This infuriates me. I launch the app to play music and am forced to interact with a pop-up promoting some random new release that is nowhere near the same universe as my music taste.
They recently did the annual “Wrapped” release. It took over the iOS Home Screen widget I use for playing/pausing recent playlists. The widget was unusable until you (1) watched the wrapped video in full on that device (didn’t matter that I had watched it on other devices before) and (2) you had to listen to the playlist they generated of your most played songs.
It keeps losing my downloaded podcasts. Takes forever to switch from online to offline mode. How hard could possibly be, just send a few packets if you get no answer you're offline.
It's really not that complicated yet they somehow managed to mess it up.
That's true, I looked at it from pure consumerish selfish point of view. I appreciate the idealistic view and caring about artists, but in the end I believe:
- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves
- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change
I mostly only use spotify for discovery, using either discovery weekly or starting a radio stream from a particular song. Is there another service that treats artists better that I can use instead for this purpose?
If you don't mind self-hosting, I've recently started using ListenBrainz in combination with Navidrome. You can upload your Spotify listen history to seed it, and scrobble your ongoing listening to keep it up to date with what you listen to. You can use a plugin[1] to automatically generate daily, weekly, and discovery playlists based on your listen history, and what you have available in your library. You can generate even more playlists using ListenBrainz data via their tool, Troi[2].
Most streaming services commission their own content, yes, but they do so to market original content - Netflix Originals don't pretend to be Wes Anderson movies, and get slid into your playlist when you aren't looking
So if they played a short annoncement beforehand so people know its an Original, it would be fine? Originals get advertised heavily, next-movie, so I assume putting it in the same playlist is fine.
Amazon Originals, Netflix Originals. Disney Originals. Paramount Originals. I'm just wondering what is different between series and music, that for music its very bad morally to create your own and to put your own in the front row. While for other streaming its accepted.
One big difference is that these shows and movies are not "ghost," they credit their crew and talent like any other production, and those folks negotiate their pay rates similar to other productions. If you are a grip on a Netflix original movie, you will get listed in the credits like any other movie.
The other big difference is that TV and movie productions have always been "assemble when needed." Production companies are typically very thin business shells who hire in 99% of what they need per show. As opposed to a band or artist like Taylor Swift or The Rolling Stones, where the core persistent business unit is the talent itself.
> One big difference is that these shows and movies are not "ghost," they credit their crew and talent like any other production, and those folks negotiate their pay rates similar to other productions. If you are a grip on a Netflix original movie, you will get listed in the credits like any other movie.
The only reason is because unions in the movie business negotiated this. That's it.
There are no unions of note in the music business, and artists get shafted left and right.
The difference is how they're consumed you don't sit down on Netflix and say "put some scifi on shuffle for 8h", you sit down and choose a show.
If you're the kind of person who would manually queue up 100% of your songs for the day then Spotify Generic songs aren't an issue. If you just hit a "2020s R&B" playlist and go that's where it feels more sketchy.
I'd agree with this. I'll seek out work by specific bands, their members and side projects. I'll do the same for actors in film and TV but Spotify is commissioning work from session musicians I have no relationship to and offering a fictitious name. I'm sure these musicians are capable, but I'd rather discover new, novel music — not something commissioned by a company for a specific mood or playlist. That feels antithetical to what makes music or art interesting.
Wow. The ghost artists - that’s horrifying. Clearly Spotify would prefer to completely squeeze out everybody below the clout level of the top 10 artists, and replace the rest with stock music. I would bet anything they’ll cut out the middle-artist any day now and fill their playlists with AI sloptunes.
Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.
Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.
"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?
The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.
> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote
1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own
2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).
And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.
Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).
As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".
And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".
Performative outrage is performative.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.
> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform
Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.
So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).
Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.
> You can generate a heavy metal song that is actually heavy metal, same with other genres that have been destroyed, or the kind of music that just isn't being made anymore.
Or just listen to any of the easily available fantastic metal albums released in the past year? I could see the argument for incredibly niche genres (though in the age of Bandcamp I'd love to see a genre that doesn't have at least a few artists producing music for it) but there's plenty of heavy metal being made these days in both the general and the traditional (i.e. the heavy metal genre versus general metal genre) sense.
You're right, I should have used country as an example. But the kind of metal I'm talking about, good 70's and maybe even a little 80's hair metal is in short supply these days.
I do listen to a ton of new music, there is enough time in the day for both. And if I want a cool new 70's style heavy metal song that is about a niche subject like the Chronicles of Prydain, AI does an amazing job.
Actually, the more I think about your reply, no. Modern "heavy metal" is some guy growling and yelling in the mic, unless you know of a metal singer with a great Rob Halford or Ronnie James Dio voice I can listen to. An exception is Zakk Wylde, that dude is badass, I had the good fortune to see him perform at Red Rocks.
This is starting to sound suspiciously similar to the old lines about all rap being about gangbangers and money/drugs etc. Theres plenty of bands that do traditional clean vocals; I'm listening to Wytch Hazels latest album as I type this. They're very old school/early NWOBHM style metal/hard rock, you may like them.
Other bands with similar[0] vocals off the top of my head: Summerlands, Night Demon, Sonja, Crypt Sermon, Visigoth, Eternal Champion
Halford, Dio,Dickinson, and the other greats are going to be hard to replicate exactly but there's plenty of singers out there that are just as skilled andactively playing music.
Love Wytch Hazel, good call! I'll give your other recommendations a try. I'm not trying to say there is NO good metal being made. Of course there's Sabaton, The Sword, Lucifer, and Ghost. But those are the exceptions, IMHO.
It's very hard for me to see how someone could believe this unless they never even tried to actually find new music. I just bought a great new metal album (human made) yesterday.
You think I was lying? About a good metal album existing? It's "The Splintered Oar", and I learned about it through Bandcamp's human curation. I hope this helps you get off Mr GPT's Wild Ride and engage with the art.
it probably is you just need to spend more time finding it. why would you choose this over finding music that has been made by someone interesting that lets you form a community or see a band live?
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
... 1000 plays in a year?
We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.
If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?
I stopped my Spotify subscription and gave Apple Music and Youtube Music a try for a few months. I'm now again a Spotify user, despite that Youtube Music is still included in my Youtube Premium.
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
A few of my favorite artists have dropped from Spotify (for great reasons that I agree with) and I want to switch to something else. I gave Apple Music a try but the interface is just unbelievably bad. Also I am a Linux user and the lack of a native app is brutal (and Cider, a 3rd party app, is a no-go for me). Tidal seems decent though and I'll probably give it another shot eventually.
The other thing is I actually do get a lot out of the suggestions and daylist of Spotify. I guess there are some 3rd party recommendation systems out there now (pulling in data from last.fm scrobbles) but I'm not aware of something that would be as easy and have such an integrated result.
Apple Music has a native Windows app (and surprisingly not Electron), but it's quite unstable and laggy, and makes me deal with "authorize this computer" or whatever every week. So, practically equivalent to having no native app.
I went down the rabbit hole with it and even briefly tried it out via wine before giving up. Pretty unfortunate that there isn't even an electron app. The web gui is just painfully slow and clunky (plus not being able to download/cache songs is the biggest bummer).
Tidal and Qobuz are good, if you need a streaming service, although Qobuz is much less oriented around "pick a vibe and press play". They might not have exactly the things you like about Spotify, but as far as sacrifice goes, if you feel Spotify should be abandoned for ideological reasons, it's trivial.
Tidal seems less obsessed with breaking everything all the time. They have a decent API and while they want you to use their playback SDKs, they're relatively less hostile to the various 3rd-party playback libraries (they don't actually encrypt their media, so once you have a valid bearer token you've got everything). I've not tried their Tidal Connect solution but I have heard it's a bit rubbish.
Have you heard of Tidal? I swapped to them from Spotify back when Spotify did a big round of layoffs. Tidal had the music I was looking for (generally higher quality recordings) for the same monthly cost of Spotify.
Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for, and I will continue to pay for, because:
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own.
2. There are no advertisements in the paid service.
3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
They have an impressively large amount of music available. In addition, they price songs at $0.16 USD/song —- or cheaper if you deposit more money onto the platform and.
This isn’t piracy (money is flowing to artists) and you get to own at a fraction of the cost of iTune, Qobuz, or other platforms that charge around $0.99/song
You would be better off pirating all of your music and buying just one piece of merch from an artist. These rogue foreign licensing agencies provide no real value, and in fact are functionally illegal and unrecognized outside of Ukraine. It's also highly unlikely much money flows back to the artists.
Ah, gotcha thanks for the heads up! I read that this site was legal and assumed that they managed to stay aboveboard by offering artists slightly more than they could get from Spotify or other streamers.
But seeing that they're operating under dubious licensing, it seems much more likely that this isn't the best way to go.
I was going to say that merch fulfilment isn't free either but I guess that's your point. A few dollars from a $50 t-shirt is significant compared to the infinitesimal fractions of a penny from streams.
At least in my case, I'm pretty sure I can afford to own all the music I listen to. I only listen to 5,000 minutes per year of mostly the same few hundred songs. I've spent 8 years x 12 months x 13 = $1248 on Spotify in my life so far, so even at $.99 per song (which is above average if I buy albums), I'm losing money
I do enjoy the Spotify Wrapped stuff, but after moving partially to selfhosting Navidrome for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases, I've been scrobbling everything (including Spotify) to Last.fm, which has a similar end-of-year round-up. It's pretty good, got mine a couple of days ago.
> for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases
I did the math once for my Spotify liked songs list [1] and it came to $52k for the last 15 years, or $288/month, if I were to self host, without piracy.
Music pricing is pretty ridiculous compared to streaming. Self hosting will pretty much always require piracy until artists decide they want more fans to buy their music than stream and price accordingly.
Yeah, mine is also a little bit ridiculous. I think Spotify encourages a certain overconsumption of music; for me, the things on my liked list are not necessarily things that I value equally.
I buy things that I either already know or have discovered on Spotify and that I enjoy enough that I want to own, so I amass a collection of favourites over time. I would never buy everything I've ever liked on Spotify, but that is also because my personal goal is not to become entirely independent of Spotify. The goal is to be a bit more intentional, to have a bit more autonomy, and to avoid good things vanishing into the inky blackness of distribution rights being withdrawn.
I own the KEF LSX II speakers and I can hear a slight difference in sound clarity between Spotify and Tidal in acoustic songs like i.e. "landslide" by "Fleetwood Mac".
Note that Tidal is supported via "KEF Connect" or while Spotify is available through Chrome Streaming, not directly IIRC.
Is it worth the big price tag? Not sure tbh. I don't play music very loud and I don't listen all that much outside working hours where my attention is elsewhere.
> 24-bit helps in production pipelines for mixing, but for end user playback it's pointless.
If you have two versions of something, where one is better than the other and the resource cost is more or less the same it makes more sense to provide the better than the worse.
Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works. The end-user won't know the difference and the new apprentice has a copy that they can work with.
That's not a loss, that's a benefit even if pointless to the end user.
> Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works.
16-bit is enough for mixing. 24-bit (or 32-bit floats, even better) are useful _within_ the mixing pipeline, so you don't need to care if one of the steps results in clipping as long as the final result is within the bounds.
No ads in the traditional sense, sure, but they do push artists and albums for example with their stupid "pre-save" functionality, even if I don't have anything to do with them. I'd consider that an ad.
It's worth the effort to host your own media. There are privacy benefits, you own the audio files (presumably) and are no longer hostage to a platform that cares little (if at all) about artists.
Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000. In fact Instagram ads have led me to discover some fantastic small artists, so I'll happily give that out to whoever cares.
I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
Or if you follow any contemporary artists who will drop a new single on any given day (which is usually not available for purchase), I much prefer being able to just go into my streaming app and press a button to start listening as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
Apple Music and YouTube Music also let you upload your own files to a cloud locker and stream them from any device, so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself. Best option IMO
> if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option
Sure it is. Music discovery via algorithmic services is not the only way. There's radio, talking to people who have similar interests, reading interviews with musicians who talk about other music they like, browsing selections at the library, reading books about music or musicians, even just reading the liner notes for an album, noticing some players you like and finding other things they've worked on, and on and on and on. It doesn't have to be high effort, it's not instant, but it works great.
As with almost all arguments against exercising privacy, this is merely a failure of imagination on your part. Spotify doesn't give a shit about your taste.
Next time you listen to music, think about all the possible data that could be observed simply from you pressing play. What time of day is it? What day of the week? Which device are you using? Where is that device? Is this an unusual genre for you at 8pm? And so on. "You listen to indie rock" is harmless data. "We know the all your emotional states from the past 10 years and also those of your whole family" is at least a little scarier, right?
Combining large amounts of data about how you use a single app can tell a lot about your life. You may say this is overblown, but if you do want to hold a true belief instead of a convenient one, start by acknowledging the enormous amounts of data Spotify actually has about who you are and how you live.
Using apps operated by Meta is an entirely different thing — they're effectively spyware.
I tend to listen to albums in full, as the artist sequenced them. I get recommendations from friends and niche communities, then follow specific artists. When I start listening for the day I'll pick a known artist or set of albums, queue them up and go on with my day.
> corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000
They don't care much about your music taste, that's not the valuable data they're collecting and reselling. They're tracking your location, habits, address, email, passwords, billing info, extensions/other apps, locations, etc etc and storing it insecurely to be easily acquired by people with arguably even less scruples than the corporation they're taking it from because the cost to store this shit securely is higher than the fines/consequences from a data breach, so why bother? All of that (meta)data is for more valuable to them and the numerous "bad actors" that data-harvest them on the regular.
> as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
This can be automated, which can also be a form of curated music discovery.
> so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself.
With what? All that music you yourself assert you aren't acquiring "manually"? Sounds like self-hosting with a couple of extra steps to me.
> I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
I can't tell if this is ignorance or arrogance, but it's laughably out of touch either way, especially in this day and age. You can just say you're too lazy to fuck with it, don't know how to do it, or don't socialize with people that share your music tastes. It's fine.
There's numerous examples in this comment section of how to do music discovery without subsidizing a company that takes advantage of both the artists that users listen to, and the users themselves, and self-hosting is in no way a barrier to that.
> Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000.
It doesn't stop there. The business model of cloud and streaming services is to charge the customer, and then sell the customer's interactions with the service to third parties (data brokers), who cross-correlate the information obtained with other sources to build very detailed individual profiles.
You would have to go lengths (throwaway identity, email, payment with gift cards, VPN, etc.) with each streaming service to effectively prevent this sort of tracking. And after that, you will still own nothing. Worse, the streaming company may even ban you for using a VPN, or refuse to play the content on free devices because DRM can't be enforced. It's complete madness.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.
If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.
Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.
It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).
Well obviously you could just pirate it instead right? Like piracy or not, spending more money or listening to less music are not the only options. Hell you could not pirate it and just listen on youtube - that's another option.
The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.
Sure - but as you can see here the focus on "ditching spotify" is often ethical. You can absolutely use services that have an artist pay-rate of $0 per stream, but I don't think people typically advocate for that - and indeed this author does not seem to either (otherwise they would have no collection size issues).
They will likely get the most money from the T-shirt because the percentage that the artist gets is much higher than any percentage they get from the distributors they distribute through (in case of both Spotify and digital albums they are likely to be the same distributor: Warner Music, Sony, Universal or some such)
I expect many people think: "fuck spotify" and "i dont think piracy is bad" at the same time. I don't think leaving spotify on an ethical basis implies any specific opinion on piracy.
I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible as is discovery and they suffer the same problem the others do with their supplied catalog being flooded in fake songs attached to real artists as “ft.).
Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.
I did not find this to be the case. Someone gave me a few months trial on them recently and I found the interface to be the only one out of the streaming services to give a shit about customers that prefer listening to albums. None of the other major streaming services I've tried do. (not Apple, Spotify, nor Tidal). My only real knock on them has been their catalog seems to be the smallest of the majors.
Spotify was always trying to push some unrelated garbage when I had them like podcasts which I would never want to listen to and especially not the types they kept pushing (wasn't even popular ones like Rogan, it was stuff like male erection help and jesus podcasts lol). They also tried to weasel in audiobooks, which again isn't something I'd ever want in a music app. I think they even tried to do tv shows for a brief period of time. All these things pushed me away from it.
Besides all the other reasons Spotify is a terrible shit company it just sucks for discovering albums. No way to turn off playlist and single recommendations. It prioritizes recommending new stuff that's in genres I don't listen to. The only nice thing it does do is support last.fm (which Qobuz and plexamp also does) so I can scrobble there and get actually accurate recommendations through that.
UX is okay but the search functionality, which is definitely part of the UX, sucks fat balls on Qobuz.
But Qobuz is still king. I gladly pay their monthly subscription even though their programmers can't even be bothered to code a proper search functionality (that is: unless you enter precisely, with every single character being correct, the name of what you're looking for, Qobuz won't find it... And then weird, just plain weird non-matching matches do show up).
But I don't despair: I take it that at some point they'll find the time to figure out how to implement a better song/artist/track search functionality.
Playback is actually nice I will give them that, it’s just everything else I’m not a fan of. Although to be fair they’re pretty much the only ones that let you search by label which is nice. Just a shame the rest of the ux isn’t very good. The infinite scrolling, items being duplicated, no indication which version an album is…
That probably depends on how you listen to music. I still have a qobuz family subscription but barely use it. Mostly I listen to new albums on Bandcamp, and if I like them enough, I buy them.
I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.
One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.
For those who feel that self-hosting limits music discovery, a more traditional option is "radio" (traditional in the sense that you listen to a curated playlist made by someone else).
Radio Paradise [1] and Radio Swiss Pop/Jazz/Classic [2] are two great ad-free ways to discover new music. There are probably tons of others out there.
You can use ListenBrainz to discover new music based on your listening activity from your self-hosted library. I've started doing this recently with Navidrome and I'm happy with the results. This is the plugin I've been using: https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla....
There is also Troi[1], a tool provided by ListenBrainz to generate playlists and radios from your local music collection.
Regardless of pricing you can't substitute one with the other... Spotify is a streaming service with a massive library. Self hosting means you must BYO media... and, news flash, populating a library with relevant content that rivals Spotify or would satisfy your average user will almost certainly require illegally acquiring said content.
Youtube has much more music than Spotify, is better sorted by Albums (without holes, no skips) and you can easily rip it. It has all the better obscure artists, Spotify delisted.
There's also a recommendation engine via YouTube Music.
And once you start listening there, your video suggestions feed becomes a music feed thus degrade the video experience. Vids and music must be separate
This is my bottleneck too. I'm all for paying artists, and the hustle of setting up self host doesn't bother me (maybe not for my wife though, who is way less tech-y than me and is in my spotify family plan.) But the benefit of tens of millions of music, a search away, is simply too much for me to give up. I do my annually retrospective in music, and Billie Eilish was my back-to-back favorite artist of the year. Without streaming service, I probably wouldn't have tried her music at the first place.
My media library is simply a directory on my Linux NAS, exported over NFS. No VPS, no Plex, no Jellyfin no Jellyfish, no Jelly donut, just NFS. If I want to listen to a song or play a movie, I just navigate to that directory and play it. Simplest system I could come up with.
That’s fine, but with something like Jellyfin you get multi-platform apps (including tvOS and android tv etc), tracking of progress within a movie or tv series, play next etc.
I've used Spotify a little from time to time over the years, but I never got rid of my music files. I have MP3 files around that I encoded in the 90's.
There's a reason Spotify might force shuffle play on the free tier. It isn't solely to annoy you into upgrading. Royalties are 2x - 5x higher for interactive vs non-interactive streaming plays.
I've tried self-hosting with navidrome [0] / plex / jellyfin but the thing I miss most is music discovery via radios / discover weekly. I've tried replicating it a few times with embedding vectors + vector search but at best it finds songs in the (sub)-genre with the tempo / mood being pretty different.
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
I just did the same, but using a Pi + nvme drive at home. I did an initial setup with Mopidy/Iris, but just tested Plex, and it was such a better experience I am going to start paying for that instead.
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
I probably should mention this: If you're a Plex user, Hetzner blocks them so don't try to host it there unless you want to setup wireguard and a reverse proxy somewhere else. They received too many complaints from media companies mad about resellers of access to plex shares hosted on Hetzner so they block the whole ASN.
Usually either the Jellyfin/Navidrome app/web UI, or a native player app that talks to your NAS over the VPN.
For iOS I ended up building a small app for my own setup that streams files straight from the NAS (SFTP/FTP) over WireGuard/Tailscale so no media server in between. TestFlight if anyone wants to try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM
I use Manet as a music player an tailscale to have access to my home server. Before I tailscale set up, I’d just download what I wanted to my phone before leaving home.
I self-host on Jellyfin with Tailscale from my home server and it's been a great experience. It's fun and intentional.
I left Spotify during one of the many scandals they've had but I think this was in 2019ish based on where I was living and I just can't remember what it was. Possibly not paying the artists enough? This was pre-Rogan. Can't say their actions over the last few years have made me regret the decision.
I ran Navidrome and then Jellyfin alongside TIDAL and then Apple Music for a while, but the UX is just so much better with my own stuff and finding things to add is fun. I wish I'd spent all the money I spent on music streaming services over the past 15 years on buying music instead. Vinyl is more expensive now (I buy it anyway), but used CDs are dirt cheap and ripping them is fun.
Does anyone have a good solution for Jellyfin with tiered storage? I’d like to store my media as encrypted blobs in object storage and then materialize it on disk when I’m about to watch it (manually queued or e.g. next episode).
With regards to keeping the service behind a VPN, I have a few questions:
1. How do you deal with various devices (Roku, Smart TVs, ...), as most don't seem to have VPN apps for them?
2. How do you deal with airplay? My ipad can VPN to my home network and access jellyfin when I am away, but Airplay doesn't work, as the stream isn't available to the device I am streaming to.
My jellyfin (and navidrome) on my home server has me very happy with the basic set up. Both are internal only, as the only service I expose is wireguard. But I haven't solved the two issues above, which also keeps me from being able to share my jellyfin with my family.
Android TV can run Tailscale or Wireguard natively. AppleTV has a native Tailscale app, and I think you can also use Passeportout for Wireguard on AppleTV but I haven't used it. Alternatively if you're on the go a lot and want to use a streaming stick in your hotel you can use a travel router that supports VPNs like GL.inet.
Airplay and Chromecast are a different story. Maybe someone else here knows different, but while it's not literally impossible it doesn't really work because of mDNS. A layer2 VPN might, but not so much on Tailscale/Wireguard.
The article is surprisingly missing the most important part: a cost comparison. I understand and share the frustration with rising prices and ads creeping into paid plans, but for people who value optionality and broad access, streaming is still meaningfully cheaper than owning content.
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)
- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent
- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns
I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.
However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.
Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.
I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!
It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)
Some people do not mind buying art or paying artists for their work.
If we assume an artist gets 1¢ per stream of a song, and that album is 10 songs long, you need to listen to it 100x for the artist to get the same as just buying a $10 CD from Bandcamp.
I understand this example is missing the cuts given to other parties (label, etc) but it is still more to the artist than streaming unless you obsessively stream the same albums repeatedly.
Spotify is cheaper because your favorite local indie band makes far less from it.
Additionally, thrift stores have loads of CDs you can rip for extremely cheap.
For the most part, you aren't meaningfully paying for content when you use streaming services. This has the effect of making it not cost effective to produce good content you enjoy, while still costing you money to pay for the services, most of that money being funneled towards slop and execs. The ecosystem as a whole would benefit if you set aside the money you would ordinarily pay for streaming, and instead spent it on choice works you appreciate, while downloading whatever you like.
For movies specifically, you should consider paying substantially more than you would on streaming if you watch any substantial amount of movies. It is very hard to fund good movies with only streaming revenue.
TIL they somewhat resurrected Google Music and raised the limit (I think it was 20k on that). I used Google Music for years because it seemed like only Spotify and them figured out reliable caching on mobile, other services when I'd lose signal they'd give up trying to stream... even noticing recently apple music is not super reliable with that.
You know you can get Spotify for way cheaper by buying card codes and activating your service from that? Just buy a new card before your subscription expires and it adds the time onto your plan when you put in the card activation code.
Even from official retail channels like Best Buy and Amazon a 1 year Spotify activation code in the US is $99, so 8.25/mo. But you can get cards from gray markets like G2A and it's only like $26 a year.
6 EUR per month really ain't much but then 80 GB of SSD is really not much for a media library.
FWIW I both rip, losslessly and verifiably, my own CDs to FLAC (lossless but compressed), I run Plex (tried JellyFin and going to switch) and yet I still pay for Qobuz (I don't see why I'd pay for Spotify when lossless streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz do exist: additionally Qobuz allows to buy DRM-free song individually).
Now, and that is not a snark: I both rent dedicated servers since decades now and run Proxmox at home.
I thought "self-hosting" meant hosting on your very own hardware, at your place (e.g. from your home).
If hosting on a rented virtual server is "self-hosting", then I take it hosting on a rented dedicated server is self-hosting too? But then what's the difference between a company renting servers and deploying its apps there? That one is registered as, say, a LLC and that the other is an individual?
So "self-hosting" depends on whether you're an individual or a company?
Sounds like a weird definition of "self-hosting" to me.
I'm looking forward to trying jellyfin once DDR4 prices come down a little. I was slow rolling my server build as I added services, but the ECC ram sticks I was using jumped up to 150 USD from 50 USD. Hopefully the lesson I get out of this is just buy the damn chips already lol
I see that they suggest Jellyfin. I wonder if there is an end-to-end encrypted media server that can be self-hosted? E.g. if I was to host my photos on a VPS, I would use Ente instead of Immich because Ente is E2EE. Same for my media.
Never used Spotify, never will. I also, as a producer, pulled my music off that service a long time ago.
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
The problem seems to be, as a producer, if you don't publish your music there, people won't find it or listen to it, at least not in the viral way that other artists are able to find success.
Sure, there are plenty of people who get their kicks from record stores and soundcloud, but to properly make it, you need to be where the ears are.
I had a nice little app that I would run once and a while and it would take all my Weekly Playlist Spotify built, remove duplicates and make one playlist.
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I had that same setup and it was great, except Jellyfin. It is ok when it works; clunky but OK, however when something goes wrong with jellyfin, it is really goes bad. Sqlite corrupted, XML files corrupted, basically having to fresh reinstall. Now with Claude code, i just made my own. Works much better, faster, no such issues and more importantly; tailored to me, so not clunky to me even though it might be for others.
.. could have purchased a few 512GB microSD cards (assuming it is not iPhone, iPad). I have all my data offline. I can also use a uPnP on android to share it across all of my WiFi network be it TV or another persons phone.
It's not just Spotify, it's also Netflix & Co., so that adds up quickly!;) But I don't argue whether it's economical or not, my point is rather:
- Commercial subscription services are getting worse
- Self hosted solutions are becoming better
Jellyfin is a really nice piece of software & Navidrome looks really cool as well! And in some (not all!) aspects the open source alternatives are even better than their subscription equivalents.
The author is angry that his Spotify subscription becomes slightly more expensive, now running at EUR 12 per month instead of 11. So his solution is to instead rent a EUR 6.50 per month Hetzner server plus a storage space that starts at EUR 3.20 per month (next bigger tier is 10.90). Which means he is now paying at least EUR 9.70 per month for infrastructure, and he has invested a whole bunch of time, and he doesn't even have any actual music, because that would cost extra.
A couple of points missed for why Spotify is bad:
- Paying musicians cheap wages to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams: https://www.engadget.com/spotify-confirms-it-wont-offer-payo...
- Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-no...
Also, even for premium customers they will display ads (local concert tickets) and add sponsored albums/tracks to playlists and the home screen.
This infuriates me. I launch the app to play music and am forced to interact with a pop-up promoting some random new release that is nowhere near the same universe as my music taste.
They recently did the annual “Wrapped” release. It took over the iOS Home Screen widget I use for playing/pausing recent playlists. The widget was unusable until you (1) watched the wrapped video in full on that device (didn’t matter that I had watched it on other devices before) and (2) you had to listen to the playlist they generated of your most played songs.
Still can't believe how bad the Spotify app is.
It keeps losing my downloaded podcasts. Takes forever to switch from online to offline mode. How hard could possibly be, just send a few packets if you get no answer you're offline.
It's really not that complicated yet they somehow managed to mess it up.
Yeah, I hate finding out when my favourite artists that I listen to on Spotify come to my city to play a show.
There is this as well: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/18/massive-attack...
That's true, I looked at it from pure consumerish selfish point of view. I appreciate the idealistic view and caring about artists, but in the end I believe:
- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves
- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change
I mostly only use spotify for discovery, using either discovery weekly or starting a radio stream from a particular song. Is there another service that treats artists better that I can use instead for this purpose?
If you don't mind self-hosting, I've recently started using ListenBrainz in combination with Navidrome. You can upload your Spotify listen history to seed it, and scrobble your ongoing listening to keep it up to date with what you listen to. You can use a plugin[1] to automatically generate daily, weekly, and discovery playlists based on your listen history, and what you have available in your library. You can generate even more playlists using ListenBrainz data via their tool, Troi[2].
[1] https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla...
[2] https://troi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Deezer is pretty good.
last.fm or rateyourmusic
They also commission music from "ghost artists" that they can pay a fix rate, then place said artists in popular playlists to reduce royalty payouts.
I really don't understand the hate around this one.
1. Spotify made a playlist that's "Chill Jazz To Study To" that's really popular.
2. They realize that listeners don't actually care about the specific artists in the playlist since it's background noise.
3. There are companies who specialize in making "b-roll" music for background noise and have a huge library of it just sitting around.
4. Spotify realizes they can license them on the cheap.
5. Profit?
Seems like a win for everyone involved including the listener who gets fresh tracks in their study playlists basically forever.
Isn't that how every streaming service does it?
Most streaming services commission their own content, yes, but they do so to market original content - Netflix Originals don't pretend to be Wes Anderson movies, and get slid into your playlist when you aren't looking
So if they played a short annoncement beforehand so people know its an Original, it would be fine? Originals get advertised heavily, next-movie, so I assume putting it in the same playlist is fine.
It would at least be better, than sneakily trying to substitute it for artists they'd actually have to pay royalties to, yes
The only evidence I can find is with Spotify doing this.
Amazon Originals, Netflix Originals. Disney Originals. Paramount Originals. I'm just wondering what is different between series and music, that for music its very bad morally to create your own and to put your own in the front row. While for other streaming its accepted.
One big difference is that these shows and movies are not "ghost," they credit their crew and talent like any other production, and those folks negotiate their pay rates similar to other productions. If you are a grip on a Netflix original movie, you will get listed in the credits like any other movie.
The other big difference is that TV and movie productions have always been "assemble when needed." Production companies are typically very thin business shells who hire in 99% of what they need per show. As opposed to a band or artist like Taylor Swift or The Rolling Stones, where the core persistent business unit is the talent itself.
> One big difference is that these shows and movies are not "ghost," they credit their crew and talent like any other production, and those folks negotiate their pay rates similar to other productions. If you are a grip on a Netflix original movie, you will get listed in the credits like any other movie.
The only reason is because unions in the movie business negotiated this. That's it.
There are no unions of note in the music business, and artists get shafted left and right.
The difference is how they're consumed you don't sit down on Netflix and say "put some scifi on shuffle for 8h", you sit down and choose a show.
If you're the kind of person who would manually queue up 100% of your songs for the day then Spotify Generic songs aren't an issue. If you just hit a "2020s R&B" playlist and go that's where it feels more sketchy.
It's so funny reading this in 2025 when this is exactly how TV works. You would literally put on the SciFi channel. How far we've come.
Good point. Music is much more personal, perhaps?
I'd agree with this. I'll seek out work by specific bands, their members and side projects. I'll do the same for actors in film and TV but Spotify is commissioning work from session musicians I have no relationship to and offering a fictitious name. I'm sure these musicians are capable, but I'd rather discover new, novel music — not something commissioned by a company for a specific mood or playlist. That feels antithetical to what makes music or art interesting.
A) It's not how every streaming service does it, and B) this is whataboutism. Even if it was true, it doesn't make Spotify less shitty.
gotta mix in a little baby powder, ya know?
Don't worry, everything'll be alright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKlDlDvjTuA
( If you need a baby break try @ 1:20 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7DAGXVC1tQ )
Wow. The ghost artists - that’s horrifying. Clearly Spotify would prefer to completely squeeze out everybody below the clout level of the top 10 artists, and replace the rest with stock music. I would bet anything they’ll cut out the middle-artist any day now and fill their playlists with AI sloptunes.
Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.
>Now the sound music comes in silver pills
>Engineered to suit you, building cheaper thrills
>Music of rebellion makes you wanna rage
>But it's made by millionaires who are nearly twice your age
The Sound of Muzak by Porcupine Tree (2002)
Great band!
Also, the UX is deliberately user-hostile.
Its only use case seems to be algorithm playlist. It’s an atrocious music player any other way.
> Paying musicians cheap wages
Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.
"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?
The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.
> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote
1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own
2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).
And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.
Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).
As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".
And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".
Performative outrage is performative.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.
> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform
Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.
So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).
Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.
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> You can generate a heavy metal song that is actually heavy metal, same with other genres that have been destroyed, or the kind of music that just isn't being made anymore.
Or just listen to any of the easily available fantastic metal albums released in the past year? I could see the argument for incredibly niche genres (though in the age of Bandcamp I'd love to see a genre that doesn't have at least a few artists producing music for it) but there's plenty of heavy metal being made these days in both the general and the traditional (i.e. the heavy metal genre versus general metal genre) sense.
You're right, I should have used country as an example. But the kind of metal I'm talking about, good 70's and maybe even a little 80's hair metal is in short supply these days.
I do listen to a ton of new music, there is enough time in the day for both. And if I want a cool new 70's style heavy metal song that is about a niche subject like the Chronicles of Prydain, AI does an amazing job.
Actually, the more I think about your reply, no. Modern "heavy metal" is some guy growling and yelling in the mic, unless you know of a metal singer with a great Rob Halford or Ronnie James Dio voice I can listen to. An exception is Zakk Wylde, that dude is badass, I had the good fortune to see him perform at Red Rocks.
This is starting to sound suspiciously similar to the old lines about all rap being about gangbangers and money/drugs etc. Theres plenty of bands that do traditional clean vocals; I'm listening to Wytch Hazels latest album as I type this. They're very old school/early NWOBHM style metal/hard rock, you may like them.
Other bands with similar[0] vocals off the top of my head: Summerlands, Night Demon, Sonja, Crypt Sermon, Visigoth, Eternal Champion
Halford, Dio,Dickinson, and the other greats are going to be hard to replicate exactly but there's plenty of singers out there that are just as skilled andactively playing music.
[0] in the traditional clean vocals sense
Love Wytch Hazel, good call! I'll give your other recommendations a try. I'm not trying to say there is NO good metal being made. Of course there's Sabaton, The Sword, Lucifer, and Ghost. But those are the exceptions, IMHO.
I don't think The Sword has put out a good album since 2012.
It's very hard for me to see how someone could believe this unless they never even tried to actually find new music. I just bought a great new metal album (human made) yesterday.
And what is the name of this great new metal album? Show me.
You think I was lying? About a good metal album existing? It's "The Splintered Oar", and I learned about it through Bandcamp's human curation. I hope this helps you get off Mr GPT's Wild Ride and engage with the art.
https://bindrunerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/the-splintered...
I haven't been buying a ton of new music recently but a couple from the last year or so are: https://parishuk.bandcamp.com/album/queen-of-the-skies-b-w-s... https://writhenhilt.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-sword-cult
And these are good youtube channels for finding new things: https://www.youtube.com/@NWOTHMFullAlbums/videos https://www.youtube.com/@666MrDoom/videos
it probably is you just need to spend more time finding it. why would you choose this over finding music that has been made by someone interesting that lets you form a community or see a band live?
Recommend something. Show me.
> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams
... 1000 plays in a year?
We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.
If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?
Also:
- the chief executive invests money into AI weaponry https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-12/spotify-boycott-danie...
It's perfectly reasonable for a Swede to invest in miltech, given current political climate. In fact, it would be irresponsible not to.
I stopped my Spotify subscription and gave Apple Music and Youtube Music a try for a few months. I'm now again a Spotify user, despite that Youtube Music is still included in my Youtube Premium.
The apps are terrible in terms of usability, performance, and reliability. I couldn't believe Apple dropped the ball on so hard on this, but then I remembered iTunes and started believing again.
Most of my problem is basic necessities. For instance, it's impossible to remove a playing song from its current playlist on competing apps. That's such a common, basic scenario that Spotify can perform easily.
Youtube Music has horrible sound quality, no need to say it doesn't provide a lossless option. Apple Music is on par with Spotify in sound quality but that's pretty much where Apple's competitiveness ends. I had to struggle with Apple Music even with the simplest things.
My Apple Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2mvmybjr225
My Youtube Music summary: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m5ms6fxsrs27
A few of my favorite artists have dropped from Spotify (for great reasons that I agree with) and I want to switch to something else. I gave Apple Music a try but the interface is just unbelievably bad. Also I am a Linux user and the lack of a native app is brutal (and Cider, a 3rd party app, is a no-go for me). Tidal seems decent though and I'll probably give it another shot eventually.
The other thing is I actually do get a lot out of the suggestions and daylist of Spotify. I guess there are some 3rd party recommendation systems out there now (pulling in data from last.fm scrobbles) but I'm not aware of something that would be as easy and have such an integrated result.
Apple Music has a native Windows app (and surprisingly not Electron), but it's quite unstable and laggy, and makes me deal with "authorize this computer" or whatever every week. So, practically equivalent to having no native app.
I went down the rabbit hole with it and even briefly tried it out via wine before giving up. Pretty unfortunate that there isn't even an electron app. The web gui is just painfully slow and clunky (plus not being able to download/cache songs is the biggest bummer).
Tidal and Qobuz are good, if you need a streaming service, although Qobuz is much less oriented around "pick a vibe and press play". They might not have exactly the things you like about Spotify, but as far as sacrifice goes, if you feel Spotify should be abandoned for ideological reasons, it's trivial.
Tidal seems less obsessed with breaking everything all the time. They have a decent API and while they want you to use their playback SDKs, they're relatively less hostile to the various 3rd-party playback libraries (they don't actually encrypt their media, so once you have a valid bearer token you've got everything). I've not tried their Tidal Connect solution but I have heard it's a bit rubbish.
Have you heard of Tidal? I swapped to them from Spotify back when Spotify did a big round of layoffs. Tidal had the music I was looking for (generally higher quality recordings) for the same monthly cost of Spotify.
Apple Music on i(pad)OS can be used with third party apps. There's plenty of better players out there than the built-in one
Spotify is the only streaming service I still pay for, and I will continue to pay for, because:
1. The catalog is comprehensive. I listen to far more music than I could afford to own. 2. There are no advertisements in the paid service. 3. Their music discovery algorithm is excellent.
I also appreciate the yearly statistics, and how they continue to add value for me. Podcasts and eBooks being added to the platform was cool. I like to make "taste combo" playlists with friends. Really one of the only companies I genuinely feel deserves my money.
You should check out iomoio.com
They have an impressively large amount of music available. In addition, they price songs at $0.16 USD/song —- or cheaper if you deposit more money onto the platform and.
This isn’t piracy (money is flowing to artists) and you get to own at a fraction of the cost of iTune, Qobuz, or other platforms that charge around $0.99/song
You would be better off pirating all of your music and buying just one piece of merch from an artist. These rogue foreign licensing agencies provide no real value, and in fact are functionally illegal and unrecognized outside of Ukraine. It's also highly unlikely much money flows back to the artists.
https://law.stackexchange.com/q/499, https://archive.is/EZ2U3
Ah, gotcha thanks for the heads up! I read that this site was legal and assumed that they managed to stay aboveboard by offering artists slightly more than they could get from Spotify or other streamers.
But seeing that they're operating under dubious licensing, it seems much more likely that this isn't the best way to go.
I was going to say that merch fulfilment isn't free either but I guess that's your point. A few dollars from a $50 t-shirt is significant compared to the infinitesimal fractions of a penny from streams.
At least in my case, I'm pretty sure I can afford to own all the music I listen to. I only listen to 5,000 minutes per year of mostly the same few hundred songs. I've spent 8 years x 12 months x 13 = $1248 on Spotify in my life so far, so even at $.99 per song (which is above average if I buy albums), I'm losing money
I do enjoy the Spotify Wrapped stuff, but after moving partially to selfhosting Navidrome for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases, I've been scrobbling everything (including Spotify) to Last.fm, which has a similar end-of-year round-up. It's pretty good, got mine a couple of days ago.
> for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases
I did the math once for my Spotify liked songs list [1] and it came to $52k for the last 15 years, or $288/month, if I were to self host, without piracy.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45133622
Music pricing is pretty ridiculous compared to streaming. Self hosting will pretty much always require piracy until artists decide they want more fans to buy their music than stream and price accordingly.
Yeah, mine is also a little bit ridiculous. I think Spotify encourages a certain overconsumption of music; for me, the things on my liked list are not necessarily things that I value equally.
I buy things that I either already know or have discovered on Spotify and that I enjoy enough that I want to own, so I amass a collection of favourites over time. I would never buy everything I've ever liked on Spotify, but that is also because my personal goal is not to become entirely independent of Spotify. The goal is to be a bit more intentional, to have a bit more autonomy, and to avoid good things vanishing into the inky blackness of distribution rights being withdrawn.
Tidal has smaller library but higher quality (assuming your speakers allow you to tell the difference).
I doubt you can listen to the difference, unless you really have golden ears.
We have been doing double blind test in HydrogenAudio.org for a while, and it shows most people won't notice (at certain levels of encoding).
https://hydrogenaudio.org/index.php/board,40.0.html
I own the KEF LSX II speakers and I can hear a slight difference in sound clarity between Spotify and Tidal in acoustic songs like i.e. "landslide" by "Fleetwood Mac".
Note that Tidal is supported via "KEF Connect" or while Spotify is available through Chrome Streaming, not directly IIRC.
Is it worth the big price tag? Not sure tbh. I don't play music very loud and I don't listen all that much outside working hours where my attention is elsewhere.
Spotify lossless support was added last year [1].
[1] https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-10/lossless-listening-a...
Spotify only streams 16-bit lossless as far as I have seen (though they claim 24 bit in this post). Might require artists to reupload the audio?
Tidal has much more 24 bit options when I did an A/B.
The dynamic range difference is very material on quality sound setups.
As a side note Bluetooth (at least for Airpods) only does 16-bit!
There's no benefit to more than 16-bits. 16-bit allows for a dynamic range of 96dB. No music is mastered anywhere near this dynamic range.
24-bit helps in production pipelines for mixing, but for end user playback it's pointless.
Maybe pointless, but if provided why not?
By the same logic, if pointless, why?
As quoted from the OP.
> 24-bit helps in production pipelines for mixing, but for end user playback it's pointless.
If you have two versions of something, where one is better than the other and the resource cost is more or less the same it makes more sense to provide the better than the worse.
Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works. The end-user won't know the difference and the new apprentice has a copy that they can work with.
That's not a loss, that's a benefit even if pointless to the end user.
> Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works.
16-bit is enough for mixing. 24-bit (or 32-bit floats, even better) are useful _within_ the mixing pipeline, so you don't need to care if one of the steps results in clipping as long as the final result is within the bounds.
Because it's a complete waste of bandwidth.
Actually Spotify finally introduced lossless quality, after teasing it for something like five years!
I always found their algorithm to be crap. Can't remember a single good song I've found through it. I like yt' s much better
No ads in the traditional sense, sure, but they do push artists and albums for example with their stupid "pre-save" functionality, even if I don't have anything to do with them. I'd consider that an ad.
I recently made the same switch. Tailscale plus jellyfin is great. Threw in Immich too for good measure.
I wanted a nice native client for Linux instead of using the web app so I wrote one in Rust. Shameless plug: https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
Do you have a recommendation for a Jellyfin client that does a good job for music, for either iOS or Android?
Finamp! https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp
https://symfonium.app/ is great on Android. I've used it with both Jellyfin and Navidrome
I use Manet on iOS
It's worth the effort to host your own media. There are privacy benefits, you own the audio files (presumably) and are no longer hostage to a platform that cares little (if at all) about artists.
Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000. In fact Instagram ads have led me to discover some fantastic small artists, so I'll happily give that out to whoever cares.
I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
Or if you follow any contemporary artists who will drop a new single on any given day (which is usually not available for purchase), I much prefer being able to just go into my streaming app and press a button to start listening as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
Apple Music and YouTube Music also let you upload your own files to a cloud locker and stream them from any device, so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself. Best option IMO
> if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option
Sure it is. Music discovery via algorithmic services is not the only way. There's radio, talking to people who have similar interests, reading interviews with musicians who talk about other music they like, browsing selections at the library, reading books about music or musicians, even just reading the liner notes for an album, noticing some players you like and finding other things they've worked on, and on and on and on. It doesn't have to be high effort, it's not instant, but it works great.
My favorite artists are those that have come from personal recommendations.
> knowing about my music taste
As with almost all arguments against exercising privacy, this is merely a failure of imagination on your part. Spotify doesn't give a shit about your taste.
Next time you listen to music, think about all the possible data that could be observed simply from you pressing play. What time of day is it? What day of the week? Which device are you using? Where is that device? Is this an unusual genre for you at 8pm? And so on. "You listen to indie rock" is harmless data. "We know the all your emotional states from the past 10 years and also those of your whole family" is at least a little scarier, right?
Combining large amounts of data about how you use a single app can tell a lot about your life. You may say this is overblown, but if you do want to hold a true belief instead of a convenient one, start by acknowledging the enormous amounts of data Spotify actually has about who you are and how you live.
Using apps operated by Meta is an entirely different thing — they're effectively spyware.
I tend to listen to albums in full, as the artist sequenced them. I get recommendations from friends and niche communities, then follow specific artists. When I start listening for the day I'll pick a known artist or set of albums, queue them up and go on with my day.
> corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000
They don't care much about your music taste, that's not the valuable data they're collecting and reselling. They're tracking your location, habits, address, email, passwords, billing info, extensions/other apps, locations, etc etc and storing it insecurely to be easily acquired by people with arguably even less scruples than the corporation they're taking it from because the cost to store this shit securely is higher than the fines/consequences from a data breach, so why bother? All of that (meta)data is for more valuable to them and the numerous "bad actors" that data-harvest them on the regular.
> as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.
This can be automated, which can also be a form of curated music discovery.
> so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself.
With what? All that music you yourself assert you aren't acquiring "manually"? Sounds like self-hosting with a couple of extra steps to me.
> I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.
I can't tell if this is ignorance or arrogance, but it's laughably out of touch either way, especially in this day and age. You can just say you're too lazy to fuck with it, don't know how to do it, or don't socialize with people that share your music tastes. It's fine.
There's numerous examples in this comment section of how to do music discovery without subsidizing a company that takes advantage of both the artists that users listen to, and the users themselves, and self-hosting is in no way a barrier to that.
> Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000.
It doesn't stop there. The business model of cloud and streaming services is to charge the customer, and then sell the customer's interactions with the service to third parties (data brokers), who cross-correlate the information obtained with other sources to build very detailed individual profiles.
You would have to go lengths (throwaway identity, email, payment with gift cards, VPN, etc.) with each streaming service to effectively prevent this sort of tracking. And after that, you will still own nothing. Worse, the streaming company may even ban you for using a VPN, or refuse to play the content on free devices because DRM can't be enforced. It's complete madness.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Spotify but a frustration of mine with the "I ditched Spotify" discourse is that it hides the ball. As this article quietly acknowledges at the end: ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
To be clear I think either option is fine, but those seem like the important aspects of the change. If you are going to spend 10x more on music by buying from artists - you can probably also afford to keep a streaming service. Spotify does suck so go to [1] or Tidal[2]. The thing that matters to artists is getting money. If you're going to radically alter your media consumption habits that's great too but again seems like the real story.
If we are serious about convincing people to use alternatives to highly controlled streaming media I think we should ground our conversations about it in the practical choices that come with making ethical choices.
[1] Qobuz has the highest per-stream pay rate in the industry by like 40%. https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/discover
[2] Tidal is the widely-available service with the second-highest pay rate. https://tidal.com/
There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.
If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.
Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.
It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).
Well obviously you could just pirate it instead right? Like piracy or not, spending more money or listening to less music are not the only options. Hell you could not pirate it and just listen on youtube - that's another option.
The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.
Sure - but as you can see here the focus on "ditching spotify" is often ethical. You can absolutely use services that have an artist pay-rate of $0 per stream, but I don't think people typically advocate for that - and indeed this author does not seem to either (otherwise they would have no collection size issues).
The piracy route can even be ethical. Compare:
* Have a Spotify subscription, listen to all 10 albums of some artist.
* Pirate everything, but buy a T-shirt from that artist.
* Buy one album digitally (their latest), and pirate the rest.
What is the artist earning from your contributions in these three cases?
They will likely get the most money from the T-shirt because the percentage that the artist gets is much higher than any percentage they get from the distributors they distribute through (in case of both Spotify and digital albums they are likely to be the same distributor: Warner Music, Sony, Universal or some such)
Yeah or even better I buy the album on Bandcamp, then they get either 85% of the price, or 100% on "Bandcamp Friday".
I expect many people think: "fuck spotify" and "i dont think piracy is bad" at the same time. I don't think leaving spotify on an ethical basis implies any specific opinion on piracy.
I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible as is discovery and they suffer the same problem the others do with their supplied catalog being flooded in fake songs attached to real artists as “ft.).
Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.
> I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible
I did not find this to be the case. Someone gave me a few months trial on them recently and I found the interface to be the only one out of the streaming services to give a shit about customers that prefer listening to albums. None of the other major streaming services I've tried do. (not Apple, Spotify, nor Tidal). My only real knock on them has been their catalog seems to be the smallest of the majors.
Spotify was always trying to push some unrelated garbage when I had them like podcasts which I would never want to listen to and especially not the types they kept pushing (wasn't even popular ones like Rogan, it was stuff like male erection help and jesus podcasts lol). They also tried to weasel in audiobooks, which again isn't something I'd ever want in a music app. I think they even tried to do tv shows for a brief period of time. All these things pushed me away from it.
Besides all the other reasons Spotify is a terrible shit company it just sucks for discovering albums. No way to turn off playlist and single recommendations. It prioritizes recommending new stuff that's in genres I don't listen to. The only nice thing it does do is support last.fm (which Qobuz and plexamp also does) so I can scrobble there and get actually accurate recommendations through that.
UX is okay but the search functionality, which is definitely part of the UX, sucks fat balls on Qobuz.
But Qobuz is still king. I gladly pay their monthly subscription even though their programmers can't even be bothered to code a proper search functionality (that is: unless you enter precisely, with every single character being correct, the name of what you're looking for, Qobuz won't find it... And then weird, just plain weird non-matching matches do show up).
But I don't despair: I take it that at some point they'll find the time to figure out how to implement a better song/artist/track search functionality.
Playback is actually nice I will give them that, it’s just everything else I’m not a fan of. Although to be fair they’re pretty much the only ones that let you search by label which is nice. Just a shame the rest of the ux isn’t very good. The infinite scrolling, items being duplicated, no indication which version an album is…
That probably depends on how you listen to music. I still have a qobuz family subscription but barely use it. Mostly I listen to new albums on Bandcamp, and if I like them enough, I buy them.
I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.
One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.
> ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.
Certainly not. As to how, I don't believe I need to provide instructions.
The main issue with streaming is that you own nothing, and also get snooped on.
If you really want to "stream" NewPipe is as good as any streaming service.
For those who feel that self-hosting limits music discovery, a more traditional option is "radio" (traditional in the sense that you listen to a curated playlist made by someone else).
Radio Paradise [1] and Radio Swiss Pop/Jazz/Classic [2] are two great ad-free ways to discover new music. There are probably tons of others out there.
[1] https://www.radioparadise.com/ [2] https://www.radioswisspop.ch/en
My other favorites, especially for coding, are SomaFM (Groove Salad or DEFCON substations)[1] and SceneSAT[2].
[1] https://somafm.com
[2] https://scenesat.com/
You can use ListenBrainz to discover new music based on your listening activity from your self-hosted library. I've started doing this recently with Navidrome and I'm happy with the results. This is the plugin I've been using: https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla....
There is also Troi[1], a tool provided by ListenBrainz to generate playlists and radios from your local music collection.
[1] https://troi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Some radio stations also record their (themed) programs and make them available as podcasts for a more on-demand experience.
Regardless of pricing you can't substitute one with the other... Spotify is a streaming service with a massive library. Self hosting means you must BYO media... and, news flash, populating a library with relevant content that rivals Spotify or would satisfy your average user will almost certainly require illegally acquiring said content.
Youtube has much more music than Spotify, is better sorted by Albums (without holes, no skips) and you can easily rip it. It has all the better obscure artists, Spotify delisted.
There's also a recommendation engine via YouTube Music.
And once you start listening there, your video suggestions feed becomes a music feed thus degrade the video experience. Vids and music must be separate
I am a heavy YT user and recently started using YTMusic and noticed no change in my main feeds.
Well, their video suggestions suck anyway. I'm fine with music and table tennis alone
This is my bottleneck too. I'm all for paying artists, and the hustle of setting up self host doesn't bother me (maybe not for my wife though, who is way less tech-y than me and is in my spotify family plan.) But the benefit of tens of millions of music, a search away, is simply too much for me to give up. I do my annually retrospective in music, and Billie Eilish was my back-to-back favorite artist of the year. Without streaming service, I probably wouldn't have tried her music at the first place.
I like that I must bring my own media. It means everything on my server was intentionally put there by me. No extra shit.
You don't need to rival Spotify's library. How many songs on spotify do you have added to playlists? You just need to purchase those....
I'm probably listening to more music than the majority of people, but I have about 6,000 songs on mine.
Nice. I self host using Navidrome, FreeBSD and Wireguard. I have a decent Fibre connection to my house and a static IP so it's "free" to serve.
I primary do it because Spotify is basically sucking the life out of the music industry and I love heavy metal.
My media library is simply a directory on my Linux NAS, exported over NFS. No VPS, no Plex, no Jellyfin no Jellyfish, no Jelly donut, just NFS. If I want to listen to a song or play a movie, I just navigate to that directory and play it. Simplest system I could come up with.
That’s fine, but with something like Jellyfin you get multi-platform apps (including tvOS and android tv etc), tracking of progress within a movie or tv series, play next etc.
Alas my work will not allow me to mount a random NFS share but I take your point, simplicity is a virtue.
I never used Spotify, keep buying CDs, and occasionally MP3 from digital stores.
Still doing the modern version of mix tapes.
Haven't lost anything, and is with a smile I observe kids today being responsible for the revival of portable tape and CD players.
I've used Spotify a little from time to time over the years, but I never got rid of my music files. I have MP3 files around that I encoded in the 90's.
There's a reason Spotify might force shuffle play on the free tier. It isn't solely to annoy you into upgrading. Royalties are 2x - 5x higher for interactive vs non-interactive streaming plays.
I've tried self-hosting with navidrome [0] / plex / jellyfin but the thing I miss most is music discovery via radios / discover weekly. I've tried replicating it a few times with embedding vectors + vector search but at best it finds songs in the (sub)-genre with the tempo / mood being pretty different.
Maybe I just need better data, been meaning to try again when that spotify crawl by annas-archive gets released. I've just been using musicbrainz [1] and youtube. Model-wise I've tried off-the-shelf ones like [2] and [3] and training auto-encoders like VAEs / MAEs [4]
[0] - https://www.navidrome.org/
[1] - https://musicbrainz.org/
[2] - https://github.com/LAION-AI/CLAP
[3] - https://github.com/SonyCSLParis/music2latent
[4] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.06405
i've found the essentia models to be pretty good for vector similarity. much better results than CLAP https://essentia.upf.edu/models.html#discogs-effnet
have a service running here if you're into electronic music and want to poke around https://cosine.club/
With the recent data leak of Spotify‘s entire playlist database, you might be able to build something considerably better for music discovery now!
This is the main factor that makes me leery to try going the full self host route.
I just did the same, but using a Pi + nvme drive at home. I did an initial setup with Mopidy/Iris, but just tested Plex, and it was such a better experience I am going to start paying for that instead.
It's been a real joy getting away from Spotify's shoving music and podcasts in my face and instead buying music from band camp based on friend recommendations.
I probably should mention this: If you're a Plex user, Hetzner blocks them so don't try to host it there unless you want to setup wireguard and a reverse proxy somewhere else. They received too many complaints from media companies mad about resellers of access to plex shares hosted on Hetzner so they block the whole ASN.
What do people do to stream to their phones. The article just mentions Wireguard, but how is the media actually played?
Usually either the Jellyfin/Navidrome app/web UI, or a native player app that talks to your NAS over the VPN.
For iOS I ended up building a small app for my own setup that streams files straight from the NAS (SFTP/FTP) over WireGuard/Tailscale so no media server in between. TestFlight if anyone wants to try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM
https://Symfonium.app is a good player for Android
I use navidrome rather than Jellyfin for music. Stream to my Android phone with Dsub2000. Amperfy is my preferred iOS client.
I haven't tried it, but there is a program called Finamp that is specifically for music streaming from Jellyfin and supports both iOS and Android.
I keep music files on my phone, and play them with foobar2000. 128 GB is a lot of audio.
I use Manet as a music player an tailscale to have access to my home server. Before I tailscale set up, I’d just download what I wanted to my phone before leaving home.
I self-host on Jellyfin with Tailscale from my home server and it's been a great experience. It's fun and intentional.
I left Spotify during one of the many scandals they've had but I think this was in 2019ish based on where I was living and I just can't remember what it was. Possibly not paying the artists enough? This was pre-Rogan. Can't say their actions over the last few years have made me regret the decision.
I ran Navidrome and then Jellyfin alongside TIDAL and then Apple Music for a while, but the UX is just so much better with my own stuff and finding things to add is fun. I wish I'd spent all the money I spent on music streaming services over the past 15 years on buying music instead. Vinyl is more expensive now (I buy it anyway), but used CDs are dirt cheap and ripping them is fun.
Does anyone have a good solution for Jellyfin with tiered storage? I’d like to store my media as encrypted blobs in object storage and then materialize it on disk when I’m about to watch it (manually queued or e.g. next episode).
Just shooting in the dark, but could you use rclone somehow?
With regards to keeping the service behind a VPN, I have a few questions:
1. How do you deal with various devices (Roku, Smart TVs, ...), as most don't seem to have VPN apps for them?
2. How do you deal with airplay? My ipad can VPN to my home network and access jellyfin when I am away, but Airplay doesn't work, as the stream isn't available to the device I am streaming to.
My jellyfin (and navidrome) on my home server has me very happy with the basic set up. Both are internal only, as the only service I expose is wireguard. But I haven't solved the two issues above, which also keeps me from being able to share my jellyfin with my family.
Android TV can run Tailscale or Wireguard natively. AppleTV has a native Tailscale app, and I think you can also use Passeportout for Wireguard on AppleTV but I haven't used it. Alternatively if you're on the go a lot and want to use a streaming stick in your hotel you can use a travel router that supports VPNs like GL.inet.
Airplay and Chromecast are a different story. Maybe someone else here knows different, but while it's not literally impossible it doesn't really work because of mDNS. A layer2 VPN might, but not so much on Tailscale/Wireguard.
The article is surprisingly missing the most important part: a cost comparison. I understand and share the frustration with rising prices and ads creeping into paid plans, but for people who value optionality and broad access, streaming is still meaningfully cheaper than owning content.
In many cases, the price of a single movie is comparable to an entire month of a streaming service, which gives access to thousands of titles. Ownership can make sense if you repeatedly watch a small, fixed catalog over many years, but for most casual or exploratory viewing, the economics still favor streaming.
Fair enough! However you need to consider:
- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)
- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent
- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns
I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.
However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.
Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.
I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!
It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)
Some people do not mind buying art or paying artists for their work.
If we assume an artist gets 1¢ per stream of a song, and that album is 10 songs long, you need to listen to it 100x for the artist to get the same as just buying a $10 CD from Bandcamp.
I understand this example is missing the cuts given to other parties (label, etc) but it is still more to the artist than streaming unless you obsessively stream the same albums repeatedly.
Spotify is cheaper because your favorite local indie band makes far less from it.
Additionally, thrift stores have loads of CDs you can rip for extremely cheap.
Spotify pays me about $0.003 per stream. That's pretty typical for every artist on the site.
For the most part, you aren't meaningfully paying for content when you use streaming services. This has the effect of making it not cost effective to produce good content you enjoy, while still costing you money to pay for the services, most of that money being funneled towards slop and execs. The ecosystem as a whole would benefit if you set aside the money you would ordinarily pay for streaming, and instead spent it on choice works you appreciate, while downloading whatever you like.
For movies specifically, you should consider paying substantially more than you would on streaming if you watch any substantial amount of movies. It is very hard to fund good movies with only streaming revenue.
I buy my music from Bandcamp and similar and drop it into YouTube Music.
It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
It's not as independent but if you're already paying for YouTube Premium it seems reasonable if you don't want to host your own media server.
> It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
TIL they somewhat resurrected Google Music and raised the limit (I think it was 20k on that). I used Google Music for years because it seemed like only Spotify and them figured out reliable caching on mobile, other services when I'd lose signal they'd give up trying to stream... even noticing recently apple music is not super reliable with that.
YouTube Music has been good so far, I’m able to trust that things I download will still be there off network.
The UX isn’t perfect (still see a ‘download’ option for things already downloaded, for example) but it’s not terrible.
I still miss my iPod from time to time, though.
From the link:
You can play uploaded songs in the background, ad-free and offline—even if you are not currently a YouTube Music Premium subscriber.
Did not expect that.
You know you can get Spotify for way cheaper by buying card codes and activating your service from that? Just buy a new card before your subscription expires and it adds the time onto your plan when you put in the card activation code.
Even from official retail channels like Best Buy and Amazon a 1 year Spotify activation code in the US is $99, so 8.25/mo. But you can get cards from gray markets like G2A and it's only like $26 a year.
Dumb question, where do you actually buy digital copy of music these days? Or find a big library of music that you can download.
Qobuz and 7digital both have extensive libraries of high quality music.
Edit: and of course bandcamp exists but I wouldn't call their collection extensive.
Don't forget bandcamp.
Yes, but not every artist is on there. I do use it if the artist has one but that's rare.
Bandcamp, and when what I want isn’t there, qobuz usually has it. A couple of times I’ve had to buy the CD off eBay and rip it.
I buy CDs and rip them myself. That's technically buying a digital copy of the music, since CDs are digital.
i use bandcamp whenever possible
6 EUR per month really ain't much but then 80 GB of SSD is really not much for a media library.
FWIW I both rip, losslessly and verifiably, my own CDs to FLAC (lossless but compressed), I run Plex (tried JellyFin and going to switch) and yet I still pay for Qobuz (I don't see why I'd pay for Spotify when lossless streaming services like Tidal and Qobuz do exist: additionally Qobuz allows to buy DRM-free song individually).
Now, and that is not a snark: I both rent dedicated servers since decades now and run Proxmox at home.
I thought "self-hosting" meant hosting on your very own hardware, at your place (e.g. from your home).
If hosting on a rented virtual server is "self-hosting", then I take it hosting on a rented dedicated server is self-hosting too? But then what's the difference between a company renting servers and deploying its apps there? That one is registered as, say, a LLC and that the other is an individual?
So "self-hosting" depends on whether you're an individual or a company?
Sounds like a weird definition of "self-hosting" to me.
I'm looking forward to trying jellyfin once DDR4 prices come down a little. I was slow rolling my server build as I added services, but the ECC ram sticks I was using jumped up to 150 USD from 50 USD. Hopefully the lesson I get out of this is just buy the damn chips already lol
I see that they suggest Jellyfin. I wonder if there is an end-to-end encrypted media server that can be self-hosted? E.g. if I was to host my photos on a VPS, I would use Ente instead of Immich because Ente is E2EE. Same for my media.
They don’t have much in terms of popular music, but I like the concept behind Resonate.
It’s a co-op of artists.
Streamers eventually own the song outright if they listen to it enough.
https://resonate.coop/
Never used Spotify, never will. I also, as a producer, pulled my music off that service a long time ago.
I'm also not very happy with Apple Music anymore either. The lack of UX care regarding the service is noticeable. It suffers from weird bugs and tracks which suddenly won't play all the time. This is not the Apple which lovingly created the first few versions of iTunes.
So I've started to collect a solid collection of lossless music files myself, a combination of CD rips, Bandcamp and Qobuz downloads. And I'm using alternate player software to access them, depending on the platform I happen to use. I don't use any server. I manually sync the music files between canonical storage systems (my iPhone, my Linux desktop, and my Mac desktop). I've even gotten my old iPod Classic out of mothballs and started messing around with it. So much fun!
The problem seems to be, as a producer, if you don't publish your music there, people won't find it or listen to it, at least not in the viral way that other artists are able to find success.
Sure, there are plenty of people who get their kicks from record stores and soundcloud, but to properly make it, you need to be where the ears are.
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I had a nice little app that I would run once and a while and it would take all my Weekly Playlist Spotify built, remove duplicates and make one playlist.
Spotify built playlists are no longer accessible in the API.
I do not like them now.
I just want to be able to buy a mp3 for a dollar is it so hard.
I had that same setup and it was great, except Jellyfin. It is ok when it works; clunky but OK, however when something goes wrong with jellyfin, it is really goes bad. Sqlite corrupted, XML files corrupted, basically having to fresh reinstall. Now with Claude code, i just made my own. Works much better, faster, no such issues and more importantly; tailored to me, so not clunky to me even though it might be for others.
Okay, so, where do you get the music from?
Cloud hosting is not self hosting. Can you touch the box? Are you root?
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> 80 GB of SSD storage.
.. could have purchased a few 512GB microSD cards (assuming it is not iPhone, iPad). I have all my data offline. I can also use a uPnP on android to share it across all of my WiFi network be it TV or another persons phone.
"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" Maybe they were wrong? ^^^
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It's not just Spotify, it's also Netflix & Co., so that adds up quickly!;) But I don't argue whether it's economical or not, my point is rather:
- Commercial subscription services are getting worse
- Self hosted solutions are becoming better
Jellyfin is a really nice piece of software & Navidrome looks really cool as well! And in some (not all!) aspects the open source alternatives are even better than their subscription equivalents.
Before cancelling his Spotify subscription and saving €11.
€11 - €6.49 = €4.51 profit per month
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This really is a completely nonsensical article.
The author is angry that his Spotify subscription becomes slightly more expensive, now running at EUR 12 per month instead of 11. So his solution is to instead rent a EUR 6.50 per month Hetzner server plus a storage space that starts at EUR 3.20 per month (next bigger tier is 10.90). Which means he is now paying at least EUR 9.70 per month for infrastructure, and he has invested a whole bunch of time, and he doesn't even have any actual music, because that would cost extra.
Hey, that's not my point!:) My point is:
- Subscription services getting worse
- Open source / self hosted solutions becoming better
Self hosting is also a learning experience / hobby.
And I'm still subscribed to other streaming services! However I get more and more annoyed of getting worse overall products for higher prices.
The satisfaction of dumping Spotify is priceless to start with, but then you also end up with full control of your setup.