I’m in a dilemma, I think ownership of media is important, but the convenience of Spotify and the algorithm of new music that it suggests has helped me find amazing artists that I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise.
Fellow sailors, what are your thoughts, and how do you personally listen to music?
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Maybe its a generational thing but I prefer having a Plex / Plexamp serveur with all my music as FLAC on my home server. I can better curate my collection and it’s available everywhere.
Support your favourite artists by buying their merchandise and going to shows.
Streaming for discovery, private tracker to get it in FLAC.
I use streaming for music these days. For one, I’m able to get either cheap or free premium services via some tricks (Apple Music currently has an exploitable, constant free trial through Shazam). I’d still consider paying for a service, though, if I had to.
For me, I consume music much differently than other media. For shows, movies, and literature, I typically only watch or read something once ever, at the most once every year. This means I don’t feel the need to retain or backup most things. I still keep what I acquire while I have space on my NAS, but there are no backups and if I ever need to free up space, I know the first volume to clean up.
Music I constantly listen to over and over. If I go through the effort of acquiring something, I’ll need to make sure the metadata is consistent. When I had my old collection, I’d have to make sure it was backed up to cloud storage because I couldn’t risk losing all that music I had found and curated. I found I was approaching the point where my monthly costs of backing up to Glacier-like services was beginning to approach the monthly cost of streaming. Plus, despite some of the discovery algorithms being terrible, it’s still been a useful tool for discovering new music. I’m also able to take streaming on the go, I cannot take the entire library I curated. I’m not someone who knows ahead of time what I’ll want to listen to.
I suppose this was all a long-winded way to say the cost-benefit analysis no longer made sense for keeping local music files for me. Part of it is streaming music services roughly have everything I want to listen to. I don’t need to subscribe to 5 different services like video platforms. Music streaming services, at least now, mostly understand that they need to be more convenient that pirating.
I stream because it helps me discover new artists, and makes it effortless. I do have my own library though.
Local library. I don’t want to pay for things I don’t own. Streaming services also can remove/ disable music any time. I also don’t need recommendation algorithms I think they are biased. I can easily discover new artists on blogs
Local library for me for sure!
I discover new music through friends, Shazam, and browsing Youtube Music.
With ~6k songs I don’t get bored that fast.
I have Ampache running on a self hosted server, which has desktop and mobile apps.
I used my local library for most of my life. Grew up with crappy internet so that necessitated downloading everything to make sure I got no hiccups when it finally came time to listen. Since starting work I began using Spotify (as a way to take all my music with me, had no alternative at the time) and continue to alternate between both. Streaming is nice and all but dependent on internet and given my experience, it’s better to have a local library. It’s just more reliable. Spotify’s great for music discovery though and has made my local library grown significantly.
I agree with OP that it is best to have DRM free files. For music recommendations, I use a Scrobber plugin for Last.fm.
Give ViMusic (for Android) a try. It’s free in F-Droid. It’s like Spotify but uses Youtube Music for the backend.
I have a Spotify account and never use it anymore. ViMusic is great.
This totally depends on YOU and how you consume music. I am an analog collector who has a small collection of cassette tapes and vinyl to play at home for gatherings. But then I have spotify for the car and for showering lol.
I have a smart TV with ReVanced so I don’t get commercials/ads on YouTube and can play music there too.
I’ve got a local library that I stream with using Subsonic/Airsonic-compatible APIs.
I have Apple One Family and that includes Apple Music, which I share with 5 others. Can’t beat that price!
