I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”.
Why am I seeing ads if I’m already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
Roughly a year ago, I moved from Spotify Premium APK to using a local music library—Symfonium on my phone and Rhythmbox on my PC. I haven’t regretted it for a second.
There’s something really fulfilling about building a personal collection that’s yours to keep permanently.
Definitely recommend giving it a try!
If you’re not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
I’d love to leave streaming services and roll my own server, but I rely on things like the Release Radar and song radios for discovery and just haven’t been able to find a self-hosted solution for that.
I don’t want to have to plan out the music I’m going to listen to, I just want to dive in.
I use the Spotify data via Every Noise at Once (https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=name&%3Bname=) to gather band suggestions, but it is an annoying amount of work compared to having a script that sees all of my music and makes a playlist of 20+ songs using that data for me. Have not found a solution for that.
Spotify is garbage. You pay them to basically pirate unlimited music (they pay table scraps). They have no values or integrity, but they do have a greedy business model.
I buy albums off bandcamp instead. Or from the artist’s site directly.
Honestly it’s a shame that most good music pirating sites have gone to the shitter, literally the only way to actually pirate and own music I could find via searching vigorously was through youtube to MP3 converters.
