There are plenty of controversies surrounding Spotify, but what really made me cancel my subscription was the fact that they ran recruitment ads for ICE. Boycott Spotify!
There are plenty of controversies surrounding Spotify, but what really made me cancel my subscription was the fact that they ran recruitment ads for ICE. Boycott Spotify!
A friend from a local band told me that the money they’re making from streaming is maybe barely enough to cover the cost of being on the platform to begin with. So yeah, I can agree with “fuck Spotify” even before going to the sketchy stuff they’ve been funding and promoting.
I’m going the self hosting route myself. Navidrome running on a small PC at home, Symfonium on my phone, and music from Bandcamp and CDs I’ve bought. If you care about the artists you’re listening to, you should care about supporting them. Buying a digital album on Bandcamp Friday for 10 bucks means 10 bucks going directly to the artist with no deductions. I haven’t looked at the numbers, but you’d probably have to be streaming their stuff thousands of times before they make the same money from streaming.
I just got an MP3 player to carry a about 40GB of music–more than I can realistically listen to, and have some CDs for the car.
Self-hosting is pretty complicated and nerdy. Awesome if you can do it, but not necessary.
I used to carry a small mp3 player too. It had only 1 GB of storage and didn’t play lossless (and if it did, it would’ve fit maybe 3 albums). At one point I started collecting everything in lossless and I was considering a newer player with more storage too, but I wanted something that could talk to Last.fm as well, which limited the choices a little bit. Ultimately I went with my current approach. I don’t need my whole music library all the time, but it’s nice that if I think of something that I haven’t listened in a while, I can get to it too. I also have it set up so that anything I mark as a favourite gets automatically cached to my phone such that it’s available offline for when the network is sketchy or not available at all.
The self-hosting is not all that tricky - there are plenty of resources that would help you manage, and once it’s done, it just works. The only compromise I have right now is that I don’t expose the service to the Internet so I have to go through a VPN. Other than that, by definition of self hosting, it’s your data, so you aren’t risking some favourite artist just pulling their work from a platform you have no control over, so it gives a bit of peace of mind.
Well, currently I’m running via a mobile hot spot because I hate my cable company and I don’t feel the need to send them money since my media is mostly physical and downloaded…
The other factor I’m a heavy mobile user and it’s not unusual to run down the battery; taking the load off the phone battery with a separate, very efficient device, is a good move; and, not that I care particulary, but wired headphones with a DAC is gonna beat bluetooth on quality.
Wired and a dedicated device will always be better of course if you can manage. I’m currently going with wired IEMs attached to a Bluetooth DAC/amp that connects to my phone. There might be some quality loss indeed, but I’m probably not going to notice it in the outside noise anyway. Still, I can use the DAC connected via USB too if I insist on lossless - but it’s a bit cumbersome with using my phone attached to it. It’s fine with a player that I toss in my pocket and maybe hit play/pause from time to time, but with a phone that I’m using way more often it’s inconvenient.