Streaming Is Broken, So What’s Next?

Amaya Lim is the writer of the newsletter Record Store, half of the band Bike Lane, and the founder of the music community and curation platform turntable.

New Listening Paradigms

Most people don’t know that you used to be able to download your extended listening history from Spotify, a record of every song you’ve ever streamed on the platform. The only time I used this feature, since deprecated, it confirmed that I had first used the application on my mom’s laptop computer in 2013 and listened to the just-released Neko Case album The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You on shuffle. I remember this event because I’d decided to risk blowing up my mom’s computer with a virus by clicking the download button on the service that seemed too good to be true.

Streaming changed my life. I didn’t really discover music until I was in middle school. I loved playing and performing, but without older siblings or friends, my exploration was limited. Streaming allowed me to develop my interests rapidly and without borders or barriers. The curation that fuels my newsletter Record Store was facilitated by its vast catalog. My band Bike Lane has reached audiences in countries we’ve never visited via streaming; I’ve felt the positive impacts of the model as well as its negative ones.

My generation’s relationship with music has been shaped by this promise of infinite, on-demand listening, delivered first through an unlimited search bar and later through algorithmic recommendation. Increasingly, algorithms are positioned as gracious filters for the onslaught of information–news, media, each other–we face everyday in the “utopian age of information access.”

New listening paradigms demonstrate an appetite for tools that allow users to meet the limitless opportunity of streaming with curiosity, rather than overwhelm. More and more, people are interested in expert-curated experiences, rather than algorithms, to combat indecision. Services like Cantilever, akin to Mubi for music, and Sleevenote, a physical player designed to celebrate album art, cater to growing communities of users seeking more limiting alternatives to the all-you-can-eat streaming experience. Music consumption has been marketed as an effortless, mindless experience, but friction can be a good thing—it’s how we determine what we like, how we flex and build the muscle of identity formation.

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When I was 15, I started making playlists with strict rules: ten songs each, no repeated artists, title of the playlist from the lyrics of the first song but not its title, and once a song is used in a playlist I can never use it again. This archive lived on Spotify by default until I confronted that this record of my life was owned by a corporation with questionable values and stored in some data center who knows where. It wasn’t really mine.

I started developing turntable, an online music community and curation platform, in late 2024 as a personal data analysis and visualization project which allowed my newsletter subscribers to interact with my playlists. When I applied for the Gray Area Cultural Incubator in 2025, I wanted to create backend infrastructure to allow other people to upload their own playlists. I ended up with a platform that’s part social media, part library unification tool, part discovery engine. It’s a place online just for music.

I initially did not think of turntable as a startup, nor myself as a founder. Before and during the Cultural Incubator, I worked in concert operations. I didn’t see myself reflected either in the artist communities I encountered through my work or in the tech spaces I was adjacent to in San Francisco. I felt unsure of how to approach the creation of an online community space that I didn’t want to sell off to public equity or enshittify in pursuit of profit. I started looking to the platforms I admired–Subvert, Nina Protocol, Evenings, Cantilever, Are.na–to ask for advice. In the process, I confirmed the existence of something I had long felt missing: digital music spaces for music people, by music people. These sites and others prove that in a world of limitless streaming, there is also a powerful public desire for platforms driven by human curation, deep community, and active discovery.

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“Our Only Competitor is Silence”

Music and the Internet have been at odds for much of their shared history. Early pirates were mostly self-described music fanatics, with reverent appreciation of the material they shared, but they transformed the industry in ways that would ultimately undermine both artists and themselves. Once music was uploaded to peer-to-peer servers, people no longer wanted to pay to listen. Piracy made music free, then streaming convinced us that it is $11.99 per month. For this low fee, we can avoid uncomfortable complicity in the transformation of the music business and maintain our morally superior position in a sanitized marketplace that feels convenient, safe, and fast.

Spotify’s Daniel Ek once said, “Our only competitor is silence.” The subscription model is built for letting autopay roll; fewer decision points engender inertia. Where the goal was once to introduce you to music you would love and didn’t yet know, which required taking the risk of a swing and a miss, Spotify’s algorithm is now tuned to minimize the chance that the user ever hits pause.

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Music consumption has been marketed as an effortless, mindless experience, but friction can be a good thing—it’s how we determine what we like, how we flex and build the muscle of identity formation.

For artists, this stark economic model creates an undeniable incentive to make music that is loopable, short, and inoffensive. Labels are in turn hard-pressed to sign and support artists whose music is difficult or singular, even if these characteristics drove record sales in the past, because “discovery algorithms latch on and boost access to what listeners keep coming back to.” This description is applicable not only to the streaming services themselves, but also to the short-form video platforms that drive modern discovery. I find myself considering which parts of my band Bike Lane’s songs fit the TikTok indie virality template: hooky, lyrically dense, simultaneously detail-oriented and totally non-specific. Will Anderson, whose band Hotline TNT recently left Spotify over ethical concerns, aptly described the service as a “mood ring.” If you want your music to get played, it should be suitable to a broad variety of moods, a smooth, reflective surface for anyone to project onto.

The prioritization of retention over other objectives–say, community, discovery, curation, education, or artist empowerment–precipitates a platform whose foremost goal is to extract value from listeners as a captive audience for advertising. Although Spotify positions itself as a music app, it is more accurately described as a brokering service that connects user data and ad buyers, “a network that brings two or more different sides together, like a shopping mall that links shops to customers.” Artists, therefore, are minor figures in the system of exploitation, despite providing the material which fuels the entire enterprise. Many of these artists, and the fans that support them, are finally starting to question the value of this middle man in an economic exchange that disenfranchises them both.

In every iteration of the music business, the relationship between musicians and listeners has been mediated by a middle man who turns art into a business proposition, both creating and extracting value. Streaming is therefore not an entirely new system, but a rearrangement of incentives and the addition of another intermediary layer. Its trick is that it purports to democratize listening, connecting artists and fans more than ever before. In reality, it’s like a thick pane of glass; division disguised as transparency.

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Alternative Futures

Spotify was running ICE ads and letting AI music overtake the platform. They frequently remove access to features of their API and service that people use and like. They limit users’ access to their own data and market it back to them in the form of Spotify Wrapped. Cory Doctorow first described enshittification in 2022 as a life cycle: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” But even after their various controversies, Spotify’s stock price and subscriber counts are rising. What are our alternatives?

In my life, streaming has felt like a fact and not a choice. As a musician and a consumer, I couldn’t imagine a world where I did not release my music for free, nor that there was a musical world outside Spotify to explore. The platform became my singular source of truth for music–if it wasn’t there, it didn’t exist.

When Joni Mitchell and Neil Young removed their discographies from Spotify in 2022, I felt for the first time the precarity of this situation. My playlists changed without my consent or even my knowledge; I continued to find many Joni Mitchell-shaped holes in the two years her work remained off the platform, and it felt like a knife every time. I considered leaving Spotify.

Most streamers understand that the cost of paying less than the price of one CD per month for instant access to all the world’s recorded music is the livelihood of their favorite indie artist, but few if any alternatives offer even close to the access and ease streaming provides. Especially for my generation, which has never known a limited music library, this exit feels impossible. As an artist, I understand that I’m complicit in my own economic starvation, but as a curator, I’m dependent on the same system for my work.

It’s impractical to think I could actually purchase every song in my library all at once, or even over time. Streaming removed economic barriers to having broad, eclectic taste; it made me a wide-shallow listener, whereas music enthusiasts of the past tended to be more narrow-deep. Wilco is my favorite band, but I don’t know every word to every Wilco song. Instead I can jump from their music to their predecessors and progeny, which both deepens my appreciation for Wilco and distracts me from their own discography. Music fandom is now just as much about breadth of knowledge, appreciation for many different genres and scenes, as it is about time spent with a specific record or band; the expert, à la Deadheads, is a dying breed. I know and love a lot more music than I might have in another time, and I don’t want to give it up. This is not to say that I think music should be free for everyone forever, only that I cannot wholeheartedly endorse any streaming-service exit solutions which include a step in the process called something like “Buy Every Song You’ve Ever Heard.”

When Hotline TNT left Spotify during the upward crest of their album cycle for Raspberry Moon (2025), Will called it “a feature and not a bug.” The statement the band released online ended with the promise that “a cooler world is possible.” There are creative ways to reduce, if not eliminate, our participation in the system that is ruining our critical thinking capacities and devaluing artists’ labor.

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Algorithms abstract listeners away from their own agency by funneling them ever closer to the median. They fail to provide the imbued perspective or opinion that makes your older sibling, cool friend, or favorite artist a well of taste to draw upon. In contrast, curation “progresses forward instead of in endless reiterative circles,” allowing us to be surprised, grow into new territory, and engage with difficult material with the help of a trusted guide. To engage with a curator is to open yourself to the opinion of a person whose personal context shapes their choices–curation will always have an ineffable sense of perspective. Services like Cantilever, whose tagline “music in the foreground” directly refutes the lean-back listening paradigm by providing curation and context in the place of algorithmic recommendation. Cantilever draws up direct streaming deals with indie record labels to host a digestible set of rotating content on the platform alongside proprietary editorial that provides the listener with context for the work.

sone, a non-profit started by Kevin Duquette, head of indie label Topshelf Records, is developing a new streaming service called tone. tone is customizable, built by artists for artists, AI-free, algorithm-free. tone’s cooperative development has been slow–Kevin and I first spoke in 2024 and tone opened an invite-only alpha in early 2026–but promising in their unwavering commitment to their stated ethos.

Both tone and Cantilever employ user-centric fee structures. These models route listeners’ monthly subscription fees to artists directly, based on every individual’s proportion of time listened. In contrast, Spotify and other traditional streaming services use a pro-rata model, which pools all subscription and ad revenue per country per month and splits it amongst artists based on proportion of total streams.

Even progressive artist labor groups still talk about the discrepancy of “per-stream rates” between streaming platforms, but obfuscating the actual economic model of streaming only perpetuates platforms’ refusal of artist agency. The system is complex, with minimum stream eligibility and secrecy around major label contracts, but users deserve to make informed decisions about the systems in which they participate.

Switching from Spotify to Apple Music certainly does not adequately address the problem, but switching to a user-centric streaming model might not either. Spotify’s former Data Alchemist Glenn McDonald analyzed the pro-rata vs. user-centric payment schemes in his time at the company. More-active-than-average listeners tend to stream “more artists as well as less-popular ones” so in a user-centric scheme, their money would be even more dispersed than in the pro-rata one. McDonald does not address the difference in the rates paid out to major label artists and independents, but I understand intuitively that if Spotify switched to a user-centric model tomorrow, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift would still be streamed more than my band Bike Lane. Being an indie musician would still be difficult, if slightly more legible.

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Even progressive artist labor groups still talk about the discrepancy of “per-stream rates” between streaming platforms, but obfuscating the actual economic model of streaming only perpetuates platforms’ refusal of artist agency.

Purchasing platforms, like Mirlo (open-source, live) and Subvert (closed source, in development), offer a reinvention of the traditional music economy where music is still something for sale. Subvert has positioned itself as a Bandcamp successor, owned and collectively governed by artists, labels, and listeners. “Bandcamp's corporate acquisitions threaten independent music,” Subvert states on its website. Fans are members too, and can vote on how the platform progresses. They held an election for leadership and opened the site for artists to build their pages before launching the platform to the public in May of 2026. Co-operatives, by necessity, take time to grow and change, but have the distinct advantage of their user-members feeling a sense of ownership and interest in the platform’s success. Subvert’s strong branding and utopian messaging draws people in, but the opportunity to shape a music purchasing platform, when so many have failed, keeps them engaged.

I spoke with the COO of another music purchasing platform, Nina Protocol, in early 2026, looking for advice regarding venture capital funding for turntable. It had taken me weeks and multiple warm introductions to get a hold of anyone at the company, and I was told repeatedly that they were “very busy.” That was good news to me as a Nina user and admirer; their manifesto offered a bold new model, complex but transparent, in which a Community Revenue Share fee ($1 on top of the artist’s price, of which they keep 100%) gets split “between the platform to fund operations and the community members who helped make that sale happen.” Nina centered the curator or tastemaker in this transaction, for the first time compensating them for their influence through every subsequent purchase. If this sounds like a blockchain thing, that’s because it is.

In an age of algorithmic recommendation, this turn toward rewarding human curation felt fresh. The site itself, and its corresponding social media accounts, were well-branded, simultaneously lo-fi and sleek. Their editorial team secured interviews with acts just before they broke mainstream, like Bassvictim, Quiet Light, and Grace Ives. Nina felt like a bright and shining beacon of the future we could have, if we only believed.

When I started writing this piece, Nina was churning out content and features weekly. These suddenly stopped in early June with the site’s announcement that it would be winding down after five years of operation, citing an inability “to find a revenue strategy that would give Nina a path to sustainability at its current size.” In its five years of operation, Nina sold about $33k of music (Bandcamp did $151m in 2025 alone), made no revenue on those sales until 2025 with the introduction of the Community Revenue Share, and left 82% of its catalog, uploaded by artists, never purchased by anyone. Despite these challenges, Nina shutting down spurred a few think pieces and much mourning across the community of users and peers. It was also a strong reminder to me that funding is a double edged sword, not to be accepted lightly. The COO urged me against the VC path when I spoke with him, and our conversation spooked me into a complete revision of my business plan, as well as a commitment to bootstrapping until I found a viable revenue model that I could implement on launch.

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It can seem that every new idea for how to bring money back into the music industry has already been tried. It can seem that every new idea is a version of the same failing model, in which people suddenly start paying for something they’ve always gotten for free. These platforms’ variations call into question who should have power in the music industry if it is to ever become workable again. First, gatekeepers like record labels and radio stations chose what succeeded, then a purely popularity-based system took its place. Money trickled and then poured out of the industry, and everyone has different ideas on how to staunch the flow. How will a cooperative model help or harm artists, especially smaller ones, in this new phase of listening? How might a community revenue share model scale its incentivization scheme if attempted again?

The cautionary tale of Resonate seems to inform–directly, in the case of Mirlo, which was founded by some of Resonate’s former members–the development of these new streaming or purchasing platforms. Resonate was a cooperative stream-to-own platform whose model was promising but failed to scale. Forum posts describe the dissolution of the board, exodus of volunteers, and lack of funding to continue hosting the platform. The cooperative model can seem like a panacea for the ills of corporate greed, but it comes with its own set of difficulties, like slow or stalled decision timelines and misaligned incentives, as its members try to carve out a socialist space within a capitalist reality. Artists are in some ways the unfortunate guinea pigs of even these well-meaning forays into alternative models; it was suggested by a user that Resonate ask artists and labels to invest in the project to save it, but the founder (thankfully) declined.

Everybody loves a new platform, especially one like Subvert or Nina with brand management that feels like it’s selling you on the aesthetic of an alternative future more than the future itself. The people behind these platforms understand implicitly that FOMO is their best marketing tactic, creating a community and online space that users want membership to, even for a fee. The tech behind these platforms–with the exception of Nina’s blockchain component, which was increasingly downplayed throughout its five year tenure–isn’t novel, but their values and approaches to music are. turntable falls into this category as well; it’s technically uncomplicated, serving as a connective mechanism that draws together disparate listening services, editorial platforms, and social sharing. It has a nostalgic, early Internet aesthetic that I feel reflects its function as a tool, invisible in its flexible utility.

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It can seem that every new idea for how to bring money back into the music industry has already been tried. It can seem that every new idea is a version of the same failing model, in which people suddenly start paying for something they’ve always gotten for free.

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The desire to return to a simpler time was palpable across my conversations. Young people are purchasing iPods again, praising the distraction-free listening experience, but there are also modern alternatives on the market. Sleevenote is an mp3 player designed to celebrate album art with a square touchscreen and sleek, minimalistic controls. Its founder described the product as “a Trojan horse for getting people to buy digital music.” Such devices pair well with purchasing platforms like Bandcamp, Subvert, and Mirlo, and for narrow-deep listeners could present a viable option for eschewing streaming entirely.

There are also interventions in the radio community, such as Evenings.FM. Evenings encompasses a hardware and a software product: Sol, a device that broadcasts live audio so “anywhere can be a radio station,” and the site which serves as a radio platform for scheduling, archiving, and streaming. Designer, artist, and Evenings founder Osebo Akhigbe’s guiding principle is that “spiritually, software should reflect community.” Curation begets more curation; Evenings works with radio stations they like and follow, who in turn curate hosts and fellows for their shows, who in turn curate artists, albums, genres, scenes, and songs.

If all musicians, curators, indie labels, DJs, and listeners were using tools made for them, how might they be empowered to expand or deepen their work? There is a vast graveyard of music tech startups, many of which failed because they were infiltrated by tech people who didn’t fashion platforms that spiritually reflected the community they sought to serve. Importantly, these communities are not a monolith; most of the above services’ founders actively acknowledge that they cannot, nor do they seek to, replace big box streaming, but rather solve a specific issue for a specific group they’re actively embedded in.

Listening and discovery are varied activities, encompassing a range of practices and preferences. It seems to me, across these conversations, that what we all really hope for is a more diverse ecosystem of platforms so as to avoid simply recreating the monoculture streaming has bred. The founder of Cantilever told me, “In the past, music platforms have been made by tech people, not music people. This time feels different, because we’re music people.”

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“How Can You Make the Work Fun?”

In the time since I started building turntable, I’ve become more fixed in my belief that technology is not evil, but it will not save us. The reason Spotify has become such a toxic wasteland of AI and demonetized music is not technology, it is capitalism; algorithms could be much better tools for discovery if they were tuned toward ingenuity or talent instead of profit. When I was first deciding whether or not turntable would utilize recommender systems, I thought a lot about how people were afraid of The Algorithm because it was a black box they didn’t understand and couldn’t control. The data is powerful, but it’s being used against both listeners and artists.

On turntable, users see related playlists ranked by how much overlap they have. Results can be filtered by artists, songs, and tags–my personal favorite is tags, which are user-generated (my tags include ice, water, glass, leather, shadow, etc). These filters and recommendations are just math and SQL queries behind a simple interface, meant to empower users to understand what they like and how to find more of it. The tagline in the onboarding is “rediscover your own taste on turntable.”

turntable will help give people the imagination to switch platforms or leave them entirely; the native player accesses whatever service you authorize, with plans to expand to the library of files on your device as well. turntable has always been non-negotiably “platform agnostic” because sharing music shouldn’t be limited to the streaming service with the biggest market share.

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Courtesy of the writer

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Glenn McDonald and I spent most of our interview time talking about strategies for building friction back into the frictionless experiences established for us by tech platforms, devices, and processes. Technology optimizes our life for efficient, painless drift; countering it requires active choices. I asked him, “How do you convince someone that they want to do more work?”

He answered, “How can you make the work fun?” Writing my newsletter, practicing guitar, painstakingly curating music, countless hours of software development on turntable–these are all examples of joyful work. The music people who are building the next generation of services know and love joyful work, because what makes music valuable is the emotional and practical labor that you can feel in every note.

My resistance to taking on the identity of the founder or the artist kept me from creating anything for a long time. When I finally started building turntable, I wrote a lot about how it felt like my life was coming into alignment, that all my energy served complementary goals. Although I was cautioned to pick a lane in the space, to not mix Record Store, Bike Lane, and turntable, I ultimately decided I couldn’t be bothered to run multiple social media accounts and didn’t want to conceal, even unintentionally, that I had investments on all sides of the industry. I started what I’ve been jokingly calling an “aggressive” social media campaign in March of this year and have received an overwhelming positive response to all three aspects of my practice. People seem to implicitly understand my joyful work: I’m a music person.

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