Selfhosted

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.

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.

I'm self-hosting my own music as of recently. I'm paying for every song. I don't have as much music as I did on Spotify, but I'm also A) owning the music B) slowly acquiring more and C) actually paying the artists. For me this is a good step in the right direction.

I'm seeing a lot of comments about music discovery being the reason to not stop paying Spotify. Idk if that's something I'd agree with. First of all, I personally listen to singles and not albums but I've been buying albums simply because that's easiest for a lot of sites (or cause I'm getting them on vinyl). So swapping over has led me to listening to full albums and thus a bit of discovery. That may not apply to everyone though. Several of those albums or artists have had collabs that have turned me on to other artists, again, maybe the music discovery people think this is child's play but it's led to a noticable increase in my collection.

Second, can't you just use Spotify free version to discover music? That's what I plan to do if I'm feeling like my current collection is getting stale. But between friends, other web services for discovery, various platforms like YouTube that happen to unveil a song here and there, indie concerts that show off new openers to me, or what have you I feel like my discovery is more than sufficient to grow the list of music I need to pick up faster than I'm burning it down or becoming bored with it.

Also, I don't understand how discovery can represent a majority of a person's listening habits. Like isn't the point of collecting favorites songs and making large playlists to listen to those things. I've got playlists with like 48 hours of music on them which cause me to not hear a repeat idk, more than once a month if I'm not seeking them out. That's partially because I have 3 playlists or so I rotate through but like... Is music discovery so critical and so exclusive to Spotify that it's worth the subscription. More me it's not.

Not to yuck anyone's yum or anything. Just trying to add an alternative perspective to these pro-spotify comments.

Author says "one-time server setup + storage" but there are a few moving parts and always updates to handle so I'm sceptical this could be truly called 'one time' (or any selfhosting). Time will tell I guess. I enjoyed the article though and gave me food for thought.

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?

I really do hope that Funkwhale get their 2.0 release out soon, should make self-hosted Spotify-like stacks simpler to do, and the fact that it works for creation and distribution as well is great.