A few weeks ago, in “Demanding Less,” I discussed ‘On Demand’ culture across television, film, and music. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks on a journey through that third area, and it led to today’s topic: I’ve left Spotify, which I’ve used since 02016. And I’m surviving.

In a FOMO-flavored funk, I took the plunge and canceled my Spotify account. The cancellation felt like a door closing on a world of music at my fingertips. In a way, it was, and it still is. Spotify has its issues, and ease of access sweeps many of them aside. Promoting Rogan, inconsistent artist payouts, and quantity over quality are few.

My Spotify “Library” has nearly 8,000 liked songs, and I remember a fraction of them. I used to think, “Oh yeah, I like music so much, I have over 8,000 songs!” I do enjoy each one, but I don’t feel a connection to most of them. I’d find a song I liked somewhere else and be surprised that I already followed the band. The names, the faces, the songs never stuck. I applaud the access to user-created playlists, but they always felt impersonal. Slowly, I came to miss the way I used to engage with music, back when I had a bespoke device for the task.

My first iPod was a hand-me-down Shuffle from my brother. Half a gigabyte, but that was enough. I waded through the net for my Kingdom Hearts music, ripped our many CDs in iTunes, and loaded them onto the device. I didn’t do it willy-nilly. The first Shuffles had no screens. The devices started your list of songs, and depending on the slider on the back, you’d either play it in order or shuffle (see what they did there) the whole list. That necessitates what I find missing from most music today: curation.

I realize curation sounds antithetical to the “Demanding Less” ideal of giving up choice, but it stops short of on-demand. You preselect each song, and after that, you can’t make edits beyond skipping a track or two. Before vast digital libraries, we were at the mercy of the wax. You popped a cassette into your deck or dropped the needle on an LP you had lying around. Couldn’t find it? No song for you! Not on the radio? Then it went unheard. These constraints, like the ones Brandon Sanderson uses to bolster his creativity, led DJs to select a series of records for a given set or party. The same went for mixtapes and their digital equivalent, mix CDs. Each one had thought put into it. You could make either on Spotify, but there was no incentive to listen to them.

So I built my own process: select songs to download (3-8 MB MP3s took a long time to download), then arrange them into a list that told a story or evoked a series of feelings. Yes, this is where the edgy KH and Linkin Park collections took root. I told my own stories through the music and closed my eyes to experience them from my bed.

Eventually, I got the iPod Touch (2nd Generation). I still synced through iTunes, but we had cable internet by then, so more data flowed through my Cat 5 cable and into my player. It was at this point where I started learning about audio quality and turning into an audiophile. Vinyl rips versus lossless CD rips. A sudden disgust with MP3s at a mere 320kbps. I had to start collecting FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files to get all the quality out of the music. The ballooning file sizes meant buying more storage. Within months, I had over 80 gigabytes of music, and at last estimate, the total runtime measured in months and days, not hours.

So now I’ve hit saturation on both sides of the fence. Too many songs available, and no intimacy left between me and the music I listen to. To solve both halves, I canceled Spotify and replaced it with two things: a familiar radio station, and an Echo of the bespoke device that got me into music in the first place.

The final push to cancel came from the radio station I mentioned in that earlier article: KEXP. I had started listening again around the time I wrote it, so the station was fresh in my mind. Not long after, KEXP launched its Fall Fundraising Drive, and I tuned in throughout. I like to support public institutions that I believe do good for society. I’ve been a proud PBS supporter for years: as a young child watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street, and Zoboomafoo; as a young adult watching Rick Steves’ Europe and Ken Burns’ many documentaries; and as an adult with my cozy detective stories. Until this drive, I had never directly supported access to music. I signed up as a KEXP Amplifier, one of the station’s monthly donors.

I didn’t go into detail about KEXP last time. It’s a 24/7 pair of stations: KEXP 90.3 in Seattle and KEXC 92.7 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The broadcasts divide into programming blocks run by producers and DJs who pick their playlists by hand. Nothing repeats ad nauseam the way it does even on a local station. Believe it or not, a handful of companies own thousands of stations across the country, and they feed the same content to many of those stations at once. The monotony and homogeneity create a bland texture of sameness across the nation. Things go stale too fast for me, and during my retail days, it drove me crazy. Some stations seemed to run on a 10-hour loop; on others, I’d hear the same song several times in an hour.

KEXP is the cure for that bland atmosphere. On that station, they play eclectic tunes, deep cuts from bands who charted once, and, of course, cult classics. The sound of each block varies, and several give voice to marginalized groups. El Sonido focuses on Latinx music, and Sounds of Survivance is an entire block devoted to Indigenous artists from around the world, including Native tribes and First Nations. You can stream the past two weeks of broadcasts on demand if you miss a show, but you can’t pick a specific song.

Now, my current setup. I’m not the only one looking to shake up their relationship with music. In the last couple of years, a wave of retro-inspired devices has come to market, each one a bespoke device for a single purpose. The technical name these days is DAP (Digital Audio Player). You can’t rightly call it an MP3 player, since it plays numerous file formats, including FLAC.

Some take the shape of a cassette deck. Others work as CD players, complete with physical media playback. I went with a third option, a smaller device, the same length as my old Shuffle but thicker: the Snowsky Echo Nano in Titanium.

It has limited onboard storage, a microSD slot, a USB-C port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The small onboard storage meant buying a microSD card, and with memory prices these days, a smaller card was the economical choice.

I recently picked up some Moondrop Chu 3 IEMs, and I like their metal construction. Picking the Titanium Nano was a no-brainer. The device matches the color of my IEMs, and its metal shell complements theirs.

Controlling the device feels great. The standout is the knob on top, which is functional as well as pleasing to look at. During playback, it works as a volume knob with granular control. The wheel also scrolls through the menus on the two-line screen. The Library feature sorts artists, albums, and songs into groups for easier browsing, but only if you tag your music correctly, which I’m still working on. If you sort your library, you can load it up and go. I have a two-step process: pick the album and tracks, then make sure everything encoded properly before it goes into storage. The extra steps will make me more familiar with my music as I go, and that feels like a win.

I noticed two things right away that changed how I think. First, the device has no shuffle feature. If I want a song, I pick it from my list, and the next song on the album follows. Listening to a whole album, another habit from the curated days of old, abandoned outside of new releases. You used to put a single CD into the player and listen through, skipping a song here and there. Vinyl meant pulling out the record, placing it on the turntable, and picking the spot where the needle drops.

Second, the “Song ADHD” I’d fallen into on Spotify is gone, purely because of how the device works.

I’m rediscovering tracks I’ve held onto for years and hearing songs that have been absent for the better part of a decade. I used to be far pickier, often skipping within a few seconds if the beat or melody didn’t fit. Now I give each one a full listen, and I feel as if I’m on a musical journey made with love. KEXP handles discovery, with DJs picking what I hear next.

I’m not saying dropping Spotify is my personal panacea, but I’m surviving, and I feel more grounded taking care with what I spend my time and energy on. If you’re more careful with your listening habits and don't have the need to switch songs like crazy. If you’re like me, though, it might be time to change your relationship with your music.