Why I Ditched Spotify, and How I Set Up My Own Music Stack

I really seriously want to ditch Spotify. The apps are trash, always doing shit I don't want without asking, I'm now getting ads for bands or artists that I don't know and never want to know, which is the last drop

Problem is that I have some 6000 songs long playlist. How can I get this playlist off of Spotify and where can I find the songs? I don't mind paying (once, as in the good times) for songs, but I'm done with the paying to own nothing

You can export your data from Spotify, and use that as a basis for downloading songs via for example yt-dlp (this can be automated), or slowly build it up again over time in whatever system you set up by buying the albums/compilations containing the songs.

Just gonna repost my comment from the thread on the Technology community yesterday for suggestions and discussion: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21273053

I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8 to be imported inside the Docker, then more elbow grease to actually make the playlist semi-accurate.

Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization and my credit card access for payments until I signed into the right Google account again, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).

My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).

Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally anywhere, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with some automation through Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.

I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.

My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.

In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it in dogshit quality, look up album/artist on Rutracker, pray that it's there when a lot of the time it is not, filter out albums/songs I don't want from the discography torrent and add it to my qbittorrent-nox on server, mount the NFS share on my main windows PC with my music staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the finalized folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.

This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don't like the song and delete it from the playlist, never to be heard again.

It's way too much.

The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can't even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen to when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren't worth it for me.

Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that's frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves, eagerly falling for whatever corposlop becomes available.

Felt like I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.

I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn't worked for me to move off of it long-term. I'd love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.

Some ideas of mine:

Musicbrainz metadata is awful. Half the time the cover art is someone's photo of some shitty Japanese vinyl with stickers. Pull covers off YT or Spotify. In fact - pull all metadata off Spotify via scraping, with Musicbrainz volunteer metadata serving only as intermediary to connect the audio to the musicbrainz id which should connect to a Spotify option and potentially a fallback option if somehow the music isn't on Spotify.
There should be an intelligent playlist creator of some sort where I can give it my Spotify account export data and it can go off song titles and albums in the playlists within to create playlists in navidrome by finding matches in my library and automatically downloading missing ones and it should be at least 99% accurate (most "Spotify playlist downloader" type websites are 99% inaccurate for instance).
Navidrome or one of it's clients should have a plugin to get suggestions at the bottom of playlists like Spotify via last.fm and play music instantly directly from Spotify/YTM, with a button to add a song to your playlist, when you do so, it automatically downloads it, copies metadata off Spotify, and adds it to whatever playlist you added it to.

All that should hopefully ease the pain and make it so you can discover, listen and add to your library without so many barriers.

Lidarr + last.fm recommended list.
- That's not really even close to what I asked.

Having your own collection is great. But it doesn't provide the service Spotify does (or any streaming service). 80% of the time I listen to discovery-type generated playlists. I want to find new music. This is fundamentally impossible with the music I own. This is something you can't self host. Even if you have a vast collection of music you don't know (by whatever means your get it), you still need the algorithms to pick the music that you're likely to like.

I really wish I could. I self host basically everything else. Even tried some local music similarity training for "smart playlists". It's kinda neat at best, but no where remotely close to the music discovery of Spotify and other online services. You need the massive amounts of users to derive that data.

No joke here, try (internet) radio. You'll discover stuff you'd never get on algo-based recommendations. I might be biased by growing up with Winamp's shoutcast
- Of course I have. Specifically RadioParadise(.com) is great for this, which I've listened to through winamp's shoutcast as well (multiple decades ago). I've even been a supporter for all those decades at this point. But it's a very far cry away from the personalized (discovery) playlists. The efficiency diffference for discovering music is orders of magnitude: I find maybe 1-3 songs a month compared to 5+ in a week for discovery playlists (somtimes less, usually more). You can even skip songs you don't like on there, but that still doesn't make up for it being universal and not personalized.
  It's nice as a palate cleanser, or when I don't wanna put effort into selecting what to play. But I'd lose my mind listening to it for truly extended periods of time. The music is great, and the (human) selection is superb, but just by the nature of personal taste, I only like around 30% of the music I'd say.
I want to find new music. This is fundamentally impossible with the music I own.
You can simply visit the artist page on lastfm and see related artists . On Bandcamp when i buy an album i want visit the profile on the people who buy the same item . There is really many way to discover artists without spotify when you think about it
Call me old, but people should learn to discover music in different ways (friends, press, concerts, etc.) and not wait to be fed by corporations... just a thought.
- Hey what's wrong with silently listening to new releases at the record shop.
  Best memories growing up we're going to a&b sound and playing Dreamcast while my parents listened to the CDs setup around the store for demos.
  I remember places having rows of stations so a bunch of people could listen to new releases at the same time.
  Digital music is great but something to be said about having to actually curate your own experience
- It is a lot more fun to discover artists yourself. Browsing a list of album covers and enjoy them, read short description of the album and artist then listen to the music. You also feel the send of fulfillement becausw the process becomes a personal adventure rather than a passive experience
- I like 1990's Japanese ska punk and I had hit a wall finding new bands since there isn't a huge English language community for that stuff. With spotify I found ten new bands the first day. I do try to find a way to own the music I like through Bandcamp or through the Amazon MP3 store but I don't know of another way to discover new music as efficiently.
- See my other reply to tofu. Not the same thing. You just couldn't do what these services do even 2 decades ago. You could discover things, but at a very different pace and very different reach. You're limited to discover what friends know from them. Discovering things via "press" isn't free either, it takes time to read the articles, buy the magazines (do they still exists?) and you're likely to only hear about popular things. You also need to find publications that suit your own taste, or learn which authors are compatible with it.
  As for concerts you can only go to those that are near you, which is either local artists or those big enough to tour away from their home base. There are artists that don't tour at all (probably a third of my catalog falls into this category).
- Streaming isn't exclusive to the methods you mentioned. I have plenty of friends make recommendations. And I found out about one of my now-favorite bands through Rolling Stone.
- The ways you mention are basically just corporations with extra steps.
  Edit: I'm just saying -- our music is practically all funneled from a corporation at several steps in the process of it getting to us, even if the final step is a friend telling you about it. And yes I know there are plenty of obscure/indie/non-commerical bands but those don't account for very much of the totality of music that gets listened to.
Setup Lidarr, and subscribe to lists for curated content. Pretty sure you can even subscribe to Spotify lists for it to auto download. But finding people who make lists recommending new stuff you like is probably the best route to go.
- yep i added a lidarr list for top 100 x genre songs and i think it updates every week. you can make it pull just the album that has the song or the artist's discography. im slowly getting a ton of music I'll never listen to just like spotify
I guess that's where the ListenBrainz/Last.fm part comes in (which is mentioned in the article).
I still get music recommendations via friends, concert/festival lineups and online forums, but that's just for my "main" genres. For other stuff, Spotify is quasi the only solution for me as well.
- Friends don't work for me. I don't know a single person who listens to even close to the things that I like. Sure there's some overlap occasionally, and I might hear about one artist once a week or month. I get dozens to hundreds recommended by spotify weekly, and I actually end up liking a handful of those. With friends, it also only works with known artists, and it's incredibly rare to get reommended something that isn't well known but happens to fit my taste by them (don't think that ever happened, actually). As an example just last week I got recommended an artist that has 60-something monthly listeners on Spotify (now 74!). I liked them so much I tried to see what I can find, and they got a youtube channel with 3 (live) videos and like 500-ish views each (38 subscribers). NOBODY is ever gonna recommend me those kinds of things, cause nobody ever heard of them, let alone anyone of my friends (and even if they have, they'd have to know to recommend them to me).
  As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful. I haven't used it in a VERY long time (decades), but last I did it was kinda "meh". You can also only start out with what you have, as you're scrobbling what you're listenting to. I no longer have most of the music I listen to daily as an actual file/library. So getting that up to date would probably cost thousands of dollars, too. Not to mention it being incredibly tedious to actually gather them on various individual shops and sites like bandcamp or wherever those artists happen to be.
  So as much as I wish there was, there isn't really a (pracical) alternative. Let alone one of the same "competence".
I believe plexamp will scan your library and will make the discovery-type playlist you're looking for
- First of all, after recent events I'm not touching anything from "Plex" with a proverbial 10 foot pole.
  But even that aside, no it won't do what I want because it can't. I can't discover something outside of my library with it. It's a music player for a Plex library. It can generate playlists of songs with similar styles, and that's nice and all, but not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for playlists of things I don't own, or know, or ever heard of, but that are still likely to be something I like. I don't want a sophisticated "shuffle".
Isn't Spotify just using an AI? Couldn't one self host an AI that plugs into the music library and makes recommendations?
- Yes it's using "an AI". But that doesn't mean anything. You can't just use any AI and have the same result. Just cause AI got a global hype doesn't mean this is new either. Neural networks have existed for many decades, which is likely what they're using. The hard part is to get the training data. That is where the value (or usefulnes) comes from. And that source is all their users, listening to all the music, importantly including newly released music, all the time. It's the basic idea of "people who liked X also liked Y". What songs people combine together in a playlist. That sort of thing.
  We don't have that data to train "an AI" so we have a local version of this. They have it for millions of users. That's why their AI is incredibly good at this task. Sure, they also let labels pay them to rank things higher so they get more listens, and that is anything but transparent when and how that happens. But over all, you can't just magically do what they are doing locally.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called "Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection." I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it's mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I'm not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don't think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I'm familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician's or band's stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I'll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don't have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It's never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

My music taste would never be on radio
Similarly my music taste is not on Spotify either
I still have a lossless music player to listen to music that likely my artists just decided to not have in Spotify
So no I don't think it's an apple to oranges things
Radio sucks ass
Spotify sucks a bit less ass
Self hosting your own collection is the future
- So edgy.

Author says "one-time server setup + storage" but there are a few moving parts and always updates to handle so I'm sceptical this could be truly called 'one time' (or any selfhosting). Time will tell I guess. I enjoyed the article though and gave me food for thought.

That quote relates to financial expenses compared to monthly Spotify subscription, not time and effort.
- Monthly Cost $9.99-$14.99 One-time server setup + storage
  The problem is that's not the monthly cost because (in addition to running a server not being a one time thing, they need maintenance) it's not including the cost to actually buy all the music:
  Digital purchases (Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon, etc.)
  For me:
  https://www.last.fm/user/ikt123/listening-report/year
  Paying for 7808 albums in 1 year is unfeasible, so this is not a replacement for Spotify for me, it could be though if you only listen to a tiny amount of music, at current rate of $15 a month for me, it's equal to like 1 album and like several smaller singles, if this is all you listen to in a month go for it.
- I’ve had it going for months now. Navidrome is very reliable and with docker, super easy to update should you so please.
  The rolling cost is my internet, which I’d have whether I’d have Navidrome or not.
- I see what you're saying but nowhere else in that table is cost mentioned. Below the table they say maintanance is minimal. If you're already looking after storage, containers and server(s) I guess that could be true.
Fingers crossed but I spun up a Navidrome container a couple of years ago, let Watchtower handle the updates, and never touched it again so far.

I really do hope that Funkwhale get their 2.0 release out soon, should make self-hosted Spotify-like stacks simpler to do, and the fact that it works for creation and distribution as well is great.

What a terrible website, its hard to understand exactly what this is
- Join a pod!

I'm self-hosting my own music as of recently. I'm paying for every song. I don't have as much music as I did on Spotify, but I'm also A) owning the music B) slowly acquiring more and C) actually paying the artists. For me this is a good step in the right direction.

I'm seeing a lot of comments about music discovery being the reason to not stop paying Spotify. Idk if that's something I'd agree with. First of all, I personally listen to singles and not albums but I've been buying albums simply because that's easiest for a lot of sites (or cause I'm getting them on vinyl). So swapping over has led me to listening to full albums and thus a bit of discovery. That may not apply to everyone though. Several of those albums or artists have had collabs that have turned me on to other artists, again, maybe the music discovery people think this is child's play but it's led to a noticable increase in my collection.

Second, can't you just use Spotify free version to discover music? That's what I plan to do if I'm feeling like my current collection is getting stale. But between friends, other web services for discovery, various platforms like YouTube that happen to unveil a song here and there, indie concerts that show off new openers to me, or what have you I feel like my discovery is more than sufficient to grow the list of music I need to pick up faster than I'm burning it down or becoming bored with it.

Also, I don't understand how discovery can represent a majority of a person's listening habits. Like isn't the point of collecting favorites songs and making large playlists to listen to those things. I've got playlists with like 48 hours of music on them which cause me to not hear a repeat idk, more than once a month if I'm not seeking them out. That's partially because I have 3 playlists or so I rotate through but like... Is music discovery so critical and so exclusive to Spotify that it's worth the subscription. More me it's not.

Not to yuck anyone's yum or anything. Just trying to add an alternative perspective to these pro-spotify comments.

The reasons for dropping Spotify are obvious, however pretext of this guide is that Spotify doesn't give enough back to artists. So the solution is to pirate it? I mean yeah sure, but don't kid yourself with the pretext.

How about a guide on ripping owned CDs?

I mean there's a whole block on this:
Lidarr is just a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused. Yes, people could point it at less-than-legal sources. No, I'm not telling you to do that. If you want to support artists, buy their work. If you don't, don't pretend Spotify streams are "support."
Important Note: Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels such as:
Digital purchases (Bandcamp, iTunes, Amazon, etc.)
Ripping CDs you've purchased
Free legal downloads offered by artists
Music available under Creative Commons licenses
And yes, I'll use this with my existing, mostly legally obtained, music collection. I don't mind the pirate stack though, it's far easier to just download the album than ripping your vinyl and tapes.
Pirate, then donate directly to artists.
- I think like this solution the best.
When you mainly listen to boomer artists who have made millions who gives a fuck
There's and endless supply of guides for ripping.
On Windows just use Exact Audio Copy - It can pull all the track info from multiple sources. I forget what I used on Linux.
The only moral theft is my theft.

Ive been using jellyfin for some years now, switched from subsonic when I got into films and TV shows.

I still love having my own music library, I can do what ever I need with the content. Also things to disappear at random.

There has been another post on Lemmy on replacing Spotify with a selfhosted stack. I already have an extensive music library, mostly ripped CDs and bandcamp purchases, but have been procrastinating a selfhosted setup for a while but I'll at least set up Navidrome and explore the options with listenbrainz etc.

Mediamonkey has a built in music server.