Sorry, I couldnt find a specific enough instance for this so here goes:
What have you guys been using instead of spotify? For me, I haven’t had it for years and have been using bandcamp, the archive, and just youtube with ublock among a few others, as well as my large home music collection.
My SO has had a spotify/Hulu bundle for a long time (which we hardly even use, Hulu and all streaming is shit now) and they of course want to raise the price. I said now is the time to drop that shit and have 0 streaming.
I have always hated Spotify for their shitty practices, and now they want to start shoving garbage ai music in our faces. Hell no. All SO cares about is their playlist, which i can export, and they do like the discover stuff but its not totally necessary (imo, not a fan of these algorithms controlling what we listen to but whatever).
Are Tidal and Quobuz really the only choice? I do “self host” but they would want more than whats in our music collection. Plus hdds are fucking spendy now. Man I miss the old days of cheap hardware.
The other caveat: it really has to run on their spyware locked down win 11 laptop for work (we are forced to use it). Work will block any site that seems scary. Or potentially their phone, but they have their computer hooked to their office speakers and prefer listening that way.
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.