About Me

I’m Tobias, a music obsessive who’s been collecting since I was a teenager. What started with my first punk mix tapes, grabbed on the schoolyard, went through the torrent years - you know, waiting a whole day to download one album while nobody else at home could use the phone. Then I discovered that vinyl gives you the best sound you can get, but the truth is for small DIY punk bands, it’s too expensive. So you end up getting nice demo tapes at concerts, straight from the venue.

20+ years later, I’ve got this crazy mix of formats - tapes, CDs, vinyl, MP3s, FLACs - and somehow it all needs to work together.

The Collector’s Problem

Here’s the thing about being a serious music collector: the music is only half the battle. The real nightmare is organizing it all. When you’ve got thousands of tracks spanning decades of punk subgenres, rare pressings, bootlegs, and digital files all mixed together, most music software just… doesn’t get it.

Spotify’s algorithm thinks it knows what I want to hear. Apple Music lumps my carefully curated rare 7-inches with random compilation tracks. None of them understand that when I’m looking for “Crass,” I might want the studio albums, the live bootlegs, or that weird EP that only got pressed 500 times in 1982.

Why I Built PUNKIFY

punkify.cc started because I was frustrated about seeing one of my vinyls on the shelf and just wanting to hear one specific track, right now. But Spotify can’t deliver it, and searching through my vinyl rip folders on my PC would take hours to find it. Basically, it’s easier to just start the vinyl - but what if I’m not at home?

I wanted to stream my own collection the way I organize it in my head - by subgenre, by era, by how rare it is, by the story behind how I found it. I wanted something that respected the difference between a first pressing and a remaster, between a proper album and a demo tape that I got handed at some tiny venue in 2003.

So I built it. Not to compete with Spotify, but because I needed something that actually worked for how I think about music.

Breaking Free from Mainstream

Look, I don’t hate Spotify because it’s trendy to hate big tech. I hate it because:

• Their algorithms push the same stuff everyone else is listening to
• They pay artists almost nothing
• They can remove music from “your” library whenever they want
• They’re pushing AI-generated music, which is terrible for every real musician out there
• Before AI, it was ghostwriters creating music for 20 different “artists” - fake creativity for profit
• Independent bands don’t have a chance to get into Spotify’s curated playlists - the system is rigged
• The massive investment from Spotify into arms companies was the last straw for me

I’m not trying to build the next big streaming platform. I’m just sharing how I solved my own problem, in case you’ve got the same one.

The Technical Journey

This site documents how I built my personal streaming service from scratch. It’s part tutorial, part music nerd rambling, part “here’s what went wrong and how I fixed it.”

If you’re a fellow collector who’s tired of mainstream platforms, or if you’re just curious about building your own music streaming setup, stick around. I’ll show you exactly how I did it - the good parts and the messy parts.

PUNKIFY isn’t about changing the music industry. It’s about taking back control of your own listening experience.