Now, I have to work for it and I like that.

I was checking out the first 15 seconds and hitting skip. Although on Spotify, I wasn’t necessarily listening to stuff. I’ll reluctantly admit that I listen to less music. My musical experiences definitely feel more dedicated and focused. Jared Samuel Elioseff, a multi-instrumentalist who records as Invisible Familiars and owns a studio in Cambridge, New York, also felt the streaming environment was generally hindering his musical curiosity: “I’ve been Spotify-less for two years now. “Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music.” Even with digital downloads, he tended to give music more time and attention.

With streaming, he says: “If I didn’t gel with an album or an artist’s work at first, I tended not to go back to it.” But he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. A Bristol-based musician and audio engineer, Shakespeare recently deleted his streaming accounts and bought a used iPod on eBay for £40. “With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable,” says Finlay Shakespeare. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience. “I decided that having music be this tool to an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “ Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.” An uncomfortably familiar loop, it made her realise: she hated how music was being used in her life.

She looked some more, through playlist after playlist. Tasked with choosing the day’s soundtrack, she opened Spotify, then flicked and flicked, endlessly searching for something to play. M eg Lethem was working at her bakery job one morning in Boston when she had an epiphany.

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