It's not breaking news that a lot of subscription services are predatory towards their customers. But spotify taskes it a step further and is predatory towards their artists as well. And thats just for the popular artists, newer artists and niche ones cannot survive with this.
Why am I avoiding piracy if the artists still barely get paid? Answer my question, Lars!
In exchange they offer convinience to both sides. Is that really worth it? I thought so for a while too but then I started feeling uncomfortable with the whole thing.
So what are the alternatives? Theres a lot of good options but the technicality and time spent evaluating the options might put off some people.
- Self-hosted music streaming server: jellyfin server, mopidy, navidrome, LMS
- Music client: Symfonium, mopidy-iris (for mopidy), jellyfin client Finamp (for jellyfin)
- Self-hosted music discovery: explo + listenbrainz
- Purchasing music: bandcamp, https://www.qobuz.com
This path is way more accessible and convinient than it might seem at first.
Another much simpler alternative is to use a physical music player (or just your phone) and load all your music files in there. I use a snowsky echo mini which has an sd card with all the albums I own (flacs from bandcamp) which is a fair compromise for me.
Spotify can suck it.