Sorry, I couldnt find a specific enough instance for this so here goes:

What have you guys been using instead of spotify? For me, I haven’t had it for years and have been using bandcamp, the archive, and just youtube with ublock among a few others, as well as my large home music collection.

My SO has had a spotify/Hulu bundle for a long time (which we hardly even use, Hulu and all streaming is shit now) and they of course want to raise the price. I said now is the time to drop that shit and have 0 streaming.

I have always hated Spotify for their shitty practices, and now they want to start shoving garbage ai music in our faces. Hell no. All SO cares about is their playlist, which i can export, and they do like the discover stuff but its not totally necessary (imo, not a fan of these algorithms controlling what we listen to but whatever).

Are Tidal and Quobuz really the only choice? I do “self host” but they would want more than whats in our music collection. Plus hdds are fucking spendy now. Man I miss the old days of cheap hardware.

The other caveat: it really has to run on their spyware locked down win 11 laptop for work (we are forced to use it). Work will block any site that seems scary. Or potentially their phone, but they have their computer hooked to their office speakers and prefer listening that way.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
    5·
    18 hours ago

    I liked Deezer a lot when I used it, but their library (at least as of 2018/2019) felt very limited. Been 6 or 7 years of minutes (…) but I want to say their agreements with East Asian labels was woefully lacking?

    I used spotify for a year or so until they tripled down on sending joe rogen dump trucks of cash while he was pushing anti-vax shit.

    These days I use a mix of Youtube Music and plexamp/mpd. The former because I “get it for free” with Youtube Premium and love it for discoverability or checking out a new band. The latter being how I store the songs I like enough to buy (or otherwise obtain). And ListenBrainz for getting discoverability out of that.

    I do “self host” but they would want more than whats in our music collection. Plus hdds are fucking spendy now.

    A 15 track album (Protomen’s Act 3) in FLAC is 393 MB. If you are neither a data hoarder nor an audiophile, you can shrink that considerably (A 320 kbps mp3 is generally about a third to a fifth the size of a FLAC). Storage is a mother fucker, no argument there. But you don’t actually need that much for a music library.

    And I’ll just add: Plenty of artists are very open that buying a 1 dollar album on Bandcamp tends to give them a LOT more money than like a day straight of listening to them on one of the streaming services. Shit is bleak.