Stephan Kunze: Life as a music fan without streaming

A conversation between two music streaming veterans about cutting the wireless cord

I am starting 2026 with an experiment: abandoning music streaming.

When Spotify launched in the Netherlands, I fell in love with it. While I was spending almost all of my disposable income on live music and sometimes CDs, I was also pirating. A lot. Streaming changed that immediately. Instead of spending hours a day browsing through Soulseek and private genre-specific torrent trackers, I now spent my time on Spotify.

After graduating, I started leading product at streaming services, with the mission to establish them as the base layer to underpin a new music economy. My adult life has truly been intertwined with music streaming.

But after 15 years of streaming music, I am particularly interested in making my music consumption more intentional. Slower streaming isn’t quite cutting it.

When January comes, I’m not sure what to expect. Or how to prepare.

I have questions.

So I’m asking music writer & curator Stephan Kunze. Stephan runs the best-selling newsletter for ambient and experimental music, zensounds. Stephan, like me, has spent a significant chunk of his career working in music streaming as a Senior Music Editor at Spotify and later as the service’s Global Editorial Lead. If you listened to playlists on Spotify between 2016 and 2022, there’s a good chance you’ve been exposed to Stephan’s curation, directly or indirectly.

In August 2024, Stephan cancelled his music streaming subscription.

I wanted to know how it’s been for him and what anyone else considering cutting the cord might learn from him.

---

Do you remember how you first got into music streaming as a subscriber? What impact did it have on your music listening and collecting habits?

I started streaming just shortly before I started working for Spotify in 2016. I had a neat iTunes library that I’d built up since the early 2000s, and I didn’t want to let go of it. I’d started curating playlists for the launch of Apple Music in Germany; realising this could turn into a lucrative line of work in a time when the magazine business basically went down the drain, I applied for an editorial position at Spotify – and set up an account there as part of the interview preparation.

I’ll admit that I got converted rather quickly. Of course, I loved the convenience of having the world’s music catalogue at my fingertips at first. I definitely listened to more hours of music from a bigger number of artists from different parts of the world, though that might have to do with my actual work in playlist curation as well. In terms of my personal music consumption, I created a bunch of evolving playlists that I’d keep adding to, and they turned out to be much more mood- than genre-based. I also noticed that I listened to way more individual songs than albums, though I’d always considered myself an album listener.

In 2024, you decided to cancel your Spotify subscription. How do you look back on that?

For some time, I viewed music streaming as the ultimate value proposition. A monthly tenner for the world catalogue, anytime, anywhere? Come on, that’s sick. But in the long run, I felt that I was missing a deeper connection to the music. I listened to so many songs, but increasingly found myself clueless about the artists, or their role in their scene; I didn’t understand how these songs fit into their body of work or the genre as a whole. I also realised that I didn’t own or have control over my collection, because I just rented access to it from a tech corporation.

I look back on dropping out of streaming as a value-driven act of reclaiming agency. I didn’t really want or need access to millions of songs; a curated library just serves my purpose much better. I’ve made the conscious decision to let each of these pieces into my life at one point, and that in itself creates a deeper relation to the music. Last but not least, I really enjoy the feeling of owning the music again; nobody can revoke my access to this music, and I don’t need to search for it on an interface that tries to capture my attention and direct it towards brainrot podcasts and AI slop.

I know you’re a big proponent of active listening. What about passive listening? How do you pick music for moments when you’re working, doing chores around the house, or when you’re on the go?

First of all, even with what I just said, I do engage in a lot of passive listening myself. I’m not opposed to that in general, I just think that we should also consider listening to music actively for a certain portion of our time. Most people don’t do that at all anymore – there’s a pervading second-screen mentality that I’m witnessing, even at concerts, which I totally despise.

Back to your question – I listen to a lot of ambient, electronic and jazz music, most of it being instrumental, so by definition a huge portion of it does work for background as well as foreground listening. That’s one possible definition of ambient music after all. I have certain seasonal go-to genres for work and travel, like dub techno, barber beats or balearic house. I’ve gone back to almost exclusively listening to full artist albums (or EPs, my favourite format in electronic music). Even for background consumption, I rarely listen to playlists or albums on shuffle, as I try to respect the auteur’s vision of their body of work.

I’ve also returned to buying physical products. It has a nostalgic element to it, for sure, but it’s also about the act of putting on a record, which felt much more deliberate and mindful than just pressing play on a stream. I’m collecting these small-run DIY ambient tapes, and one way of passive background listening is actually that I randomly grab something from my tape collection and play it front to back on my portable Sony cassette recorder.

After adopting minimalism, you owned fewer than 100 things at one point, and documented them in a spreadsheet. One could argue that streaming, rather than owning, allows for a more minimalist lifestyle. How do you look at this?

It’s true, but I just don’t believe in minimalist orthodoxy anymore. I’m still a follower of minimalism’s core values and principles, but the mainstream has twisted it into this perverse, hollow consumption trend. That’s one thing capitalism’s really good at – appropriating its critiques.

While streaming definitely allows for a more flexible minimalist lifestyle (“access over ownership”), the negative aspects I mentioned earlier started outweighing those advantages for me. I looked for a way to retain the flexibility but get rid of that massive disconnect and consumption mentality. I’ve actually abandoned some minimalist practices because they clashed with other, more important values, like ecology and sustainability.

How do you organise your collections? Do you use any tools?

When I moved away from streaming, I found some great articles on Pitchfork about collecting and storing digital music. My solution was a NAS, which is a big local hard-drive carrier that you can store your music collection on and then access from anywhere through an internet and/or local network connection. That way, you can basically curate your own HQ streaming service.

I store all my digital music in FLAC quality on my NAS, which I’ve mirrored to a Dropbox cloud. I don’t use any tools for organising, other than keeping my ID3 tags proper and clean. Additionally, I use my Music library on my laptop to remain on top of new promos, which makes up a large portion of my professional daily listening. I will only have current stuff on there, probably around 80-100 albums at any given time. I only download promos that I find intriguing, and I will usually stream them once or twice before I download. I’m quite mindful about letting new things into my life, which I guess is something I’ve kept from my hardcore minimalist days.

What were the biggest points of friction when you left streaming behind? How did you solve this?

First of all, a daily work situation for me – how do I listen to stuff that I don’t own and don’t want to buy, but need to check for an article? I’ve resorted to YouTube as an easy solution here. Sure, the sound quality might be subpar, but this is not pleasure listening after all – and for these more scientific cases, YouTube is perfectly fine.

Secondly, I had a few amazingly curated, mood-based playlists with hundreds of songs in my streaming days, which I would often default to in my daily routines. I really missed those for some time. But I’ve managed to rewire my brain so that I always spend at least a minute or two thinking about what I actually want to listen to now. It might feel less convenient, but it’s definitely more mindful. That was one of the most profound insights for me – understanding that convenient consumption rarely leads to true, lasting fulfilment. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss developed this formula, which asserts a direct correlation between the effort you have to make and the purpose you’ll find in an activity (or “happiness”, if you will). I tend to believe he’s mostly right.

A benefit of leaving streaming behind is that it forces one to be more intentional about what to listen to and when. This must pair well with your mindfulness practice, which seems to have become deeply embedded in your lifestyle.

Imagine a younger, perhaps less mindful, version of yourself in 2025. How do you think leaving streaming would have played out for him? What advice would you give?

I’d probably tell my younger self that while surely convenient, new technologies aren’t always just net positive, and to carefully consider the downsides of streaming as well, instead of just shrugging them off. Look, even now I’m far from a Luddite; I’m a digital knowledge worker, and I spend a substantial portion of my life in the digital realm. I just think that we should generally question the usual tech corp narrative based on inevitability and “progress” arguments. That’s not limited to streaming, but to technology as a whole. Then again, I’m not a missionary or crusader. Everyone needs to find out for themselves.

Is there any practical advice you’d give someone on the verge of making the switch?

Keep your streaming subscription running for a while. Maybe you don’t even need to cancel it. I am seeing a near-distant future where most music fans (not the casual ‘lean-back’ listener type) have both a streaming account and a personal, owned music library (physical and digital).

So don’t try to make the switch all at once. You’ll need some time to organically build up your library. If you still have old hard drives and music libraries floating around, take an afternoon to go through them and check what you’d still want to listen to. Don’t just import everything – this is probably music you liked a decade or longer ago. Some of it has not aged well. You don’t need to clutter your new library up with that stuff. I actually took the switch as an opportunity to build up a new library from scratch, containing only DRM-free music from Bandcamp and other independent sources.

What needs to be clear is that this will not be an easy or convenient switch – that’s why streaming is so popular, after all. This will definitely come with some friction, and you should be prepared and okay with that.

Lastly, to kick off people’s post-streaming journeys, what is an album everyone should have in their collection?

You do realise this is the one question you should never ask a music writer, right? I spent hours assembling my list of The 100 Albums That Rocked My World, and the result would basically change every single day since I published it. But I suspect that you won’t let me off the hook so easily, so I’ll just pick one that I’ve been returning to for a decade at this point.

2814’s Birth of a New Day is simply the best vaporwave album of all time, even though it contains absolutely no slowed-down muzak or smooth jazz samples; it doesn’t feature a Roman bust on its cover either, but a whole lot of Japanese characters and a cyberpunk aesthetic. Forget the vaporwave tag, though – this is some of the most gorgeous, melancholic ambient electronic music of all time. The perfect album for the dark and cold season, and it does absolutely work as passive background listening too.

---

If you’d like to learn more about Stephan Kunze and his excellent music writing and curation, I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter zensounds.

---