The reasons for dropping Spotify are obvious, however pretext of this guide is that Spotify doesn’t give enough back to artists. So the solution is to pirate it? I mean yeah sure, but don’t kid yourself with the pretext.
How about a guide on ripping owned CDs?
Having your own collection is great. But it doesn’t provide the service Spotify does (or any streaming service). 80% of the time I listen to discovery-type generated playlists. I want to find new music. This is fundamentally impossible with the music I own. This is something you can’t self host. Even if you have a vast collection of music you don’t know (by whatever means your get it), you still need the algorithms to pick the music that you’re likely to like.
I really wish I could. I self host basically everything else. Even tried some local music similarity training for “smart playlists”. It’s kinda neat at best, but no where remotely close to the music discovery of Spotify and other online services. You need the massive amounts of users to derive that data.
Call me old, but people should learn to discover music in different ways (friends, press, concerts, etc.) and not wait to be fed by corporations… just a thought.
See my other reply to tofu. Not the same thing. You just couldn’t do what these services do even 2 decades ago. You could discover things, but at a very different pace and very different reach. You’re limited to discover what friends know from them. Discovering things via “press” isn’t free either, it takes time to read the articles, buy the magazines (do they still exists?) and you’re likely to only hear about popular things. You also need to find publications that suit your own taste, or learn which authors are compatible with it.
As for concerts you can only go to those that are near you, which is either local artists or those big enough to tour away from their home base. There are artists that don’t tour at all (probably a third of my catalog falls into this category).
Discovering things via “press” isn’t free either, it takes time to read the articles, buy the magazines
I don’t know about you but this is so fun for me it bring me joy and fulfillment as opposed to being fed by algorithm
It’s the opposite for me. I don’t want to read about music. I just want to listen to music that I don’t know yet but am likely to like. I don’t want to dig around for it. The algorithms you dislike do something that no article or podcast can: give me personally tailored recommendations. She not in an abstract way but just as a playlist.
An algorithm has zero concept of artistic quality . I also want to always extends my taste and not the opposite
I’m aware it has no concept of artistic quality. But I also don’t care about the quality of music, especially if perceived by some journalist. I only care if I like music. Some of it is intricately composed, masterfully performed. Some is pop, or generic/simple house.
I have discovered entire genres with the algorithms you seem to think only give narrowing recommendations. Some people probably listened to those and something I liked.
Let me repeat again: I have discovered many, many artists for me that I literally would have no realistic chance of every hearing about in any other way. Ever!
It is a lot more fun to discover artists yourself. Browsing a list of album covers and enjoy them, read short description of the album and artist then listen to the music. You also feel the send of fulfillement becausw the process becomes a personal adventure rather than a passive experience
As I said in my other reply, different people like different things. I don’t want an adventure. I want the passive experience. I do other things while listening to music (work, read, tinker, …). I almost always have some music playing, but rarely do I just listen to music (it does happen though). I’ll pick styles depending on mood or task, it’s like the rails that keep me on track while working (as an example). If I’m not listening to music, I lose focus.
I simply can’t do that with an article or other medium that requires my primary attention. I don’t feel a sense of fulfillment either, but increasingly annoyed that reading this thing about music is taking more and more time. Believe me when I tell you, it’s not for me.
If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.
I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.
There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.
Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.
My music taste would never be on radio
Similarly my music taste is not on Spotify either
I still have a lossless music player to listen to music that likely my artists just decided to not have in Spotify
So no I don’t think it’s an apple to oranges things
Radio sucks ass
Spotify sucks a bit less ass
Self hosting your own collection is the future
So edgy.
