it's time to ditch streaming for an ipod

where and how to download free mp3s from dead websites

When I was a teenager my primary hobby was music. Not playing it (I can't play an instrument), or singing (I can’t sing), or even dancing to it (I can’t dance either), but locating it. Nothing was automated for adolescents in the 2000; you curated and developed taste on your own, often showing off your latest discovery by adding cryptic lyrics to your AIM profile, changing your MySpace song, or burning CDs for friends. Music blogs were scripture and I was their disciple. Every day after school, I’d check my favorite blogs for uploads, scrape the mp3 links with a browser extension, and upload them to my iPod. I’d find text-only playlists on blogs and would copy and paste the names of each song into LimeWire and torrent dozens at a time. Without a TV in my bedroom or a smartphone to scroll through, I’d listen to my new songs one by one, highlighting my favorites by adding them to my iPod’s "On-The-Go" playlist. Sometimes I’d listen to a song on repeat and write down the lyrics (as I heard them) in a notebook.

Very few kids I attended school with in the Dallas and Houston suburbs were familiar with the indie, twee, and 70s punk I listened to. I was considered weird and artsy. I wore shirts with way too many buttons, ballet flats, and had purple streaks in my hair. The music I listened to felt like an extension of my appearance and the persona I’d created of Girl Who Reads Lolita in Algebra Class. I didn’t want the average Texas teenager to like or understand me. I wanted to surround myself with “intellectuals” who read British literature, wrote poems, and could name three Buzzcocks albums. I was pretentious and obnoxious, but music felt like a portal to a life that was inaccessible to me. And I was really good at, and very intentional about, finding it.

My obsession with music exploration waned in the late 2000s and early 2010s with the rise of streaming services. When Rhapsody premiered it felt promising, like a way to save time. Torrenting all my music came with challenges. Sometimes you’d download a mislabeled song, or a track with no label at all that you’d have to name and catalog, or a completely out-of-order album. Then Apple folded iPods into iPhones and Spotify debuted, with automated custom playlists for every user. It’s easy to grow complacent with apps and outgrow previous technologies when everybody else is adopting what’s new and abandoning the old and archaic. That’s simply what consumerism is and what capitalism relies on. I found myself enjoying the art of music discovery less and less. I figured it was part of becoming an adult, but I don’t think so anymore. It’s difficult to appreciate what’s automated and I resent the algorithm’s assumption of who I am and what I’ll like. No algorithm can replicate human suggestion, curation, or taste.

We appreciate something more when we feel we’ve discovered it. It’s the basis of personal taste. Nothing feels better than when we find something we’ve been searching for, whether it’s our lost car keys, some holy grail pair of vintage shoes, or new music we can’t stop listening to. Our brains reward us with dopamine. When music becomes intertwined with technology — just another part of using our phone while we scroll, answer texts, or check our email — the reward is diminished. Our brain doesn’t know the difference between the Spotify app and all of the apps that make us feel like shit when we open them. Some apps might give us more dopamine than others, but our brains pretty much only know Phone and Social Media.

Music and tech are so interwoven now that I never interrogated their compounding before, but music should never have merged with phones. Streaming is convenient, sure, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Music is art. It shouldn’t be part of the machine we play with every day. Most of us already feel chained to our phones. I don’t write, read, or create art on my iPhone unless I have absolutely no choice, so why do I listen to music on it? Cameras never ceased production just because the iPhone also has a camera, and because its camera is notoriously dogshit, sales for digital and film cameras are rising again (I have a growing vintage collection). But portable music outside of the iPhone has become nearly nonexistent. It’s been nearly 20 years since the iPhone debuted with music storage, 15 years since iPhones began outselling iPods, and 8 since Apple began phasing them out. No alternatives have been introduced. We’ve all resigned ourselves to consuming tunes through an app instead of with a separate device. We were promised consolidation, that it would be more advantageous to have everything in one device, yet there’s growing frustration with our over-reliance and I’m grateful for every minute I can be off my phone.

Enraged by my inability to even take a walk and listen to music without bringing my phone along, I bought a 5th generation iPod. It’s clear and has a red wheel and is modded with Bluetooth, a USB-C port, and 512GB of storage. It wasn’t cheap and I don’t have it yet; delivery wait times are up to three months. I bought mine from PlayerMods, where prices range from $239 to $439 plus upgrades. However, there are way less expensive modded iPods for sale everywhere (like on eBay). You can even do it yourself if you have the patience and wherewithal. You can also just buy a regular iPod — they’re widely available and some are even cheaper than a yearly Spotify subscription. Your phone battery, sucked dry daily by your streaming habits, will thank you. Plus, you’ll actually own what you’re listening to. As stated in my previous piece on Internet decay, nothing we possess is material or belongs to us anymore. This includes the music we stream.

If you need more reasons to ditch Spotify, there are plenty. We all know they don’t pay their artists but they’ve also been accused of using a pay-for-play model with their new Discovery Mode. They’ve created and advertised fake AI artists as real, the audio on the platform is not high quality, and you’ll be served countless playlists but the algorithm that curates them really, really sucks so you’re unlikely to find anything you like. Their privacy policy is already trash and in the UK, following the passing of the Online Safety Act, Spotify is threatening to shut down the accounts of anyone who does not opt in for a face scan or upload their ID or passport in order to verify age.

You don’t need to buy an iPod to start downloading and curating music. You can do that for free and listen on your phone or computer right now. And I’m not going to advocate for pirating music without paying artists, but I’m also not going to pretend you can afford to in this economy. Artists used to release free mp3s of their music to tempt people into buying their albums or seeing them live. This was called sampling; these are the audio files that would circulate on old music blogs. So, pay new or smaller artists you want to support, and if you are downloading their music for free, buy merch and concert tickets. Be intentional about it. But if you want to explore older music from the 2000s and earlier, there are plenty of websites with free mp3s online, many of which have been preserved in the archives for decades. Consider it second-hand. We’re going mp3 thrifting — and if you have the patience, you’ll strike gold.

EXCAVATE MP3S IN THE ARCHIVES

I’m sending out a separate Substack post with a list of the best dead blogs with working and downloadable links, but if you want to use the Internet Archive to find old music like I do, here’s one example of how you can do it. We’ll use Gorilla vs. Bear, one of the most popular music blogs of the 2000s. Enter the current link into the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and a calendar of website captures spanning decades will appear. Click one at random. We’ll choose January 11, 2006. You might hit a page (or an entire blog) with no working links, but your patience will be rewarded. The first link (an Elliot Smith cover) doesn’t work. The second one does! You can scroll and listen before committing to downloading anything, or you can do what I do and streamline it. I use an extension called DownThemAll (only available on Firefox) to scrape the entire page. There’s 35 mp3s here and more than half were downloadable (20!) including Tapes ‘n Tapes - Insistor, a song I haven’t owned as an audio file since possibly the exact week we’re looking at. And this is just from one capture from the calendar. Before you leave the capture, there’s a list of other music blogs with free mp3s on the left side of the page. I would have gone through all of these when this version of the site was live and I encourage you to do the same. The links probably aren’t accessible here, but if you copy and paste the names of the blogs into Wayback Machine, you will find working pages and many more downloadable mp3s.

FIND HUMAN-CURATED MUSIC

Some music blogs are still around. What’s uploaded may not be downloadable as mp3s anymore, but for discoverability purposes, blogs are great. IndieShuffle, Stereogum, and Aquarium Drunkard (now membership-funded) were some of my favorites in high school. You can find a music blog for pretty much any genre, btw.

50 Minutes is a free music blog that sends you 50 minutes of music bi-weekly.

Deep Voices is a Substack dedicated to Spotify and Apple playlists, but they also feature music you can pay for directly from artists’ Bandcamps.

Hype Machine is god tier. HypeM is a database of music scraped from hundreds of websites and blogs, so on top of finding new music you will also discover new writers. They’ll email you five new hand-selected songs a week, for free, if you sign up. And they won’t advertise you anything; this is a website preserved in time. It still looks and functions as it did when it debuted in 2007. HypeM runs on contributions now and if you pay the minimum of $3, you’ll get access to all their music archives.

DOWNLOAD EXISTING MEDIA AS MP3s

Download mp3s from YouTube by copy pasting the URL into this website.

Download mp3s from Soundcloud by copy pasting the URL into this website.

Download mp3s from Spotify by copy pasting the URL into this website.

SoulSeek is a free hybrid p2p (peer-to-peer) file-sharing network. It’s a communal and mostly music-focused platform where you can share your files and download other people’s.

Yay. You own music now.