I stopped using Spotify over a decade ago. Now I just use Pandora which is actually still pretty good. And occasionally I'll use YouTube music if I want to check out a new band or something. But Spotify is pretty usless.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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Eh, I switched back to running my own server like five years ago. Sure, technically I'm not giving individual artists their $0.0005 a stream, but nowadays I discover more music, attend more shows, and buy more merch.
During the couple of years I spent streaming, I discovered like Alvvays and Yumi Zouma. Nowadays, I discover new bands monthly if not weekly.
Like AI, streaming recommendation engines are mediocrity machines. All they can do is find you things that sound like the things you already listen to. Sometimes, if you're adventurous, you find things you love that sound unlike anything else you listen to. If you find a great thing like that, it can change you. Unlike recommendation engine music, which will try to keep you the same forever.
What's your discovery means now? How do you get exposed to things not currently in your wheelhouse? And once you find that thing, how do you integrate that into your library for listening on an often enough basis?
I find that I binge explore, grab 12 new artists like an old mix CD and see what sticks, but then feel like a hoarder when it sits unplayed in my library for a year.
Not who you asked, but I can tell you where I'm at with that. My primary listening is on an mp3 player, and I also use a home server for listening on speakers/tv. Switching to a separate device used only for music has made my listening far more deliberate. When I pick up the player, I'm making a point to listen to music, not just have it on in the background like I used to. It's also a pain in the ass (comparitively) to make playlists on it (I purposely chose a scroll-wheel style and no touch screen) so I'm listening to a lot of full albums now, which I never really did before, exposing me to a lot more than I used to since I don't just throw the song or two I like on a playlist and leave the rest.
There's been an interesting side effect that I didn't expect: Being more deliberate with my listening has sharpened my ear to music, I hear music in movies and shows in a way I never used to, I'm beginning to recognize voices and band styles by ear, I actually focus on music now instead of it just being part of the background. As such, I find a lot of new music these days by looking up songs from movies and tv. For example, the most recent:
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I completely devoured the Sinners soundtrack. (Ludwig Göransson is a fave and I've always been a fan of Buddy Guy)
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Watching Dope Thief, I realized I never skipped the intro. Got me hooked on Little Simz
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James Gunn has some great taste. Beyond season 1 of Peacemaker, Season 2 has already got me absolutely loving Foxy Shazam, and after the latest ep I've been getting into Hardcore Superstar.
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Strangely enough, Rick and Morty has some bangers in the later seasons, and got me listening to stuff I never would have like Kishi Bashi.
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Additionally, there's the news. I've been listening to Bob Vylan and Kneecap, and only heard of them because they stood up to support Palestinians.
Not only has my listening become more deliberate, but my sourcing of new music has as well. No longer relying on an algorithm to do the work for me has allowed me to hone a new skill and learn how to find new music myself.
can't speak for OP but for me, surprisingly, youtube shorts. Once that damn thing gets your algo figured out for you suddenly you can start finding bands that are in your wheelhouse. Start by looking for shorts on your current favourite bands and eventually new stuff will start popping up that should be similar to your taste.
Honestly for all the crap that's on youtube, shorts has been one of if not the best tool for me to find new music/bands. Once I find something I like then it's off to SoulSeek/Nicotine+ to add it to my server.
As much as I know Spotify isn't great for artists, I do find it to be the best streaming option for how I enjoy music. Next to Winamp of course.
It really whips the llamas ass.
Unfortunately, Spotify's streaming quality is rather low, even if you pay for a monthly subscription.
I switched to Tidal when I bought a dedicated DAC and a pair of very highend headphones and have not regretted it - you can hear the difference on good gear.
I have great gear, I have FLACs, I have 180g records, and I have Spotify, and they all sound fine. Perhaps I come from a time when 192 mp3s were what you downloaded, but IMO if it's a 320 mp3 or above it sounds the same. Only time I ever noticed and appreciated a difference was when sampling or mixing, and then higher quality can be appreciated, but if I'm just cranking tunes, Spotify, FLAC, or vinyl, really makes no difference, they all drown out the ringing in my ears just fine.
Looks like your ears' hearing profile matches the psychoacoustic models underlying lossy compression algorithms very closely.
That's the thing many people don't understand - lossy audio compression works better for you the more your ears match the average human ear.
In my case, being an older fuck with slight hearing deficiencies, I don't match this profile as closely. That's why I require higher bitrates (or lossless compression such as FLAC) for music to sound high quality.
So yeah - listening experience isn't just a matter of taste, it's highly subjective and will vary from person to person. For people like me, the difference between low-res streaming and FLAC is very noticeable, and ironically not because my ears are better than yours, but because they're worse. :)
I listen to punk music recorded on crappy gear, so I prefer not to hear it hi-fi.
Crappy punk music should be listened to from vinyl anyway.
Or cassette
Yeah. On second thought, that's even better. A shitty 80s boombox covered with band stickers is the ultimate way to listen to punk music. Sitting on table along with a dirty ashtray and a couple of empty beer bottles.
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A long time ago, you could go to a special store and trade government paper for music disks and tape that you got to keep forever.
Same but I have a huge collection of digital media.
When I discovered that it was possible to buy and download drm free lossless flac-files i went back to buying music again. Never looked back tbh.
honestly, most of my CDs have been used once: Put in a PC and ripped (to 96kbps MP3s, of course!)
That bitrate seems low? I always thought 160-192kbps was the floor for a decent sounding rip, but it’s been over a decade since I’ve even had a CD so maybe things are different now
Yeah, that's low. I don't bother with anything below 320 kbps.
Where do you buy them from?
Qobuz. And sometimes bandcamp
Thanks
Dunno about the user you asked, but I've used Bandcamp for that.
Im gonna guess bandcamp?
Mostly Qobuz.
Oh, I thought that was only indie artists
Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart's content.
Spotify was always for chumps.
Alright, I got an eighth. How do I trade it for music?
Come to my house and I'll play you some of my CDs
I remember that time and it was kind of awful. It was brutal in terms of packaging, and lugging around all those cds sucked. It was way more expensive and the money still all went to record companies, not to mention how terrible it felt to pay full price for a mostly garbage cd just for one song (singles existed though but not for everything).
Records companies also had final say on who we listened too and completely controlled the whole scene essentially.
I get the nostalgia but it was 100% worse both for artists and consumers. Well it has always been rough for artists tbh, I don't know if it's harder right now or not.
They want fuckin 40 bucks for a vinyl these days and they don't even throw in a digital download for that price, and the radio is owned by like three companies unless you live near a college station.
The contracts that steal music from artists haven't changed one iota. Unless you've got juice like Paul McCarty, Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, and even then it can be a fight that takes years.
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What in the tech world isn't broken? Besides older consoles and computers disconnected from the internet.
My Internet-connected Linux computers are pretty fucking rad.
My GOG games aren't, my Steam library's still chugging along after 11 years, my Linux installs haven't failed or started spying on me and my offline, modular 3d printer still works.
It's all about understanding what you're using/buying and what's the incentives for those on the other end. We shouldn't have to think about that all the time, but on the bright side there are cool things happening outside of enshittification by publicly traded corpos.
Also VLC is free and is one of the best media players there is, and yt-dlp is so easy to acquire music with I'm surprised people thought spotify was a good long term idea for their music consumption.
Steam will do a rug pull one day. You purchase a license to their games, you do not own them.
What do you think will happen? Classic enshittification?
Wanting some kind of subscription to still play?
Helps that steam's DRM is piss-easy to crack, and good indie devs give you DRM-free redeemable copies if you show a proof of purchase (Klei my beloved)
steam will go to shit soon as we lose gaben
Would that be coorporate suicide for steam?
Probably. Reasonable storefronts are the only thing keeping the warez at bay.
Fingers crossed he passes the reigns to someone with the same vision.
Quite a bit of what they do gets into open source.
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I love seeing this. As someone who has kept his own library of music since 2004 and went through the peak of local libraries to it almost being dead after like 2012, this is a day I never saw coming! When it started declining, home hosting solutions were already sparse, but then some more threw in the towel as well. Right now, I use Navidrome as my server and Symfonium for the app and has been an incredible 2 years using it. If people start coming back, I feel like it will only drive more creativity and new features as it will be worked on more than it is.
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