Yes! Kill Spotify & Co! Literally The Worst Thing That Happened To Music Since The Whole Major Label

yes! kill spotify & co! literally the worst thing that happened to music since the whole major label monopoly debacle

if you wanna invest a little more resources and brain juice, you can even set up your own spotify-like server to stream your stuff to your devices even if you're away from home - especially helpful if your music library gets too big to comfortably fit on your phone storage

i use an amalgamation of old pc parts, debian headless, the lsio swag docker image for connectivity, beets for tagging, and navidrome as the actual library/streaming service, feishin as my desktop music player (fantastic ui and very similar to spotify!) and symfonium for my android devices (which is the only thing not free and open source, apart from the hardware and my domain name, but it's a very good player, and it's only like 9€ one-time after a generous trial) - it took weeks to set it all up since i started from a place of very little knowledge about how servers work etc, but the amount of effort i put into it makes me all the more proud of the finished thing, and i learned a LOT about how the internet works on a technical level! <3

here's a list of programs/sites/whatever that were helpful to me when i was moving away from using spotify & back to downloading music:

soulseek - peer to peer downloading program, has most music you'd want. there's "rules" to it though and the UI is a little confusing, but you can figure it out. there's tutorials. i believe in you

cobalt.tools, ytiz.xyz, yt-dlp - mp3 downloaders, for the songs that you can't find on soulseek

musicbee - music player, extremely customiseable. reminds me of when i used itunes back in the day. has a lot of good features, including syncing music over to your phone

lastfm & listenbrainz - sites that keep track of your listening stats. i'd recommend this even if you still choose to use a music streaming service

syncedlyrics - cmd thing that gets you timed song lyrics, like the ones spotify has. there's no UI but it's easy enough to use. just grab the lyrics and timestamps it spits out and paste it into musicbee

music presence - program that shows what song you're listening to in your discord status, in case you use discord and enjoy the thought of other people seeing what you're listening to, which i do for some reason

i'm not going to lie to you and say that switching away from spotify/streaming services is an effortless task, it took me half a whole day of nonstop Work to get all my music downloaded and sorted out, but i will say that it was worth it!! and you should do it 👍 if you want to