Goodbye Spotify & Where to Find This Podcast

Row the boat on the freezing stream. Pick a flower for the girl. Leaves fall down near the freshly made grave. Move through this day, half in light and half in darkness. Up the street, the cold creams close for the season. When the clocks change, they always bring the rain. If you go, put a pair of coins in your front pocket. Distant shores are not so sure. Sticks might break bones, but words never hurt him. Her red scarf waves a sad hand, damp and wine-colored in the cool air. Welcome to a very short episode of the Passing Through Podcast. I have two quick announcements to make. First, I am leaving Spotify. So going forward, this will be the only episode of this podcast that you see on Spotify. And I want to assure you right here at the beginning that I have not stopped making new episodes. I'm only moving this show off of Spotify. I alluded to this back in episode 116 if you want to go check that one out. But before I talk about why I've left Spotify, I want to talk about where you can still find me. And all of this will also be in the show notes for any of you who are listening while multitasking right now and shoveling food into your mouth while shopping for Halloween costumes and drinking the finest swine wine. The best place to listen is the passing through podcast dot com. It was built with love by yours truly. And there you will find everything all in one place. There'll be episodes, audio, transcripts, and the sock that you lost three years ago and could never locate again. And the website is free. It's self hosted on a web page that I have total tyrannical control over. And best of all, it's blessed by space gnomes. And not only space gnomes, but the intergalactic pig nipple nebula, which squirts shimmering starry milk out into the cosmos. And few people know this, but that's actually where our Milky Way galaxy flows from. So, blessed be the intergalactic pig nipple nebula. Now, of course you can still find this show in most other places that you listen to podcasts. Like Apple Podcasts or YouTube or Overcast, CastBox, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, iHeartRadio, iHeartHuckabees, even iHeartApplebees, and many, many more. And you might be wondering at this moment, okay, why remove this podcast only from Spotify? And that's a good question. This for me is a personal preference thing. So I don't shame or begrudge anyone else for using Spotify to listen to music and podcasts because I did this for many, many, many, many years. And I only stopped once I quit my job and decided to live in a van. And here I am. So for me, and probably many of us, it's just not practical anymore to collect big boxes of vinyl or to amass wall-to-wall libraries of CDs or cassettes or 8-tracks or whatever the fuck you're listening to music on these days because when rent is $2,000 in New York for a closet apartment, there's no room for physical media in this economy anymore. Up until the last couple of years, I was a lifelong Spotify user with thousands of songs in my library. I was making playlists every month, sometimes multiple playlists a month. I have a catalog of, I don't even know, hundreds of playlists. And those playlists were reflections of my mood and my emotional state and what I was going through. And I had deep nostalgia and connections to these songs. So walking away from them was a big thing for me because for as long as I can recall, I have had an insatiable appetite for music. Music was always such an integral part of my experience of the world. I mean, I've been listening to music since I was in the womb. I was listening to baby Mozart while I was pissing in the womb. Actually, that's a fun fact. F-f-f-f-f-fun fact. Babies do indeed piss in the womb. They start at around 14 weeks once the kidneys form and they just don't stop. It's kind of nasty, right? But it gets even nastier. The baby actually swallows it, then pisses it out again, over and over, recycling all day long. So think about that the next time you're at a party and someone asks you what's the first thing you've ever drank and wasn't your mother's milk. F-f-f-f-f-fun fact. Back to leaving Spotify. Something changed in these past few years for me because gradually I became more and more dissatisfied with Spotify's pricing models. Or the way that they'd randomly just remove songs from their library without notice. Or their anti-union initiatives that disadvantage worker protections and erode class solidarity. The way that they underpay artists. Their move to air ice recruitment ads on their platform. And the CEO's $700 million investment into AI militarization software. All of these things came together to create this atmosphere of, do I really want to be on this platform? And if you look at a picture of Spotify's former CEO, Daniel Ek, he looks like the unholy love child of Lex Luthor, Moby and Paul Giamatti. So that was another factor in me leaving the platform. And so I unsubscribed maybe two or so years ago and I haven't looked back since then. And even though I stopped giving them money, it started bugging me knowing that my podcast was still hosted there. And at first I thought, well, even if the platform stands for things that I don't support, at least the message of my show is about how we're all connected and as such we should be good to one another because we are one another. The show, I hope, invites us to think differently about the human and more than human worlds in which we are situated. And while we're all passing through this life, I'm pulled to provide provocations about the possible purpose of what a human is and how we can be good relatives to those other than human persons we are inextricably entangled with. So I figured the message here was important enough to broadcast on Spotify cents. The more people that it reaches, the more impact that it has. But slowly, very slowly, I started to feel a growing misalignment that I just couldn't reconcile, a sort of tainted pact. And so given this, I ultimately, after much deliberation, decided that I'd rather take a metaphorical baseball bat to my knees and exit the platform like many artists and creators already have. And that's when I took up the slow and arduous work of building the website and planning the migration from Spotify to the passing through podcast.com. I learned a lot of nerdy shit about RSS feeds and XML and servers and URL encoding and JavaScript and other stuff that I don't need to bore you with. And now everything is in place to pull the plug and untether myself from where most of my listeners subscribe. It's a risky maneuver and one that I don't undertake lightly. I am a small, independent podcast. It will be hard to grow outside of the Spotify ecosystem. I understand this because I know that I don't want to go to different apps when I want to listen to different content. I want it all in the same place. I want it to be frictionless and smooth and easy. So if you don't want to follow me out into the vague unknown and prefer instead to listen to all of your podcasts and music on Spotify, I respect that. I get it. Having a different app for web browsing, music, email, podcasting, four apps for messaging, four apps for social media, seven for foot porn, five for dating, and six for geese allaying. It's a lot. I actually had to Google that last one and I was shocked to discover that in a 12 days of Christmas song, that's what my true love gave to me on the sixth day of Christmas. Six geese allaying. And I never noticed the eight maids a milking either, which is oddly synchronistic with the content of this episode. But yeah, to summarize, the first announcement here is that the podcast isn't going anywhere. It's just not on Spotify anymore. So if you want to listen, come and find me somewhere else. The second shorter thing to announce is that I've started up a Patreon because as many of you know, I live in a goddamn van and not like a luxurious big camper or anything like that we're talking about a 20 year old Volkswagen transporter. So I will happily take any scraps that you'll throw at me. It takes time to make these episodes, takes time to record them, to book guests, to edit the episodes, to create the music, to string the whole thing together into something semi-sensible and coherent. And most listeners don't really have a sense of all of the hours of work that go into any given episode. And I offer those episodes for free because I hate paywalls. And the idea of excluding people based on their economic situation is absolutely abhorrent to me. And it makes my soul crawl. I much prefer concepts of gifting and generosity and reciprocity and inclusivity. You know, all of these words that end in ITY, it seems. So whether you support this podcast on Patreon, or you listen for free, the content is going to be exactly the same. So if you aren't able to give anything, no worries at all, you could continue to listen for free. But if you enjoy this itinerant independent podcast, and you have the means and would like to support it, you can think of it as like buying me a drink once a month. This could be like a tea or a beer or a sweet glass of swine milk fresh from a warm teat. And if you've ever suckled the soft white heat from a hot hog, then you are a member of a very exclusive and time-honored club indulging in an extraordinarily epicurean delight. If you want to enter into a brave new world of boar-bristled beverage consumption, sign up to the Sorted Swine Swiller tier at patreon.com slash the passing through podcast. And you'll have to go check out for yourself whether or not that is in fact a real tier. But I am on my way out here. So if this is your first and only encounter with this podcast, I beseech you to go and listen to a different episode, visit the passing through podcast.com or go anywhere else that you listen to podcasts and scroll through the archives. I think there's enough diversity between the material and the guests that there should be a little something for everyone, whether you're into psychology or philosophy or nature or meditation, psychedelic spirituality, permaculture, community, literature, music, photography, or if you've ever felt grief or been touched by death, you have a home here on this podcast. Because regardless of what your interests are or what your life experience is, you, just like me and everyone else in this vast cosmos, are only passing through. So do what you can to make that journey fruitful for everyone. Be good to one another. So long Spotify. Thanks for the ride. And to all of you listeners, I will speak to you next time. Stop drinking regular boring ass milk and start drinking swell. Sourced from the biggest bore. I used to drink milk. Nothing good ever happened to me. Only halitosis and scoliosis. Drink swilk. It's what bones crave. Once I switched to swilk, everything changed. My acne cleared right up. I had more pep in my step. Even my male pattern baldness just went away. Best of all is now I don't need painful hair surgery in Turkey to restore my sense of youth and potency. Drink swilk. It's the marrow margrafyer. My husband started drinking swilk. Swilk. Uh, okay. And, well, he turned into a 900 pound boulder. Swilk. We're actually in the middle of a class action lawsuit. He's having a hard time providing his signature on the court documents because he's made of fucking obsidian. This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Swilk is a dietary supplement intended to supplement the diet. It is not meant to replace a balanced diet or to be used as a sole source of nutrition. Take only as directed. Swilk is a trademark of the Dolos Corporation. Swilk.