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.
Setup Lidarr, and subscribe to lists for curated content. Pretty sure you can even subscribe to Spotify lists for it to auto download. But finding people who make lists recommending new stuff you like is probably the best route to go.
yep i added a lidarr list for top 100 x genre songs and i think it updates every week. you can make it pull just the album that has the song or the artist’s discography. im slowly getting a ton of music I’ll never listen to just like spotify
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.
I like 1990’s Japanese ska punk and I had hit a wall finding new bands since there isn’t a huge English language community for that stuff. With spotify I found ten new bands the first day. I do try to find a way to own the music I like through Bandcamp or through the Amazon MP3 store but I don’t know of another way to discover new music as efficiently.
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).
Streaming isn’t exclusive to the methods you mentioned. I have plenty of friends make recommendations. And I found out about one of my now-favorite bands through Rolling Stone.
The ways you mention are basically just corporations with extra steps.
Edit: I’m just saying – our music is practically all funneled from a corporation at several steps in the process of it getting to us, even if the final step is a friend telling you about it. And yes I know there are plenty of obscure/indie/non-commerical bands but those don’t account for very much of the totality of music that gets listened to.
I guess that’s where the ListenBrainz/Last.fm part comes in (which is mentioned in the article).
I still get music recommendations via friends, concert/festival lineups and online forums, but that’s just for my “main” genres. For other stuff, Spotify is quasi the only solution for me as well.
Friends don’t work for me. I don’t know a single person who listens to even close to the things that I like. Sure there’s some overlap occasionally, and I might hear about one artist once a week or month. I get dozens to hundreds recommended by spotify weekly, and I actually end up liking a handful of those. With friends, it also only works with known artists, and it’s incredibly rare to get reommended something that isn’t well known but happens to fit my taste by them (don’t think that ever happened, actually). As an example just last week I got recommended an artist that has 60-something monthly listeners on Spotify (now 74!). I liked them so much I tried to see what I can find, and they got a youtube channel with 3 (live) videos and like 500-ish views each (38 subscribers). NOBODY is ever gonna recommend me those kinds of things, cause nobody ever heard of them, let alone anyone of my friends (and even if they have, they’d have to know to recommend them to me).
As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful. I haven’t used it in a VERY long time (decades), but last I did it was kinda “meh”. You can also only start out with what you have, as you’re scrobbling what you’re listenting to. I no longer have most of the music I listen to daily as an actual file/library. So getting that up to date would probably cost thousands of dollars, too. Not to mention it being incredibly tedious to actually gather them on various individual shops and sites like bandcamp or wherever those artists happen to be.
So as much as I wish there was, there isn’t really a (pracical) alternative. Let alone one of the same “competence”.
As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful.
This isn’t a huge issue, listenbrainz supports importing your spotify history.
I believe plexamp will scan your library and will make the discovery-type playlist you’re looking for
First of all, after recent events I’m not touching anything from “Plex” with a proverbial 10 foot pole.
But even that aside, no it won’t do what I want because it can’t. I can’t discover something outside of my library with it. It’s a music player for a Plex library. It can generate playlists of songs with similar styles, and that’s nice and all, but not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for playlists of things I don’t own, or know, or ever heard of, but that are still likely to be something I like. I don’t want a sophisticated “shuffle”.
I was addressing this part of what you said:
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.
EDIT: also, fwiw, I didn’t downvote you lol.
I was addressing this part of what you said
Ah ok that part wasn’t clear to me, sorry (maybe quote it if you’re reffering to a small part of a comment?). Yes, it would work for that, but I don’t have that collection. I could sail the high seas, but that kinda defeats the purpose of wanting artists to get paid and rather hypocritical. At least they do get paid (even if poorly) using Spotify. So somehow getting to the point where that would work for discovering new-to-me music and that also doesn’t screw over artists seems hard, unless I’m missing something?
EDIT: also, fwiw, I didn’t downvote you lol.
No worries, I don’t pay attention to votes anyway. Doesn’t matter on Lemmy (esp. on comments) unless you’re talking about visibility, which doesn’t do anything on a comment chain like this one either…
Isn’t Spotify just using an AI? Couldn’t one self host an AI that plugs into the music library and makes recommendations?
Yes it’s using “an AI”. But that doesn’t mean anything. You can’t just use any AI and have the same result. Just cause AI got a global hype doesn’t mean this is new either. Neural networks have existed for many decades, which is likely what they’re using. The hard part is to get the training data. That is where the value (or usefulnes) comes from. And that source is all their users, listening to all the music, importantly including newly released music, all the time. It’s the basic idea of “people who liked X also liked Y”. What songs people combine together in a playlist. That sort of thing.
We don’t have that data to train “an AI” so we have a local version of this. They have it for millions of users. That’s why their AI is incredibly good at this task. Sure, they also let labels pay them to rank things higher so they get more listens, and that is anything but transparent when and how that happens. But over all, you can’t just magically do what they are doing locally.
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.
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.
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.
That quote relates to financial expenses compared to monthly Spotify subscription, not time and effort.
Monthly Cost $9.99-$14.99 One-time server setup + storage
The problem is that’s not the monthly cost because (in addition to running a server not being a one time thing, they need maintenance) it’s not including the cost to actually buy all the music:
Digital purchases (Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon, etc.)
For me:
https://www.last.fm/user/ikt123/listening-report/year
Paying for 7808 albums in 1 year is unfeasible, so this is not a replacement for Spotify for me, it could be though if you only listen to a tiny amount of music, at current rate of $15 a month for me, it’s equal to like 1 album and like several smaller singles, if this is all you listen to in a month go for it.
That seems extremely high, can you explain your listening habits? Are you listening to all of those albums start to finish? Are you selecting each of those albums or just letting the algorithm run wild?
Majority of music is in albums, nearly 12,000 different tracks listened to, but most are singles, I rarely listen to albums from start to finish
I listen to a lot of music in general
https://aussie.zone/post/19441027/16055498
Also I figured out you can turn off the payola:
To opt out of receiving sponsored recommendations, go to your Spotify account on desktop > Account > Privacy settings > turn off Tailored ads.
This will opt you out of receiving sponsored recommendations and personalized ads generally across our product. If you turn off Tailored ads, you will continue receiving podcast ads in your Premium account, but they will not be tailored to you.
So even if you broke it down to me just having to buy singles I’m still getting a ridiculous amount of value from Spotify
I’m still getting a ridiculous amount of value from Spotify
If only the same could be said for the artists you’re listening to…
In 2024, Spotify alone paid out a record $10 billion to the music industry—totaling nearly $60 billion since our founding.
You have to remember that prior to Spotify the music industry was desperate, as people turned to downloading mp3’s illegally the music industry basically just resorted to suing people who potentially downloaded a song.
I’m also very highly sceptical of this whole article, from the crappy accounting to
Lidarr is just a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused. Yes, people could point it at less-than-legal sources
My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I’ve purchased
Riiiiiight.
You’re just hooked up into a piracy platform that pays artists nothing by coincidence.
On top of this:
In 2024, more musicians are making and releasing music than ever before. In fact, a new report has found that more music is released in a single day now than in the entire year of 1989.
Music simply isn’t a high value product anymore, the market is flooded, there is more music coming out per minute now than you can listen to.
But it’s all good, I’ll keep paying for Spotify because Spotify pays all the artists I listen to.
The standard payment to an artist on Spotify is “$0.003 to $0.005 per stream”: https://simplebeen.com/artists-make-on-spotify/
That is basically nothing for any artist that isn’t in the top tier of mainstream success.
prior to Spotify coming along the industry was in decline as downloading MP3’s on torrents and file sharing programs was the norm
You’re essentially pirating music by using Spotify, you are not paying the artists that you listen to in any meaningful way.
Spotify gets artists music and name out there to hundreds of millions of people, people who become fans and buy their merch and go to their concerts - that’s where artists make music, NOT from album sales. The music from album sales basically all goes to the label and all the partners.
Spotify is good for artists.
I think this assumes piracy
Or ripping the CDs you’ve amassed over 10-15 years.
(But it’s probably sailing the high seas)
Eh at this point it’s easier to download even the stuff you already have on CD
I’ve had it going for months now. Navidrome is very reliable and with docker, super easy to update should you so please.
The rolling cost is my internet, which I’d have whether I’d have Navidrome or not.
Another bump for navidrome, I’ve been using it for 4 years and it’s the best.
Oh my goose! I love them! 💖
I see what you’re saying but nowhere else in that table is cost mentioned. Below the table they say maintanance is minimal. If you’re already looking after storage, containers and server(s) I guess that could be true.
Are we looking at the same table? It says it’s about cost in the left column. Or am I misunderstanding your post?
Sorry re-reading my comments it’s not super clear what I meant: nowhere else in the table do they take account for the ‘hidden’ on-going maintenance of looking after a server/self-hosting. So this is the only row where they address ‘cost’ and I just thought it’s a bit optimistic to say replacing all of Spotify just costs a one time server setup and storage. I think you’re saying this row was only meant to indicate financial cost and I agree it’s basically accurate from that meaning. However this is only the ‘initial’ cost. For example a self-hosted server and storage will eventually have to be replaced whereas Spotify will just keep replacing their own servers and that’s already baked into the price of your subscription (caveat: that Spotify price will rise over time).
It’s not a big point really, maybe I’m nitpicking.
Oh I see, that’s right! It’s not something we selfhosters usually admit when comparing costs I’d say :-)
Fingers crossed but I spun up a Navidrome container a couple of years ago, let Watchtower handle the updates, and never touched it again so far.
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?
When you mainly listen to boomer artists who have made millions who gives a fuck
I mean there’s a whole block on this:
Lidarr is just a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused. Yes, people could point it at less-than-legal sources. No, I’m not telling you to do that. If you want to support artists, buy their work. If you don’t, don’t pretend Spotify streams are “support.”
Important Note: Always ensure you’re obtaining music through legal channels such as:
- Digital purchases (Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon, etc.)
- Ripping CDs you’ve purchased
- Free legal downloads offered by artists
- Music available under Creative Commons licenses
And yes, I’ll use this with my existing, mostly legally obtained, music collection. I don’t mind the pirate stack though, it’s far easier to just download the album than ripping your vinyl and tapes.
Pirate, then donate directly to artists.
I think like this solution the best.
There’s and endless supply of guides for ripping.
On Windows just use Exact Audio Copy - It can pull all the track info from multiple sources. I forget what I used on Linux.
The only moral theft is my theft.
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.
What a terrible website, its hard to understand exactly what this is
Join a pod!
BRB going to dive in the ocean
Just dont name your pod “Titan” just in case.
Mediamonkey has a built in music server.
Ive been using jellyfin for some years now, switched from subsonic when I got into films and TV shows.
I still love having my own music library, I can do what ever I need with the content. Also things to disappear at random.
There has been another post on Lemmy on replacing Spotify with a selfhosted stack. I already have an extensive music library, mostly ripped CDs and bandcamp purchases, but have been procrastinating a selfhosted setup for a while but I’ll at least set up Navidrome and explore the options with listenbrainz etc.
