memes

Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and … I’m just gonna stop.

It's a bit spam-like, but I'm going to write something about this separately despite having replied about a different item previously.

I'm technical so it has to be taken with a grain of salt but umm:

1. Home streaming software is not really that difficult to setup and run.

2. Search beats tagging for me, which is embedded as part of point #1.

3. There are an abundance of options for streaming music, it's (almost of course) easier and with more available choice than running your own Plex server which millions of people do. Hell, if you like plex you can just use its music app.

4. Of course you have to have a computer on in order to stream to yourself. I have a NUC (to counterpoint your "large energy bill" point) I use for the purpose of Plex and music streaming. But at least the music you like will stay there even as artists fight with various streaming services or try to start their own to get market share via exclusivity. It's all still there, because in a very real way you actually have the music.

5. Your Internet does not have to be great to stream music. Some of us older fucks remember RealAudio. We literally streamed audio via dial-up modem. Aside from that, many streaming software packages including the one I use have an ability to locally cache what you're listening to. I can listen to anything I've recently listened to on an airplane without preparing because it has an offline mode.

To each their own, but Spotify isn't for me for a large number of reasons.

No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have

I haven't used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There's not really much to them other than "people who liked X tend to like Y" or "here's something that sounds similar to an artist you like". It's discovery sure, but it's discovery on autopilot. It'll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.

I usually don't want something "similar to...X" when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I've found probably a dozen.

All valid points, and I'm glad Spotify works for you. For me though, the tedium isn't nearly as bad as it seems to be for you. I'm fine with my methods since they've never truly failed me Even with my relatively disorganized collection, I can find what I'm looking for pretty quickly even without metadata (Lots of my oldest stuff is also from Limewire, and even Kazaa. Let's just not mention the bitrate of some of it lol).

I'm fine with gradually expanding my tastes too, so I don't need Spotify for finding new things. To be fair though, I have found some truly great stuff through the site that I feel I would have never heard, so it's not without its merits. Though if you're ever bored and you want to do some manual discovery, Every Noise at Once is a bizarrely cool place and might lead to some interesting finds. But YMMV. And if I don't feel like picking anything I'll just throw on whatever internet radio station suits my fancy.

I get you on the storage space as well. Luckily for me, a lot of what I listen to (don't make fun please) is chiptunes, and I found a kickass app for my phone that reads the same files that the real consoles read so I can enjoy them in truly perfect quality, plus I have actual weeks of music in this format for less than 300 megs.

I admit my tastes are highly eclectic - to say the least - but I'm perfectly content with that. It's great that you, along with the majority of other people, have an option that best suits your needs. May we both be able to access our music solutions as long as possible.