The buying vs "renting" comparison is on-point. Setting up Jellyfin last year was great and all, but Navidrome is probably the most used service in my entire setup. I've probably spent more on music files than I have in all my years on streaming services, but for the artists, one album purchase goes so much further than 1000+ streams last I checked (though admittedly the bulk of my library is still built through slskd).

The entire appeal of a home server to me in the first place was breaking away from big tech bullshit, and this was such a huge piece of it.

I'm not through yet, but the rent/own animation is very fitting and also very cool

Love Navidrome, it's one of the best pieces of software in my life. I'm one of those lucky/obsessive people that never stopped maintaining a music collection in the era of streaming. I think I used Spotify for about 6 months in total, but always came back to my own collection, especially when I could upload the whole thing to Google Play Music to access it anywhere. After GPM was killed I started self-hosting with the OG Subsonic server but soon switched to Navidrome.

As a comment to your post, if everything you have is purchased via Bandcamp, I find their own app pretty reasonable for on-the-go streaming, but they actually recently added their own Subsonic-compatible implementation, so you can connect to that server with whatever Navidrome client app you use as well: https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/07/16/discover-improvements-and-subsonic-implementation/ I think this really makes switching to a Bandcamp-based streaming library significantly more accessible for any folks that don't have the desire/willingness/knowledge to set up their own fully self-hosted system.

One thing i haven't done but i know some people like is getting song recommendations. Ive heard some success in using listenbrainz for that. Might be worth checking out if you want to still get recommendations. Navidrome scrobbling

I think I still have a tab open with/about Navidome somewhere up my long list of open tabs 😬

Nice writeup! Agree with the ownership part absolutely, and the alternative software is quite good indeed XD

Just dropping in here that you should absolutely try Nicotine+ for finding basically anything

If your taste is today’s pop, the stuff that only exists inside the big platforms, then no download store will sell it to you.

If finding a place to buy pop music is a problem, did the author forget that you can buy physical media and rip it?