I’ve been wanting to move away from subscription services for music (I used google play music, then yt music) for awhile, but it’s always been a big hurdle. I’ve enjoyed algorithmic radios for too long haha. But I've been burned by enshittification enough to want to control my music, much like the other services in my life.
I already owned a fair bit of music though, and having a subscription service was encouraging me too much to just not support/buy music from artists I like.
In the end I found some fairly promising avenues for getting new music recommendations, and found some clients that can make radios from owned songs, and finally made the plunge.
I absolutely love musicbrainz doing the effort of tracking every artist and release of nearly every song I've looked up. It's a minor amount of centralization but it solves a really major problem: once I know the id of a given song, I can get all the metadata for it, and from there tag music properly and consistently.
With that in mind, I'm currently using lidarr for music management, because it uses musicbrainz IDs and can auto tag stuff. However, it doesn't have a clean "drop stuff in this folder and it'll get imported and tagged", which is what I'd want (or at least indexers to Bandcamp and other drm free music platforms), and searching for artists from within the UI is struggling for me. At this point I'm not sure all of my music has been correctly identified down to the release level, and I'm hoping to use a tool like beets to hash the actual audio data and match them up properly at some point.
The music is then served via a navidrome server, due to its widespread support. This, too, has some compromises too, though: it doesn't support music videos. The music videos are some of the biggest parts of why I enjoy certain songs, and the biggest feature I miss from YT music is the audio/video toggle. But ATM it doesn't seem like there's any popular tools for serving both like that. I may also integrate it with Music Assistant for playing music at home, but that hasn't been a desire thus far.
I then use feishin on the web and symfonium on my phone to actually listen to the music. Those are both highly polished interface and can generate radios from a given song.
For recommendations, I initially planned to scrobble to listenbrainz and use troi to get recommendations. However, I'm not sure how best to handle the process of me listening to the music and then deciding whether to obtain it or not. It's also another centralized piece, but really I have pretty good trust in the musicbrainz people currently, so that's not a huge deal to me. I'd miss the universal IDs a whole lot more than recommendations, haha (especially since I haven't set this up currently).
Turns out, I already have so much music I know I like that discovery isn't really necessary. Right now I really just rely on the occasional music recommendations from YouTube. I also found out I don't actually mind that my histort has essentially “reset”. I could find a way to export my listens from youtube music, but it really just seems my desires for these features, despite their ability to keep me on those platforms for so long, just don't actually matter to me like I thought. In theory, any future music recommendations could just happen through recommendations from friends. After starting this realization, I read this article that reaffirmed my feelings, and led me to using the random album page a lot more. I also like this article helping those who have started leaving music streaming services find new ways to discover music.
The other missing piece of the puzzle is live music. I love going to live music with my wife, and currently this is a process very much controlled by a handful of large corporate entities. I hate ticketmaster and how they screw over fans and musicians, but fixing that isn't in my power. I also don't like bandsintown, but it's essentially the only way to get notified of the bands I like being in town. I'd love to see the lidarr calendar include this data somehow, or an instance of mobilizon (a federated event/meetup platform) for live music events (tagged with the musicbrainz IDs for each artist, of course), or otherwise. For now this is just a wishlist item.
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