One con: Finding new music is harder (I imagine).

That's what radio helps with, there was also Pandora, but I didn't know if it is still alive after Sirius XM bought them.

ListenBrainz is the solution for discovery

Finding new music is harder (I imagine)

In my opinion, it's harder, but not even necessarily because it's harder to do it in the end. More because it's just harder to get started.

For example, I find way more music I enjoy listening to through Bandcamp than I ever did on Spotify, but that requires having existing artists that I follow and can see their recommendations for, having a feel for which genres I actually like instead of a vague mental concept of what I like to listen to that I can then keyword search by in Bandcamp's search/discover section, and hoping that the human curators on Bandcamp's newsletter pick artists I like. Bandcamp doesn't really have algorithms, so those are my only real options.

It's more effort, but it's infinitely more rewarding.

I have found a ton of new music through KEXP's YouTube channel.

On Bandcamp you can go on your feed page which shows albums based on the genres and artists you follow, and what fans you follow have bought.

I do it the old fashioned way. Giant binder of discs I get my passenger to flip through and swap in and out

No, but I have a USB stick with over 100 albums on it, so I can listen to the same 5 albums all the time.

No man, my usb works perfectly

precisely

You gotta put in the effort, which most people are too lazy to do

I don't even play it :3

Isn't the discovery free? Lol

Navidrome is awesome and super easy to set up if you use a PikaPod.

I pay for Apple Music (well, technically I get it as part of Apple One) for one reason: the library matching function. I have half a gig of mp3s on my home computer, many of which are not on any streaming service, and apple makes them all available to every device I own.

For me, thats worth the monthly price.

Me too. However I recognize that many people are content to listen to the same things they enjoyed in high school forever. In which case they definitely do not need streaming

this post is just to placate a group of people. i prefer streaming for new music friday. i also don't want another crate or hard drive of shit i lost interest in.

It took me 10 listens to get into Jimi Hendrix. You are consuming quantity but quality requires effort.

The built a thing by burning investor money to artificially lower the price and sell out high on stock IPOs is still going strong I see.

Lossy

This is why I use Spotify and why it's gotten so much worse over the last year.

My blocked artists list used to be empty, but now it feels like I'm blocking every third new artist for being AI.

Except that as part of its enshittification Spotify has intentionally changed its algo to push people into more and more homogenous "beige", nothing music. It has become so prolific that Spotifycore has become a term to describe what happens when you let Spotify autoplay.

With the rise of AI, Spotify is now producing and recommending beige music that is produced on an industrial scale, at the expense of actual artists.

Mood Machine go brrr

Mood Machine by Liz Pelly review – a savage indictment of Spotify | Music books | The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/05/mood-machine-by-liz-pelly-review-a-savage-indictment-of-spotify

I would argue that this is the entire value proposition of Spotify. I may not own the music, but I have all the artist and song names. I can always re-acquire them at any time.

There's a reason music piracy is still niche compared to games or movies/tv.

Spotify is still a good deal to me. I'll gladly pay $12 a month to not have to go through the hassle of torrenting and organizing music.

I love starting out with one song and just letting the algorithm do it's thing. It comes up with new shit for me all the time.

Get a library card! My local small town library has access to a surprising number of nearby libraries, and if I'm willing to wait a week or two for the item to be available and get transferred, I've been able to get some decently non-mainstream stuff for free. For more obscure stuff, bandcamp is pretty awesome.

Try Usenet

https://1337x.to/ has been my piracy go-to for years and they've rarely missed.

I do have a Qobuz subscription, I just rip whatever I want to listen and stream from my home server.

You can also do a free trial for a month and just use a disposable e-mail to redo it every month, if you don't want to pay anything.

I've never played any of the FFs :/

I dunno, RJD2's Ghostwriter clicked for me immediately, among others