As of writing this blog post, so 10/25/2026, I have 562 songs in my liked playlist. All handpicked.

When I created my Spotify account

It was very early, though according to my Spotify data backup, it's 6/11/2023. Which is quite far back. I did definitely use YouTube music, and overall Youtube, before Spotify as a whole. I don't know why I necessarily created my Spotify account. YouTube Music worked just fine. It might be because of my Xbox, actually.

The Xbox

Back in 2023, I guess right after school ended, I went right on the Xbox and started playing some Trackmania. June 11th was exactly when my school ended. I downloaded Spotify on it because I realized that you cannot download YouTube Music on an Xbox. Crazy part was that my Spotify account was actually on a temporary email and not on my main email. I never thought that I was going to be hooked to music so much that I needed it to be on my main email.

For the majority of the summer, I woke up at ~6AM to hop on Trackmania and put on some music, specifically breakcore.

Breakcore?

Oh, this is a long era. I still listen to breakcore till this day. Now the origins of why I started listening to breakcore was unknown. I always thought it was because of this short, but scouring further into my scrobbles that I imported from that Spotify data request, I apparently specifically started listening to breakcore at November 24, 2023 (that short was made in January 17, 2024). And it was a very drastic switch from what I normally listened to. Here, take a look.

This is quite confusing as if you look just 2 days earlier, you see me listening to phonk 😭 (used to listen to that phonk playlist from Spotify. Though, now it's definitely up to date with the new "phonk")

So I dug deep into what started me to listen to breakcore. It took me ~5 to 10 minutes or so, though, I found another short. This YouTube short was made at November 16, 2023. So reasonably either:

• A: I watched the short and then, after some days, watched the short or went straight to Spotify to listen to the song and then add it to a playlist.
• B: A few days later from when the original short was posted (so maybe actually on November 24th) I found a repost of the Short and then went straight to Spotify and listened to the song and then added it to a playlist

But there's one distinction. On November 23, I actually listened to nothing. Look at the timestamp above for 2023-11-23. If you look at any song, it says Nov 22, 2023. So what did I do on that day specifically? It's really confusing. I thought it was maybe a glitch with ListenBrainz, but no. Luckily i still have the Spotify data request zip on my drive, so I booted up OpenCode and asked it to analyse the data specifically at November 23, 2023. I was surprised, look below.

I thought maybe OpenCode was lying (hallucination, errors in my drive backup), so I tried to find the last scrobble on November 22, 2023. OpenCode was right.

That means we have one more option:

• C: I watched YouTube Shorts the majority of November 23 and found a repost of the short and then after that day I realized it was good and listened to it on Spotify and added it to a playlist.

Now sadly, I was still right about one thing. I found breakcore through a YouTube short :(

so you ranted about breakcore, how does that relate to hating spotify?

yeah sorry for the rant. To get back on track, I listen to various niche artists, mostly breakcore, but also other genres. If you go ahead and search up Spotify payout rates, you'll see that it gets a lot of criticism. I don't like how Spotify doesn't reward small artists, though I do get that they have there own way of handling business. I just wish that my listen can help them more than the minimum.

Moving on, other problems with Spotify. I'll keep it short:

• #1: No good Adblock version Spotify on Android
• #2: The shuffling sucks
• #3: makes you want to not listen to your favorite songs anymore

#1: ok, yes, I know that's not a Spotify problem. But remember back in the days where you can get a Spotify Adblock APK so easily? It was as easy as getting a Adblocked YTM. Nowadays there's still ways, but it's harder than it was before.

#2: Look. Every single time I put on shuffling, it's so bad. First of all, the shuffling has always never been truly randomized. You're really telling me that I need to download Spicetify just to get a truly random shuffling experience? Also "Smart Shuffling" is just horribe. I never, once actually got a good song from smart shuffling. I've tried, but it's always gives something pretty distant or just not my taste.

#3: I get that this might be with other streaming platforms as well, but Spotify is definitely the worst contender in my opinion. Spotify always forces you to go listen to a specific song or genre once it "clicks" with its algorithm. I'm telling you, you cannot escape. You can block it from your music taste, but at that point, that's bad user experience. YTM and Soundcloud is much better in making you feel good when listening to music. Spotify forces you to listen to your favorite songs until it becomes boring.

so why not switch to something else?

—Su6o's brain

Converting ~500 whole songs from your Liked Playlist to any other streaming service is quite a hard task. I've been using TuneMyMusic to transfer my Spotify Liked Playlist to YTM and it works pretty well. Though I can't transfer all 500 songs as I don't have the premium plan. I've tried countless times to switch to YTM, but some songs are literally only on Spotify for some reason (yes, I even searched those specified songs specifically on YTM, and they don't pop up).

The end?

I stick with Spotify, though sadly, I do not even support any artist I listen to because I use an AdBlocker. Ads are annoying, and at the end I feel really bad for the small artists out there that I can atleast help them someone. Really a stream does mean a lot to them.

I use YTM for songs that are able to convert from Spotify, though nowadays I mainly use Spotify only and locally downloaded mp3s of songs.