I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).

Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.

I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don't know if it's harder right now or not.

When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.

Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart's content.

Spotify was always for chumps.

[glances at shelf in corner]

Can confirm.

My GOG games aren't, my Steam library's still chugging along after 11 years, my Linux installs haven't failed or started spying on me and my offline, modular 3d printer still works.

It's all about understanding what you're using/buying and what's the incentives for those on the other end. We shouldn't have to think about that all the time, but on the bright side there are cool things happening outside of enshittification by publicly traded corpos.

Also VLC is free and is one of the best media players there is, and yt-dlp is so easy to acquire music with I'm surprised people thought spotify was a good long term idea for their music consumption.

My Internet-connected Linux computers are pretty fucking rad.

What's your discovery means now? How do you get exposed to things not currently in your wheelhouse? And once you find that thing, how do you integrate that into your library for listening on an often enough basis?

I find that I binge explore, grab 12 new artists like an old mix CD and see what sticks, but then feel like a hoarder when it sits unplayed in my library for a year.

I also use Symfonium, it is just awesome

Navidrome + ListenBrainz + Bandcamp (and a little Soulseek) = unshittification

I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8.

Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).

My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).

Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.

I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.

My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.

In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it, look up album/artist on Rutracker, filter out albums/songs I don't want from the discography torrent add it to my qbittorrent if available, mount the NFS share on windows with my staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the correct folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.

This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don't like the song and delete it later. It's way too much.

The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can't even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren't worth it for me.

Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that's frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves.

Feels like I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.

I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn't worked for me to move off of it long-term. I'd love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.

Same. I’ve got most of my downloads on my phone with VLC to play them

You can also just buy digital downloads from sites like Bandcamp and Quobuz, and even iTunes if you click past the Apple Music streaming part.

Why would you not stream that to yourself? No need to buy additional hardware to get in the way.

Optical drives are no longer in production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BafMgVvHTI

I refuse to use YouTube without sponsorblock and dearrow. I use Firefox on android with extensions and make a YouTube PWA because thumbnails in the official app are ridiculous.

Even good channels like Veritasium have completely irrelevant titles make me skip videos I would've watched

I clicked on it because I knew a lot of things with Spotify are broken and I am interested in it. I have a lot of friends on there and I like having good arguments against it. Also I just like this channel and my mood did very much fit the "we're fucked" part of the title 😅