I will take a moment to defend myself: I paid for Spotify because I was a power user (listening to music 4-12 hours every day while working) and also because I had the family plan so a few other family members could piggyback off of my sub.

But even saying that, I have spent way too much money on Spotify and the thought of spending any more money on it gave me the heebie jeebies., so this year I set out to put a stop to it.

I got some suggestions here for how to rip my Spotify playlists, but I eventually went with Spytify as opposed to anything that hooked into the Spotify API, just to make sure I wouldn't do anything that would get my normie family members' accounts banned. It has some issues such as incorrectly determining song duration and cutting some songs off, and the fact that you need to rip the songs by playing them in real time, but it worked "good enough" for my purposes.

I also went out and downloaded the high quality lossless music files for bands I listen to a lot, and honestly it's making me start to turn my nose up at mp3s a little lol.

I also was able to set up yt-dlp in order to download all my shitty song mashups and SiIvaGunner rips that aren't hosted anywhere else.

Just about the only thing I'll probably miss from Spotify is getting introduced to random indie bands via Discover Weekly, but hey I'll always have the web browser for that.

So that's my success story I guess. It's never too late or too early to quit subscription services comrades!