I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack | Hacker News Reader

I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack

leshicodes.github.io

279 pointsstarkparker296 comments

So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?

In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.

The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.

I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'

Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?

I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.

Does the record company make more money than the artist? That’s unfair to me.

The people making the art, should be paid the most.

Why?

That's the way they feel. Why do you think it shouldn't be that way?

> The people making the art, should be paid the most.

Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular.

If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.

> They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.

more than zero can still be too little money in exchange for the labor provided and the profit produced.

If the value that others get from it is not worth the effort that someone puts into making it, then we say it's unsustainable. You can't make people give you money, to cover the cost of something they don't want. And, that goes for the entire chain of human effort that is from the artist to the listener.

There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload. * maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song. * creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people. * creates ads to recommend the service to people. * ...etc

If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case).

If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort.

We live in a society.

and yet, artists are paid fractions of pennies for the privilege of allowing their music to be streamed while streaming company owners make millions and millions of dollars and put that money into machines that kill children. some society.

Or, the reality is that everyone in the chain of effort wants, and deserves, a bit of money in their pocket, for their efforts. If that chain means nothing comes out the other end, it doesn't mean there's a problem with society, it means that the tech isn't there yet to make the chain shorter/cheaper. I'll leave that advancement to you! You can do the right thing, the thing nobody else wants to do, and make the service that solves this issue. As others have said, distribution costs are near zero, so, it must be easy!

With streaming, distribution costs are effectively zero. There is marketing but only up front. Nobody’s marketing 1970s rock bands anymore but they still get a lot of listens.

>There's a fair market value for the art

Fair ain't got nothing to do with it. Markets don't give a shit about 'fair'.

Too true. For clarification, unhinged "free market" is how you end up with capitalism, try the the same with the "fair market" you get communism.

With unhinged free market you get monopolists and no free market.

Fair from the perspective of the person doing the work. I'm using the dictionary definition of "fair" here: A fair exchange is an interaction or agreement where both parties feel they are receiving something of equal value for what they give, resulting in satisfaction and balance rather than resentment or guilt. I'm not using the "living wage" definition, which is a phrase that's not related to the definition of the individual words that it uses.

If they didn't find the compensation fair, for their effort, they wouldn't do the work, and would do something else instead. You want to see positions that that are at the boundary of "fair"? They have incredibly high turnover rates, because people think "this isn't worth it" and quit. Where I am, fast food is a great example of this, where the companies weren't paying wages people wanted to work for, leading to unsustainable turnover, labor shortages, then pay increases.

It seems like no one understands what a record deal is. Or an advance. Or publishing rights.

No one needs to sign a record deal. Or take an advance (which is a loan).

It’s like VC money. There are plenty of threads here which recommend not taking VC money and bootstrapping instead.

And yes, some artists self fund, self publish and self-upload. I’m not defending Spotify or streaming rates, just saying platitudes don’t seem sufficiently nuanced or informed.

I agree. The networking, distribution and expertise is a huge leg up in most cases. Not everyone can vulfpeck.

If I buy a machine, then hire a worker to make a widget. And I sell that widget for $20 but pay him $10 is that fair? The machine, shipping, sales, marketing, inventory arent free.

I'm a pretty dyed in the wool anarchist, and I'd say most leftists would say, "of course costs for capital should be considered in prices." The objection is when your costs are $5 for non labor, $10 for labor and you sell the part for $20. Where's that excess value going? Maybe once the costs of the machines are paid off, the workers should all get raises, right?

This is often the case where one side is an expert at contracts and business and the other side is an artist.

I went to a show recently and the band was performing old material and they stopped to make a big deal about how they finally won back their music after 10 years. Famously Prince and Taylor Swift also went public with their disputes.

Good for them, but they signed the contract that locked up their rights for a decade. It seems weird to get too upset at the label for what you thought was a good deal at the time.

I don't know a ton of the specifics for music, but I am not sure if I agree your statement is always true. A lot can go into producing and distributing music, and I don't think it is fair to say the artist should always make more than all the other people who work on making the music happen combined. It isn't just a 'company' making that money, it is all the people working behind the scenes, all the investment in equipment and things, etc. I would need a lot more info on cost breakdown before I say the blanket statement of "the artist should make more"

In the world we've built, mainstream success isn't defined by ability or quality, but rather polish and marketing reach. Marketing works because the average human is pretty shallow.

Would it be different if we started over? Maybe.

I’m not sure about this accounting. I know some artists with very successful songs and they made nothing substantial from millions of streams

Could it be that the streaming platform pays 0.005 which then gets divided amongst the whole band, and then the label takes their cut for producing and marketing it?

Whereas before, the label was simply giving 10%?

I managed a few artists in the past. Usually Spotify paid something like $0.0035 per stream but it ranges based on where the listen took place. One artist owned part of their catalog so earned the 100% on those streams. The rest of their catalog was owned by a major label where they were credited 15% of the streaming take (which was slightly higher than the direct rate) towards their unrecouped major label account.

I'd say overall though, streaming can be good for artists. It helps keep them fresh in fans ears (via auto-generated & editorial playlists) and provides a revenue stream for the older stuff that would never be selling in stores or iTunes now.

Question (You may or may not have insight): What happens when I download a playlist and listen to it offline in my car on an hours long roadtrip? Do my “streams” get counted once I get back online? Does the artist get credit for an estimated number of streams based on typical patterns? Does the artist get bupkis since I might play a song ten times but it wasn’t technically streamed to me?

It is also implied that the author is now pirating their music, so now instead of the artist getting some money from the author, they get none.

The author says they buy the albums.

"Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by:

Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales Buying physical media from official stores Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists Attending concerts and buying merchandise Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further.

My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."

I assumed a lot of that was a disclaimer to try and avoid encouraging illegal activity outright.

Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.

Lidarr isn't just for piracy, it's a good tool for keeping your library organised.

It does musicbrains matching, fixes the metadata based on that, fetches pretty pictures of the artist etc.

There are other tools for it, but Lidarr is what works for me.

They specifically mention: lidarr is connected to sabnzbd. They add 'to download music I bought' but I find that very hard to believe.

Since when do sites like band camp etc expose your bought library over usenet?

He is implying that he only downloads music from usenet that he purchased in some form somewhere else. Whether that is any less illegal, I don't know.

Artists no longer make money from selling music. They make money from live performances, or niche products like vinyl records/merch. But from streaming services? Not really.

Live performances also have the added benefit of shielding artists from AI music.

The article says they purchase from bandcamp which takes less than 20%, and support them on patreon.

I used to work with a former member of a moderately successful rock band (they had a song in Guitar Hero, for example). He'd talk a bit about the royalties he'd received. His royalties from Spotify were negligible. Like single digit dollars per month.

Think about a ~$15/hour job. A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that. Only the top fraction of a percentage of artists on Spotify hit that.

Music has always been a tough business with middle men taking the lion's share of the upside. Streaming services just add another layer of middlemen.

> A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that

How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc.

I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.

how much did their label get?

I can't say whether the music industry fairly compensates artists or not. I can say that the film industry, for example, has leveraged each subsequent evolution in distribution technology as on opportunity to shift profits towards distributors and away from those involved in production.

> how little money per stream artists make ... What is fair compensation for writing a song?

Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?

The reason compensation isn't a settled thing is it's a very complex thing to answer.

The simplest possible answer is "the artist sets their own price" - assuming they just DIY'd the entire production, advertising, distribution, etc themselves. But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all, not to mention all the non-music skills if they're not paying professionals to do the rest.

If they're not just going to play at the local coffee shop, or bus from city to city barely making enough for gas and beer, they need some way to professionally produce, mass-market, and mass-distribute their songs. It's not feasible for most musicians to do this themselves, so there exists a music industry to do it... which gives them all the cards... letting them set the price, and contract terms... which are often unfair. That's what happens when an industry is given the power to exploit people: they do.

> Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?

Why are any of these the distribution medium's (or better, listener's) problem? The songwriter, recording studio, audio engineer, marketing firm, etc should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed. The artist is the one who should accept this risk. Just like.. basically everything else in the world. The plumber who installed an office sink is not entitled to some fraction of the occupying organization's revenue, right?

> But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all

Which is why labels exist. They take the risk on, and pre-pay for (everything), in exchange for the lion's share of potential revenue. Artists are, of course, welcome to stay unsigned and handle all the risk and rewards themselves, but that typically isn't a good value prop.

IMO everything here is working as designed, including Spotify. The author just doesn't understand that "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" is exactly what should happen.

> should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed

Because by and large they don't want that. They are creatives who would prefer to be invested in their work: Charge less now, putting more into their work in the hope and belief that it will pay off over time. Sometimes it does.

This is still rent seeking behavior in an industry that pivoted from a live services and paid ownership model.

Nothing wrong with rent-seeking when you actually offer something people want, it's optional, and you don't force them with bait-and-switch (all of which are cases of the bad rent-seeking).

Renting a house is rent-seeking too, for example.

Switching Adobe to a subscription service, on the other hand...

how is that rent-seeking?

they actually contribute to the song.

I don't think you can call it rent seeking when it's both completely nonessential and 100% the fruit of their labors. If anything, Spotify is rent-seeking.

Part of what's wrong with the industry. Steve Albini had a flat fee and was one of the most sought after recording engineers (aka producer but he hated the term). And that was based on the quality of his work moreso than his modest, flat fee.

A producer is not remotely the same thing as a recording engineer?

He usually did the job of a producer but he didn't like the term, as he wanted the artist to get all of the credit for creating the art, even through the producer often plays a big role in the final product.

Producers also often contribute singing, instrument playing, and songwriting, so the distinction between them and the "artist" is pretty flimsy. In ways, artist is as much defined as "the person that gets all of the credit for creating the art" as anything else.

People don't actually care about answering this question, they just want to steal music and keep a 'clean' conscience.

I think the opposite is actually true - people want to pay for music, but in a way that compensates the artists they like without enriching someone who 'only' provides the mechanism that they use to listen. People rail against Spotify, music labels, and TicketMaster for extracting so much money from the music industry that there's very little left for people who actually make the music.

The music industry has made millionaires out of people who would otherwise just be playing or singing in a room.

The software industry has made millionaires out of people that would otherwise just be hacking or debugging in a room.

Nope! I just think the business model is rotten. I worked at Amazon MP3 back in the day, mostly because I adored the concept of people paying to download DRM-free files. Same reason I use GOG for my games: I have a lot of money waiting for people that want to sell me files that I have control over.

But the industry moved another direction, and they want ultimate control over everything: not just the songs themselves, but the clients to play them and everything in between. And the tragedy is they screw the artists just as much as customers. Copyright has been captured by the middlemen at the expense of the artists and audiences: that's the real reason people have no respect for the industry, and why copyright is so reviled.

Without giving specific numbers, I think the following situation is inherently unfair:

I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.

They on average pass approximately 70% on, but the record labels also eat heavily into that before the artists get their share.

I'm reminded of an effort a few years ago to legislate the creators getting 50% - which of course meant the "platforms" and the "labels" would collectively share only the other 50%. Which is presumably why the initiative failed.

> The three major labels - Sony, Universal and Warner Music - faced some of the toughest questioning of the inquiry, and were accused of a "lack of clarity" by MPs.

> They largely argued to maintain the status quo, saying any disruption could damage investment in new music, and resisted the idea that streaming was comparable to radio - where artists receive a 50/50 royalty split.

> "It is a narrow-margin business, so it wouldn't actually take that much to upset the so-called apple cart," said Apple Music's Elena Segal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473

These days Spotify has hundreds of millions for Joe Rogan and podcast investments, and Apple reports a 75% profit margin on services, so I guess it is quite profitable for everyone except the actual artists.

indeed - record company exec salaries don't come out of the ether, that's money that could otherwise go in the artists' pockets

Apple Music is a miniscule part of service revenue compared to App Store, payments from Google ($20 Billion a year), AppleCare, etc.

Right, and before you even get into password sharing you have stuff like this: Apple Family Plan: Costs $25.95 per month, includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud+ storage, and allows sharing with up to five other people

So $5.20/mo per head and you get TV, games and storage with it.

Or Spotify Family Plan - 6 Premium accounts for family members under one roof. $11.49/month

So family plans seem to discount unlimited music streaming down to $2/mo per head.

$24/year or what a single CD used to cost, before even doubling it for inflation..

If I pay Spotify $20 and listen to one song one, surely they don't send that artist $14...

They don’t. What happens is that your listen is pooled with all listens of all songs, and every payout the artist/label gets a check for the percentage of that total listening pool. For small artists that have relatively few listens, they don’t get almost any money.

So it doesn’t matter if Spotify passes on 70%, most artists aren’t going to see any substantial portion of that, label or not.

The record company representing that one artist also does not get $7 of the $10.

shameless plug:

SoundCloud implements a "fan powered royalties" model, so that $10 in your example goes to those who artists who you stream

https://community.soundcloud.com/fanpoweredroyalties

I have often thought this method made more sense. It should not be total revenue / total streams, it should be what a single person pays going to exactly what they listen to.

It isn’t fair that someone who listens to a ton of things has a much greater say in how the money is distributed even though they pay the same as someone who only listens to one artist.

By that logic the most fair would be pay per play for every song, with some fraction to the artist. But subscribers really like the single payment for unlimited plays model.

It would just mean your total fixed subscription cost is apportioned across all of the artists you play in the month in proportion. It’s not an extremely difficult calculation.

Yeah that would work, but then the more you listen the less each artist gets per stream. Which is less fair to the artists, especially for subscribers who listen to a wide range of artists.

Why is it less fair? The artist gets less revenue per stream, but it doesn’t cost the artist more per stream, and they are earning the revenue per user.

For example, let’s imagine a subscription service with just two users, paying $10 a month and each only listens to a single artist. The first user listens to their favorite album once a day, while the second user listens to their favorite album 9 times a day.

Would it be fair for the artist the first person listens to to only earn $2 while the other artist earns $18? Why should the money spent by the fan of Artist A be used to subsidize the support of artist B, even though they never listen to their stream?

This quirk of “divide by total streams” instead of “divide each users subscription by their particular stream” has lead to a type of fraud where someone will submit a song to Spotify, then create thousands of accounts that just listen to that song 24/7. Those 24/7 listening accounts have unfair say in who gets paid, so much so that you can make more than the subscription price just by having that user stream your songs.

Whether that is the most ‘fair’ method or not, a pay per play model wouldn’t be the best for either listeners, artists, or streaming company.

There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.

No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.

The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.

In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.

There's just one problem with your model. There's no royalty difference between a Spotify subscriber playing one song vs 1000 songs if it's just % of subscriber's listening time. Someone who gets more plays by absolute numbers is going to be upset when they don't get a proportionate amount of money. The only way to make more money on Spotify is to get more fans and/or convince your existing fans to listen to fewer artists.

This is a popular HN suggestion for disbursement but it makes the math super weird.

This isn't likely to happen or change, but what if subscribers were instead billed by usage? If you streamed 24 hours a day for the whole month, that could round out to $10 a month, but if less, then simply a proportional percentage.

Spotify would never forgo current profits from flat monthly plans, but then why shouldn't artists be granted the same advantages in royalties proportional to a subscriber's ratio of playtime if the subscribers are charged a flat rate any how?

I just found out Spotify is $20? In my country it's less than $3. Why the huge pricing difference.

It usually comes down to cost of living in the county.

Speaking of Spotify, they apparently just updated their Terms of Use as of September 3, 2025, effective September 26, 2025. From the email I received:

> We have clarified that you may only access the version of the Spotify service available where you live at the applicable price set for that version of the service.

> We have clarified how we bill you for subscriptions and how subscriptions may be canceled.

> We have provided more information about different ways in which content may be posted or shared on the platform.

> We have also provided more information about our content policies and practices, and our personalized recommendations.

> We have included links to important user policies and guidelines for your ease of reference.

> We are making some updates to the arbitration agreement.

Found some more discussion of pricing issues:

https://old.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/1n4x58f/spoti...

And this change was not called out in the email, but seems interesting to note:

https://musictechpolicy.com/2025/09/02/ai-implications-of-sp...

YouTube have done the same with the Premium subscription. From the email I received:

> We are updating the Terms of Service for YouTube Premium, YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium Lite subscriptions ('Terms'). These new Terms will be included in the YouTube Paid Service Terms of Service and will come into effect on September 26, 2025.

> We are making these changes to improve clarity and transparency regarding your subscription, including:

    Clarifying our plan types.
    Explaining our policies on promotional offers and accepted payment methods.
    Clarifying that your subscription access should be predominantly from the country where you signed up.
    Providing additional explanations and clarifications on our subscription policies.

I believe that the date may be the end of Q3 for the financial year, if I had to guess, which might explain the similar moves by both parties, though I'll admit that I'm speculating on that point. There's a lot of overlap in vested interests on Spotify and YouTube, when it comes to music especially.

I guess it's time to cancel my youtube premium sub since it's US-based but I no longer live there and it's not available where I live now.

One of the big differences between the old days and today is that you have exponentially more musicians releasing music every day due to how easy it is for bedroom producers to create and release tracks with very little barrier to entry. I can create 10 songs in a weekend on my laptop in my basement and send them out to all of the major streaming services for about 20 bucks.

This floods the market with many, many independent musicians trying to get heard. And the only way to get heard today is to make it onto curated Spotify playlists, build a following, and hope that someone at a record company somewhere hears you and takes interest. Not only is Spotify a tool for consuming music by the public, it is also the main way that musicians have to promote themselves anymore.

As a musician (who gave up the dream of making this a job long ago), it really sucks. There is infinitely more competition out there now, and when you factor in all the AI crap making it on to Spotify (some of which they are responsible for), it is even worse.

What style of music were you making? I suspect, and this goes for more than just the music industry, that it helps if you're a natural self-promoter.

Not GP, but I believe Polyphia [1] self-produces on a laptop in a bedroom (or at least did when they started out?).

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU

I make 90'S-ish indie rock. I play all the instruments (drums, guitar, bass, keys) and sing.

Having to self-promote is the main struggle, and that's the only way to "make it" anymore. Similar with the book publishing industry. My wife spent a year writing an amazing book, paying an editor, but when shopping it around to publishers, none of them would bite because she didn't already have a social media following. They expect you to have 20k followers knowing that X percent of those will buy the product.

And any time spent self-promoting (especially before launch) is time not spent on the key creation itself. I imagine having a natural interest in it and/or then a very low-touch habit of creating and promoting is important. e.g., set up a camera as part of the writing or recording process, and find a highly-imperfect option for editing the resulting media for upload.

Maybe a market-based approach is inherently flawed for things like art, research, various services (health, education, etc)

> So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making?

The value of recorded music is now zero.

Recorded music having A value was a result of markup on distribution profits. There is now no money in distribution. (There are a lot of parallels between how globalization works and how the record industry worked but thats another conversation).

ML, generative music is coming for the music industry.

Its not hopeless but your Spotify is just a loss leader. It's a gateway to your social media, to your (paid) endorsements and to your shows (another problematic facet of the industry) and merch. There are plenty of ways people with talent and a "voice" can profit. But you better be consistent and authentic.

Now ask how much global distribution used to cost. It's $40/yr right now with Spotify. That alone makes Spotify a massive boon for artists. Any bedroom artists complaining about Spotify just don't understand the industry at all. It's a performance art and always will be. If you can't get people to come to your shows or don't even play shows, well, look inward.

A better comparison is the pre-streaming royalties from radio and Muzak.

> The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005.

Not saying it's perfect, but Qobuz is paying[1] ~3.5x that.

I've been trying it out as a Spotify alternative, fairly pleased so far, though the "radio" feature in Spotify is better at finding new tracks I like.

That said I buy albums on Bandcamp for stuff I really enjoy.

[1]: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...

I think I may think about it in the opposite direction. It's not that the artist makes too little, for me it's just that the platform makes too much. Spotify _should_ be taking a 5-10% cut, and anything above that is unfair.

That's not enforcable or anything, but it is why I think artist are paid too little while also thinking the subscription is expensive.

I was always a fan of not per stream but of percentage based minutes listened. I spend 15€ every month, take off taxes and Spotify operating expenses, which would be like 10€ left: - I listen to X 90% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 9€.

- I listen to Y 10% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 1€

I think this would be fair, because I kinda listen the same minutes every month, and most people with a fixed daily schedule probably do it too.

I'd say I pay 10€ per month and it gets evenly split by the artists's songs I've listened to that month.

If I only listen to one song or rather one artist. They get all the money (minus the fees for running the service).

If I listen to 100 songs by 100 artists, each gets only 10 cents (minus the blablabla).

That's how it should be, really.

Why do you choose the CD era as your comparison point? Why not cassettes, or the LP decades? The industry has changed a lot and choosing a different baseline is illuminating to any discussion of "fair" compensation.

What hasn't changed is the fact that vertically integrated distribution-and-promotion with large market share has all the leverage, all the information, and all the legislative influence. In any time period where that exists, the same result plays out through different media.

That is to say, in terms of negotiating power, free market economics, and political influence the artist is not just strongly disadvantaged, but artificially so. It's not a David and Goliath, it's more like David and the Death Star.

When Roger Fischer, Adam Smith, and Jack Abramoff would all agree that one side probably needs some extra support, it's a good bet that "fair" lies so far on the other side of the scale that we don't have to worry about precision or philosophy of "fairness" to make a big improvement.

Because CD has not been superseded by any other physical media? Nobody sells music on an USB stick or on a microSD card. If I go to buy music, it will be always CD.

> CD has not been superseded by any other physical media

What's a Blu-ray DVD disk then?

If there still was a mass market for music on physical media, CDs would have been superseded, either by an optical disk or some kind of SD card.

But there isn't. so it hasn't.

Where can I buy music on a Blu-ray DVD? They are simply more expensive, while nobody needs the extra space for music data. At least where I live music is only sold on CD. There are new vinyl disks being produced for a retro market, but a player for these needs significantly more space then a Compact Disc. In addition to buying a new player I would also be bound to only play music at home. Every car has a CD tray, my laptop has one, I have several players at home.

> Where can I buy music on a Blu-ray DVD

The format and equipment exists, it's called "blu ray audio"

The fact that it's not in widespread use is my point exactly: the mass market isn't there any more.

> Every car has a CD tray,

I think that will go the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. Cars have bluetooth.

> my laptop has one,

CD players on laptops literally have gone the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. They're rare to non-existent on new models.

> I have several players at home.

So do I - they're in a box somewhere.

You're not refuting my point at all - there's not successor to CDs, not because it's a perfect, modern medium for physical music. But just because there is no longer a mass market for music on any physical media.

> The fact that it's not in widespread use is my point exactly: the mass market isn't there any more.

Their might not be a mass market for neither, but these are not available in the same scale at all. You maybe can find blu ray audio somewhere on the internet, but I've never seen them, while the the music store has hundreds of CDs and every street musician and band sells CDs.

I honestly do not know what the selling point of a Blu-ray disk is. The form factor is exactly the same and nobody needs the capacity. The capacity of a DVD is already too large, why should anyone use a Blue-ray disk? Neither want the musicians produce and sell more than some hours of music, nor do consumers need music for days without interruption. There simply is no kind of music which takes more than a few hours.

So the only difference is that the disk is more expensive and the player is likely incompatible, so hardly a benefit.

> So do I - they're in a box somewhere.

I was only talking about players in use.

I recall reading a report somewhere that vinyl sales are higher than CD sales in the US.

I don't know anything about the data. But I literally just purchased a record player that my soon to be 14 year old daughter requested for her birthday. She doesn't have and has never requested a CD player.

Right, and the same argument applies: "But a USB/MicroSD format would carry more bits in a smaller space than CDs, and be less fragile, it's just a more convenient physical format for music!"

But a) there is no mass market for any physical format any more. It's driven by nostalgia. And b) There's more nostalgia for Vinyl than for CDs simply because they were the main medium for much longer. Of course CDs are less fragile and bulky than Vinyl, just like SD cards are less fragile and bulky than CDs, and streaming on existing devices is even more convenient. But that's not the driving factor. It's all fun until someone leaves their Vinyl record collection in a hot car for a few hours.

I think microSD cards are a bit to small to be convenient. They easily get lost or broken. USB has a nice form factor for storing and transport but the UX for the player is worse, as the stick doesn't vanish in the player like a CD or a microSD card. I think the best UX, would be an SD card the size of a bank card, that can be put in a slot, but the marginal difference to a CD is really low.

How much they should make I'd say is up to how much you value them. If you really like an artist and want to support them, a objectively better way than just streaming their music is purchasing their albums, vinyls, merch, etc.

Spotify isn’t setting a market price, so I’m not sure what your argument is here.

Setting a market price means a band in really high demand can charge X dollars but a new band, that isn’t well known and doesn’t have high demand could charge X/4 dollars.

Spotify OTOH, charges exactly the same price to the user no matter what song they listen to, and the price is “Monthly cost/number of songs listened to”. Unsurprisingly, instead of leading to the promotion and creation of a whole new set of bands, which is what the democratization of tools and knowledge of music through the internet should have led to, this has instead led to consolidation because the removal of the market price and setting a flat structure means people continue to flock towards the songs that are perceived to be the highest value, ie the most popular stuff.

That isn't how Spotify distributes their revenue

> Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.

From here: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding...

>So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?

The amount they'd get for royalties if you couldn't pirate but had to buy their album/single to hear it. So similar to what they got at the pre-mp3/pre-Napster era. Remove a little for the (non existing) physical costs.

(Whether they'd actually get 100% or 0.5% of those royalties would be between them and their record company contract).

"But this is streaming"

And my argument still is: you should pay the amount analogous to buying it once, and then stream it forever or zero times. Streaming should just add the convenience, not change the pricing.

That's why I like bandcamp. Artists choose the price for their music and I'm free to pay that price, or more, if I think that's fair compensation.

> I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen?

Fundamentally, inflation-adjusted there are 1/2 as many dollars coming in the front end to the US music industry in the 2020s as there were in the 90s peak, per most sources... even though population is 30% higher. So per-capita music spend in inflation adjusted dollars is down like 60-65%. And there's probably far more artists to spread that around to now with the long tail of bedroom producers / part timers / etc all the way up to Swift.

So surely artists are making less than they used to, regardless of how the pie is sliced up because there is a smaller pie. Given the trend in everything else in our economy, I am dubious that the newer streaming arrangements are incrementally more artist-friendly than the old physical media music industry.

>… should be able to earn money from <activity>…

I wonder what forms our perception of what activity should be able to earn money from and what should not. I know that me being a professional nap taker should not be able to earn money from it, but when does one activity turn into ‘should be able to earn money from’?

Recently I gave up on Apple Music. The clients had gotten so bad from a UX perspective that I found it frustrating to use. Especially on desktop. There is also no easy way to cache your _entire_ library to disk. Other services+clients are heaps of Electron that I'd rather avoid.

It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around:

0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known.

1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging.

2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS.

3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid.

4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music.

5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5].

All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department.

[0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms

[1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag

[2] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://swinsian.com

[5] https://tailscale.com

Just to pile on the terrible Apple Music UI — it's so unnatural and baffling to me. One example that really takes the cake is that there is no ability to set a sleep timer in the app. After having to google it, the only way I've found is to set a timer in the Clock app and change its ringtone to be an "action" of stopping all playing audio. WHY???

Well, that's Apple and iOS for you in a nutshell. I found out about it the hard way as well. I have mixed feelings about Apple's products and design, but that may be one of the most stupid things I know of.

I've started buying cds cheap and ripping them. It's kind of incredible how much music you can stockpile legally for the same amount you're paying for a monthly sub. I have a pretty similar stack to yours and with tailscale makes it very convenient to have my own streaming platform anywhere. Plus I have many albums that simply don't exist on streaming. Downside is there are some albums that are streaming only, mostly soundtracks from Disney. I get those from Qobuz since they let you download flac.

Apple Music costs $10.99 per month in the US.

How much music can I stockpile legally with that?

Last time I checked, a CD easily costs $12, excluding shipping. Not to mention that I probably listen to at least one new album per day.

Curious how your math works.

Thrift stores are .99 to 2.99. The local library has a for sale section with a massive selection of music. Ranging from .49 on up. Ebay is good for more rare albums but there's so many shops selling them also for dirt cheap free ship, to the point where I don't even know how they profit.

I've also had amazing luck going to estate sales and just asking if I can buy them all out. The last one I paid under 10 cents a cd. People just want to get rid of their 'old tech no one uses anymore'.

Most people realistically are listening to the same music multiple times over multiple months. If you listen to a different album every day you do kinda fall outside of the norm and ya, that would probably make streaming a better choice.

> I probably listen to at least one new album per day

this is absolutely not typical of the average listener

LMS is in cpp and not c

Just added my old music collection to my private Jellyfin server on my home network. The UI for music is not as polished as some focused alternatives like Navidrome or FunkWhale, but it's good enough... And I like having both fewer apps installed on my devices and fewer discrete services running on my homelab.

It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.

If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:

* https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art.

* https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files.

If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).

I recently switched to Jellyfin when Plex started charging for remotely accessing my home server.

For anyone considering it, I found Tailscale + Jellyfin work a charm. There aren't great docs for doing so, and I beat my head against it for a little bit, but all you need to do really is to add both your local IP range and the Tailscale IP range to the allowed ranges for Jellyfin.

With that, any device on your tailnet can access it. I went further and set up a cloud VM with a public web address behind an auth, installed Tailscale on the VM, and set it up to reverse proxy port 443 to the Jellyfin tailscaleIP:port on my tailnet. So now I can get to it through any web browser or Jellyfin app on devices that aren't on my tailnet.

I'm extremely happy with the results, and the nice thing is that unlike Plex this setup is never subject to forced changes in the future.

The problem is that PlexAmp is literally the killer feature of Plex. Literally no open source software comes close. It would be great if it did, and I would switch, but it’s the only app that even remotely competes with Spotify for me for that reason.

Never used PlexAmp but I'm happy with FinAmp

FWIW, for music in my car and on my phone, I only used Plex and use Jellyfin as a failover. I just use Pi Music Player and I keep my whole MP3 collection on a memory chip, so I don't have to be online at all. Whenever I pull the chip out of my phone and put it into my laptop to copy and remove my photos (cloud backup? no thanks) I update the mp3 folder.

Finamp isn’t there yet but it is closing the gap to Plexamp.

Curious. When are you seeing Plex charging? I am using it remotely from a home server and see nothing about paying for anything.

It’s been that way for years now, it’s all on their website https://www.plex.tv/plans/

If you want to stream from outside your local network you need to pay. Hardware transcoding is also paywalled now, along with a bunch of other things.

Where I live, it was always free to stream from outside your LAN until July 2025. Maybe that's because I had used it for a long time and was grandfathered in, I don't know.

I bought a discounted lifetime Plexpass at least a decade ago. Still, I’m gradually moving over to Jellyfin because Plex has made a ton of business decisions that feel user hostile.

What's the point of the tailscale setup of you have a reverse proxy open to the net anyway?

The easiest way for the VM to reverse proxy stuff to my home server (without tracking my residential dynamic IP and messing with my router / NAT) is for the VM to be on tailscale too..then I can just proxy calls on the VM to the home server's tailscale address.

If you're asking why I bother to use tailscale on my phone to connect Jellyfin that way instead of just using the reverse proxy, I guess it saves me a little in bandwidth costs and it pings faster.

I suppose that makes sense... I guess tailscale doesn't need NAT config?

I have a dynamic IP in theory, but if I keep the router plugged in with less than 30 minutes downtime, I can keep the same IP for years.

Feishin, used by the author as well, supports Jellyfin.

As for mobile, while Symphonium supports Jellyfin, I prefer Finamp as it maintains the split from multiple music libraries.

I'm always glad to see people move away from Spotify's model and towards options that better support artists directly, and I definitely don't mean this to take anything away from the article despite how it sounds, but just seeing the system diagram reminds me that it's amazing the lengths that systems-minded people will go to to create their own Rube Goldberg-esque systems to 'optimise' the experience.

I counted thirteen separate components. If it works for the author then more power to them, but I personally want to spend less time futzing with technology when it comes to this kind of thing and more time actually just actively listening to new music.

I buy from Bandcamp or Apple, sync locally, and I'm done. Bandcamp's iOS app is better than Apple's Music at this point (though not a hard bar to reach). And I find new music organically from listener-supported streaming public radio.

I haven't mentioned analysis or recommendations, but honestly I so rarely seem to find anything through the typical algorithms and recommendation-type mechanisms that I genuinely like, and stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons.

Still, a good starting point for people wanting their own similar setup.

> stumbling across something new just from having public radio on in the background still feels magical, organic, and overall such a good way to broaden your musical horizons.

I've largely given up on algorithmic recommendations and gone back to human curation. There are humans out there writing about music, movies, and everything in culture. I've found the ones whose tastes I largely trust, and I follow them via RSS to read about the things I might like.

Are some of those critics probably using algorithms themselves? Sure. Let them dive into that swamp and pull out the gems. I'll stay on the shore, watch, and wait.

> human curation

More and more I feel like recommendation algorithms for discovery of anything seem to just not actually work for finding things which are new and exciting, but perhaps that's by definition.

If information is surprise then the most interesting things are those which aren't like the things I already know. And the easiest way to find those things I find is to just tune in to something where you don't know what you'll hear, and simply wait. That's it. It might take a while, but I bet you'll find something that feels new, exciting and perhaps expands your tastes a bit. And what could be better?

Absolutely. I've made several new Spotify and Pandora accounts over the years. Initially they offer good recommendations but eventually the algorithms always aggressively funnel down to the same 2-to-3 dozen similar-sounding songs (though its a different set of songs with each new account). Once trapped in that algorithmic tarpit, the only thing to do is start over, which is annoying. Now I let myself discover things via human critics or just in the course of life.

I use the song radio mode to find tracks relevant to distinct songs that I've enjoyed recently, and I find this incredibly effective at unearthing new material that I really like. For many years, I've had no trouble with this finding new artists and quite different songs. Then if I've listened to those a few times, that seems to populate Discover Weekly with a new angle.

This. I don't need another tech stack to maintain. Music stored on a disk, played via VLC. For underway, I have a copy of the music on my phone.

KISS

I really want to do this but like any hobby it takes too much time. My biggest frustration as a youtube music user is that the app doesn't appreciate that it might not always have a good internet connection and takes forever to fallback to your downloads when loading the library.

If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(

If you just want independence, just start collecting MP3s or CDs or whatever. I've been collecting physical music since the mid 90s and my whole MP3 collection is still under 128GBs, so I just copy it anywhere I want it now. Unless you really put some effort into it, storage will probably grow faster than your collection will.

Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.

The large flac/mp3 collect I have from my ripped CDs is the reason I even consider it. I just find the toil to be not worth it over minor foibles I have with streaming music. It would sure be nice though to have the time.. I operate software at work for a living. I don't want to come home and operate it too :( Was all about it in HS and college though.

If you've already got it, I'm not exactly sure what you think the toil is? You just copy it places. Maybe just the MP3s for things like phones. Then use an MP3 player.

If you mean the inaccuracies of the metadata, again, you just peck at it as it bothers you. You don't have to fix it all at once. Any decent MP3 player can do searches for specific songs. Nor do you have to do a hard cut from streaming services.

I do have it all hooked up on Syncthing so my changes stay in sync but that's not exactly a hard thing. It's only marginally harder than a straight copy, and sometimes honestly even a bit easier given how dodgy phones can be about large normal copies.

I did this to a 500 disc colection in fits and starts and it was a bit of drudgery for the final push with three drives running at once. the biggest issue is ensuring metadata is up to snuff. Lots of CD-text has garbage capitalization. Cover art can be crappy or unavailable. Musicbrainz hashes have occasional collisions forcing you to manually enter titles.

I want to do this too, and have a feeling that it's not as hard or time-consuming as it seems. 15 years ago, all my music lived in a /Music folder and I could play anything in there, instantly. It should be easy to just move that folder to a networked drive, get some sort of mp3 player app on my phone/devices, and point it at that folder. If the app is allowed to download files as well, that's even better. Otherwise, plugging in my phone/mp3 player and uploading songs manually was never particularly difficult, even back then.

If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.

You can more or less do this with apps that will stream your library off Google Drive. The one I tried demanded permissions to read everything in my Google Drive which seemed too dangerous, but if you had a separate cloud drive somewhere you could set it up pretty easily.

I believe it's too risky to have DMCA-able content in Google Drive.

Maybe, though I will point out that Google did/does offer this as a service:

https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en

The VLC app can read and play from networked drives, at least on my iPad.

Run a DLNA server and you client options grow.

Not sure what platform you're using youtube music on but there are a few open source third-party apps for android that may have better offline functionality (though I have not either of them, I just came across them while searching different streaming music options)

InnerTune: https://github.com/z-huang/InnerTune

Musify: https://github.com/gokadzev/Musify

that's cool. those apps are one google backend update away from death though :/

It’s been a long time since I used it but an iOS subsonic client I used to use (I think it was iSub) had better local-first / offline behavior than Apple Music or Spotify.

Navidrome is really simple to set up in a Docker container, if you already have some kind of system for self-hosting. If not, it's a good opportunity to start!

My own self hosted audio journey ended with Lyrion Music Server[0], formerly Logitech Music Server. It is now open source and run by the community.

There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate.

It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough!

[0]https://lyrion.org

I have over 400 CDs and SACDs in my collection, from the 80s to the oughts. Have ripped them to my Roon server connect to a Qnap NAS with now over 30 TB storage, as Flac or DSF files. For those CDs that have over the years degraded and can't be ripped, I wrote a scrapping agent for an (in)famous Russian Music Archive site and have > 1M magnet links stored on a MariaDB instance running on the Qnap. I only download albums/tracks as backups, for those I have paid for, via Put.IO

My Marantz Amp is Roon Ready and the Roon App (both the desktop and the iPhone version) is pretty good and sound quality is amazing as the App streams the files bit perfect without any downmixing, via ethernet.

Roon unfortunately doesn't handle DVD-A and DTS formats properly. I use Plex server and Infuse running on the Apple TV for those, and they work well. (Yes, I know I can convert .dts files to multi-channel FLACs using ffmpeg, but too many files, and I have not gotten around building an automated conversion workflow)

Genuinely curious…

Did you, in fact, rip your SACDs at their true, higher, resolution?

If so, how ?

You can get hacked Blu-ray players to rip SACD.

Yes, in the early days. Now I download SACD "backups".

You need to use the below software and get yourself an Oppo 105 BD player.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/0yvj4ytl1tgk4r0eqt385/AA4yicm...

Full instructions here:

https://www.hifive.sg/index.php?threads/ripping-sacd-on-a-op...

The bonus here is that the artists you like will get a much better share versus spotify's very low pay out rates, especially if you're into more obscure acts which fall under spotify's "no payouts under the 1000 plays/year threshold", which conveniently works out to be around 2/3rd of the entire platform.

https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetiz...

Ha, this is the guy that got absolutely butchered in his Reddit post [1] about the same link. OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1n87xho/why_i_d...

> believes piracy is not theft

That's true by definition isn't it? Piracy (Internet piracy, since that's the context) is copyright infringement, not theft.

Maybe by definition, but if you're a game developer and you find out everybody is pirating your game and not purchasing it from Steam/physical store, it's akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out. You're not going to say "They are infringing on my copyright".

> akin to them walking into the store, sliding the product under their jacket and walking out

That is a misrepresentation of what is happening across computers and networks. Here is a better analogue:

If someone walks up to my car, taps it with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate slowly materializes, and then drives away in the duplicate... Of what have I been deprived? Maybe privacy, depending on what I had in the car at the time it was duplicated... But that's tangential to the point here.

There's a worthy argument that the above scenario is still a wrong (some kind of tort, maybe). But there is simply no argument that the above scenario is equivalent to theft.

Theft deprives someone of a scarce material resource. Copyright infringement subverts someone's exclusive, government-granted monopoly. Unlike being secure in one's possessions, copyright has never been understood as a natural right. People grok this distinction intuitively, even if they neither fully understand the technology nor possess the words to articulate it well.

These apologetics for piracy are ancient and weren't good decades ago, let alone now. Yes, digital data has no scarcity. But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it. Someone worked hard on making that music (or game, or whatever), with society giving them the chance to turn a profit by selling copies to people. When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time. So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, piracy is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.

Megacorporate propaganda conflating copyright infringement with violent raiders on the high seas is both decades old and completely ridiculous.

> But that doesn't mean it's a victimless crime to just take it.

Please reply to what I wrote, not what you imagine I implied. Nowhere have I suggested copyright infringement is victimless. I have suggested it is more like a tort than a crime, but civil wrongs are wrongs against someone (i.e. a victim).

> When you just take it without paying (thus violating the social contract), you are in a very real sense stealing that person's time.

Please don't twist and abuse language in lieu of a sound argument. Stealing a person's time is already a specific thing: wage theft. It doesn't involve a nebulous social contract; it involves an actual contract between employer and employee for scarce time.

> So while it might not be the case that a digital copy taken does not cause the original to go missing, [copyright infringement] is very much theft in the moral sense. And that is why people get upset about it.

People aren't entitled to whatever returns they fantasize about for a given business model. If technology obsoletes a competitive strategy, we all have to live in that new world. People are understandably upset, and understandably refer to a wrong (theft) that is familiar, sympathetic, and yet factually not the case.

Copyright infringement need not be understood as theft to be understood as wrong. Treating it as theft mischaracterizes the wrong and sets society on a path to criminal enforcement against civil violations, creeping restrictions on general purpose computing, and the growth of the surveillance state.

People who pirate in the year 2025 are almost definitely going to be spending more on music (physical media, merch, tickets, etc) than the average Spotify subscriber. This was true ~20 years ago and given the ease of Spotify and the relative pain of pirating, I would imagine it's even moreso the case today. And even if they spend half a Spotify subscription on music, that's more money going to artists than a Spotify subscription giving them carte blanche access to most music.

If a corporation walks up to you, taps you with a magic wand, mutters some incantations, waits a few minutes as a perfect duplicate of you slowly materializes, then walks away with the duplicate, would you consider it theft or copyright infringement?

You would argue they are depriving you of a scarce material resource: your knowledge and experience that make you a valuable, esteemed professional. The corporation would argue that nobody is removing your copy of knowledge and experience, and they would not have hired you in the first place anyway.

> You would argue...

I would? Are you sure? Please don't put words in my mouth.

Is your hypothetical an invasion of privacy? Yes.

Is it enslavement of the duplicate? Very probably, yes. You don't specify what the corporation will do next, but I don't see how they'll avoid it.

Is it theft of my knowledge and experience? No. I'm not deprived of them, and would still have them after.

Is it copyright infringment? Possibly, but not necessarily of "my" copyright. I remember plenty of copyrighted music and can hum it on a whim. Presumably the duplicate could do so also, so that music has been copied, along with rest of me.

You've made a rather wild jump from the inanimate to the sentient and from deprivation of specific property to deprivation of natural rights. And you've genuinely lost me with what this hypothetical is even supposed to prove.

Again, it's possible for things to not be theft and also still be wrong for other reasons. Theft is a specific wrong. Words have distinct meanings.

> I would? Are you sure? Please don't put words in my mouth.

I would. I was steelmanning your argument. Your bad faith is showing.

> You've made a rather wild jump from the inanimate to the sentient [...] deprivation of natural rights

You have made a wild jump from a work of art to a car without any issue. I have never talked about deprivation of natural rights.

> Theft is a specific wrong.

Define theft then, and let's see if it applies to downloading a pirate copy of a music album.

Theft is taking possessions away from someone else, and as a result depriving the victim of that property. The legal threshold would also include an intent to deprive (mens rea) in most countries.

Copyright infringement is making a copy of something for purposes beyond fair use when the government has declared it the exclusive right of someone else to make such copies. The legal threshold would also include evidence of harm.

The jump from a digital file to a physical car is specifically to demonstrate that these things are not equivalent. Copying a file does not deprive someone of that file. To make the physical world work similarly to the digital, we have to add magic that violates conservation of energy and duplicate a car at effectively zero marginal cost. To make the digital world work similarly to the physical, we would have to end general purpose computing and lock down all computers such that files can only exist in one place and can only be moved, not copied. Both transformations in an attempt to achieve equivalence are obviously absurd. That's the point.

These things (theft and copyright infringement) are both wrongs, but they are strongly distinct wrongs.

The jump from inanimate things (files and cars) to sentient life (human duplicates) in your example is still unclear to me. It looked to me like you were assuming I would think of it as theft if a corporation made a duplicate of me. So I gave several reasons other than theft for me, or anyone, to think of that as wrong. What are you trying to demonstrate, given that I still don't think your example would be theft and have other reasons---those deprivations of rights---to think of it as wrong?

> I was steelmanning your argument.

No, because what you brought up was not my argument.

Steelmanning, when the counterparty is present, involves restating someone's argument until they agree, "yes, that's a fair summary of my argument," and then critiquing that.

You are strawmanning, not steelmanning: inventing a new example that the counterparty did not reference, which is substantively different from the argument actually made, and then critiquing that.

The idea that every illegitimate copy is a lost sale is old and tired. Most people wouldn't mind enjoying plenty of entertainment products that would otherwise never pay for (regardless of whether a free alternative exists or not).

Since you talk about game developers, just today was "Hollow Knight: Silksong" released, a game with no DRM (which means it will be on every pirate site the minute it releases, something that was known beforehand), and had just a few hours later over half a million concurrent players on Steam, one of the many storefronts where the game is available.

No industry has ever been killed by piracy, not even close, and the cases of musicians, authors, and game developers who have attributed piracy to their success keeps piling up. I really don't get why people who in other aspects of life try to look at the facts of things keep arguing so fervently about something proven to be, at best, a net positive and, at worst, a way for more people to enjoy arts and entertainment that they would never had otherwise.

If you don't get money for your works, you might be unlucky, or you might just not be good enough to make what people want [to pay for]. As a game developer myself, that's certainly my case. I hope to one day make something so many people care about, that they go out of their way to pirate it, because statistically that means I'd sell a lot of copies.

Sure, 100% of piracy wouldn't translate to sales but from my own perspective - I pirate. A lot. Hypocritcal for arguing about this? Yes definitely. But if there is a movie I really wanted to see, such as Tom Cruise's last Mission Impossible entry, and the concept of downloading a movie for free didn't exist - I would pay for it (Whether it be a cinema screening, a digital purchase, DVD, or specific streaming service). Otherwise I could never see it [Maybe on Free TV at some down the line?]. However, I do know that we live in an age where every bit of media can be stolen so I am less likely to pay, and know at some point after threatrical release it will be available online. And I was right. I kept my $20 and enjoyed the movie.

And I'm not arguing it's killing the industry. Shoplifting exists today but brick and mortar isn't dead (Well, it is dying but that's because of online shopping). But stores would see a little less profit due to shop lifting. Very similar to piracy.

It is stealing, and using an out dated definition to try and paint it as anything else is a wild take.

I hope you do make it as a developer one day, and create a hit game, and you have some telemetry showing 10000 people playing and check your Sales to see 200 copies sold and you tell me if you think you haven't been robbed.

The world in which I choose to live (which is seemingly getting further removed from 'shared reality') the meaning of words actually matter. I'm reminded of the classic Calvin & Hobbes strip[0] that ends "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding"

"Maybe by definition" does not a counter-argument start.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/words/comments/10k610a/calvin_and_h...

To the letter of the law or contextual text, you may be super right. Still does not solve the issue of artists that are getting ripped off left and right.

Do you pay every busker you pass by? Or do you block your ears when you pass to ensure you don't "steal" the music?

I think a combination of UBI, abolishment of copyright and a busking model with 100% of the proceeds going directly to artists would improve things no end. We have the technology to do this and have no need for leeches like Spotify.

There is a great difference in consuming art because you want to and consuming art because it was forced on to your senses.

Piracy is a real crime, I like to define it as theft of goods in transit. however it might be more specifically be the above in international free zones.

I always find it funny how people want to try and inflate one of the lesser crimes "copyright infringement" into one of the most heinous ones. Might as well call it software rape, it's just as accurate.

But the definition of theft is that it permanently deprives the owner of the object being thieved. Piracy might be a real crime but it doesn't match the definition of theft.

I'm not even sure what software rape is supposed to mean, but to me that seems to belittle the very real crime of rape.

It may not be theft, but it is stealing :

---

Stealing: the action or offence of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft.

---

Regardless if there is anything physical missing, you're still obtaining something for which you don't have the ownership rights, therefore another persons property.

And somewhere there's a starving artist that would get $0.25 per purchase that now gets nothing, so you could argue that you're stealing from the artist.

> OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.

Copyright infringement is neither piracy nor theft, those are both metaphors used largely for the purpose of emotional manipulation.

Why do I think you would feel differently if a company used GPL software in a method that was against the license.

I dunno, I’d assume it is projecting your own inability to separate analysis of basic definitions and facts (the question of “in law, are any or all of copyright infringement, piracy, and theft literally the same things?”) from personal political preference (“is rigid adherence to the wishes of the copyright owner desirable for commercially licensed music? is rigid adherence to the wishes of the copyright owner desirable when that is adherence to the terms of a copyleft free software license preferred by the FSF?”) combined with you being really bad at guessing other people’s political opinions (“is dragonwriter a zealous proponent of the FSF in particular or copyleft licenses in general?”) even in a forum where those opinions are on full display?

That's a very apples and oranges comparison and betrays a lack of even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills. Either that or just playground bullying.

The GPL protections don’t exist without copyright law. Why are you so willing to dismiss other creators right to control how their content gets created and think the people who choose to create content and license their software under the GPL should be respected.

> The GPL protections don’t exist without copyright law.

The GPL is a hack leveraging copyright law against itself, speciically, it seeks to achieve two things:

(1) The legal freedom that would exist in the absence of copyright law, and

(2) Source disclosure of modifications, on terms that preserve point (1).

Without copyright law, (1) is unnecessary, but people with concerns like those that motivate the FSF would probably look for a different mechanism to encourage source disclosure.

> Why are you so willing to dismiss other creators right to control how their content gets created and think the people who choose to create content and license their software under the GPL should be respected.

First, how is pointing out the fact that copyright infringement is neither, in the literal sense, either piracy or theft, and that those are metaphors used for their emotional impact, dismissing anyone’s right to do anything?

Second, while I respect the FSF’s basic goals with copyleft licensing, I’d much prefer copyrights with a shorter default term (perhaps extendable with a fee, but even then I’d prefer the terms of the extension beyond a short default term made it possible to buy the work into the public domain at a set price that was also the basis for the fee for maintaining the copyright), narrower subject matter coverage, and broader fair use limits, even though that would limit the utility of the GPL as a wedge to encourage source disclosure on Free terms. I don’t think people using the GPL deserve any better treatment under copyright law than people releasing content that isn't under a Free license, I think the current structure of copyright law is an excessive restriction on human liberty that does not serve the public good.

You don’t have the “liberty” to decide what other people create. You are free to use your time, money and effort to produce something that you want to give away.

I mean the use of lidarr is a dead giveaway. Don't need to snoop his history to put 2 and 2 together

well, he did add this important note. now he only uses lidarr for managing his collection

Important Note: Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels

"instead of giving them pennies, let's give them nothing!!!"

> OP has extensive history in the piracy subreddits and believes piracy is not theft.

OP sounds awesome. Thanks for the recommendation!

I don't see any butchering whatsoever in the Reddit thread?

So i decided that Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal/whatever doesn't pay enough money to the artists, and instead i decided to pay none.

gotcha.

I read the comments. Despite clearly explaining that he was supporting artists, people just said "no you're lying" and baselessly accused him of piracy.

Anyway OP seems like a great person. And if he did like pirating, cool! You are free to live your life how you see fit :)

> Always ensure you're obtaining music through legal channels

> My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased.

Sure. I believe you.

I don't understand.

At the start of the article the author says this is why Spotify is good.

"For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends."

How does one discover new music through algorithms or share playlists with friends on this proposes self-hosted stack?

He claims it tiges him everything Spotify offered plus more.

"Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more."

But I don't see how it does those things, and those are the main reasons I use Spotify. 80% of the time I listen to automatic playlists based on my music tastes and hear new and old (but new to me) music constantly. If I don't like it I skip the track to the next as much as I want. How on earth am I supposed to do that if I have to buy and curate every new album into my collection?

Haven't used it myself but the author's tool for recommendations is Lidify.

But that doesn't come close to the flow and convenience of Spotify.

So I have to manually invoke Lidify, then see the recommendations, then buy the songs, load them into my library, then mix them into my playlists. And what if I don't like them? Now I bought songs that I have no interest to listen to again.

How many songs can I even buy per year for $99 a year that Spotify costs. $1 per song? I certainly cycle through way more than 100 new songs a year with the Spotify algorithms to hear new music.

I just don't see how he can make a claim that his setup is even remotely comparable to Spotify.

Been rebuilding my music library from my sailing the high seas days when I did not have money. CDs sound really good. Some much better than streaming Spotify.

Glad I own the media. A buddy was listening to an Audiobook on Spotify, paused it and came back to it no longer being on Spotify. Between stuff like that and no toggle to disable AI generated music, I don't think I'll be going back.

_grabs minidisc player and goes for a walk_

Or discovering that the song you loved has been edited by the artist, and your favorite line is now garbled because it’s not PC anymore? So glad I had the original CD, so I can listen to it how I remember it!

What if how I remember it is with a skip that happened because the radio DJ bumped the player while I was recording it to tape? :D

hah, i always take my MZ-N1 with me whenever i go outside as i genuinely find it simpler to use than trying to manage a local music collection on an iPhone, does make me feel a bit pretentious though :-)

I did the same as the OP except I use Amperfy on iOS and Tempo on Android. Navidrome is super simple to setup and finds new music immediately. Never breaks. It's not exposed to the Internet directly but via a Cloudflare tunnel (like the OP) and an obscure url that I'm the only one to use.

I also wrote a little Python script to transform Spotify playlists into Youtube lists of urls. Shazam can add songs to a Spotify playlist so it's a way to discover new music.

I hate to be that guy. Obscurity is not security.

There's technically no distinction between a random url, and a random prime that is part of a keypair. There's a difference of "degree" of randomness, but not of approach.

In both cases you get owned if somebody guesses your random bytestring.

Don't worry, we hate you being that guy too ;)

Obscurity sometimes gets you enough, if only just cleaner log files. Something something threat model.

I know. I know it's way easier. And i know everybody hates that guy :)

You're right, but I'm not really after "security". It's not like I'm hosting state secrets.

I may move to tailscale though, which would be the same thing without exposing anything publicly. Besides I already use tailscale for other things.

The obscure URL kind of doesn't matter if you are on an ipv4 address. There's only so many of those around. People skip scanning by url and go straight to iterating through ips.

It's annoying how the author mentions "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" along with buying from Bandcamp but doesn't describe how they integrate music from Bandcamp into their collection, instead linking to programs that seem designed exclusively for downloading from torrents and usenet.

I also have a Navidrome setup that is my main music streaming method which I've used for a few years now. I buy from bandcamp quite often and downloading and importing music from bandcamp (and managing metadata generally) is the most tedious part. I use beets[1] and if I buy, say, a mix of 10 tracks and albums, I then get 10 URLs and I have to download and run `beet imp` on each mp3/zip file. I do this over SSH with a bunch of copy-pasting since I haven't convinced myself it's worth the time[2] to change my method. It looks like there's some way to scrape bandcamp and automate this process based on the existence of this tool, bandcamp-dl[3]. If anyone has their own method to suggest I'd appreciate it.

[1]: https://beets.io/

[2]: https://xkcd.com/1205/

[3]: https://github.com/Evolution0/bandcamp-dl

Only components I would swap out here is Cloudflare Tunnels and use of docker.

I have my own tailnet with a self hosted head coordinator (headscale). No need to expose music server to public internet or tie your setup to a service that can easily go down or suddenly find yourself paying for it. Access service from within tailnet

While docker is great for development purposes. I have found for self hosting it adds a bit of overhead (particularly memory and cpu) and complexity to installations (port forwarding between container and host, firewalling, ip discovery, cpu/gpu passthrough). Sure containerization is great if you have the funds/hardware/time and need to scale across thousands of instances/servers. But becomes overkill for these types of use cases.

I would replace with deploying on top of nixOS and manage remotely with nixos-anywhere with declarative configuration.

Going to bookmark this since I have been putting off setting up my own media server. OP tailors to music but also want to make my collection of Blu-ray, and photos accessible.

Docker with Portainer is really simple and much more straightforward to use than having to remember what services run on what ports, etc. I have been self hosting a bunch of apps and web services on an Asustor for a couple of years now, with Cloudflare CDN in front of it, and everything runs smoothly and never breaks.

I just went to the Portainer websites and I can't figure out what it does, exactly. All I know is they've chosen nice fonts. Do you mind explaining what it does for you?

It adds a GUI to Docker so that you can manage your containers from a web page instead of the cli (create, configure, start/stop, etc.) You don't need it if you know Docker well but it's a nice to have.

Thanks. Sounds a bit like Docker Desktop.

In the time you can talk someone through a successful Nix(OS) installation, they've already installed something like Unraid and clicked "apps -> navidrome -> install" and are already listening to music =)

Docker / Docker-compose removes so much complexity when selfhosting it's one of the best things happening to the hobby in a while.

really the biggest service spotify has for me is its music recommendation engine... and so the big question with all this setup is: is listenbrainz's recommendation engine better than spotify?

on spotify recommendation is just a euphemism for 'we are being paid to promote this'

so yes

oh, you've been listening to antichrist siege machine lately? check out sabrina carpenter!

that's not been my experience with the "discover weekly" feature

Wow, that’s a lot. Just install any offline music player on your phone and transfer songs to it…?

My current music collection is 399GB (mostly lossless Flacs).

I'm not buying a phone with 512GB-1TB of storage just for my music, 5G is available everywhere and my home internet connection is plenty fast. I can just stream it from home - maybe sync some locally if I'm going off grid.

And moving files manually one by one to my phone? Oof. It's not the early 2000s, we have better solutions.

>I'm not buying a phone with 512GB-1TB of storage just for my music,

If a 512GB phone costs you $300 dollar more tahn the one you would have bought, it amounts to $2 per month for a 5-year phone. Spotify is three times that.

$300 will also get me a used mini PC[0] with 2TB of storage[1] I can set up at home in an evening with Navidrome+Audiobookshelf and not have to buy a phone with massive storage at all! :D

And as a bonus everyone in my family can listen to the same collection without having to upgrade to a 1TB phone. And I can use the same source in my car, on my laptop, desktop etc. All without having to waste 400GB of space for music storage on every device.

[0] https://www.ebay.de/itm/156667490633

[1] https://www.ebay.de/itm/296887285188

Then convert it to Opus. I have a similar ~440 GB in FLAC and would never opt for such a complex solution when one of the major benefits of FLAC is that you can do proper encoding yourself.

I mean, you’ll never listen to 399 GB of music at the same time. So, not really an issue.

Or the middle way, just install one of {navidrome/plex/jellyfin} + app.

But OPs stack also can do a bit more.

My music collection would not fit on my phone. But I got 1Gbit/s upload and 4G connection most of the time.

I just use Plex hosted on a Raspberry Pi, and Plex Amp. I download mp3s from Bandcamp/wherever, and use beets [0] to auto-tag.

EDIT: FWIW, I don't recommend most people host their own music. Spotify/YouTube music is easy to use and has most music people want to listen to. I only self-host because I'm the type of person who has built a collection of mp3s since 2005, and the few times I tried switching to Spotify, I would commonly not be able to find specific things I wanted to listen to.

[0] https://beets.io/

I self-host digital media (and have physical copies of the very best stuff) because I want to be able to access the things I like even if there's some legal bullshit about the content.

And when it's on my NAS and backed up, I can be pretty sure that I can still access it in 10 or 20 years.

Some services like youtube music also allow you to upload your own tracks and mix them in the playlist so you can have the versions of songs you want or ones that they don’t have.

Ah interesting, I remember this being a feature of Google Play Music 10 years ago as well. Nice to see they kept it around.

I've been thinking about doing the same thing as the OP for a while, but haven't really gotten around to it. I've started scrobbling to last.fm in order to see if their recommendation algorithm can be a replacement for Spotify. The jury is still out on that.

As my financial situation has gone from a place where I felt I could not really care and still save a healthy amount per month, to a place where I feel it is more necessary for me to try to keep up with my finances I've gone from really liking Spotify to a realization that I've probably spent enough money on spotify over the last 15-ish years to buy a cheap car or quite a sizeable music collection, had I just spent that money on music directly.

I have gotten my money's worth from Spotify for sure, I listen to it a lot and have probably gotten to hear magnitudes more music than if I merely bought an album or something every month instead, but at this point I can't get over the fact that if/when I unsubscribe to Spotify, I will have nothing and will have to spend a lot to get access to the music I actually care about again.

In a sense, I wish there was an audible style subscription for music. Give me the ability to sample music as a replacement for spotify radio, or/and some playlists like discover weekly and a few personalized ones, and a credit to pick something to buy permanently.

I ditched Spotify for Montreal’s own CKUT and its best known (to me) program, WEFUNK Radio. No problems for over 20 years now. Oh yeah, none of these have ads! Listener supported radio and streaming is where it’s at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CKUT-FM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEFUNK_Radio

https://www.wefunkradio.com/

DJ Static and Professor Groove are too legit to quit. They’re the second DJs to ever podcast, apparently, as they’ve been on air since 1996 and streaming online since 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomaFM

https://somafm.com/

If you don’t know about SomaFM, now you know. A true SF original.

https://www.bagelradio.com/

Also a special shout-out to BAGeL Radio, formerly rebroadcast by SomaFM. A one-man project that is amazing and unique, also from San Francisco. If you like indie stuff, it’s as good as Indie Pop Rocks of SomaFM, with a bit wider range in genres played.

The table comparing the authors solution to Spotify is missing the biggest benefit of streaming services, which is the cost.

It would cost way more than $11 a month to buy all of the music I listen to.

If you're always listening to new music, that makes sense. But are you really? Or are you listening to the stuff you already know and like, with an occasional sprinkling of new music? My impression is that most people are more in the latter group than the former, and at that point you need to consider whether you come out ahead if you buy music rather than renting it. I know that I personally would waste a ton of money paying for Spotify, because I'm 99.99% listening to the music I already know and like.

For some napkin math:

I just transferred my library from Spotify to Apple Music (with the new built in tool!): 13k liked songs.

I started using paid Spotify from invite, before public release in the US, so 15 years.

Lets go very conservative (for me) and say every 3 songs is from the same album, at $12/album (LOL!): $52k, or $288/month.

Spotify cost: $2.1k, or $12/month

If I had to pay for albums, I would definitely be listening to less varied music.

I mean, I did say if you're listening to new music all the time then Spotify makes sense. It sounds like you are, so it makes sense for you. But not everyone does that. For myself, I already have the music I like. I would say that once every 3-4 years I come across a new artist I like and I purchase a few of their albums. If we're really aggressive, let's say I buy two new albums per year at $12 each... so my marginal cost is $24/year versus $144/year with Spotify. It all comes down to one's listening habits.

> I mean, I did say if you're listening to new music all the time then Spotify makes sense.

> It all comes down to one's listening habits.

Yes, I'm aware. I was clearly giving you a somewhat extreme example to support your statement. But, it appears it was interpreted as some sort of a personal attack for some reason. I can't comprehend the modern internet.

I'm in the opposite situation. I only listen to old songs I already own (and even then, not often, as I often prefer silence -- I only listen to music actively, not passively when doing something else), so the cost of Spotify felt like a total ripoff. Navidrome was a godsend.

Worth noting that lidarr is broken right now. It relies on a metadata server provided by the lidarr org (like that's not going to blow up in our faces) and that metadata server is currently down. It's been like that for I think 6 months?

https://github.com/Lidarr/Lidarr/issues/5498

>If you're starting a NEW lidarr library, you should wait. It's not ready for that.

I’ve never been on the Spotify train, but with an all-Apple household, including HomePod Minis in multiple rooms, I’ve been stuck in iTunes/Apple Music land. We own our music, which is nice. And I dutifully pay the $24.99 per year for iTunes Match so that I can tell Siri what to play on HomePods, but I will be 0% surprised when they deprecate that service.

Anyone have a good non-Apple way of getting Siri to play songs from a personal music collection on HomePods? My kids use it most.

It's interesting, but the author's motivations are a little muddled:

> several issues became impossible to ignore: artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream

and later:

> My setup uses sabnzbd

I never really understand all these very complex setups. I have a Music folder on my (Synology) NAS that I can browse and play with any mediaplayer (VLC, Foobar), without transcoding anything, with a Wireguard VPN connection to reach outside home network. I tag metadata with an editor, and construct subfolders within the parent directory itself. Or am I missing something?

I refuse to use streaming services since they exist. Pay per month to listen to everything? No thanks. These days, I buy everything I like on BandCamp. I have a "mirror script" for BandCamp sites I find interesting, to be able to listen into the stuff, and decide if it is worth buying.

I use a MPD based setup on a rpi at home. Built a small web interface to control the thing (MPD clients are plenty but rarely sufficiently accessible). Even wrote my own AI based presenter[1], which will make a description of the cover art part of its moderation. Nice for me, since I am blind. A simple feature (took me a few hours to write) that a proprietary vendor will actually never offer. In this particular case, if I don't scratch my itch, nobody else ever will.

When I am mobile, I use the "Shuffle All" button in the BandCamp app to play through the things I've hand-selected over the past 10 years.

[1] https://github.com/mlang/llm-mpd

I've gone back and forth on this.

I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void.

I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice.

It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming.

From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to.

The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.

$30/mo seems pretty steep for backups. How much storage are you talking about, and what tier?

All of the music I purchased from bleep and bandcamp is still available to download again, and the CDs I rip from the used book stores are in a box to be ripped again if I ever need it.

5TB through Synology's C2 service.

Is it possible to backup via Synology HyperBackup connected to a Backblaze B2 bucket? The monthly costs might be much cheaper.

It misses the only feature why I'm using Spotify: the vast music catalogue instantly available.

Coming from foobar2000 I think of all the other features of Spotify as being mostly annoying or unneccessary.

Spotify is definitely one of those tools that has some ethical issues, but that is so damn convenient it's hard to imagine giving up.

I could do something like what the article describes, but it'd definitely be a lot of work.

So instead, to support artists, I decided to set a budget and start collecting vinyl. It feels right. I still get all the benefits of Spotify for discovery and convenience, I support artists, and I appreciate having a tangible artifact representing my enjoyment.

Plus, album art is way cooler at full size.

Does the fact that Spotify's CEO finances AI weapons change the calculus?

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...

I've been so happy with my iPod, iTunes, and CDs. It's very simple to manage, works without internet, and I already had a decently sized collection of music on there. Listening to new music is so much more intentional. And it works with my Sennheisers and AirPods Max using the headphone jack! I've been buying complete albums to listen through.

My three favorite recent purchases have been Paul McCartney's Ram, Jack Johnson's In Between Dreams, and John Mayer's Paradise Valley.

Good for you.

But for me, personally, I went with the lazy route. I just downloaded the songs I like and saved them to a USB stick, plugged it into my speakers and called it a day.

Honestly, I don't really know much about audio quality other than higher kbps = higher quality (I might be wrong on that though).

My library consists of ~120 .m4a files, 128kbps, most (if not all) downloaded from YouTube.

I wish I had a way of just bulk buying everything thats “in my library” on Apple Music.

I know its not Spotify, so maybe not related, but I have a much better experience with PlexAmp and would love to be able to buy my way out. Even if its €1,500 or something.

It should be noted that I actively fought against Apple Music as a subscription service, but buying music became (very rapidly) a third tier experience once they started pushing in that direction.

I had my music stack way before Spotify because this was the only way (and completely illegal at that time)

One thing I _really_ want to point out is:

>One-time server setup + storage

This is a fairy tale. No, you will have to support this stack, things will break as they always do and hardware is not free either.

And this works more or less well for techy people. (only a small portion of them).

Spotify because a thing because most people do not want to do all that. Or store hundreds of CDs.

> you will have to support this stack, things will break as they always do and hardware is not free either.

Hardware is hardly the first thing that will break when you consider the number of pieces in that architecture, including a bunch that aren't self hosted.

>My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists.

It's ironic to say in an article about illegaly streaming music. It's possible to both buy a CD and legally stream music and the artist will get money from both actions. By illegally streaming the music the artist is missing out on money they would otherwise earn.

What bit of this is "illegally streaming"?

  1. Author buys music legally from Bandcamp
  2. Author adds said music to their local self-hosted solution
  3. Author listens to said legally bought music on their phone, streamed from the home server

Where is the illegal part?

> Where is the illegal part?

Right here in the stack:

>Lidarr -> sabnzbd

Someone else mentioned he is also very active in piracy sub-reddits.

Think of piracy what you want, but I doubt all music OP has was paid for ;-)

I myself started collecting music on Bandcamp and recently set up a server with navidrome to have my full collection of music (mostly game soundtracks as of now).

It's a bit of a struggle to get access to "common music", because virtually no one offers mp3 downloads anymore, but a lot of the music I used to listen to is already over on my own server, for the low low price of 4€ a month.

Going through the trouble of maintaining a home server is not worth it for me. I wish dropbox offered some extra service for music/video.

If you organize your folders correctly, you could probably have that dropbox folder synced with one of those services. The maintenance isn't too bad once its up and running, probably more hurdles (proxies, etc) if you are accessing outside the home. If you are the only user, you can use tailscale to access your hosted apps when out of the home.

I never used Spotify, still buying CDs and MP3.

And if I had place for it, I would be getting vynils as well.

Additionally I buy many of those directly from bands, on smaller venue concerts, where they sell their stuff and even get to talk with us directly.

It is already enough music to consume in my lifetime, more people should focus on controlling the feeling of FOMO against the industry, be it music, movies or games.

Hey, I am also a boomer.

Yep. :)

In the meantime, Spotify still cannot handle two different artists using the same name. It's almost 2026, and they still haven't fixed the issue with recommending songs from irrelevant "artists" who "borrowed" their stage names from more popular ones.

> and the fact that despite paying monthly, I never actually owned anything.

FYI, when you purchase digital music through iTunes/Amazon/etc, you still don't actually own anything. You are purchasing a license for personal use, which can be revoked for various reasons.

I thought you could buy songs as downloadable mp3 files on Amazon? Did they stop allowing that?

You can download an MP3, but you still don't "own" it in the conventional sense. You are licensing it, and a downloaded MP3 is how you utilize that license. If that license was revoked for some reason (admittedly not a likely scenario), continuing to have the MP3 on your system would be a violation.

In practice I doubt this would ever be an issue, but just wanted to point out that you effectively never "own" a digital reproduction of something unless you are the actual copyright holder (or the copyright is permissive), and digital copies can be clawed back in a way that a CD or physical book you purchased cannot.

So long as the copy is DRM-free, which I’m pretty certain Amazon and Apple are these days, there is no means to enforce such a revocation. Of course, you could find yourself unable to download a new copy should you ever need to.

I believe there have been instances where Amazon removed books from user Kindles, which (thought these files are indeed DRM'd), that is not the mechanism by which this was done.

"If I'm willing to violate the law I'm good" is true and I don't disagree, but that also applies to full-blown piracy.

> digital copies can be clawed back in a way that a CD or physical book you purchased cannot

There is no difference between an mp3 file and a CD? A CD is exactly a digital copy (a book is an analog copy). What's true for one has to be true for the other.

Nope. You own the CD. You do not own the MP3.

My understanding is that it’s basically the same as ripping a CD - I have a perpetual license for personal use.

Of course if I broadcast it publicly or share it on bittorrent I am in violation. But if all I do is keep it in my music library for myself to listen to, it’s OK.

So, while the MP3 is covered by an Amazon license and the ripped CD has an implied fair-use license, those license terms are more-or-less the same.

I'm somewhat sure you can buy a DRM free copy on both Apple Music and Amazon.

How would they revoke it? What would happen?

Woosh.

That's the whole point.

That was definitely not the point. The author was contrasting a streaming service with purchasing digital music files, implying the latter is "ownership".

It seems to me music streaming is the most widely developed self hosting stack. There are literally dozens if not 100+ platforms, servers and clients - so it's very easy to find what you need, even if it's much different than what OP got.

I setup Plex recently and can access it on the go from an Android phone over cellular. I can also use "Alexa, ask plex to play <whatever>" to stream to the Echo Dot. It's quite amazing to not have to bugger about anymore.

This is nice, but the real thing that's needed is an easy way to buy music and dump it into that stack (and preferably keep a copy so I can redownload it). A shop front that lets me log into other shop fronts, or something?

you mean like bandcamp?

Oh - yes. I've never been to that website before. I guess if I could buy something on Bandcamp and it loaded straight into my local setup that would be exactly what I'd want, yes.

CTRL+F for "lidarr"

Close tab

Lidarr is not in any way a solution for music collection.

If you substitute just that one section with ripping CDs/vinyl you own it's still interesting.

You could've skipped the first 2 sentences, started with the third and finished with one more explaining why Lidarr is not a good solution. I was able to find a blog by joekarlsson which echoes your sentiment, is the album first architecture that makes Lidarr a bad choice? Any alternatives you'd recommend?

This sounds really interesting. Can you handle connected devices i.e. play on Sonos, Bluesound devices, Denon HEOS?

The genius of streaming was being more convenient than piracy. With streaming prices hiking up, recommendations getting worse and their libraries becoming plagued by one-song-releases and AI Slop, piracy is becoming a thing again. The same is happening for video, apparently, as people get tired of having to pay for half a dozen streaming services more than they used to pay for 300 cable channels.

Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.

I'm interested in the general direction, but for different reasons. IDGAF about AI artists and industry financials - but Helsing killer robots...

I also recognised different features I would miss. After an initial bump, the discoverability benefits declined to negligible. What I did greatly value was the unified interface. For that reason, the winner for me is to use plex as the media server, giving plexamp for all clients.

Navidrome looks nice but it looks like it is Desktop only. I am using Plexamp as well. I tried some alternatives but couldn't get them to work reliably. People miss Plexamp as an option because they try the regular Plex app and not the simplified Plexamp.

Navidrome is compatible with browser apps through a protocol the name of which eludes me at the moment

The web interface also runs pretty flawlessly on mobile browser. I was actually shocked at how responsive it was.

Subsonic API: https://www.subsonic.org/pages/api.jsp

Navidrome is a server, not a desktop app. It's more analogous to Plex than Plexamp. If you want a mobile app that can do Subsonic (the protocol Navidrome uses), Symfonium on Android is amazing.

Navidrome is a server. You can use it directly by connecting to it in a browser, but its point is to serve the music to a client, of which many exist for both iOS and Android.

Vanced ftw. Blocks all youtube ads and plays with the screen off.

This does sound like a fun service to roll out actually

Is there a way to do this for Mobile?

its all been down hill since rdio shut down

Bahhhh don’t remind me. It’s unreal none of the contemporary players in the music game learned a thing from Rdio’s seemingly universal admiration.