Welcome to the era of only Spotify Plays matter - let’s take a look at the underbelly of streaming scams affecting independent artists.
Welcome to the era of only Spotify Plays matter - let’s take a look at the underbelly of streaming scams affecting independent artists.
I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8.
Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).
My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).
Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.
I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.
My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.
In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it, look up album/artist on Rutracker, filter out albums/songs I don’t want from the discography torrent add it to my qbittorrent if available, mount the NFS share on windows with my staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the correct folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.
This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don’t like the song and delete it later. It’s way too much.
The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can’t even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren’t worth it for me.
Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that’s frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves.
Feels like I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.
I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn’t worked for me to move off of it long-term. I’d love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.
I dont go into depth that much, but i do a lot of manual labor getting everything in place when I get new music. Maybe I never spent a good amount of time figuring it out, but preset id tags done automatically never worked out for me. I check them all and edit a few things on some, and then I run it through music Picard using someone’s script to only update genre tags and give up to 5 per track. After that, I add them in. My biggest complaint about Spotify was that I didn’t feel anything when it recommended me stuff, and it always felt off as to what I heard. Something about looking it up, finding what’s new, and wanting to hear it is why I keep coming back. Spotify, I didn’t learn anything about who came on unless I looked. Weirdly enough, I feel like I discovered way more myself than with the algorithm.
Wish I had your money experience tbqh, because Spotify algorithm is the only algorithm I use (that I’m aware of, anyway) and it’s the only one I find that doesn’t just suggest me random crap, but is almost dead on to what I want every time I’m building a new playlist, and while I had a fairly developed and diverse taste to start with, I have found hundreds of artists that I would consider myself a fan of through Spotify. It’s genuinely a lot to give up to never find any artists like that again and go back to a much more narrow cone of vision for music :(
Even though I talk a big game about quitting algos everywhere else on Lemmy, I also can’t say I was ever particularly impressed with recs of YT’s, Google’s, Tumblr’s or Insta’s or TikTok’s algos in comparison, hence why all those were very easy to delete/block/disable.
Worth noting though, your phrase “came on” makes me think you are talking about some sort of smart shuffle or auto-generated playlist feature, which I never used. My only interaction with the Spotify algorithm is scrolling to the bottom of a playlist I’m making and seeing the list of songs that are listed at the bottom as recommended, if I like it and there’s a place for it on the playlist, I will add it. The only flaw in this mode of interaction is after many many playlists, and the fact that I try not to repeat any songs between playlists, I find that what it tends to suggest is just songs I already have in my other playlists.