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.
I went to tidal. I would happily self host, but I value the discovery of new music through these services. Throwing on a “radio” based on a song to get a certain vibe and then maybe finding songs I didn’t know about.
YouTube music isn’t awful but for years it drains my battery fiercely. I think it’s related to me having my main Playlist downloaded, it always seems to be permanently stuck in a downloading status. Maybe some song on there is no longer available.
Speaking of these apps, why do barely any of them let you take your “liked” songs and filter by genre? Sometimes I just want the metal songs from my Playlist, or whatever. Spotify did, but they’re shitty nowadays.