I’ve ditched Spotify last year when their app has suddenly started draining battery on my phone (and also because of them being so eager to give Rogan a platform). I’ve switched to Deezer, but I’ve ran into the same issue I’ve had with Spotify for a while - even if I download a playlist for offline usage, it’ll still try to connect to the internet, so if I was somewhere with poor reception, it’d get stuck on a spinning circle for a minute before giving up and showing me the songs I’ve wanted to play. I ended my Deezer subscription, rebuilt the library on my laptop, and just manually transfer files to my phone. I get instant access to my music with no delays, with music players that offer much better experience and handle shuffle and queues the way I want to, and aren’t a glorified Chrome tab on desktop. and if I really like an album, I’ll just straight up buy one. I listen to music a fucking lot (two years ago i was in top 0.2% of my country’s Spotify users), and according to some screenshots of my Spotify Wrapped, I’ve played my artists songs for 1200 minutes, which translates to 300-400 plays at best (probably less than that, given that many of their songs are around 6 to 8 minutes long). given that, from what I’ve found online, 1000 plays gives artists 4 bucks, I could just buy two of their songs on Bandcamp and pirate the rest of their music, and they’ll still get more money in a year from me.

I do miss seamless playback switching between devices, though. it was a really nice Spotify feature, when it worked, that is.