Goodbye Streaming, Hello Chaos: My Return to a Local Music Collection

I have finally snapped.

Not in a “turn your radio to 666 AM and wait for further instructions” kind of way, but in a “cancel every streaming subscription, wipe my phone, and return to my personal music collection like it’s 2007” kind of way.

You see, my hard drive is a musical landfill. I’ve got MP3s at 128 kbps that sound like they were recorded through a potato, 320 kbps tracks that are fine but redundant, and FLAC files so enormous they’re basically squatting on my storage like an unpaying tenant. Every time I scroll through my library, I can almost hear my SSD weeping.

So I’ve chosen a middle path: Opus at around 160 kbps.

• Small enough to not need a NASA-sized hard drive.
• Clear enough to hear the cymbal crashes without wondering if the drummer is trapped in a cardboard box.
• Perfect for cramming thousands of songs onto my phone without my storage screaming for mercy.

Yes, I know — audiophiles will tell me I’m “throwing away precious bits of sonic magic” and minimalists will say, “Why not just keep the streaming?” But both camps can relax: I’m going back to a time when I owned my music, didn’t need an internet connection to enjoy it, and could happily spend hours making playlists called things like Driving Into a Storm While Questioning Life Choices.

And speaking of phones, this coincides perfectly with my upcoming switch to Android. I’ll finally have the freedom to load up a microSD card, drag-and-drop my tunes like it’s the golden age of Winamp, and maybe even bring back a dancing llama visualizer for good measure.

Now, technically, I’m still holding onto one streaming service… the Apple Family Music plan. Why? Because my entire household are Apple Kool-Aid–drinking zombies, and if I dared cancel it, I’d be exiled to the couch with only a broken Bluetooth speaker for company.

In the future, I’ll probably get a bigger phone with more storage, but for now, I’m just happy to be cutting out most of the subscription noise and building my own portable jukebox.

Streaming services, it’s been real. But our relationship was never exclusive. And now I’m running off with my old FLAC files — after I squeeze them into something more reasonable, of course.