With the CEOs of streaming platforms spending millions on AI weapons, surveillance technologies and profit-maximising algorithms whilst failing to pay independent bands and labels, and alienating us from music as a social practice. We need collective alternatives that bypass big companies. We declare that streaming companies are an expression of our capitalist exploitation and alienation! We demand you to:

Start a collectively owned music archive. By starting an archive, owned collectively, you gain autonomic independence. No CEO neither politicians can take the music away if it is not in their liking that you listen to it. Ensure that no AI-generated, commodity-form music enters this archive. Delete this uncreative, computer-produced, capitalist rubbish immediately. It is cultural overproduction without social meaning.

Exchange tapes with your friends. Do you possess the newest release of your local punk collective? Exchange it with the comrade who owns a 1993 house tape. Break with hoarding and practise musical mutual aid.

Acquire a tape player to listen to music outside the circuits of digital capitalist control. Support bands directly by purchasing tapes instead of renting access from platforms. Use the tape player as a tool of reproduction. Record tapes from your collectively owned digital archive.

If you produce music yourself, duplicate it and distribute it freely among your comrades. You can find a manual on how to duplicate tapes here. If you are already a well-known artist, socialise duplication at scale. Use a larger duplication organisation or build your own collective mass-duplication infrastructure. German artists should avoid contact with GEMA* wherever possible.

Create mixtapes instead of submitting to Spotify’s algorithmic cultural planning or AI prompted playlists. If you want songs from big bands, rip them of from YouTube using your tape recorder. For personal use only, you should not sell these tapes. If you want songs from smaller bands, acquire them from Bandcamp and integrate them into your mixtape. This is conscious, relational cultural exchange, not passive consumption. It is a more personal way of sharing music with your friends than simply creating a shitty Spotify playlist. Start giving the mixtapes fancy names but be careful, names carry political meaning.

Visit flea markets and reclaim abandoned tapes from capitalist waste cycles so you can overdub them. Maybe your grandma has some old recordings of church service recordings on tape. Let punk erupt between the pastor’s words. Sabotage the archive of authority. Get crazy with it, spin out!

Design your own Covers. They are called J-Cards, and their dimensions are freely accessible knowledge. Just cut them out of some thicker paper, draw on it or create a funky collage. The dimensions for slipcases are also freely accessible knowledge you can find online, in case you want to create your own cardboard slipcase instead of using the plastic case. If you want your J-Cards or slipcases to be even fancier, find some place where you can cheaply screen or riso print them. Stamp on them yourself using low-tech, anti-industrial stamps you made from potatoes or lino.

Do not merely accumulate cassettes as fetish objects, actually listen to them! Play them on repeat, get annoyed by tape jams, fix them with a pen and then listen to the repaired tape again and again. Care, maintenance and repetition are acts of resistance against planned obsolescence. Don’t leave them lying in the sun. Like vinyls, they will melt in the sun, then you’ll need to record a new one to listen to that music again and again. Capitalism melts everything, we rebuild again and again.

Get a Walkman to listen while moving through capitalist space. We do live in a capitalist digital world, and sometimes it can feel good to escape it. We live under digital capitalism, and escape is not always possible. Do not individualise this failure, it is structural. Streaming is convenient but listening to music should not be an easy peasy lemonsquezy pumpkin pie motherfucker thing! Abolish Spotify. Do not simply migrate to Apple Music, Amazon or YouTube as these are identical capitalist relations in different disguises. If streaming remains necessary, prefer Qobuz or Tidal, which currently exploit artists less aggressively and do not openly invest in AI weapons.

The concept of solidarity-based, anti-capitalist music practice can also be transferred to CDs or MP3 players!