DRM and Attention - Spotify and Instagram
Posted on with tags Lifestyle, Technology, and Updates
In December I resurrected my Spotify and Instagram accounts after deleting them in 2020. After two and a half months of using them both (and deleting them again) here are my observations:
Initially things were pretty great. I was able to reconnect with some friends I hadn’t been in touch with since high school. Instagram also has a really great format for sharing trip and event photos. Nevertheless, 99.9% of what you see on Instagram is Tiktok-adjacent shortform content and ads. Even though you can add accounts to “Favorites” and “Close Friends”, there is no easy way to cut out all the cruft.
Compared to when I deleted my account, Instagram is a dopaminurgic minefield and I realized very quickly that I wasn’t missing out on anything. Frankly, I spent most of my time on it scrolling reels. And if I really want to share pictures of what I’m doing, I can just put them up here or text them to people. You’re not missing out if you don’t have an Instagram.
Spotify
Spotify’s music discovery features are pretty great and the selection of music is huge. For a little less than a CD per month, you get to have all your music downloaded offline on every device. That’s pretty cool, especially if your primary mode of getting music was by ripping CDs.
After two months, however, the novelty wore off and I realized that I don’t listen to $12 of new music every month. Amortized over the life of CD ownership, the cost of listening to the music you already own asymptotically approaches 0 where with Spotify you pay to listen to the music you already “own” forever. Qobuz can be a good bit cheaper than buying physical CDs also, so an equivalent $12 monthly budget for music consumption can go further with DRM-free purchases than with Spotify. (If for some reason you really need Spotify’s music discovery features, you can still access them with the free version!)
I used to get all my music off Qobuz, which let me download everything locally, or by purchasing CDs and ripping them with OpenBSD’s cdio.
Since getting a Macbook, I found that MacOS actually has a built in CD ripping utility in its music program and automatically compresses music to your prefered bitrate and syncs when you connect your phone.
This is infinitely more convenient than what I was doing with rsync and cdio to move music around on my old setup and less expensive than using Spotify.
Given that the iOS music app works with CarPlay &c. you don’t lose any functionality that the Spotify app would otherwise deliver.
It also means I have physical ownership over my music.
This seems like a pretty clear cut Nash equilibrium.
Summary
In conclusion, you can get by without Spotify and Instagram in $CURRENT_YEAR. They aren’t all bad, but I don’t see the need (personally) if you aren’t running a business (especially if you already have a personal website). I definitely appreciate the convenience of them, but this is just my two cents.