I'm changing the way I listen to music
Why (and how) not to stream music in 2025
Update (March 19, 2026): This post now has a Part Two!
Also, in February 2026, I chatted about this post (the one you’re currently reading) with Gabbie of New Bands for Old Heads:
Thanks for reading!
If 2025 was the year of music listeners and musicians alike removing their music from Spotify1, 2026 needs to be 2025 Part Two (a phrase I will absolutely never say again). Some especially valiant listeners fully quit all major music streaming services2, not just Spotify. I’m attempting to do the same in 2026.
Here’s how you can do it too and why you should, with some caveats and considerations.
Plot twist: I stopped using Spotify long before 2025, but…
I signed up for a paid YouTube Music subscription in 2017, back when it was Google Play Music, because it came with an ad-free YouTube subscription at no extra cost. At the time, it was $9.99 per month (so, $10 per month3) — major bang for my buck.
At some point in the last two years, it went up to $13.99 per month (so, $14 per month). Not great, but I still got two services out of it, so I kept it.
In 2025, though, as Google’s investments in AI4 and the war and genocide technology correlated with AI became more apparent, I felt increasingly that I needed to divest (Google owns YouTube). So, last month, I ended my YouTube Music subscription.
I haven’t signed up for a different music streaming service. I don’t plan to, either.
How am I going to listen to music now?
To some extent, this is a question I’m still answering, but I have a few options and ideas below. (Note that I’m covering only digital music listening, not physical media.)
Artist-friendly but limited: Bandcamp
Many artists and albums I love are available to stream or buy on Bandcamp, which has no ads. After two or three no-cost streams, Bandcamp will prompt you to buy the music you’re streaming, and it’ll prevent you from streaming it again until you buy it.
That’s great for artists, even if Bandcamp has become less trustworthy5. But for most listeners, it’s also exactly the problem. I’ll discuss that later in this post.
In any case, when I do enjoy an album that’s on Bandcamp enough that I want infinite access to it, I’ll buy it. This means I can download it forever to any of my devices and stream it infinitely on the Bandcamp mobile app. I’ll try to buy from Bandcamp on Bandcamp Fridays only, except if I’m writing about the music before then.
My most recent Bandcamp purchase was Prewn’s System, a great listen if you love ‘90s PJ Harvey; I knew I needed to buy the whole album, which is excellent, when I kept waking up with the title track in my head. (I also bought Natti Vogel’s pay-what-you-want pre-release of his upcoming album, an innovative way for artists to give their fans direct access to their music.)
On the other hand, after three listens to Sudan Archives’ absolute flex of an electropop track “MY TYPE” via Bandcamp, I’m relegated to only other options if I want to keep listening. The full album “MY TYPE” is from, THE BPM, isn’t consistent enough for me to regularly listen to all the way through, so I’m not going to buy it. (I don’t buy single tracks.)
Complicating matters with Bandcamp is that not every artist or album is available there. I became obsessed with CMAT’s Euro-Country last year, but CMAT’s Bandcamp has basically none of her music. And typically, major-label artists I love, such as PinkPantheress, are contractually forbidden from being on Bandcamp.
So, where else do I go?
Bigger library than Bandcamp but expensive: Qobuz
I checked Qobuz’s download store (I truly thought it was just a streaming service, glad to be wrong!), and Fancy That is on there. Another non-Bandcamp release I love, JADE’s That’s Showbiz Baby!, is on there too. Woohoo!
Qobuz came to mind as an option since it’s known for its exceptionally high-quality audio and isn’t known as problematic in any way. The thing is, Qobuz’s music purchasing prices are nothing short of galling. Who does Qobuz think I am, Jeffrey fuckin’ Bezos? Yeah I’m tall and bald, but 🗣️we are not all the same🗣️
On Qobuz, I can buy a CD-quality digital download of Fancy That, a nine-track, 20-minute release, for $11.49 and a high-res 48 kHz version for $13.296. That’s Showbiz Baby!, a 14-track, 46-minute album, costs $17.19 for CD-quality audio and $19.89 for high-res 44.1 kHz audio.
By comparison, Fancy That costs $7.99 USD on the seemingly indefatigable iTunes Store, and That’s Showbiz Baby! costs $10.99 USD. But don’t buy from iTunes! Seriously, don’t. More on this soon.
Better prices with two caveats: 7digital
A friend of a friend recently told me about 7digital, and its prices are pretty good. Fancy That costs $8.49 USD on 7digital, and That’s Showbiz Baby! costs $11.49.
Both prices I’ve named here are for 320kbps MP3 audio files. 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC is significantly more expensive, and as you can maybe tell from my writing about Qobuz, I’m not enough of an audiophile to pursue it.
Each of the aforementioned 7digital 320kbps MP3 prices is $0.50 more than the same audio files would cost to download from iTunes. But iTunes’ ethical problems alone make 7digital worth it.
There are two significant caveats with 7digital, though. The first is that, even if you buy music via its U.S. website, you’ll be charged an international transaction fee since the company is U.K.-based. I can avoid these fees since one of my credit cards doesn’t charge them, but this obstacle could prove a dealbreaker for some.
The other caveat is that 7digital is owned by the B2B music licensing platform Songtradr as of March 2023. In September 2023, Songtradr also acquired Bandcamp, which then laid off half its staff in October 2023. Capitalism digs its heinous claws into everything!
Given its Songtradr ownership, 7digital could theoretically experience the same instability and decreasing trustworthiness as Bandcamp. The platform is reliable now, but hey, you never know — Songtradr could just spontaneously decide to shutter it without warning. Until then, though, I see myself using 7digital a lot.
Absolutely not an option: iTunes
Presumably, iTunes can charge significantly less for digital downloads than Qobuz, and slightly less than 7digital, since Apple is among the world’s largest corporations. This means it has numerous other revenue sources, whereas Qobuz is solely a music platform and 7digital is operated by Songtradr.
Apple, though, uses forced labor in Congo to make iPhones and Apple Watches. Like my fellow far-leftists and other people likely to get named terrorists for supporting trans rights or persecuted for filming ICE activity, I heed the call to never buy from Apple again, and to purchase refurbished devices from a third-party retailer if my iPhone or Apple Watch call it quits.
So, I’m obviously not buying my music from iTunes. I’d rather struggle to access the music I love than fund literal slavery.
The problem I’m still trying to solve: The money of it all
I don’t have the budget to buy every album I enjoy, and most people I know would say the same.
After all, money doesn’t grow on trees, because it’s fake and we made it up just to marginalize people and cut off their access to basic human rights.
I digress, but the point is, whereas I would listen to dozens of albums per month when I was on streaming, my ability to do that is limited now.
Bandcamp will cut me off from streaming after a few listens, and then I have to buy the music. Qobuz and 7digital are buy-only (no streaming), unless I were to sign up for Qobuz’s streaming plan, which defeats the whole purpose.
I either have to buy every album I want to listen to in full, or I have to stream them via Bandcamp or the free, ad-enabled versions of popular streaming services.
However, I’ve tried listening to albums via YouTube Music with free, not premium, access, and the ads are too disruptive to the music listening experience. It’s not viable, and I have other options.
How I plan to listen more intentionally
Embracing my inner ‘90s kid
I might try out the old-school approach of buying an album after hearing just its singles and enjoying them. This could start with streaming the singles via the artist’s official YouTube channel upon release or watching their music videos. (I guess I can’t entirely avoid streaming, but I can aggressively minimize it.)
I’m excited to watch more music videos! As music videos have become less important, I’ve watched them less, but I do love them, so developing a more intentional relationship with them, while also developing a more intentional relationship with listening to music in general, sounds ideal.
The approach I’m suggesting here reminds me of how folks bought music in the ‘90s when CDs dominated. Streaming didn’t exist, so you could barely preview an album before buying it. You probably heard the singles on the radio or saw the music videos on MTV or VH1 or BET, and that’s it.
Sure, some music stores had machines you could pop a CD into and then listen to the whole thing in headphones. But smaller music stores lacked these if I’m remembering my childhood correctly, so often, when buying an album, you went in at least somewhat blind.
Bandcamp offers a bridge between this old-school approach and the present-day streaming world, with its limited number of streams before buying the music is required. That’s not a blind purchase in the way it was with CDs in the ‘90s, but when albums I want to buy aren’t on Bandcamp, I might still go with blind-buying.
Setting a budget, because most of us have to
Inherent in telling folks to stop streaming music and buy it instead is the assumption that everyone has infinite money with which to do so.
A major reason music streaming platforms have been so successful is that wages have stagnated as wealth inequality has increased. As the average person has increasingly less money to spend, discretionary purchases7 go by the wayside.
As such, In This Economy™️, most people who are passionate about music are forced into streaming.
Many of us may want to buy all the music we listen to, but listening to dozens of albums per month, for a monthly fee of roughly $8.50 to $14, is an unbeatable deal when discretionary spending is limited.
This price range is approximately how much one or two digital downloads cost. To buy each of the dozens of albums you listen to per month is much, much more expensive than streaming them all. We’re talking orders of magnitude here, not just dollars and cents.
To strike a reasonable balance between buying more music and not destroying my wallet, I’m going to set a monthly music purchasing budget. I’ll start with $50 per month, or $600 for the year.
I’m naming a per-year amount since Bandcamp Friday occurs only eight of out 12 months in 2025, and buying music on Bandcamp Fridays is best for artists. Since $600 / 8 = $75, that’s $75 for me to spend per Bandcamp Friday, minus any money I’ve already spent on music purchases outside Bandcamp Fridays.
I think I can work with that, but I’ll likely increase or decrease my music buying budget as time passes. After all, budgets are never static; I can change them as my finances change.
Figuring it out as I go
Streaming has dominated the last 10 to 15 years of music consumption, not to mention my own relationship with music. Ditching it will be a big change, so I’ll inevitably discover along the way that some of the approaches I’ve discussed here will work better than others.
I might also figure out even more effective ways of listening to music without streaming. If so, I may write about them in a future post. I also plan to write a longer post about the economic aspects of streaming’s omnipresence and the ethics around streaming, whereas I merely touched upon these topics earlier in this post.
In the meantime, though, I feel excellent about getting $13.99 (okay, $14) back per month from ditching YouTube Music. I feel excellent that I’m no longer giving $14 per month to a megacorporation invested in AI, war technology, and genocide. I feel excellent that the dollars I spend on music will now go far more to the artists than to the platforms that govern music access.
The journey ahead may be challenging for me. But at least I know it’s the right one.
Your turn now: Will you ditch streaming somewhat or entirely in 2026? How will you listen to music in 2026? Share your plans in the comments:
Thanks for reading Lavender Sound. I urge you to take a second to read about the fact that Israel continues to bomb Gaza after the ceasefire, and that the United Nations has said the state of Israel is committing genocide yet has greenlit a “peacekeeping” plan that further disenfranchises the Palestinian people.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Max Freedman (all pronouns) launched Lavender Sound to write about music by and for LGBTQ+ people. They also interview artists for The Creative Independent, and they’ve previously contributed music criticism to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Paste.
Here’s a list courtesy of Stereogum.
Thanks to Dan of The Rainbow Rx for sharing the following article with me and some other Musicstack writers late last year: https://www.avclub.com/quit-streaming-music-2025-apple-spotify
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck charm pricing!
AI is a completely immoral, thoroughly fascist technology that we need to collectively rise up against and consign to the same fate as NFTs. As in, we collectively saw the scam with NFTs and made sure they stopped being a thing. We gotta do that with AI too, folks. Time is running out.
Subvert.fm is an emerging Bandcamp alternative that’s cooperatively owned. I joined for a $100 one-time payment, meaning I co-own the platform alongside all its other users! I can’t wait to see Subvert take off, but since it’s in its early days with a highly limited catalog, I’m still leaning heavily on Bandcamp and haven’t covered Subvert in this post.
You get 33% off Qobuz high-res downloads if you sign up for Qobuz’s Sublime streaming plan, but in writing this post, I’ve assumed you’re not signing up for any streaming subscriptions. You don’t get any discounts on CD-quality audio with a Qobuz streaming plan.
Although art is essential (the experimental musician Lyra Pramuk articulated this better than I ever could when I interviewed her), under capitalism, music in general is improperly seen as a nice-to-have, so when talking about money, I’m counting music as a discretionary purchase.
When people talk about how "hard" it is to exit streaming platforms, what they're really saying is they don't want to give up the convenience of access to everything for free. Platforms learned this early and got real good at weaponizing it.
Nothing digital is 100% ethically pure, so one has to go with the least worst options. IMO, you've got a great plan here. I personally like Qobuz and the price is worth it to me, if for no other reason than I know they're at least making a good faith effort to pay artists more. I'm also mindful not everyone is as fortunate as I have been.
The good news is that there are still low/no-cost options for music discovery; as you've mentioned Bandcamp is good (Qobuz is improving daily). Sites like campus-fm.com steer you toward college stations. And of course curators like you and I right here on the platform. Sure, I'm talking my book, but we're a resource. It's what we do!
...and that's just digital avenues. We haven't even touched on IRL options!
I don’t have the budget for streaming or purchasing really. I do try to buy physical copies of vinyl - maybe every other month, but vinyl has gotten so expensive!