I will take a moment to defend myself: I paid for Spotify because I was a power user (listening to music 4-12 hours every day while working) and also because I had the family plan so a few other family members could piggyback off of my sub.
But even saying that, I have spent way too much money on Spotify and the thought of spending any more money on it gave me the heebie jeebies., so this year I set out to put a stop to it.
I got some suggestions here for how to rip my Spotify playlists, but I eventually went with Spytify as opposed to anything that hooked into the Spotify API, just to make sure I wouldn’t do anything that would get my normie family members’ accounts banned. It has some issues such as incorrectly determining song duration and cutting some songs off, and the fact that you need to rip the songs by playing them in real time, but it worked “good enough” for my purposes.
I also went out and downloaded the high quality lossless music files for bands I listen to a lot, and honestly it’s making me start to turn my nose up at mp3s a little lol.
I also was able to set up yt-dlp in order to download all my shitty song mashups and SiIvaGunner rips that aren’t hosted anywhere else.
Just about the only thing I’ll probably miss from Spotify is getting introduced to random indie bands via Discover Weekly, but hey I’ll always have the web browser for that.
So that’s my success story I guess. It’s never too late or too early to quit subscription services comrades!
Also I’m currently using foobar2000 as my desktop music player! As for Android, I’m still cycling through different music players on the app store trying to find something both feature rich and not annoying
Plex and the music app plexamp are great if you are looking for alternatives.
Also, soulseek for downloading music.
foobar2000
man this name has not crossed my mind in like 15 entire years, wow
On Android I highly recommend Retro Music, it’s free and open source, available on the FDroid store. It’s fast, has a great interface, and supports ~gapless flac playback~
Foobar is on Android too, but I also use VLC
When I was on Android I used to use Pulsar and loved it. Hopefully it hasn’t changed much over the years between?
I honestly won’t judge you. I found I can buy music off bandcamp for cheap and it still pays the artist better than a listen on Spotify or Youtube. That said, there’s still some appeal to the likes of Spotify and Youtube, especially given how much clutter a cd listener can accumulate.
Yeah in the past I had preferred the convenience of streaming versus dealing with downloading everything and managing files and storage. Now that the enshittification has intensified it’s got me changing my habits.
There’s a few indie bands I found through Spotify that I wish I could purchase their discography off of bandcamp or something, but as of the moment they are only available on music streaming services, so the 300kbs Spotify rip mp3 is as good as I’ll get for now… sucks
I’ve been hoarding LAME -V0 vbr MP3s for decades and I still haven’t quit Spotify.
Did the same a couple years ago. I still listen to the discover weekly playlist with the free version on mobile but I use Mutify which automatically mutes the ads. I won’t tolerate ads but I don’t mind a minute or two of silence every once in a while.
