For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends. But over time, several issues became impossible to ignore: artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream, fake Artists and ghost Tracks, AI music and impersonation, creepy age verification complicity and the fact that despite paying monthly, I never actually owned anything. So I decided to take back control of my music experience. Here’s how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more.
Few laughable things here:
Artists don’t get paid when you’re using Lidarr and sabnzbd lol. Dudes pirating music while trying to say how badly Spotify pays artists lol.
Your complete library is only available offline if you’re streaming locally or have already downloaded all of your music to every device you want to play it offline on. Don’t know what he means by “limited downloads” for Spotify either.
In this setup he is having data collected and tracked by last.fm, (potentially) whichever indexing services he is using for lidarr, (potentially) whichever download service he’s using for sabnzbd, and ListenBrainz (which even makes all user listen data and text public). Oh and his ISP. And cloudflare.
Hosting your own media library is awesome, just don’t try and bullshit people by pretending that you’re better than Spotify because they pay their artists poorly when you’re stealing from the artists yourself.
kaidenshi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I understand the author’s intent to support artists by purchasing their music on various platforms, but by using Sabnzbd to download music from Usenet, this is essentially a guide to pirate music. The only thing in this setup that isn’t automated is purchasing the albums, and at one point the author says he uses Sabnzbd to download from Bandcamp. No, he doesn’t, that’s impossible; Sabnzbd is a Usenet client and nothing more.
I applaud the author for trying to be honest and support his favorite artists with legal purchases to justify his use of these apps, and it’s a great setup. But let’s not pretend that most people following this guide will actually legally purchase any music they download once they see how seamless and fun it is to pirate it.
And I say all of that as someone who has a similar setup with Lidarr and Sabnzbd, I am not judging anyone who chooses to pirate music. And I do purchase actual physical albums of some of the music I download so I can support my favorite artists. I just wanted to call out the author for being a bit disingenuous about his setup.
BrikoX@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
He does? I can’t find that reference.
kaidenshi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I could swear I read it exactly that way, but looking back I don’t see it, perhaps I inferred it from this:
To be clear, Lidarr/Sabnzbd can ONLY download from Usenet, which (as far as I know) is not an authorized download channel for any legally purchased media. I get what he’s saying, that he buys the music from a legit source and then downloads it from Usenet for simplicity and automation’s sake (which is exactly what I do as well), but the inference appeared to be that he was somehow pointing Lidarr/Sabnzbd at Bandcamp directly.