White Paper

Crates: Reclaiming Music Ownership and User Autonomy in the Streaming Era

Version 3 · March 2026 · 20 minute read

Table of Contents

Introduction

Our music collection is a significant part of who we are. The music we have been gathering all our lives – tracks, playlists, and releases – is not just content. It is a map of our memories and a reflection of our taste. For dedicated listeners, building a music collection is an ongoing act of exploration, shaping a core part of their identity.

For most of recorded history, the relationship between a listener and their music was direct and permanent. We bought a physical item. We owned it. That connection meant something: the effort of finding a record, the ritual of putting it on, the commitment of following an artist or label through every release. That friction was not an obstacle. It was part of how people connected with music. Even in the download era, you had to organize your files, decide what to keep, what to burn to CD, and what to buy later.

Streaming changed that. In exchange for frictionless access to everything, it replaced ownership with rental, careful curation with abundance, and the act of listening with mass consumption. For most casual listeners, this is pure convenience. For serious listeners — the collectors, the DJs, the tastemakers, the people whose relationship with music goes deeper — it feels shallow, slowly eroding the connection that makes music meaningful.

Crates is built for those people. This paper sets out what urged us to build it: how technology is serving people who love music, what dynamics are at play, and what a better model looks like.

1. The Streaming Status Quo: Convenience, but at what cost?

Leading streaming platforms promise convenience and infinite choice, but their designs increasingly prioritize the platform’s benefit over the user’s.

As Cory Doctorow identified in his landmark Wired essay on platform decay, services follow a predictable pattern: they attract users by being genuinely good, then progressively degrade the experience to extract profit — a cycle he named enshittification. [1] The pattern is now visible across every major streaming platform.

Spotify’s home screen is dominated by autoplay radios, mood mixes, and algorithmically promoted content. As critic Kyle Chayka documented in The New Yorker, recent interface redesigns have “made it harder to find the music I want to listen to” — pushing listeners away from their own libraries and toward the platform’s feed. [2] The concept of the album — as a creative statement, as a cohesive unit of listening — has been flattened into a container of atomized audio, where every track competes for the same thirty-second attention window.

“Spotify does not seem to care about your relationship to ‘your’ music anymore. For long-term users, this has felt like a slow-motion bait and switch.” — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

The design shift is not accidental. As MIT Technology Review reported in 2024, at least 30% of songs streamed on Spotify are now algorithm-recommended, and the personalization systems of every major platform are converging on the same sound. [3] What was marketed as discovery has become an uninteresting feedback loop. Listeners are quietly conditioned, over time, to stop seeking music out themselves — to accept whatever arrives in the feed as a reasonable representation of their taste.

Musician Kim Gordon, reflecting on her own relationship with streaming platforms in early 2026, called it simply: “the tyranny of frictionless culture.” [14]

By late 2025, Massive Attack had pulled their entire catalog from Spotify — stating that “the economic burden that has long been placed on artists is now compounded by a moral and ethical burden.” [15] It was the first major-label act to do so. The decision landed as a signal, not just a protest.

For casual listeners, this may be acceptable. For the collector who has spent years building a library with intention, for the DJs whose professional identity is tied to the depth and specificity of their taste, for the tastemaker whose value to their community is precisely the quality of their recommendations — this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a systematic dismantling of the conditions that made their relationship with music possible.

2. The Surveillance Problem: When Listening Becomes Data

Beneath the interface problem sits a more fundamental one. Streaming platforms are not primarily in the business of music. They are in the business of behavioral data — and music is the mechanism through which that data is collected.

Music journalist Liz Pelly documented this in detail for The Baffler: Spotify built a parallel advertising business around emotional profiling, pitching to marketers its ability to target listeners based on “moods and activities” inferred from listening behavior. [4] Its own advertising materials describe “billions of data points every day” powering what it calls “streaming intelligence.” The commodity, as Pelly puts it plainly, is no longer music: “The commodity is listening… the commodity is users and their moods.”[4]

Academic researchers have independently identified what they call a “watching eye” effect in continuous AI monitoring on streaming platforms — raising serious questions about behavioral profiling, lack of transparency, and the risk that collected listening data could be leveraged to manipulate user behavior beyond its stated purpose. [5]

Pelly further documented how Spotify’s mood-based segmentation strategy led it to populate editorial playlists with “ghost artist” tracks — generic music produced in-house or by third parties, for which no royalties are owed. [6] The platform had positioned itself as a meritocracy. The ghost artist practice exposed how a centralized service can quietly rig its own feed in favor of profit margins — and invisibly, because users have no visibility into what they are being served to listen or why.

MIDiA Research’s 2024 analysis adds the social dimension: hyper-personalization is creating listener isolation. When every user receives their own unique algorithmic feed, shared cultural experience erodes. [7] The possibility of building community around music — of a shared reference point, a collective discovery, a conversation between people who love the same thing — becomes structurally harder.

3. The Fragmentation Problem: Scattered Collections, No Trusted Home

Alongside the algorithmic and surveillance problems sits a practical one that affects dedicated music fans every day: their collections are scattered, and no tool exists to bring them together.

A serious listener in 2026 typically has a hybrid library: local files on a hard drive, purchases on Bandcamp, maybe a Discogs collection, saved videos on YouTube, likes on SoundCloud, playlists on a streaming service and so on. Each platform is a silo. Each has its own interface, its own logic, its own limitations. Power users routinely juggle between three and six platforms to manage a single music life. Finding something specific across all of them is often impossible.

This fragmentation does not just create inconvenience. It actively undermines the kind of deep, intentional engagement with music that serious listeners value. When your collection is scattered, you default to whatever is easiest to access — and what is easiest to access is almost always the platform’s recommendation feed, not your own carefully assembled library.

4. The Ownership Gap: What Listeners Have Lost — and Are Reclaiming

The fragmentation problem sits on top of a deeper one. Most of what people call their music library is not actually theirs. It exists at the platform’s discretion — subject to licensing decisions, catalog removals, service shutdowns, and the quiet renegotiation of terms that accompanies every platform’s journey through the ‘enshittification’ cycle. Doctorow’s framework is precise here: once listener dependency is established, platforms can “exert control over users” in ways that were unacceptable at the start. [1]

The cultural data reflects a growing resistance to this. Vinyl album sales in the United States surpassed $1 billion in revenue in 2025 — their 19th consecutive year of growth, with nearly 47 million units sold, according to the RIAA. [9] This is not a niche audiophile revival driven by sound quality arguments. It is a sustained, generational behavioral shift — toward music as something you own, something with weight and artwork and permanence, something that cannot be removed from your library by a licensing decision made in a corporate office.

Writer Denise Lu captured the sentiment in The New York Times Magazine: “I didn’t like depending on a third-party platform, or being part of a social experiment that feeds data to advertisers.”[8] Her prescription was simple: “Want to enjoy music more? Stop streaming it. Build a real music collection. Reintroduce intimacy to the songs you care about.” The instinct is clear. What has been missing is a digital tool that meets it without requiring a full retreat to analog.

“The most reliable way to hold on to the tracks you love is to download them for yourself.” — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker

5. What a Better Model Looks Like: Phase I — The Dedicated Listener

The first and most urgent part of the answer is a tool built honestly for the people who have been most poorly served by the current model: the collectors, the DJs, the tastemakers, the curators — the dedicated listeners who care about music as culture, not content.

Crates is that tool. It unifies the entire music world of a dedicated listener into one private, organized, searchable space: local files, Bandcamp purchases, Discogs collections, YouTube saves, SoundCloud discoveries, Spotify playlists — all accessible from a single interface, with consistent search, tagging, and playback. Not as a workaround, but as the core product premise. One app, all your music, on your terms.

The interface puts your library first — not some streaming platform’s recommendations. There are no unskippable suggestions between your tracks, no mood-optimized autoplay queues designed to maximize session time. Advanced tagging and metadata editing give power users the depth of organization that mainstream apps have always refused to provide. Custom fields, multi-source search, and add-on support mean the experience can serve any level of customisation.

The architecture is built to match the values. All data stays on the user’s devices, forming a private sync mesh that operates only when needed — ensuring speed, reliability, and genuine privacy. The database format is open and standardized, compatible with established metadata protocols including ID3, MusicBrainz, and ISRC. Your collection is portable. You are not locked into Crates any more than you are locked into a specific shelf for your records.

There is also a less obvious advantage embedded in this model, and it compounds over time. Because Crates holds a trusted relationship with the user — and because it unifies their complete music world across all platforms and formats — it has access to the highest-quality picture of their actual taste that any tool has ever had. Spotify only knows what you stream on Spotify. Crates knows your files, your Bandcamp purchases, your SoundCloud saves, your Discogs collection, your playlists — the full shape of a musical identity built over years. That dataset, consented and locally held, is the foundation for AI recommendations that are genuinely personal rather than statistically averaged. Unlike platform recommendations built on pooled behavioral data, what Crates learns about your taste belongs to you alone — no profiling, no third-party access, no surveillance.

The business model reflects the same values. Crates is monetized through a one-time supporter license with a free community tier ensuring access for all. No subscription. No advertising. No data harvesting. Revenue compounds over time through optional paid upgrades, add-ons, and affiliate commissions from music purchases made through the app. The model is anti-subscription by design, aligned with the psychology of collectors who invest in tools they own rather than services they rent.

Early traction validates the approach. Crates reached more than 3K sign ups in public beta through entirely organic adoption, with 8% converting to paid. Users describe it in terms that confirm the product is landing where it was aimed: “I imported all the music I have been collecting for years into Crates, and it actually feels like I now have my own private Spotify.” Another: “After spending years inserting comments and metadata on my files, it’s a relief to discover Crates and start listening again to my music, without the distractions of the streaming platforms.”

6. What a Better Model Looks Like: Phase II — The Broader Audience

The dedicated listener is the starting point, not the endpoint. The millions of serious music users who represent Phase I are not just a market segment — they are the tastemakers who shape what the broader culture listens to. DJs who play to thousands. Curators whose playlists reach niche communities across geographies and genres. Radio producers who introduce audiences to artists they would never encounter in an algorithmic feed. These are the people music moves through before it reaches everyone else.

If the current model has a single most damaging effect on music culture, it is cutting those people out. Algorithmic personalization creates individual bubbles. It removes the tastemaker from the equation — replacing the DJ, the curator, the knowledgeable friend with a system optimized for engagement metrics rather than cultural value. Music still reaches people, but the human judgment that once filtered it, shaped it, and gave it meaning has been quietly automated away.

Crates puts them back in. The community discovery layer — built around what Crates calls Gems — gives curators and tastemakers a way to share recommendations that carry the weight of real human judgment. A Gem is a track shared by someone whose taste you trust, with a note on why it matters — artist and title hidden until you choose to reveal it. It is the digital equivalent of a friend pulling a record from the shelf and saying: you need to hear this. Discovery becomes social again, shaped by people rather than optimized by machines.

As the tool earns trust among Phase I users — the tastemakers — their activity on the platform becomes the discovery infrastructure for Phase II: the broader audience of listeners who are dissatisfied with purely algorithmic recommendations but don’t know where to look. Sean Booth of Autechre put the problem plainly in a 2024 interview: “So much of it’s good, but nobody knows about it because there’s so much of it. How do you find the needle in the haystack?”[16] They don’t need another algorithm. They need better human guidance. Crates is built to do its part, at scale, without reverting to the centralized, extractive model that created the problem in the first place.

7. A Fairer Deal for Artists

The listener experience and the artist economy are connected problems, and the connection is direct: the conditions that make music less meaningful for listeners are the same conditions that make it less sustainable for artists.

Björk put the economic reality plainly in a 2025 interview: “Spotify is probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians. The streaming culture has changed an entire society and an entire generation of artists.” [10] A purchase sends money to an artist. A stream sends fractions of a cent, pooled and redistributed in ways that disproportionately benefit the most-played global acts. The math is not complicated — it is just rarely stated this clearly.

Bandcamp demonstrates what a fairer structure looks like in practice. Artists receive around 82% of each sale. The platform has paid out over $1.5 billion to artists and labels to date, with $19 million paid in 2025 alone through its Bandcamp Fridays initiative. [11] These figures are not rounding errors. They represent a fundamentally different relationship between what a fan spends and what an artist receives.

Crates integrates with this model directly. Users can import their Bandcamp collections, link to artist stores, and purchase music for permanent addition to their library — making the act of buying a natural part of the listening experience rather than a separate, inconvenient one. The philosophy the product is built around is this: stream what you’re curious about, purchase what you love. When a listener buys rather than streams, a greater share of their music budget flows directly to the artists they genuinely care about, rather than into a subscription pool weighted toward global superstars.

Over time, as Crates earns the trust of the tastemaker audience and builds the community infrastructure for Phase II, it creates the conditions for an even more direct artist-fan economy: one where curators introduce artists to audiences that would never have discovered themselves otherwise, and where the path from discovery to purchase is short, transparent, and honest.

8. Why Now

The conditions that make this moment right for Crates are not manufactured. They are visible in the culture, in the data, and in the behavior of the audience Crates is built for.

Vinyl album sales have grown nearly 300% since 2016. [9] A column about quitting Spotify goes viral in The New Yorker. Major publications ask whether there is any escape from the passivity of the streaming era. Research from Harvard Business School finds that while 75 percent of direct-to-consumer companies now offer subscriptions, the model has become so pervasive that customers are actively rethinking which recurring costs justify their keep — and walking away from those that do not. [12] Power users are juggling multiple tools to manage what should be a single music life, and the frustration is audible.

Local-first software is now technically viable in a way it was not five years ago. Modern hardware enables fast, private applications with full user-controlled UX, reducing reliance on cloud infrastructure and the surveillance models that come with it. The privacy conversation has shifted from niche concern to mainstream expectation. Cisco’s 2024 Consumer Privacy Survey found that 75 percent of consumers would not purchase from organizations they don’t trust with their data — and nearly half of 25–34 year olds have already switched providers over data practices. [13] Bluesky reached 30 million users in under a year of public availability, driven by people actively seeking a platform built on user ownership and open protocols rather than algorithmic control. Power users move first. The mainstream follows.

The competitive landscape has a clear gap. Roon serves audiophiles at $829 lifetime, requiring dedicated hardware. RekordBox serves DJs at $276 per year, owned by Pioneer. MediaMonkey manages local files on Windows with legacy UX and no streaming integrations. None of them combine unified library management, cross-platform streaming, community discovery, privacy-first architecture, and modern design at an accessible price point. Crates is the only tool in the space with genuine breadth across all five dimensions.

Conclusion: The Tool Layer for Ownership-First Listening

Streaming will remain part of the music landscape. The convenience it delivers is real and it is not going away. But the era of streaming as the only model — the unchallenged default for every kind of listener, regardless of how deeply they care about music — is ending. The evidence is in the vinyl numbers, in the backlash, in the quiet exodus of serious listeners toward tools and platforms that treat music as something worth owning rather than something to be rented by the month.

What has been missing is a digital tool built explicitly for that shift. One that takes the hybrid reality of the modern serious listener seriously — the files and the Bandcamp purchases and the SoundCloud saves and the Discogs collection — and brings it all into a single trusted home. One that puts the listener in control of their own discovery rather than delegating it to an engagement algorithm. One that makes the act of supporting an artist financially a natural part of the listening experience. One that is honest about its business model and does not require surveilling its users to survive.

Crates is the tool layer for ownership-first listening in a post-pure-streaming world.

It is built by people who are the target users — lifelong collectors, DJs, music event organizers, and technologists who started from frustration and discovered a real opportunity. The millions of high-intent listeners who represent Phase I are the leading edge of a much larger shift. If Crates wins their trust, it wins the tastemakers who shape what the broader culture hears. And in doing so, it begins to rebuild the connection between dedicated listeners, the artists they love, and the music that matters.

Technology should work for the people who use it. Music is too important to be left to systems that treat it as data. Crates is here to prove that a better model is possible — and to build it.

References

  1. Cory Doctorow, “The Enshittification of TikTok,” Wired, January 2023. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
  2. Kyle Chayka, “Why I Finally Quit Spotify,” The New Yorker, July 31, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-i-finally-quit-spotify
  3. Mia Sato, “How to Break Free of Spotify’s Algorithm,” MIT Technology Review, August 2024. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/16/1096276/spotify-algorithms-music-discovery-ux/
  4. Liz Pelly, “Big Mood Machine,” The Baffler, June 10, 2019. https://thebaffler.com/latest/big-mood-machine-pelly
  5. N. Mokoena and I. Obagbuwa, “AI Automation in Digital Music Streaming Platforms,” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 7, 2024. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1515716/full
  6. Liz Pelly, “The Ghosts in the Machine,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2025. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
  7. MIDiA Research, “Music Discovery Is Not Dead, Just Evolving,” MIDiA Research, May 2025.
  8. Denise Lu, “Want to Enjoy Music More? Stop Streaming It,” The New York Times Magazine, September 19, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/19/magazine/music-not-streaming.html
  9. Ethan Millman, “Vinyl Sales Hit $1 Billion In U.S. Revenue Last Year,” The Hollywood Reporter, March 16, 2026. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-industry-news/vinyl-sales-reach-1-billion-in-2025-riaa-report-1236534484/
  10. Björk, interview with Dagens Nyheter (via NME), January 24, 2025. https://www.nme.com/news/music/bjork-spotify-is-probably-the-worst-thing-that-has-happened-to-musicians-3831745
  11. Mandy Dalugdug, “Bandcamp Fridays hit $154m in payouts since 2020,” Music Business Worldwide, December 2024. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/bandcamp-fridays-hit-154m-in-payouts-since-2020-with-19m-paid-in-2025-alone/
  12. Elie Ofek and Amy Konary, “With Subscription Fatigue Setting In, Companies Need to Think Hard About Fees,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, October 17, 2023. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/with-subscription-fatigue-setting-in-companies-need-to-think-hard-about-fees
  13. Cisco, “2024 Consumer Privacy Survey,” Cisco Trust Center, November 2024. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/trust-center/consumer-privacy-survey.html
  14. Kim Gordon, RA Exchange EX.788, Resident Advisor, February 18, 2026. https://ra.co/exchange/827
  15. Massive Attack, statement via Instagram, reported in NME, September 19, 2025. https://www.nme.com/news/music/massive-attack-removing-music-from-spotify-protest-daniel-ek-military-investments
  16. Autechre’s Sean Booth, interview with Metal Magazine, October 2024. https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/autechre