A couple of years back I gave up streaming for ownership. The main driver was the utterly unfair deal artists get, and the lack of ownership for my hard earned dollars.

At first, it felt like I was missing out, and I missed the algorithms that helped me find new music. Determined, I stuck at. Discovering BandCamp, and rediscovering CDs was instrumental. For algorithms, I actually found forums to be better, and connected to more amazing artists than before.

Where possible, I buy CDs. If not, I buy FLACs. From BandCamp, you can often get both. The CDs get ripped and stored unless I got FLACs too. I use MusicAssistant for streaming my own collection, and automatic file sync to keep a copy on my phone while on the go.

At the end of the day, I've a sizable collection, spend less than streaming (overall, obviously not up front), I have ownership, and artists get a much better deal 😃.

Fuck streaming from apple/Spotify or similar.

I really like Qobuz. They are a lot more ethical and paying the artists. I believe they are French based. App got a lot of updates too lately.

Qobuz or buy CD's and rip them. Or just fucking pirate flac files.

A good alternative would be:

• Ripping your own CD's and playing them on an offline player.
• Use Soulseek (would recommend Nicotine+ app) to pirate music and playing it on an offline player.

For players; on my PC (Linux) I use Strawberry. Windows has AIMP which is really good. On my Android I use Shuttle.

Bandcamp was really good. It's still going but it's kind of a corpse animated by capitalism now. You get drm free music and sometimes musicians will like do listening parties or chat or other fun stuff.

If you buy one album a month for $10, after a few years you have a sizable library that's yours to keep forever. Don't rent music.

Throw out streaming entirely. Maybe buy an album here or there and pirate the rest. Legitimately, if you buy one album and nothing else, you are absolutely supporting the artist far more than listening to their songs "legitimately" through streaming.

I'm still using Tidal, and have been for many years. It's got high fidelity (FLAC, Dolby Whatever), large catalogue and is not expensive.

IMO the best combo is pirated Youtube Music (e.g. via OpenTune) for music discovery, then Bandcamp to buy albums you enjoyed.

That way you're not paying subscription to the giant corpo sucking life out of musicians, you get to actually own the music you buy forever, and in great quality (as long as you archive it properly), and a significant proportion of your purchase goes to the artists who created the things you enjoy!

+1 for Qobuz.

I have my own media server where i host everything that I buy digitally in the qobuz store to support artists and I use the streaming part to discover new things , or at parties etc. Its not the cheapest, but that's kinda contradictory to supporting artists anyway. Its a good combination since a subscription gives you a bit of a discount on digital purchases as well.

Bandcamp + Navidrome

No. Buy their CDs and rip them into something like Jellyfin.

Visit the library once a month and leave with 10 CDs. Rip 'em all to mp3's. Month by month you'll build up a valuable collection that is yours alone. If you are an audiophile then you might not like the mp3's but I can't hear any discernable difference that would make me say "what poor sound quality". If I can tap my foot or sing along then it's more than good enough.

Bloomee https://bloomeex.org/bloomeetunes/

Cross-platform music player built with Flutter and Rust. Mix your local library with online streams, sing along with lyrics, and own every bit of it. No ads. No account. No tricks.

Bloomee pulls from YouTube but works like a music streaming app. It has a robust feature set, it can work as an offline music player using local files, it has Last.fm integration, and it can import playlists and albums from Apple Music, Spotify and ytmusic.

Bloomee is free and open source, and has builds for Android, Linux and Windows. It is available in F-Droid via the IzzyonDroid repository: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/ls.bloomee.musicplayer

Bloomee is free so no money is being paid to the artists through it. If you want to support the artists, the best way to do that is to purchase from them through platforms like bandcamp.

Piracy + iTunes + Jellyfin + Symfonium
(for me)

Bandcamp, then tidal. A friend works in the music industry, he said tidal can't always pay out but they have way better rates than the other streaming services. Bandcamp is like 999x better for artists though. You get the files (for free even if you buy vinyl or cd). It's so much better.

Option A: Pool your subscription in a family plan with others already using it anyway. The resulting share is far lower than the single subscription

Option B: Rip CDs and/or put on the pirate hat

I get that finances aren't the best for many people, but it always makes me very sad to see that music has been undervalued to a degree where it's not in anyway unusual to expect to get access to all music ever created for 10 dollars a month. Obviously, that means that the vast majority of artists get very little money. This has lead to a large share of the music available to stream being AI generated garbage. Because it doesn't make sense to put in the time to create a work of art when people are just not prepared to compensate you properly.

I pirate music to see if I like it, and buy what I like, mostly on vinyl, often through Bandcamp. Despite the pirating, I pay far more than 120 dollars a year for music. That's the price of like 3-4 albums, and I haven't gone a year buying less than 10 albums. And that's excluding all the gigs that I go to. Music is valuable to me, and I still have the first album I bought in 1992, and everything thereafter. It's an awesome experience rediscovering stuff I listened to in the nineties, that I had completely forgotten about.

If you're interested in a FOSS alternative, try metrolist. You can download songs and it's a frontend to YouTube music, so you have access to their full catalogue

If you want a way that more directly supports creators, nothing is is better than buying their songs place a place like bandcamp

Many have said buy music. I agree. You own your music fully. (effectively) and don't buy from apple. Bandcamp ftw. I'm a strange one and use Pandora for gennral vibe streaming. Then if I come across a song that resonates with me I go out and buy it. And before peeps talk bad about Pandora, I discover artists with less than 1000 views on YouTube on it that actually sound good. My only problem with Pandora is that it has a station bleed issue where songs from other stations you made will "bleed" songs into other stations. like I have a dnb station that sometimes plays hip hop instrumentals because of the jazzy vibes that dnb sometimes has. But after a few forceful thumbs down, it behaves. But don't do Pandora if you are wanting to listen to a SPESIFIC song. Just go buy it.

This site has a nice overview of different options.

Personally I use Soundcloud because I mostly listen to sets and like the convenience of browsing new stuff while on the go, I buy the occasional vinyl if I want to support a small artist.

The page also lists options to transfer your likes and playlists

Youtube ReVanced lets you use the YT Music app without ads, it also lets you watch youtube without ads

all of them are the same. they dont give artists jackshit, that is the business model.

The price for Apple Music, just like the price for everything else in the economy, has inflated.

When Apple Music launched it was $9.99 for an individual. That's $13.98 in 2026 dollars. In October 2022 they raised the price to $10.99. That's $12.32 in 2026 dollars. Now it's $11.99 in 2026 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that's the cheapest they've ever priced it.

Family plan price went up a bit, adjusted. $19.99 over 2022's $19.04.

https://keepingupwithinflation.com/tracker/apple-music/

Qobuz has a streaming plan, and you can buy and download drm-free music. It's a good option if you want to just stream (the app has added some nice improvements lately). Even better if you're also looking to build your collection and looking to go the whole non-streaming route.

Purchases tend to be pricey, and there's a slightly more expensive plan with a discount on drm-free that might make sense, depending on how often you plan to make purchases.

Edit: this currently doesn't fall into the < $10 category but is comparable to the old Apple Music price.

Hope you kept your CDs if you want a service that isn’t shit that doesn’t get more expensive for a worse product over time.

i buy music 🤷‍♀️

Yarrrr!

LiDARr and plexamp

I wrote a blog post about this
https://medium.com/@fftublog/topic-music-or-how-i-learned-to-delete-spotify-and-love-mp3s-b4c31354d3fc?source=user_profile_page---------0-------------849bbe645636----------------------

i just use Soulseek and download all the music i could want onto my phone (have 1tb microsd).

best way to support artists is buy their merch

Idk but I recently stumbled on https://freefy.app/. i used it to play a song I was showing to a friend vs YouTube. Looks promising from there very short time I used it.

Apple Music has the second highest payouts to artists, only behind Tidal which is much more expensive.

You really can’t have it both ways. You either want artists to get paid, in which case you’re paying more, or you want it for cheap and artists get paid less.