt eventually. Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and eventually the old infrastructure—torrents, file hoarding, RSS feeds—will genuinely become unavailable. But I’m not there yet. I’m still the kind of person who owns a hard drive full of anime episodes, who buys music on Bandcamp, who occasionally breaks his own rules because what he wants isn’t available through legal channels. It makes me feel a little less relevant. A lot less normal. But I’m oddly okay with that, as long as I can choose when it happens.