After over 3 years of scrobbling almost 65,000 songs into Last.FM, I'm leaving the platform. I originally signed up years ago in 2006, back as it wanted to be a social media hub of music lovers. CBS purchased it and its popularity has fallen over time as it now exists as little more than a Big Data conduit. There's likely something fundamentally flawed in paying a monthly fee to access your own data in a context where the company isn't rolling out any new features.

The reason I returned in 2017 was to show live data on my WordPress site—I always thought it gave a zing of vitality/humanity to this space. Sometimes this virtual world can be a lonely place to roam, passing the AI denizens that stream through the cyber metropolis...rarely does it feel fully alive.

All of this, from news sites to social media, from cooking blogs to sports fandom off come off as a well-coded piece of AI, code with an intent to make me think in line with the Ivy League intelligentsia or how on some fundamental level, my insufficiency can be resolved by Just Another Subscription Service.

Speaking of music and JASS, my year-long subscription to Spotify is winding down at September's start. While I jumped aboard Spotify early on—although Rdio was the superior platform—my current user profile only spans back to 2014. Yet, I'm thinking about moving on from Spotify.

Food for thought: if I kept $720 in my pocket instead of spending it on my current Spotify account, couldn't I own everything I listen to with how cheap CDs are today? I could convert them to a FLAC and MP3 formats and retain the benefits of digital medium. Instead of paying $10/month, I could buy a used CD or three a month.

Perhaps, this is an impractical approach to put into action. Yes, in the past week, I've felt the need to listen to Don Davis's score to The Matrix, but, could I defend its purchase? I could argue from a perspective of substitute goods and indeed there are albums I love to listen to over and over again. But, what about artists with limited, popular availability?

I love synthwave music, a phenomenon that only really exists in this virtual world. Yes, you can buy The Midnight's catalog on cassette and vinyl as novelties, but, it appears they've run out of CDs. And what about Gunship, Timecop1983, Kalax? Or any other artist sampled from The 4th Expedition? I would basically be punting the entire genre.

And while I'd have to see what is relevant today in setting up my own streaming server again, that's more cash required to set up a dedicated server...and lest I forget, I'm out in the country with no wired access to the Internet so my streaming service might as well just be my vinyl collection.

Plus, I have a propensity to resist collecting things, because I ENJOY collecting things. It's a foolish pursuit and I typically clear everything out in an unmitigated, SHOCK-AND-AWE response.

Endgame: am I saving money? I've already demonstrated that not only would I spend the same money every month, I suspect I'd spend more. Sure, there comes a time when I'm satisfied with the music I have, but, now we're talking about decades in the future before there's a strong reason to not rent music. If I had kept my 800+ CD collection I built from 1995 to 2002, then a strong argument could be made against music rental. But, with this literally handful of Battlestar Galactica soundtracks and Garth Brooks albums remaining, does it make fiscal sense to own?

It funnels down to which service to rent and since my data shape my experience in Spotify, again, I pay for my own data. Thanks again, my ever obese, android friend at my Enterprise's conn, Big Data.