If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.
I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.
There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.
Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours 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.
clmbmb@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours 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 8 hours 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.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours 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.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The ways you mention are basically just corporations with extra steps.
hogmomma@lemmy.world 6 hours 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.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
ngdev@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
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
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 9 hours ago
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.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours ago
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”.
papertowels@mander.xyz 7 hours ago
I believe plexamp will scan your library and will make the discovery-type playlist you’re looking for
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours ago
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”.
HurlingDurling@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Isn’t Spotify just using an AI? Couldn’t one self host an AI that plugs into the music library and makes recommendations?
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours ago
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.