Music Streaming Sucks
The Good - Convenience
We all listen to music. Whether it’s on the radio, through a home theater system, or on a phone in the shower, blasting through a bass-heavy Bluetooth speaker that creates a reverb effect in the bathroom—it’s something we all do. At some point, we’ve all streamed music. I bet you’ve queued up a song on YouTube or, during a board-game evening (yes, physical games still exist), someone pulled out their phone, opened Spotify, and everyone joined in to add songs to the queue.
When traveling, driving, or working, you open your preferred streaming service, pick your favorite album or playlist, and just listen.
When an artist releases a new song, it’s available on most platforms within a day or two. There’s no need to visit a music store, buy a disc, rip it, save it somewhere, or share it with friends in exchange for their discs. Streaming eliminates all that hassle.
Open the app, click play and your favorite tune is here.
The Bad - I Paid for This 💩
Spotify, YouTube Music, Tidal—they all suck.
And they suck hard.
Are they convenient? Sure.
Are they annoying in their own unique ways? You bet your audiophile ass.
I listen to music for about a third of the year, so having a reliable offline and streaming experience is essential for me. Yet, every streaming service manages to screw up, each in its own frustrating way.
Take this example: I went on a trip with a 12-hour flight. Anticipating the boredom, I downloaded all my playlists beforehand. Once the plane took off, I opened Spotify. As the buildings shrank beneath me, Spotify hit me with an error: "You don't have anything downloaded. Please connect to the internet." I glanced at my in-law sitting next to me, and they looked back with the same annoyed expression—they had the exact same problem.
The same thing happened on the return flight.
Spotify’s entire offline feature, which I paid for, was useless. The app insisted I had no downloads, despite showing me the downloaded playlists before I boarded. Googling the issue after we arrived showed that we weren't the only poor souls plagued by this issue.
Fortunately, I had albums I’d purchased on Bandcamp saved as mp3/flac files on my phone. Those files were enough to keep me entertained for 8 hours of the flight.
Still, moments like this highlight just how unreliable streaming services can be. Even when they advertise specific features you depend on, they often fail to deliver when it matters most. The convenience of streaming is overshadowed by the frustration of its unreliability, making it feel like a gamble every time you press play.
The Ugly - User Interfaces
I’m a Linux user and stick to Android for my phone. Everything I’m talking about here is based on Linux, Android, or Firefox. I won’t use anything else. Being a second-class citizen in the tech world doesn’t bother me because many open-source alternatives are surprisingly good.
For local music files, Mucke is one of my favorite apps on Android. It has a clean, fairly intuitive design and takes inspiration from other much used Android music players.
On desktops, Strawberry may look a bit dated, but it gets the job done—and does so more than satisfactorily.
In contrast, desktop apps for streaming services are often terrible. Most are Electron-based monstrosities packed with DRM, which can either work inconsistently or fail entirely depending on your device. While unofficial, community-built alternatives exist, they don’t solve these underlying issues and often come with their own set of limitations.
Spotify: From Great to Garbage
I’ve used Spotify for 12 years. When it started, it was an excellent way to stream music. Back then, companies like Spotify had money to burn, and they threw it at the problems of being small and obscure. But once they had to start turning a profit, everything went downhill.
Spotify began aggressively pushing podcasts. Why? Because they're cheap—Spotify pays for podcasts once, unlike music, where royalties pile up for every stream. For someone like me, who doesn't, and won't, listen to podcasts, this was just an annoyance.
By 2019, podcasts weren’t just an option; they were front and center. The UI was deliberately designed to ensure you couldn’t avoid them.
Spotify was always known and admired for its fast develop and release cycles, which was usually only done on the back-end. Then someone at Spotify realized they could experiment with the layout and push it out to users whenever they wanted. Each time they rolled out a new UI, you’d be randomly selected to "test" it. As someone who’s on the neurodivergent spectrum, these constant changes drove me insane.
Navigation items would move to new submenus, requiring more clicks, and I would be irritated for days or weeks until I got used to it—until the next random update hit.
YouTube Music: The Resource Hog
Remember when YouTube had a simple, functional interface? Now, it’s bloated and resource-heavy, especially on older hardware.
YouTube Music takes that inefficiency to a new level. The web app is painfully slow, the download function often crashes my browser, and managing playlists feels like a punishment.
Tidal: Linux? Never Heard of It
Tidal operates on another level of incompetence. It’s as if Linux doesn’t even exist in their universe. Their web app doesn’t deliver the high-fidelity playback they promise, and while a community-built Electron app exists, it’s unsupported. Downloading music? Forget about it on desktop. Which by the way also is one of the first three features mentioned on their Website. Nowhere a disclaimer that Linux is not supported in any way.
Ecstasy of Gold: Local Files
There’s one method that has never disappointed me: local music files (mp3, flac, wav, ... whatever you prefer). Once you’ve downloaded the music, you can play it on almost any device. Yes, you have to move or copy files manually, but it’s worth it because:
- You own them.
- You control where they’re stored.
- You can listen to them anytime, anywhere.
Of course, getting the music as mp3 files can be a challenge. Luckily, many of my favorite artists use Bandcamp, so I can buy their music, download it, and support them directly in one go. The other option? Searching for "souls on the seven seas." (If you don’t know what that means, it’s probably best you don’t try it.)
With the way streaming services are falling apart, this is the only reliable method of listening to music anytime, anywhere.
Since I had to migrate to Tidal (again) today, my hatred for streaming services has only grown. In the coming months, I might explore self-hosting my own music collection. It’s work, sure, but at least I’ll finally have a music experience that’s entirely mine.
Concluding
This was me rambling about streaming services, and hopefully, it inspires you to take a closer look at how we used to enjoy music a decade or two ago.
You might not need to lay your Sony Ericsson flat on a table, perfectly aligned with another, just to transfer files through infrared. But with today’s tools, there are other, faster, and perhaps more reliable methods to truly own your music—and enjoy it without the headaches of modern streaming services.
And if you made it this far, Thank you!