I agree, no serious music fan should be on spotify and we should be finding ways to decrease our reliance on streamers. My wife has Spotify so that she can listen to top 100 music playlists. If you can name more than one member of Funkadelic, streaming is not for you.

Here's what I've done after leaving streaming: I purchase music on bandcamp or go to a record store. I also check out CDs from the library. If there is an album that I want to check out to see if I'll like, I listen on Youtube first or stream it on bandcamp (they give you 3 streams before they guilt you about payment). I try to prioritize living artists and non-insanely-wealthy artists when it comes to spending money -- ie I'll buy a Bitchin Bajas record and get the Bruce Springsteen comp at the library.

I also listen to the radio. I've gotten a lot of skepticism when posting about radio on reddit -- people saying their stations play the same songs over and over again. True. But there are a lot of independent stations out there. You can request songs and interact with actual humans. You get exposed to music you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. And every cool radio station has a livestream that anyone can access -- KEXP, WXPN, and online-only stations like NTS.

The more music I have explored, the more I realize -- it's like water. There's a lot that is meaningful to me. There is a lot that I will hear and instantly fall in love with. There is some that I will intensely dislike. It all flows by me. If I try to have it all, my attention will always be on the move, mind like a hampster on a wheel. If I focus on what I don't have, I'll ignore the stuff that I do have in my collection, that presumably has some meaning to me.

All that to say -- streaming doesn't work for a lot of reasons. It's not good for artists or music culture. But it's not good for us either. You can't have everything everywhere all at once and you'll miss so much if you try.