Hi! You know one now. While I stream music from Google Play (or Google Youtube Music, or whatever they've pivoted to), I still have all the mp3s - and for good reason, because Google Music consistently tried to switch many of my tracks for the "censored" versions, which I'd have to re-upload.

And Youtube Music isn't much better, and it's only a matter of time before their aggressive opinions on what's good for their consumers diverges from mine.

I'm not willing to let a company dictate which music I can listen to based on licensing agreements with yet another company. I try to buy my music directly from the creator, and keep it safe and sound.

Funkwhale will never be as large as Spotify, and that's fine. There is a niche for what they're offering.

Of course Spotify is popular and it may well be a demographics thing, but I wouldn't say that this describes a sample size of "nobody", or excludes everyone in America:

> Fans have paid artists $619 million using Bandcamp, and $18.3 million in the last 30 days alone.

And that is from Bandcamp alone. There are numerous other genre-specific sites that sell music, as well as Amazon, Google and others.

I can't speak for everyone, but one of the challenges of this relatively open market is managing music bought from different stores. Who wants 5 apps to stream from all these places? Funkwhale is really designed with a more libre/open source/communal spirit, but happens to be excellent at doing this for individuals too.

I live in the US. I had probably 800 albums or so in 1986 when I started re-buying most of them as CDs. In the late 90s I spent weeks ripping them to 192kbps MP3s via lame. Since then I've bought many hundreds more CDs, though recently it is usually just buying mp3s directly from bandcamp or from amazon. On occasion I will buy the physical CD because it is cheaper than a digital-only mp3 option. I just checked and I have a bit over 20,000 songs.

My family has a spotify account. In the past we used pandora. I have tried them both but I always immediately come back to playing albums from my own collection.

I'm in my mid 50s, and I grew up listening to album-oriented rock (AOR), and not just a stream of pop hits. I still prefer to listen to albums start to end. When an album ends, I judge my mood and think what album fits it and put that one on. That is something spotify doesn't do for me.

People that enjoy listening to music -- audiophiles, DJs, music producers, musicians, etc -- often search out and download their favorite tunes, .flac and .wav specifically, simply b/c these formats have higher fidelity to the master mix. Granted, not everyone cares about high-fidelity audio, and that's ok too.