This post is mostly just me bitching about the music industry but also genuine interest in what other people in this community do when it comes to music streaming. Apologies if this is an incomprehensible wall of text.
My favorite self-hosted project is Navidrome. I’ve been running it for years and it’s been absolutely perfect the entire time. Related clients like Supersonic and Tempo have been fantastic as well. More than half of my donations to open source software have been to music related projects like these, I use them for multiple hours every day.
I’m giving up on using them though, because actually obtaining the music to stream has become harder and more expensive every year. Unlike self-hosted movie/tv streaming, the primary reason I self-host music is to support the artists. I feel better paying $10 for an album I enjoy compared to the artist getting pennies from me streaming it. I’m sure as hell not doing this to save money, I spend around $30/month on average on new music.
My only criteria for buying music is that it’s at least CD-quality. Going back a few years, my options (ordered by preference at the time) were Bandcamp, Qobuz, 7Digital, the artist’s own website, physical CDs that I’d rip myself, then finally giving up and using Soulseek. Bandcamp and Qobuz would typically cover 95% of what I was looking for, I’d rarely need to use Soulseek.
But over the course of those past few years…
Bandcamp was bought by Epic, then sold to Songtradr, half of its staff were laid off, and it’s been a shell of its former self ever since. It seems like Bandcamp is now mostly ignored by artists, with albums rarely releasing or releasing far later than other platforms. It’s genuinely a surprise when I find the artist or album I’m looking for on Bandcamp at this point.
Qobuz has been experiencing rapid enshittification as they try to get people to subscribe to their streaming service. Dark patterns added throughout the purchase and download process, albums being pulled from my account, and albums becoming more expensive (I’m seeing a whole lot more $15-$20 albums than $10 albums now).
7Digital is dead.
Artist websites rarely offer lossless downloads anymore. Last time I bought an album directly from an artist was Madeon in 2019, and that’s now an archived page you have to go out of your way to find.
CDs are somehow still a reliable option, but I just cannot justify this anymore. At some point having a collection of 250 plastic discs that I rip precisely once and then store forever just doesn’t make sense. I’m tired of buying physical clutter to get digital files. I sold a sizable chunk of my collection a few months ago.
Soulseek, the “fuck it I’m pirating it” option whenever I can’t buy an album through any available means. Surprisingly even Soulseek seems to be suffering, I used to be able to find anything, but now even a slightly obscure release can be hard to find.
So now, my preferred options are Bandcamp, Qobuz if the album is less than $15, then Soulseek. I’m using Soulseek a hell of a lot more now, which defeats the point of why I do this in the first place. So fuck it, I subscribed to Tidal.
But like, what the fuck? Why is it so hard to give artists more money?
So, for others who self-host their music collection, or even still rock an iPod or something, what do you do? Do you buy lossy releases? Do you pirate everything? Is there a magical website that has every album for sale that I just don’t know about? CDs? I can’t be the only one with this problem, but I haven’t seen anyone else talk about it.
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Straight up piracy at this point.
I have vanilla-ass white boy musical tastes, so I’ve had little issue finding what I want on Soulseek.
That said, there is one thing about Soulseek that’s not advertised: there’s a freaking enormous list of “blacklisted” terms that won’t return search results even if the data is there.
Lots of banned artist and album names that will return zero results, unless you do something like search for a song or two that’s on the album you want and finding the data that way.
Might be worth seeing if changing what you’re specifically searching for improves your results, since I was dealing with like 70% completion until someone told me about that ah, feature.
Edit: and you can have my iPod from my cold dead hands.
Why are they blacklisted?
Wait like what is on this blacklist?
it’ll usually be the artist’s name. Like if you search for “Taylor Swift”, you’ll get exactly zero results because that phrase is blacklisted due to a complaint from the label. If you instead search for a specific song, you will see results, and can work backwards from there to find the album you’re looking for.
Yeah, I’ve had to use that blacklist workaround on many occasions, lol
Lots of banned artist and album names that will return zero results, unless you do something like search for a song or two that’s on the album you want and finding the data that way.
The only objectionable hurdles are the insurmountable ones
Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.
Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall
Also faircamp and mirlo.space
I’m probably not going to pay $10 a year with additional fees to have my music on a website unless a lot of people are already using it
150,000 track collection owner here.
CDs are king, but the cost adds up. A lot of artists I follow are on Bandcamp, which I use to purchase my music. I assume everything I buy there will eventually be removed, so I don’t rely on them for archiving it.
But then, there’s the piracy route, which I do for a good portion of my library. Rutracker is absolutely fantastic for lossless. Soulseek is solid, but you gotta use it in a smart way for some releases. Some keywords don’t turn up any results for some reason. So, to find certain albums/artists, try searching for a particular song, then browse by folder on those results to find full albums, if that makes sense.
Why not use Qobuz or Deezer to rip music? Qobuz-dl and Deemix let you rip FLAC from those services if you have a streaming acct. I use Deemix with my Deezer acct to download a TON of music I cant find anywhere else.
Its a lot of work, I agree. But it’s doable. At this point, as services get shittier, pirate. They need to learn that as their services get shittier, people will leave. Give them a financial reason to get better ;)
The answer to your question of why it’s so hard to give artists your money is exactly the same as it has been for ages for all media. The few companies who survived the consolidation of the industry have done everything in their power to make sure they are the gatekeepers of content. They buy and merge or kill off any competing companies or technologies.
They weren’t successful with MP3s or with streaming because they didn’t bother to understand the technology or that the Internet was the new marketplace and thought they could just do what they had done with physical media and pay for laws that protected their interests and sue everyone, but they ultimately lost control because you can’t sue hundreds of millions of people like you can sue a few thousand stores. So they had to give the people what they wanted for a while so they could have time to buy up all of the companies.
But they’ve now done that and paid enough to get the laws and precedents on interpreting those laws that they wanted, so courts are becoming better at enforcing those laws more quickly. So they can pressure new tech that pushes the limits on interpreting the laws to not last long enough to get people hooked. And now that they’ve reconsolidated most of the market and technologies as capitalism tends to do if you’re patient enough and there’s no possibility of monopoly regulation or market disruption, we’re stuck with pirate or use the garbage they feed to us and most artists are back to having to sign their art away and sleep with executives to get the marketing and distribution from the gatekeepers just to get a chance at success. The rest have to rely on word of mouth and self distribution which even online can be expensive without the advantages of centralized hosting providers, merchant accounts, and bandwidth.
Piracy. I’d buy albums if I had money, though. I’ll slowly phase into getting them once I get some more cash.
I can find most stuff I listen to, and I rarely grow my music library. I mostly listen to 20-30 albums, with some more mainstream music peppered in.
My music library currently sits at 90 gigabytes (mostly flacs), so quite small compared to others I’ve seen around here. Still, I have plenty of variation to keep me entertained :D
If you have Tidal, aren’t there some apps to rip the lossless audio from there? You could get most of the stuff that you need, and then cancel the subscription. If you feel bad, maybe order some merch from the band, haha.
Pirate the music and send $20 to the artists venmo
I know this is a joke, but honestly, this would support the artist more than the past 75 years of labels and streaming corps, which is IMO high seas piracy in itself.
Public libraries often have CDs tout can borrow.
CDs for me. If you buy a big disc binder they really don’t take up that much room. Its about the same size as the 1971 compact OED that sits on the same shelf.
If I really wanted to get rid of them I’d just donate them to the local library system. The ones they don’t want they’d resell as a fundraiser.
Do they make USB C CD players? I’d unironically use that with the linkin park re-issue albums and the upcoming new one lol
So there’s things like this, where it’s a portable cd player (so it outputs line audio) https://a.co/d/j5AmTd0
And then there’s also a bunch of external usb-c cd drives that plug into your computer. And those range in functionality/price all the way from basic cd drives to Blu-ray readers/writers.
You mean like this?
Annnd saved lol. I think my car would pick it up as a media device….maybe?
I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.
I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.
I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.
To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt
I went to my local library, digged through all music CDs for stuff I could enjoy and ripped what interested me.
Not gonna lie, that must be one hell of an obscure (or new) song if it’s not available on Soulseek. If your song happen to be Japanese, try Ototoy.jp. That’s where I get most of my FLAC albums.
The last time I had trouble finding something on Soulseek, it was an album that had released a month or two ago, so it might’ve still been too new.
Like you I try to support artists by purchasing physical media or releases on Bandcamp. Outside of that I get my music on Soulseek, through torrents, Usenet, and occasionally XDCC. I don’t need lossless files and even if I download FLACs I transcode them to 320kbps MP3 before they go on my iPod anyway. The harder it becomes to acquire music legally the less bad I feel about downloading with abandon.
bandcamp and piracy are still the main routes. try to look at the artist’s soundcloud too for links to what they use. some genres (like trance for me) still heavily use soundcloud
I am in a similar boat. Since you have Tidal might want to look into Tidal-dl to “backup” the things you especially like in high quality.
Tidal is actually not too bad, and it pays artists more than other services (not a lot, just more) but I do expect it to go downhill/away eventually so I make a habit of downloading what I can and supporting the artist directly in other ways.
I rather pay for the enshitification of Qobuz, than pay those crooks at Tidal any money. That MQA shit is still very deep and practically enshrined in my soul…
MQA?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated
Basically trickery with alleged lossless, but it is not even close to lossless and you need very special players that can unfold MQA. Tidal got a lot of criticism for it and eventually switched away to FLAC…but the way they handled it was pretty bad and it still brushes me the wrong way.
Admittedly I was completely ignorant of this before but if they switched (back?) to flac then it seems they at least listen to criticism, no?
Or what did they handle poorly? I was thinking of getting tidal but at the moment I am still content with my offline library.
They dropped MQA format support on Oct 20 in favor of FLAC https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/25876825185425-Audio-Format-Updates
If I can, I buy direct downloads.
If I can’t do that, I’ll buy the CD (as long as its direct or a small label).
If I can’t, or its one of the big labels, I’ll find it elsewhere. I’d rather buy merch to support the artist directly than buy anything that goes through the big labels.
For me, most of the artists I follow are in band camp. I haven’t feel any enshitification on it so far, and I don’t love giving me money to epic either, but there is also bandcamp Friday. For whoever is not on it, I just pirate (torrent) or download from qobuz using a throwaway account on trial, trying to buy cds, merch or whatever from the artist.
