Subject: "Reclaim Your Music Today"
Music has never been more accessible than it ever has been. Platforms like Spotify let you carry around your favourite music wherever you go, provided you have internet. Whenever I tell people I download my music, they give me a weird look and think Iβm stuck in the past decade. Believe me, there is something very fulfilling about it.
The cost attractiveness of streaming has tanked as of late. Spotify has been the most egregious with anti-consumeristic practices. They are known for pilfering money from premium customers, often time locking basic features that were freely available behind paywalls. Spotify has been going down the path of enshittification to maximize shareholder value.
Ultimately, only the CEOs have been getting richer. The artists themselves still have to fight tooth and nail to get a seat within the algorithms. Consumers are getting a product that regresses each update, with only rising prices to boot. I recently found out that the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek was funding an arms manufacturing company making autonomous killer drones. I cannot in good conscience support any kind of business like that.
Why I Quit
I was an avid Spotify user for the longest time. I loved the fact that I could listen to any song I wanted. I was freely able to curate playlists and enjoy songs from my native tongue. That was until they introduced the god awful smart shuffle feature. It prevented you from going through your playlist in order and forced you to play on shuffle.
It was so disruptive to the way I listen to my music and I swore off Spotify as a service for good. What were the alternatives? I could always jump ship to another streaming platform. I only really had two in my mind, those being YouTube Music and Amazon Music. There was one more option I tried which seemed a little daunting. Self-hosting.
Instead of letting algorithms dictating what I listen to, I ended up doing research the old-fashioned way. I browsed Reddit and LastFM to find artists that might suit my liking. I discovered lots of indie bands that stuck with me in the long run. There is a personal element to it too, a satisfaction you get when you listen with zero expectations and their music blows you out of the water.
Growing Pains
The biggest loss to anybody moving to self-hosting is losing instant access to music you want to listen to. Thatβs a huge deal breaker for many and I totally understand that. Having to first download the music from god knows where and then adding them to your player of choice is quite the headache. To me, it feels weirdly ritualistic though, making the music have more worth. Itβs no longer the product of instant gratification.
The big mental reframe that you need to make is that you are moving away from curating songs to curating albums and artists. Self-hosting allows you to be more picky and forces you to make a conscious decision before trying something out. Most services like Qobuz let you preview a small portion of the song before you listen. If you are a bit more risk averse, you can always try it out on YouTube beforehand.
The other problem was storage. My personal music library has grown up to a whopping 30GB. Not small by any means. If you have an external storage device, you can move all your files there. This could be a flash drive or an external hard disk. Otherwise, another viable option is Google Drive. The 15GB free plan is quite generous. You can use programs like rclone to manage the files on the cloud.
If you have a NAS or a Server at home, you can always spin up a Jellyfin or Navidrome docker image and run things that way. You can access your library everywhere by adding a VPN service like Tailscale. On Navidrome specifically, it allows you to transcode audio, meaning the quality of the files can be lowered on-stream which is useful on mobile devices with daily quotas.
Lastly, a good music player would be make or break for your listening experience. On Android, I would highly recommend trying out Musicolet. I even paid for premium since the one-time purchase was dirt cheap. On Windows, I would recommend MusicBee. It has a pretty intuitive UI and Iβve had a solid experience with it. It even has LastFM integration for scrobbles.
Conclusion
Self-hosting changed the way I listened to music. I discovered far more artists this way that ended up sticking with me. It offered me freedom to how I listen to music and made consuming the media more intentional. It weirdly intersected with a lot of my other hobbies such as homelabbing but Iβm sure even others can also benefit a lot from this.