Selfhosted

@erisir @maikelthedev I missed that Bandcamp got purchased. That is kind of worrying.
Although everything I've bought off bandcamp is safe in my own library, I would be sad to see it disappear as a good source of music.
It's unusual in that its good both to artists (transparent artist compensation) and listeners (downloadable drm-free music files in multiple formats, minimal js on the website, no bs, just music).
It's been ~1 year since the purchase, I hope the same bandcamp is here in 5 years

Bandcamp are also one of the few that sell lossless FLAC files, and while I don't really care about listening to FLAC directly, it makes sense as an archive format.

PlexAmp is actually really good as a music client.

You can reasonably use Tidal to find new suggestions and plex to actually listen to stuff. That's basically what I do. Tidal's algorithm for discovering new music is better than Spotify's imo, was pleasantly surprised when I switched because of plex/tidal integration. The biggest pain will be the initial Tidal setup with music preferences (likes/dislikes etc)

I will say though that Tidal/Plex integration is far from perfect, I initially got it to mix my downloads with a streaming service and quickly discovered plex cannot download Tidal songs which put a huge dent in my plans.

Ditch Plex and get Jellyfin. Use Symfonium to play your music on your phone.

Plex will display the mixes tidal generates for you but other than that it just general popular stuff. Not necessarily what you listen too.

It also is separate button from your libraries

Symfonium has been amazing! The only thing I was sad to lose from Plex when I switched to the superior FOSS alternative Jellyfin was Plexamp. There was a Finamp app but it was missing a lot and didn't work too well. Symfonium on the other hand has been a dream come true.

For albums it works great for me but I also have a moderately sized playlist of lower quality songs (about 900) which plex amp struggles with. When I started that playlist, scrolling would become really laggy.

I switched to using plex for high quality music where I care about correct metadata tagging etc, and navidrome for low quality stuff. Both are then brought together on my phone using symfonium

The radio is not an answer. I stopped listening to it in 2006 when I installed a new car radio that had an AUX input for my iPod. I recently had to use a car that didn't have BT audio and was forced to use FM. It was horrific. The same playlists from 2006, but with longer and more frequent ads. I tried every station I could find and it was the same deal.

Personally I think Spotify is worth $10 a month.

While I agree that there aren't any great self-hosted solutions, more diversity in the music space is important. I refuse to use Spotify, and for me it's not about price. In fact, if they charged more and actually paid their artists more I would probably hate it less. But overall I mostly refuse to use it for other reasons:

It couples the company that delivers your music with the app you must use to stream your music. In my opinion these should be separate - perhaps an open protocol that streaming companies can all use and open source clients that can connect to one or many of them?

Spotify made it clear that they don't care about Linux users when they killed their Linux client. Yes I know about librespot, it's only a trivial decision away from Spotify killing it. And unlike Reddit's API changes, the backlash would be minimal since most people use the official one.

It strongly relies on network effects to get everyone on the platform and keep them there. As mentioned above, this hurts independent artists because they are forced to publish their music on a platform that doesn't pay well just because everyone is on that platform. But there are more than just network effects between artists and consumers: Spotify relies on social-network style antipatterns to keep users in their ecosystem. I've been told by my friends that I am "difficult" because I don't use Spotify and they want to share something with me. That is Spotify's manipulation

Their official client is electron, I don't want to have to run a whole browser stack to listen to music. Not to mention the fact that npm is plagued with supply chain problems and unless the Spotify devs manually audit every dependency of every dependency of every dependency any time they add or update one (doubt it), users are one attack away from being compromised.

When I did briefly use Spotify many years ago I took the time to build up some playlists of music and randomly songs would disappear from the playlists when Spotify lost rights to stream it.

I personally use Bandcamp for recommendations/discovery, and then purchase music I like to listen to and self-host it with MPD. It works great.

I'm not saying this is for everyone, obviously streaming has its merits. But in my experience most people self host not because something costs money, but because they have zero control of the actual experience, and they want to avoid the vendor lock-in issue.

Listening to the radio also helps. The BBC Sounds website will tell you all the tracks played in a programme for any of their radio stations.

My player (Roon) does not support ListenBrainz scrobbling and it's always really bothered me. I just set multi-scrobbler up and I'm so happy. Thanks for linking it!

OP, if you don't mind paying and self-hosting I highly recommend Roon / Roon ARC.

Another thanks for the recommendation on multi-scrobbler. I was trying to find a method for filtering which devices/players in Plex would scrobble to last.fm, and that did the trick. I just had to configure a filtered notification in Tautulli to send to multi-scrobbler and then to last.fm.