Comment on Why I Ditched Spotify, and How I Set Up My Own Music Stack | LeshiCodes
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
Having your own collection is great. But it doesn’t provide the service Spotify does (or any streaming service). 80% of the time I listen to discovery-type generated playlists. I want to find new music. This is fundamentally impossible with the music I own. This is something you can’t self host. Even if you have a vast collection of music you don’t know (by whatever means your get it), you still need the algorithms to pick the music that you’re likely to like.
I really wish I could. I self host basically everything else. Even tried some local music similarity training for “smart playlists”. It’s kinda neat at best, but no where remotely close to the music discovery of Spotify and other online services. You need the massive amounts of users to derive that data.
I guess that’s where the ListenBrainz/Last.fm part comes in (which is mentioned in the article).
I still get music recommendations via friends, concert/festival lineups and online forums, but that’s just for my “main” genres. For other stuff, Spotify is quasi the only solution for me as well.
Friends don’t work for me. I don’t know a single person who listens to even close to the things that I like. Sure there’s some overlap occasionally, and I might hear about one artist once a week or month. I get dozens to hundreds recommended by spotify weekly, and I actually end up liking a handful of those. With friends, it also only works with known artists, and it’s incredibly rare to get reommended something that isn’t well known but happens to fit my taste by them (don’t think that ever happened, actually). As an example just last week I got recommended an artist that has 60-something monthly listeners on Spotify (now 74!). I liked them so much I tried to see what I can find, and they got a youtube channel with 3 (live) videos and like 500-ish views each (38 subscribers). NOBODY is ever gonna recommend me those kinds of things, cause nobody ever heard of them, let alone anyone of my friends (and even if they have, they’d have to know to recommend them to me).
As for the last.fm/listenbrainz that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful. I haven’t used it in a VERY long time (decades), but last I did it was kinda “meh”. You can also only start out with what you have, as you’re scrobbling what you’re listenting to. I no longer have most of the music I listen to daily as an actual file/library. So getting that up to date would probably cost thousands of dollars, too. Not to mention it being incredibly tedious to actually gather them on various individual shops and sites like bandcamp or wherever those artists happen to be.
So as much as I wish there was, there isn’t really a (pracical) alternative. Let alone one of the same “competence”.
As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful.
This isn’t a huge issue, listenbrainz supports importing your spotify history.
Setup Lidarr, and subscribe to lists for curated content. Pretty sure you can even subscribe to Spotify lists for it to auto download. But finding people who make lists recommending new stuff you like is probably the best route to go.
yep i added a lidarr list for top 100 x genre songs and i think it updates every week. you can make it pull just the album that has the song or the artist’s discography. im slowly getting a ton of music I’ll never listen to just like spotify
I want to find new music. This is fundamentally impossible with the music I own.
You can simply visit the artist page on lastfm and see related artists . On Bandcamp when i buy an album i want visit the profile on the people who buy the same item . There is really many way to discover artists without spotify when you think about it
No joke here, try (internet) radio. You’ll discover stuff you’d never get on algo-based recommendations. I might be biased by growing up with Winamp’s shoutcast
Of course I have. Specifically RadioParadise(.com) is great for this, which I’ve listened to through winamp’s shoutcast as well (multiple decades ago). I’ve even been a supporter for all those decades at this point. But it’s a very far cry away from the personalized (discovery) playlists. The efficiency diffference for discovering music is orders of magnitude: I find maybe 1-3 songs a month compared to 5+ in a week for discovery playlists (somtimes less, usually more). You can even skip songs you don’t like on there, but that still doesn’t make up for it being universal and not personalized.
It’s nice as a palate cleanser, or when I don’t wanna put effort into selecting what to play. But I’d lose my mind listening to it for truly extended periods of time. The music is great, and the (human) selection is superb, but just by the nature of personal taste, I only like around 30% of the music I’d say.
I believe plexamp will scan your library and will make the discovery-type playlist you’re looking for
First of all, after recent events I’m not touching anything from “Plex” with a proverbial 10 foot pole.
But even that aside, no it won’t do what I want because it can’t. I can’t discover something outside of my library with it. It’s a music player for a Plex library. It can generate playlists of songs with similar styles, and that’s nice and all, but not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for playlists of things I don’t own, or know, or ever heard of, but that are still likely to be something I like. I don’t want a sophisticated “shuffle”.
I was addressing this part of what you said:
Even if you have a vast collection of music you don’t know (by whatever means your get it), you still need the algorithms to pick the music that you’re likely to like.
I was addressing this part of what you said
Ah ok that part wasn’t clear to me, sorry (maybe quote it if you’re reffering to a small part of a comment?). Yes, it would work for that, but I don’t have that collection. I could sail the high seas, but that kinda defeats the purpose of wanting artists to get paid and rather hypocritical. At least they do get paid (even if poorly) using Spotify. So somehow getting to the point where that would work for discovering new-to-me music and that also doesn’t screw over artists seems hard, unless I’m missing something?
EDIT: also, fwiw, I didn’t downvote you lol.
No worries, I don’t pay attention to votes anyway. Doesn’t matter on Lemmy (esp. on comments) unless you’re talking about visibility, which doesn’t do anything on a comment chain like this one either…
Isn’t Spotify just using an AI? Couldn’t one self host an AI that plugs into the music library and makes recommendations?
Yes it’s using “an AI”. But that doesn’t mean anything. You can’t just use any AI and have the same result. Just cause AI got a global hype doesn’t mean this is new either. Neural networks have existed for many decades, which is likely what they’re using. The hard part is to get the training data. That is where the value (or usefulnes) comes from. And that source is all their users, listening to all the music, importantly including newly released music, all the time. It’s the basic idea of “people who liked X also liked Y”. What songs people combine together in a playlist. That sort of thing.
We don’t have that data to train “an AI” so we have a local version of this. They have it for millions of users. That’s why their AI is incredibly good at this task. Sure, they also let labels pay them to rank things higher so they get more listens, and that is anything but transparent when and how that happens. But over all, you can’t just magically do what they are doing locally.
Ok, so it doesn’t exist because of the training data, couldn’t that be achieved by the self hosted users sharing anonymous training data? Or maybe sharing curated playlists to help the suggestions for others? I totally understand some may see it as a privacy concern, but since the ultimate privacy is becoming disconnected to everyone and everything, there might be a level of sharing that can be achieved where users could feel comfortable.
Note, I just woke up and this makes total sense to me right now, so don’t hate me please.
clmbmb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Call me old, but people should learn to discover music in different ways (friends, press, concerts, etc.) and not wait to be fed by corporations… just a thought.
kittyjynx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I like 1990’s Japanese ska punk and I had hit a wall finding new bands since there isn’t a huge English language community for that stuff. With spotify I found ten new bands the first day. I do try to find a way to own the music I like through Bandcamp or through the Amazon MP3 store but I don’t know of another way to discover new music as efficiently.
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Hey what’s wrong with silently listening to new releases at the record shop.
Best memories growing up we’re going to a&b sound and playing Dreamcast while my parents listened to the CDs setup around the store for demos.
I remember places having rows of stations so a bunch of people could listen to new releases at the same time.
Digital music is great but something to be said about having to actually curate your own experience
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
See my other reply to tofu. Not the same thing. You just couldn’t do what these services do even 2 decades ago. You could discover things, but at a very different pace.
mrdown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t know about you but this is so fun for me it bring me joy and fulfillment as opposed to being fed by algorithm
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
It’s the opposite for me. I don’t want to read about music. I just want to listen to music that I don’t know yet but an likely to like. I don’t want too dig around. The algorithms you dislike do something that no article or podcast can: give me personally tailored recommendations.
mrdown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It is a lot more fun to discover artists yourself. Browsing a list of album covers and enjoy them, read short description of the album and artist then listen to the music. You also feel the send of fulfillement becausw the process becomes a personal adventure rather than a passive experience
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
As I said in my other reply, different people like different things. I don’t want an adventure. I want the passive experience. I do other things while listening to music (work, read, tinker, …). I almost always have some music playing, but rarely do I just listen to music (it does happen though). I’ll pick styles depending on mood or task, it’s like the rails that keep me on track while working (as an example). If I’m not listening to music, I lose focus.
I simply can’t do that with an article or other medium that requires my primary attention.
mrdown@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I am just expressing the other perspective. Not telling you to have the same
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The ways you mention are basically just corporations with extra steps.
hogmomma@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Streaming isn’t exclusive to the methods you mentioned. I have plenty of friends make recommendations. And I found out about one of my now-favorite bands through Rolling Stone.