29 Nov 2025
Media you care about becomes part of you. I have full copies of songs that matter to me, stored in my head, cross-referenced to powerful memories.
I used to have them stored in my house, too. Then we all got rid of our CD collections and eventually even our C:\mp3s folders and ipods.
That wasn't a problem while there was a system that would stream them back to me, reliably, on demand. I didn't stockpile music the way I don't stockpile electricity, or fresh water. The system provides.
But - at least these days - the system fails. And the system lies about it. Spotify sometimes vanishes tracks the way Stalin vanished political rivals; not only do they not exist, they never existed. You must have been imagining it.
It's not the first application that's tried to gaslight me, and I will not tolerate it.
Go ahead - search Spotify for Mind Over Matter's amazing track Somebody's Love. You won't find it, just an instrumental. I've smashed through tens of kilometers along Adelaide's sun-soaked coastal running paths, dancing over kerbs to syncopated beats and throwing shapes to those lyrics. Don't tell me there aren't any.
How many more tracks have been silently removed from my playlists, and from my search results?
I don't know. It's like brain damage.
There's probably some intensely complicated and financially inevitable licencing reason for this. I don't care. Spotify has crept into my home and stolen my keepsakes, leaving no trace, leaving me to wonder if they ever existed.
The relevant system's incentives are no longer aligned with mine, and I expect that they will increasingly become less so.
Over the last year, I've been moving away. C:\mp3s exists for me again (well, /Volumes/media/music). I run my own music server via Navidrome, I buy music from Bandcamp, and I've built a physical (NFC-based) "record player" to re-establish the process of "pick up an interesting-looking album and put it on the hifi".
I listen to music more intentionally, often an album at a time, and I make conscious choices about what I let into my library. It takes significantly more work, in the same way that cooking dinner takes more work than going to Macca's. But now, pieces of my history can't be changed underneath me.
Oh, and Somebody's Love? It's still available here - for now.