So, imagine I’m using any sort of streaming server. Is there ANY of them that have the ability to suggest new stuff, which is the number 1 and only reason I still use Spotify?
If anyone could answer this including the setup they have to run it, that would be awesome.
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It’s quite unlikely that a self-hosted music streaming server could give you suggestions of music not in your library without an external service. But there might be some alternatives to Spotify that can address some of the economic injustices in music streaming, just like self-hosted and free/libre/open-source software can address some injustices that damage user privacy and data sovereignty in centralized services.
While not strictly about streaming, I find Bandcamp quite nice for discovering new music. As a bonus, bands receive much more money if you purchase their music than what they’d get when streamed on a service like Spotify. (Note that, in aggregate, a band may nevertheless earn more from mainstream platforms if they are streamed a lot but listeners aren’t willing to purchase. Be sure to buy music that you like if you have the means to do so! Not only it helps bands to create more awesome music, you can also listen to downloaded digital files after the demise of centralized streaming platforms.)
Worryingly, Epic Games purchased Bandcamp last year. However, the fate of the platform looks at least somewhat safe, since its workers recently managed to unionize despite initial union-busting by corporate.
Another laternative would be Resonate, which is run as a co-op and has a novel approach to music purchases and paying bands. However, their collection can currently be a bit sparse, depending on which genres you’re interested in.
@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 yearsBandcamp 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.
Plex does alright at suggesting music from your own library, and also has some really nice DJ-like song transitions that are legitimately way better than any other track fades. However, Plex users have been frustrated with the company’s slow response to fixing long-standing bugs, and some of the features are paid. It’s also not open-source.
No idea if it can suggest music that isn’t in your library; I know that they integrate with Tidal though, so maybe if you have that it’ll also suggest stuff from Tidal?
PlexAmp is actually really good as a music client.
Ditch Plex and get Jellyfin. Use Symfonium to play your music on your phone.
I’ve used Plex, Jellyfin, and Navidrome. I’m currently using Navidrome, but Plexamp is a massively better product for discovering/interacting with your library. The sonic analysis really takes it to another level.
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.
I had high hopes for the plex/tidal integration. But it is not ready yet. Hoping they can improve upon it, when things worked it was great.
Would be awesome if tidal or Spotify had a lower cost “discovery” account that had a limited number of streams per month that could integrate with plex/plexamp to stream AND provide recommendations. But I think the market for the is probably too small for them.
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
An alternative could be to use last.fm.
Many self hosted streaming servers or media players support scrobbling (sharing what song you listened to) to last.fm. You can then see your music history across different streaming platforms (including self hosted) and have tailored recommendations for new artists or albums on the last.fm website.
A few downsides are:
- Recommendations are not integrated into your music player.
- Not self hosted (there seem to be some alternative, but I don’t think they will make recommendations), you depend on last.fm.
Spotify is the only streaming service I continue to pay for. Mainly because of the sheer size of the library, and the way they recommend new music.
I’m enjoying Symfonium with Navidrome & Tailscale.
It just works with what I have in my music library but it the server side is great and the Symfonium app is the first time I’ve been happy to ditch Spotify, only had it for a month or two but really happy with the setup so far.
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.
There isn’t really anything like Spotify. There were attempts to use a service like Last.fm (which isn’t self hosted) or libre.fm (which is self hosted but development has been stopped) to track your listening data. Then there were a couple discovery projects that worked with Navidrome (don’t really remember the name but they’re probably somewhere in r/selfhosted) but they haven’t been very succesful.
Even if you somehow managed to solve those problems you’ve got the next problem which is the fact that you don’t have the recommended song available in your library. Perhaps it could be solved wit Lidarr.
Personally I think Spotify is worth $10 a month.
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.
Plex Amp is by far the best
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
Hmm weird, I have 1500 some tracka without issue. Is yr metadata on an SSD? I’m not really sure how it sync the metadata but I figure having it on an HDD would cause issues
Actual files are on an HDD and the database on an SSD
I think the only real answer to this is the radio, and even that’s not as good
Spotify is just one of those things that always has and always will provide a better service than piracy due to the amount of good music arguably outweighing the time you have to listen to it
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.
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Spotify just shows you want they want you to listen to, just like any other streaming service. I’ve found more cool music within the past few years thanks to music communities than I ever did from Spotify, not to mention the giant amount of music that isn’t even on Spotify to begin with.
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.
maybe in the UK, but US radio is trash.
The only thing I can think of would be Roon. Some drawbacks though. It’s proprietary and it’s a paid service. It’s very, very good for playing and streaming local music though. They put a lot of work in to their metadata, and do have recommendations in place. You can also get artists/songs/albums like this. There’s no curated lists yet, but AFAIK it’s in the pipeline.
I use it for all my local music. Both at-home and outside streaming work great. There’s still some work for them to do with tagging more obscure styles correctly, like Future funk.
This assumes that you have all the new stuff on your server every time? I mean, proposing new stuff without having it makes no sense
I haven’t seen it mentioned here but you can use Plexamp along with multi-scrobbler attached to a service like listenbrainz or last.fm. This will record what you listen to and help come up with personalized recommendations.
Navidrome.
Navidrome doesn’t have music suggestions, which is what the OP is after.
For me sadly there is no alternative, since I rely on Spotify connect a lot :/
