Also, even for premium customers they will display ads (local concert tickets) and add sponsored albums/tracks to playlists and the home screen.

There is this as well: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/sep/18/massive-attack...

That's true, I looked at it from pure consumerish selfish point of view. I appreciate the idealistic view and caring about artists, but in the end I believe:

- Most people will generally choose what's most convenient for themselves

- Streaming services will only change their ways if they lose customers. Any change they do is A/B tested, so the ads / price increases are definitely in their short term interest. Only when their customers churn because they cannot afford 10 subscriptions anymore or are tired of paying for ads something will change

I mostly only use spotify for discovery, using either discovery weekly or starting a radio stream from a particular song. Is there another service that treats artists better that I can use instead for this purpose?

They also commission music from "ghost artists" that they can pay a fix rate, then place said artists in popular playlists to reduce royalty payouts.

Wow. The ghost artists - that’s horrifying. Clearly Spotify would prefer to completely squeeze out everybody below the clout level of the top 10 artists, and replace the rest with stock music. I would bet anything they’ll cut out the middle-artist any day now and fill their playlists with AI sloptunes.

Spotify really wants to convert music into a commodity they can buy cheaply, own, and sell to an indifferent audience.

Also, the UX is deliberately user-hostile.

Its only use case seems to be algorithm playlist. It’s an atrocious music player any other way.

> Paying musicians cheap wages

Spotify doesn't pay artists at all. You know why? Because they pay the rights holders. Literally no one with their performative outrage against Spotify ever ask where are the billions of dollars that Warner Music, Sony, Universal collect.

"Oh, Spotify is so bad it doesn't pay artists". Spotify pays 70% of its revenue (that is, money before all the taxes, expenses etc.) to rights holders. What more do you expect them to pay?

The article at Harpers that you quote frequently makes rounds. And even though the article itself literally writes how Spotify is completely beholden to rights holders and pays them 70% of its revenue... it still goes on to blame Spotify and only Spotify for everything.

> to make boring music (ghost artists) for playlists they promote

1. IIRC Spotify doesn't produce any music of their own

2. The article confuses Spotify and companies that are literally in the business of providing that music (and besides the scammy ones there are legitimate ones that have been in this business forever).

And, again, Spotify doesn't deal with artists directly.

Can't say anything about PFC or Strategic Programming (even though I worked at Spotify. Even if I knew anything, I probably couldn't say anything anyway).

As for the bullshit about "keeping intiatives under wraps". Lol. At any given time Spotify is involved in about a hundred different "initiatives". It doesn't have to advertise all of them. Especially not things like (pure speculation:) "there's probably a 5% increase in listening to stock music, can we get preferential contracts with companies that already provide 70-80% of stock music".

And to top it off. Read the quote from one of the musicians you so deride: "The money was better than any money I could make from even the successful indie labels".

Performative outrage is performative.

> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams

1000 streams per year comes out to $3-$5 per year, perhaps less. That's the cutoff. I'm ambivalent about this decision, but again stop with the performative outrage.

> Not preventing the deluge of AI-generated music flooding the platform

Here's an AI-generated artist. Please tell me how you're going to detect that it's AI-generated and remove it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3Uyfnp-jag Or, indeed, why it's worse than the brain rot that Taylor Swift (to give an example) outputs by the ton.

So Spotify does what any sensible company does since they have no choice: let generative music in (btw, generative music has been a thing since computers were invented), and attempt to curb the flood of slop (for some definition of slop).

Just as with any other performative outrage no one discusses what exactly Spotify (or other platforms) can do to stop this.

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> Not paying musicians anything at all if they don't have enough streams

... 1000 plays in a year?

We're taking a handful of people (Close friends? A proud mother? The artist themselves?) listening a few times a week.

If an artist has no following, and creates music that listeners consider substitutable for AI slop or low-effort shovelware, then they are hobbyists with no reasonable right to renumeration?

Also:

- the chief executive invests money into AI weaponry https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-12/spotify-boycott-danie...

A few of my favorite artists have dropped from Spotify (for great reasons that I agree with) and I want to switch to something else. I gave Apple Music a try but the interface is just unbelievably bad. Also I am a Linux user and the lack of a native app is brutal (and Cider, a 3rd party app, is a no-go for me). Tidal seems decent though and I'll probably give it another shot eventually.

The other thing is I actually do get a lot out of the suggestions and daylist of Spotify. I guess there are some 3rd party recommendation systems out there now (pulling in data from last.fm scrobbles) but I'm not aware of something that would be as easy and have such an integrated result.

Have you heard of Tidal? I swapped to them from Spotify back when Spotify did a big round of layoffs. Tidal had the music I was looking for (generally higher quality recordings) for the same monthly cost of Spotify.

Apple Music on i(pad)OS can be used with third party apps. There's plenty of better players out there than the built-in one

You should check out iomoio.com

They have an impressively large amount of music available. In addition, they price songs at $0.16 USD/song —- or cheaper if you deposit more money onto the platform and.

This isn’t piracy (money is flowing to artists) and you get to own at a fraction of the cost of iTune, Qobuz, or other platforms that charge around $0.99/song

At least in my case, I'm pretty sure I can afford to own all the music I listen to. I only listen to 5,000 minutes per year of mostly the same few hundred songs. I've spent 8 years x 12 months x 13 = $1248 on Spotify in my life so far, so even at $.99 per song (which is above average if I buy albums), I'm losing money

I do enjoy the Spotify Wrapped stuff, but after moving partially to selfhosting Navidrome for a growing collection of rips and DRM-free purchases, I've been scrobbling everything (including Spotify) to Last.fm, which has a similar end-of-year round-up. It's pretty good, got mine a couple of days ago.

Tidal has smaller library but higher quality (assuming your speakers allow you to tell the difference).

I always found their algorithm to be crap. Can't remember a single good song I've found through it. I like yt' s much better

No ads in the traditional sense, sure, but they do push artists and albums for example with their stupid "pre-save" functionality, even if I don't have anything to do with them. I'd consider that an ad.

Do you have a recommendation for a Jellyfin client that does a good job for music, for either iOS or Android?

Of all the privacy concerns in my life these days, corporations knowing about my music taste is not cracking the top 1000. In fact Instagram ads have led me to discover some fantastic small artists, so I'll happily give that out to whoever cares.

I'm sure it works fine if you've basically settled on what music you like and never listen to anything new, but if you do like to discover new music, self-hosting just isn't an option.

Or if you follow any contemporary artists who will drop a new single on any given day (which is usually not available for purchase), I much prefer being able to just go into my streaming app and press a button to start listening as opposed to trying to find and rip audio files from the internet and put it on my server and deal with metadata and cover art manually.

Apple Music and YouTube Music also let you upload your own files to a cloud locker and stream them from any device, so even if the platform is missing stuff you can fill it in yourself. Best option IMO

There is another way. Spend some money on artists, directly (digital downloads, merchandise, concerts, etc.). Pirate all music.

If you still spend as much on music as before (for the sake of argument), more of that amount now goes to the people who actually make music. It's a big middle finger to Spotify and the likes.

Of course, the obvious issue is that your money now isn't distributed fairly according to some viewpoints. You like band A, and buy some of their merchandise or a CD, but you also pirate singer B's music, and don't pay them a dime. On the other hand, if you want to stop helping these mega-platforms exploit artists and users and just generally suck, piracy seems like a good answer if you can do it without risking yourself.

It won't help much in the short term though, this is not an option for most people, but I won't judge anyone taking this route and can see how it can be ethically sound for many (but certainly not for all).

Well obviously you could just pirate it instead right? Like piracy or not, spending more money or listening to less music are not the only options. Hell you could not pirate it and just listen on youtube - that's another option.

The real cost to self-hosted is time and complexity. But there are all sorts of alternatives to simply not using Spotify anymore - not just self hosting.

I want to love qobuz but their ux is horrible as is discovery and they suffer the same problem the others do with their supplied catalog being flooded in fake songs attached to real artists as “ft.).

Qobuz is one of the only places I’ve found to buy drm free music for some artists I follow.

That probably depends on how you listen to music. I still have a qobuz family subscription but barely use it. Mostly I listen to new albums on Bandcamp, and if I like them enough, I buy them.

I bought ~20 albums last year, which I guess would have been about the same price as my qobuz subscription.

One caveat is that I do have ~300 CDs from the pre-streaming era, which I’ve ripped. If you were starting from zero I can see it’d be a bigger issue, but TBH I mostly listen to new albums anyway.

> ditching streaming services either means spending a lot more money or listening to a lot less music.

Certainly not. As to how, I don't believe I need to provide instructions.

The main issue with streaming is that you own nothing, and also get snooped on.

If you really want to "stream" NewPipe is as good as any streaming service.

My other favorites, especially for coding, are SomaFM (Groove Salad or DEFCON substations)[1] and SceneSAT[2].

[1] https://somafm.com

[2] https://scenesat.com/

You can use ListenBrainz to discover new music based on your listening activity from your self-hosted library. I've started doing this recently with Navidrome and I'm happy with the results. This is the plugin I've been using: https://github.com/kgarner7/navidrome-listenbrainz-daily-pla....

There is also Troi[1], a tool provided by ListenBrainz to generate playlists and radios from your local music collection.

[1] https://troi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Some radio stations also record their (themed) programs and make them available as podcasts for a more on-demand experience.

Youtube has much more music than Spotify, is better sorted by Albums (without holes, no skips) and you can easily rip it. It has all the better obscure artists, Spotify delisted.

There's also a recommendation engine via YouTube Music.

This is my bottleneck too. I'm all for paying artists, and the hustle of setting up self host doesn't bother me (maybe not for my wife though, who is way less tech-y than me and is in my spotify family plan.) But the benefit of tens of millions of music, a search away, is simply too much for me to give up. I do my annually retrospective in music, and Billie Eilish was my back-to-back favorite artist of the year. Without streaming service, I probably wouldn't have tried her music at the first place.

I like that I must bring my own media. It means everything on my server was intentionally put there by me. No extra shit.

You don't need to rival Spotify's library. How many songs on spotify do you have added to playlists? You just need to purchase those....

My media library is simply a directory on my Linux NAS, exported over NFS. No VPS, no Plex, no Jellyfin no Jellyfish, no Jelly donut, just NFS. If I want to listen to a song or play a movie, I just navigate to that directory and play it. Simplest system I could come up with.

I've used Spotify a little from time to time over the years, but I never got rid of my music files. I have MP3 files around that I encoded in the 90's.

i've found the essentia models to be pretty good for vector similarity. much better results than CLAP https://essentia.upf.edu/models.html#discogs-effnet

have a service running here if you're into electronic music and want to poke around https://cosine.club/

With the recent data leak of Spotify‘s entire playlist database, you might be able to build something considerably better for music discovery now!

This is the main factor that makes me leery to try going the full self host route.

Usually either the Jellyfin/Navidrome app/web UI, or a native player app that talks to your NAS over the VPN.

For iOS I ended up building a small app for my own setup that streams files straight from the NAS (SFTP/FTP) over WireGuard/Tailscale so no media server in between. TestFlight if anyone wants to try: https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM

https://Symfonium.app is a good player for Android

I use navidrome rather than Jellyfin for music. Stream to my Android phone with Dsub2000. Amperfy is my preferred iOS client.

I haven't tried it, but there is a program called Finamp that is specifically for music streaming from Jellyfin and supports both iOS and Android.

I keep music files on my phone, and play them with foobar2000. 128 GB is a lot of audio.

I use Manet as a music player an tailscale to have access to my home server. Before I tailscale set up, I’d just download what I wanted to my phone before leaving home.

Just shooting in the dark, but could you use rclone somehow?

Android TV can run Tailscale or Wireguard natively. AppleTV has a native Tailscale app, and I think you can also use Passeportout for Wireguard on AppleTV but I haven't used it. Alternatively if you're on the go a lot and want to use a streaming stick in your hotel you can use a travel router that supports VPNs like GL.inet.

Airplay and Chromecast are a different story. Maybe someone else here knows different, but while it's not literally impossible it doesn't really work because of mDNS. A layer2 VPN might, but not so much on Tailscale/Wireguard.

Fair enough! However you need to consider:

- Depending on your taste you will need to subscribe to multiple servics. Shows / movies I enjoy are scattered across Netflix, AppleTV+, Prime, Disney+. And it's increasingly unlikely that IP is licensed out (i.e. no Star Wars on Netflix)

- There is a surprising amount of movies which are not on any streaming service (at least in Germany) OR they are but you still need to buy a digital copy or rent

- The UX of self hosted solutions like for example Jellyfin or other open source can (surprisingly!) be better than the paid solutions. I.e. no ads & and no UX redesigns

I'm not opposed to streaming services at all. I will subscribe to them as long as it's value for money.

However in recent years streaming services got worse while self hosted solutions got much much better.

Your point - subscription is cheaper than self hosting - may still hold, but the balance has definitely shifted in favor of self hosted solution.

I don't think it'll become mainstream in the near future (or ever) but for me personally it's worth it!

It's also not "either / or". You can both self-host and have subscriptions, but maybe you can cut down on some subscription services:)

Some people do not mind buying art or paying artists for their work.

If we assume an artist gets 1¢ per stream of a song, and that album is 10 songs long, you need to listen to it 100x for the artist to get the same as just buying a $10 CD from Bandcamp.

I understand this example is missing the cuts given to other parties (label, etc) but it is still more to the artist than streaming unless you obsessively stream the same albums repeatedly.

Spotify is cheaper because your favorite local indie band makes far less from it.

Additionally, thrift stores have loads of CDs you can rip for extremely cheap.

For the most part, you aren't meaningfully paying for content when you use streaming services. This has the effect of making it not cost effective to produce good content you enjoy, while still costing you money to pay for the services, most of that money being funneled towards slop and execs. The ecosystem as a whole would benefit if you set aside the money you would ordinarily pay for streaming, and instead spent it on choice works you appreciate, while downloading whatever you like.

For movies specifically, you should consider paying substantially more than you would on streaming if you watch any substantial amount of movies. It is very hard to fund good movies with only streaming revenue.

> It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en

TIL they somewhat resurrected Google Music and raised the limit (I think it was 20k on that). I used Google Music for years because it seemed like only Spotify and them figured out reliable caching on mobile, other services when I'd lose signal they'd give up trying to stream... even noticing recently apple music is not super reliable with that.

From the link:

You can play uploaded songs in the background, ad-free and offline—even if you are not currently a YouTube Music Premium subscriber.

Did not expect that.

Qobuz and 7digital both have extensive libraries of high quality music.

Edit: and of course bandcamp exists but I wouldn't call their collection extensive.

Bandcamp, and when what I want isn’t there, qobuz usually has it. A couple of times I’ve had to buy the CD off eBay and rip it.

I buy CDs and rip them myself. That's technically buying a digital copy of the music, since CDs are digital.

i use bandcamp whenever possible

The problem seems to be, as a producer, if you don't publish your music there, people won't find it or listen to it, at least not in the viral way that other artists are able to find success.

Sure, there are plenty of people who get their kicks from record stores and soundcloud, but to properly make it, you need to be where the ears are.

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It's not just Spotify, it's also Netflix & Co., so that adds up quickly!;) But I don't argue whether it's economical or not, my point is rather:

- Commercial subscription services are getting worse

- Self hosted solutions are becoming better

Jellyfin is a really nice piece of software & Navidrome looks really cool as well! And in some (not all!) aspects the open source alternatives are even better than their subscription equivalents.

Before cancelling his Spotify subscription and saving €11.

€11 - €6.49 = €4.51 profit per month

Hey, that's not my point!:) My point is:

- Subscription services getting worse

- Open source / self hosted solutions becoming better

Self hosting is also a learning experience / hobby.

And I'm still subscribed to other streaming services! However I get more and more annoyed of getting worse overall products for higher prices.

The satisfaction of dumping Spotify is priceless to start with, but then you also end up with full control of your setup.