So, imagine I’m using any sort of streaming server. Is there ANY of them that have the ability to suggest new stuff, which is the number 1 and only reason I still use Spotify?
If anyone could answer this including the setup they have to run it, that would be awesome.
While I agree that there aren’t any great self-hosted solutions, more diversity in the music space is important. I refuse to use Spotify, and for me it’s not about price. In fact, if they charged more and actually paid their artists more I would probably hate it less. But overall I mostly refuse to use it for other reasons:
It couples the company that delivers your music with the app you must use to stream your music. In my opinion these should be separate - perhaps an open protocol that streaming companies can all use and open source clients that can connect to one or many of them?
Spotify made it clear that they don’t care about Linux users when they killed their Linux client. Yes I know about librespot, it’s only a trivial decision away from Spotify killing it. And unlike Reddit’s API changes, the backlash would be minimal since most people use the official one.
It strongly relies on network effects to get everyone on the platform and keep them there. As mentioned above, this hurts independent artists because they are forced to publish their music on a platform that doesn’t pay well just because everyone is on that platform. But there are more than just network effects between artists and consumers: Spotify relies on social-network style antipatterns to keep users in their ecosystem. I’ve been told by my friends that I am “difficult” because I don’t use Spotify and they want to share something with me. That is Spotify’s manipulation
Their official client is electron, I don’t want to have to run a whole browser stack to listen to music. Not to mention the fact that npm is plagued with supply chain problems and unless the Spotify devs manually audit every dependency of every dependency of every dependency any time they add or update one (doubt it), users are one attack away from being compromised.
When I did briefly use Spotify many years ago I took the time to build up some playlists of music and randomly songs would disappear from the playlists when Spotify lost rights to stream it.
I personally use Bandcamp for recommendations/discovery, and then purchase music I like to listen to and self-host it with MPD. It works great.
I’m not saying this is for everyone, obviously streaming has its merits. But in my experience most people self host not because something costs money, but because they have zero control of the actual experience, and they want to avoid the vendor lock-in issue.