There are enough reasons to avoid using Spotify (and most other streaming services). For me the big reasons are:
- Bad players with very limited functionality, for example:
- Can’t shuffle-play your entire library
- Can’t add your own tags and other metadata
- Must use resource-hungry client applications, no third party clients can be used that might offer better features
- No way to easily pre-download as much of your music as you need
- Can’t upload your own music (YouTube Music allows it, but it’s a mess)
- Limited catalog, some artists or albums are missing, sometimes for silly reasons like geofencing
Add to that the problem that music streaming services don’t pay artists nearly enough and that they can remove music you like from their catalog any time they want. It’s enough for me to see streaming as a toxic mess.
But its easy to self-host your own purchased music. My favorite music source is Bandcamp because it passes 80% of the income on to artists, as it should be. I slap my downloads on my little homeserver which has Docker, and from there it’s very easy to self-host a streaming service. My combination of stuff is:
- Navidrome as music streaming server
- Supersonic as lightweight desktop player (Linux, Windows, macOS) – this also supports other music servers (Subsonic, Jellyfin, Nextcloud Music and more)
- Symfonium as mobile player (Android)
This has worked reliably for years now with basically no maintenance. The worst I had to do is fix some metadata in badly tagged music files, but that’s easily done using Musicbrainz Picard.
With every release, all this software gets better and better. It’s the reverse of enshittification. You should support it if you can, either by using it, reporting bugs and improving the software yourself or by donating. Navidrome and Supersonic are both FOSS and accept donations (currently via Ko-Fi). I won’t post donation links here because they will get outdated, see the project pages above for more.