This post is mostly just me bitching about the music industry but also genuine interest in what other people in this community do when it comes to music streaming. Apologies if this is an incomprehensible wall of text.
My favorite self-hosted project is Navidrome. I’ve been running it for years and it’s been absolutely perfect the entire time. Related clients like Supersonic and Tempo have been fantastic as well. More than half of my donations to open source software have been to music related projects like these, I use them for multiple hours every day.
I’m giving up on using them though, because actually obtaining the music to stream has become harder and more expensive every year. Unlike self-hosted movie/tv streaming, the primary reason I self-host music is to support the artists. I feel better paying $10 for an album I enjoy compared to the artist getting pennies from me streaming it. I’m sure as hell not doing this to save money, I spend around $30/month on average on new music.
My only criteria for buying music is that it’s at least CD-quality. Going back a few years, my options (ordered by preference at the time) were Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7Digital, the artist’s own website, physical CDs that I’d rip myself, then finally giving up and using Soulseek. Bandcamp and Qobuz would typically cover 95% of what I was looking for, I’d rarely need to use Soulseek.
But over the course of those past few years…
Bandcamp was bought by Epic, then sold to Songtradr, half of its staff were laid off, and it’s been a shell of its former self ever since. It seems like Bandcamp is now mostly ignored by artists, with albums rarely releasing or releasing far later than other platforms. It’s genuinely a surprise when I find the artist or album I’m looking for on Bandcamp at this point.
Qobuz has been experiencing rapid enshittification as they try to get people to subscribe to their streaming service. Dark patterns added throughout the purchase and download process, albums being pulled from my account, and albums becoming more expensive (I’m seeing a whole lot more $15-$20 albums than $10 albums now).
7Digital is dead.
Artist websites rarely offer lossless downloads anymore. Last time I bought an album directly from an artist was Madeon in 2019, and that’s now an archived page you have to go out of your way to find.
CDs are somehow still a reliable option, but I just cannot justify this anymore. At some point having a collection of 250 plastic discs that I rip precisely once and then store forever just doesn’t make sense. I’m tired of buying physical clutter to get digital files. I sold a sizable chunk of my collection a few months ago.
Soulseek, the “fuck it I’m pirating it” option whenever I can’t buy an album through any available means. Surprisingly even Soulseek seems to be suffering, I used to be able to find anything, but now even a slightly obscure release can be hard to find.
So now, my preferred options are Bandcamp, Qobuz if the album is less than $15, then Soulseek. I’m using Soulseek a hell of a lot more now, which defeats the point of why I do this in the first place. So fuck it, I subscribed to Tidal.
But like, what the fuck? Why is it so hard to give artists more money?
So, for others who self-host their music collection, or even still rock an iPod or something, what do you do? Do you buy lossy releases? Do you pirate everything? Is there a magical website that has every album for sale that I just don’t know about? CDs? I can’t be the only one with this problem, but I haven’t seen anyone else talk about it.
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Like you I try to support artists by purchasing physical media or releases on Bandcamp. Outside of that I get my music on Soulseek, through torrents, Usenet, and occasionally XDCC. I don’t need lossless files and even if I download FLACs I transcode them to 320kbps MP3 before they go on my iPod anyway. The harder it becomes to acquire music legally the less bad I feel about downloading with abandon.
I don’t self-host my music streaming currently (lack of funds) but I’m planning to in the future. I live in a large city and borrow CDs from the library to rip at home. This might not work for more obscure stuff or if you don’t have a good library in your area, but this way I don’t need to make more space for CDs and I support the library doing it. If I want to support artists, I get merch and/or go to concerts.
I use Jellyfin and Finamp and they work fine. All the old navidrome and airsonic solutions seem to be dead, and I never liked Funkwhale. Who wants all of their music in encrypted block storage?
I also like the quality bump. When I’m not streaming, my music is in FLAC on a DAP with some high quality cans. I can’t get that with Spotify on a phone, and I camp and hike a lot in areas without cell service, so having it with me is a plus.
Music sits in between storing movies and books. I have less than 2TB in total but the amount of albums is more than the amount of films that I have, and that’s 7TB+. Music, even FLAC, isn’t terrible on space, unless you’re a 24-bit fiend.
I buy phisical media and lately I’m listening to internet radio again. There are streams in flac even.
I gave up trying to do the right thing now I just torrent everything and use Plex amp to steam to whatever it had worked fine for me
I mostly use Spotify, but have the flacs of a few albums I really like on navidrome. As for how I got them… Yeah. I do have the for CDs a few of them but I don’t have a CD reader and most of them are completely destroyed, so I feel like piracy is justified for those.
For me, most of the artists I follow are in band camp. I haven’t feel any enshitification on it so far, and I don’t love giving me money to epic either, but there is also bandcamp Friday. For whoever is not on it, I just pirate (torrent) or download from qobuz using a throwaway account on trial, trying to buy cds, merch or whatever from the artist.
bandcamp and piracy are still the main routes. try to look at the artist’s soundcloud too for links to what they use. some genres (like trance for me) still heavily use soundcloud
Pirate the music and send $20 to the artists venmo
I know this is a joke, but honestly, this would support the artist more than the past 75 years of labels and streaming corps, which is IMO high seas piracy in itself.
So mostly I try to get my music from Bandcamp, artists’ websites, or iTunes. With these methods I don’t have to correct any info through Kid3 and normally have the correct album art for Navidrome.
If they don’t have an option to purchase their music I’ll use soulseek or yt-dlp to download it. That’s normally for obscure artists, music that can’t be sold due to Copyrights, or sanctioned countries (for example Russian musicians).
I’ve found that self-hosting my music has helped me slow down my music consumption and be more picky about what I listen to. I’ve also found good quality applications such as Feishen (macOS), play:Sub (iOS), and Symfonium (Android).
I personally have been trying to setup a music library just for my ipod classic, and no matter what I do I keep finding duplicate songs. I also plan to self host my music library to access from my phone when I don’t have my ipod, but first I want to get rid of dupes which makes this so frustrating.
I enjoy a program called Alldup. It’s quite nice for my uses
The answer to your question of why it’s so hard to give artists your money is exactly the same as it has been for ages for all media. The few companies who survived the consolidation of the industry have done everything in their power to make sure they are the gatekeepers of content. They buy and merge or kill off any competing companies or technologies.
They weren’t successful with MP3s or with streaming because they didn’t bother to understand the technology or that the Internet was the new marketplace and thought they could just do what they had done with physical media and pay for laws that protected their interests and sue everyone, but they ultimately lost control because you can’t sue hundreds of millions of people like you can sue a few thousand stores. So they had to give the people what they wanted for a while so they could have time to buy up all of the companies.
But they’ve now done that and paid enough to get the laws and precedents on interpreting those laws that they wanted, so courts are becoming better at enforcing those laws more quickly. So they can pressure new tech that pushes the limits on interpreting the laws to not last long enough to get people hooked. And now that they’ve reconsolidated most of the market and technologies as capitalism tends to do if you’re patient enough and there’s no possibility of monopoly regulation or market disruption, we’re stuck with pirate or use the garbage they feed to us and most artists are back to having to sign their art away and sleep with executives to get the marketing and distribution from the gatekeepers just to get a chance at success. The rest have to rely on word of mouth and self distribution which even online can be expensive without the advantages of centralized hosting providers, merchant accounts, and bandwidth.
I buy music, at least CD quality. I might splash out for 24-bits if given the choice (only because it seems to be standard on Bandcamp so for consistency I aim for the same in other stores), but not for > 48 kHz.
I upload to my server for archival purposes, but will convert to mp3 to sync to my devices. I buy CD quality poorly for archival purposes. I can’t tell the difference. Plus I have navidrome and I can stream, but having my entire library available at all times, even when offline, is very important to me.
I buy, in order of preference, from Bandcamp, 7digital, and only as a last resort from Qobuz. If even Qobuz doesn’t have something then I go on Amazon to buy the CD. I hate Qobuz ever since they removed the download all button. I remind them of it with the feedback form with every purchase. It was the reason I will prefer 7digital over Qobuz. I don’t know why you say 7digital is dead. They have up to date titles for the music I care about (metal). The only thing I dislike about 7digital is the http (no https) download, but I’d rather risk that than support Qobuz with its dark patterns.
Minidisc
Lucky bastard.
My MD players still play but no longer record. I can’t find anyone in my country to repair / replace the record head.
Plenty of player/recorders cheap out there on eBay and elsewhere. Guess it’s a gamble at this point though.
Typically the ones advertised as “tested” or “working” have only had the player tested. Not the record functionality.
Not gonna lie, that must be one hell of an obscure (or new) song if it’s not available on Soulseek. If your song happen to be Japanese, try Ototoy.jp. That’s where I get most of my FLAC albums.
