By July 15, Nina Protocol will shut down.
For those who never came across it, Nina is a free and independent music platform launched in 2021 as an alternative to the increasingly standardised world of music streaming. While most platforms compete on scale, convenience and algorithmic efficiency, Nina focused on something else entirely: direct support for artists, niche music communities, and genuine and human discovery.
As someone who has been slowly drifting away from Spotify over the past one or two years, Nina became one of my favourite ways to find new music. Not just through the platform itself, but through its editorial work and the scenes it highlighted.
What made Nina special wasn’t simply its business model. Fans could buy music directly from artists and labels, while creators kept all the revenue generated through sales. More importantly, it gave space to underground scenes and smaller communities that rarely fit into the logic of mainstream streaming. Opposing to the other streaming services, it felt like it was built around participation.
Unfortunately, passion alone isn’t always enough to survive. In a music economy that rewards scale above almost everything else, Nina struggled to attract the kind of rapid growth required to sustain itself.
Its closure made me think more directly about my own relationship with Spotify: the only thing keeping me subscribed to Spotify at this point is sentimental attachment. I’ve been using Spotify since I was sixteen, thousand of saved songs, playlist attached to specific years of my life, old discoveries, forgotten obsessions… It has effectively become an archive of my musical history.
Recently I realised that I barely use it the way I once did, so I considered downgrading my relationship with it: keeping the account as a reference library while stopping the monthly payments.
Spotify arrived at exactly the right historical moment. In the late 2000s it presented itself as the solution to music piracy: a legal, frictionless way to access an almost unlimited catalogue of music. For listeners, it felt revolutionary: instead of downloading and organising music yourself, an entire library was made available instantly for a modest subscription fee.
The problem is that the incentives built into the platform have always favoured scale. Spotify distributes royalties through a pro-rata model, where artists are paid according to the share of total streams they generate across the platform. In practice, this means that the bigger artists receive the largest portion of the money. More streams attract more visibility, more visibility generates more streams.
Recent policy changes have only reinforced that dynamic. Tracks that fail to reach minimum streaming thresholds effectively stop generating royalty payments, making it even harder for smaller artists to earn meaningful income for the platform.
But my growing distance from Spotify isn’t only about economics.
It’s also about predictability.
Sometimes it’s great having something chosen for you. If you’re out for a run, at the gym, cooking dinner or tidying your room, you don’t necessarily want to spend 20 minutes digging through Bandcamp pages or music blogs. Sometimes you just want music to be there, and recommendation algorithms are pretty good at that.
The problem is when convenience becomes your main way of listening.
I’m someone who tends to hyperfixate on tracks and artists for weeks, sometimes months. There’s comfort in that, repetition is part of listening behaviour. But once the fixation ends, I often realise I’ve been moving within the same small circle of sounds, so what’s the price of that comfort?
Comfort can become a trap: the more efficiently a platform learns your preferences, the less likely it is to challenge them, so discovery becomes optimisation and your taste is not expanded.
What is important to notice here, is also that Spotify and Nina emerged from fundamentally different impulses. Spotify’s founders approached music as a problem to solve through technology: unlimited access, frictionless consumption and scalable distribution. Nina came from people embedded within experimental and DIY music communities: they weren’t trying to optimise listening, they were trying to create different conditions for it, and that difference matters.
Over time, Spotify increasingly focused on what it calls “lean-back listening”: music that accompanies activities, playlists organised around moods – productivity and ambience became central to the platform’s identity. The consequence extend beyond listening habits. Artists adapt to the system that rewards them. If playlists favour unobtrusive music that blends seamlessly into cafes, offices, and study sessions, then there is a financial incentive to make music that does exactly that.
This raises a crucial question: is passive consumption becoming the ideal listener experience?
Streaming now dominates the music industry. In the UK, it accounts for the overwhelming majority of recorded music revenue, with Spotify remaining the market leader. Convenience has won. Most listeners understandably choose the platform that gives them immediate access to everything.
But convenience isn’t the same thing as discovery.
If anything, the decline of platforms like Nina makes discovery feel more important. We spend a lot of time worrying about AI replacing human labour, but we don’t spend enough time talking about what recommendation systems do to human taste.
Algorithms are useful. They have introduced me to artists I might never have encountered otherwise, rejecting them entirely would be pointless.
The issue is what happens when recommendation becomes the primary way we encounter culture.
When every suggestion is based on previous behaviour, the unfamiliar disappears and taste becomes increasingly self-reinforcing. You stop encountering things that seem strange or outside your interests, which are the ones that often reshape your perspective.
At some point is worth asking uncomfortable questions. Do I genuinely love this or have I simply been exposed to it often enough that it now feels pleasing?
Perhaps this is one reason why people increasingly seem exhausted by algorithmic feeds. Across digital culture there are signs of fatigue with systems that continuously predict what we want before we’ve had the chance to decide ourselves.
Nina’s closure doesn’t make me optimistic. If anything, it demonstrates how difficult is for alternatives to survive. Still, I don’t think the answer is nostalgia.
The answer is actively protecting spaces where discovery can happen. Go to small gigs, follow independent labels, read music magazines and blogs, seek out scenes that exist outside the centre of attention. Let recommendations come from friends, conversations and chance encounters instead of using exclusively platforms.
Most importantly, leave room for uncertainty. Good taste isn’t something an algorithm can perfectly optimise, it’s something that develops through curiosity, experimentation, and surprises.
That’s what made Nina valuable, and that’s what I hope it doesn’t disappear with it.
- DJ Suzy announces debut album Kira Krash, shares new single “Sw33t” - August 20, 2026
- NOIA logs back in with “As Per My Last Email” - August 18, 2026
- Rockie Rode releases video for “I’m So Wasted” - August 13, 2026
