edit: revoking my recc pls see the reply! i dont use it anymore but Deezer was very easy to move to back when i tried it, and had some quite solid staff-curated playlists. don’t know what it is like now tho, i am just using my local files & SomaFM via musicbee these days.

Quitting Spotify for me was like cigarettes lol

I need to be so for real right now. Nothing beats Spotify in terms of speed, catalogue, and features. But every other service blows them out of the water because Spotify is just that bad with AI and artist abuse. I still use Spotify for searching for songs because its search is still bar none so far, but I don’t listen to tracks or have premium anymore

The closest alternative is Tidal, it’s fast and has third party integration that leaves much to be desired but it’s there. Still janky but closest you can get to Spotify or Apple Music and it’s a good service on its own.

If you like music discovery and good taste and hate AI, Qobuz is pretty great. But it’s not a replacement, Qobuz is new, slow, and lacks features. I can’t block artists in Qobuz yet so I don’t do a lot of listening there. If that feature is in and they make it faster I’d use it full time

Honestly, the entire way we use the web has regressed a bit and I had to mourn it honestly cause through and through the internet sucks now. But smaller web has charm that I’ve missed, only constant in life is change or w/e

I liked Deezer a lot when I used it, but their library (at least as of 2018/2019) felt very limited. Been 6 or 7 years of minutes (…) but I want to say their agreements with East Asian labels was woefully lacking?

I used spotify for a year or so until they tripled down on sending joe rogen dump trucks of cash while he was pushing anti-vax shit.

These days I use a mix of Youtube Music and plexamp/mpd. The former because I “get it for free” with Youtube Premium and love it for discoverability or checking out a new band. The latter being how I store the songs I like enough to buy (or otherwise obtain). And ListenBrainz for getting discoverability out of that.

I do “self host” but they would want more than whats in our music collection. Plus hdds are fucking spendy now.

A 15 track album (Protomen’s Act 3) in FLAC is 393 MB. If you are neither a data hoarder nor an audiophile, you can shrink that considerably (A 320 kbps mp3 is generally about a third to a fifth the size of a FLAC). Storage is a mother fucker, no argument there. But you don’t actually need that much for a music library.

And I’ll just add: Plenty of artists are very open that buying a 1 dollar album on Bandcamp tends to give them a LOT more money than like a day straight of listening to them on one of the streaming services. Shit is bleak.

I switched my family from Spotify to Tidal. There was a migration script that made it nearly seamless.

No podcasts though.

SoundCloud supports importing playlists. I feel it has a lot of popular music nowadays, but I mostly listen to stuff some guy made on their laptop, so I’m not the best person to ask.

YouTube premium has the benefit of removing YouTube ads in addition to access to the music.

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I bought an actual MP3 player and download music. I know it sounds like a pain in the ass, but it makes you think much more intentionally about the music you listen to and you engage a lot more and get a better sense of your preferences. This is also makes it way easier to listen to whole albums the way the artists intended and give a much better experience overall than just listening to whatever random mix of songs the algorithm wants to throw at you.

It also means I can have real outputs and use better and more inexpensive headphones and can listen wherever and whenever I want without needing to worry about internet access or data usage and I can pick it up and listen to music without having to read whatever bullshit notifications or communications are on my phone at any given time.

I have found that making decisions that minimize how often I have to look at my phone has made my mental health a lot better. I read books with real books or on a separate e-book device, I listen to music with a music player, I play games on a handheld console, I watch video entertainment on a TV. I use my phone for communicating and reading the news, that’s about it, and I think its a lot better that way.

Are Tidal and Quobuz really the only choice?

From what I heard from them, those two are a good alternative to Spotify and also have better audio quality if you’re a audiophile and it matters to you. If I recall, other music streaming platform don’t have the best discovery feature ever and also depending on which music genre you like, they may not have as many the music you would listen.

That being said, I suggest giving either one of them a try.

Radio Garden or other Internet radios are an option too

I discovered I actually prefer Internet radios entirely to song dna streaming type stuff

Tidal/Qobuz if streaming is a necessity, and you don’t want to use your own library.

If you do want to use your own library, here are the things I’ve tried, all self-hosted:

I tried Funkwhale (fediverse music streaming), which worked fine, but eventually the install crapped out (my fault), and it didn’t feel worth it to reinstall for reasons. If you want to use your own music, this is probably what I’d recommend for people who aren’t super techie, or have users who aren’t, and want to stream.

I used Navidrome, which was good. I stopped using it because I wanted something with file tag ratings support. Also it’s a pain to upload music, and not really non-techie friendly.

What I use now is several pieces of software per device. On desktop I use Strawberry as a music player. It supports file tagged ratings, and smart playlists based on them. On mobile I use Symfonium for the same reason. I use Nextcloud to keep my phone, and laptop synced music-wise.

For discovery, I use ListenBrainz, which is similar to last.FM. it gives a weekly discovery playlist, and a weekly jam playlist, and even does the wrapped thing. Strawberry supports scrobbling to LB out of the box, but Symfonium doesn’t, so I use PanoScrobbler for it.

It took a bit of effort to set up, but now that it’s set up I don’t really think about it. I have my discovery playlists on an RSS feed, so I just get it with my news, and I just open my music app and play music. Haven’t had any real issues beyond scrobbling not working offline, but it saves them locally and uploads them later if it can’t reach LB.

For music I just have all of my stuff as 128kbps MP3s. 1,709 songs, 4 days 8:08:59 of listen time, takes up 7.5gb of storage. I can’t tell the difference between FLAC and 128kbps mp3 anyway, so it’s a waste of storage for me, anyway. All synced through Nextcloud. I think there’s an extension that’ll let you stream directly from Nextcloud, but I haven’t looked into it. I know that Symfonium can stream from WebDav, but I haven’t set it up yet.

I went to tidal. I would happily self host, but I value the discovery of new music through these services. Throwing on a “radio” based on a song to get a certain vibe and then maybe finding songs I didn’t know about.

YouTube music isn’t awful but for years it drains my battery fiercely. I think it’s related to me having my main Playlist downloaded, it always seems to be permanently stuck in a downloading status. Maybe some song on there is no longer available.

Speaking of these apps, why do barely any of them let you take your “liked” songs and filter by genre? Sometimes I just want the metal songs from my Playlist, or whatever. Spotify did, but they’re shitty nowadays.

The YouTube with ad block sounds like the best option if there is a way to easily import the playlists to Youtube’s playlist feature. I might consider a new account dedicated solely to music. SO can take advantage of the algorithms suggests for discovery (When it’s not trying to grift them).

I’m actually curious, do you know of a good way of migrating playlists to YouTube?

for music: mpv to play good old audio files saved on a hard drive, from ripped CDs.

Lidarr and usenet, it’s sweet