this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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I think it's more that most people just aren't aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren't any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what's the alternative? Sure there's a few Linux phones out there and that's almost an alternative but it's not there yet. You could go with a "dumb" phone, but for most people that's not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.
If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they'd probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.
What’s an example of an alternative with a really great recommendation algorithm?
Things like recommendation algorithms are difficult for small companies/individuals to provide. Let alone the library of music.
No algorithm but buying physical media again is one path.
A few months ago I got a couple CDs and I'm hoping to rebuild my collection and get off Spotify. It supports artists better, and YouTube is still there to help discover new music.
Buy a CD a month instead of your service. A roll back for technology of course, but worth trying imo
Our musicians are getting fucked with streaming services and I like directly supporting them.
Since you asked, in the US at least I would say Tidal's is quite good. Not a small company, but an alternative.
Plexamp does a pretty good job with the radio features, granted you will have to torrent stuff you’re not necessarily familiar with first. If you have a few friends who also share their music libraries with you it can really help by including their tracks in your radios.
Wait, PlexAmp allows for multiple libraries?
Settings > playback > radio > include external media
“Consider tracks from shared servers and TiDAL”
Also if you just mean multiple libraries like switching between them, click at the top. I’ve got 4 of my own and 1 from a friend here.
Also, there’s an app called Prologue that adds audiobook support to Plex’s libraries. Or rather, it parses the metadata that Plex refuses to parse.
Basically, Plex doesn’t read audiobook metadata. It just refuses to. It can still play audiobooks, but it treats them like 250 hour long albums. Which is… Well… Not great. Especially when a single chapter can be 10-20 minutes long. But Prologue does parse metadata.
You log into Prologue with Plex, then it uses Plex’s remote access to actually read the audiobook files. Then it does its own metadata parsing directly on your phone. So the Plex server isn’t doing any extra work to serve the file, and no config changes are required on Plex’s end. But on your phone, you get nice pretty chapters, bookmarks, speed controls, etc…
I tried to get Audiobookshelf to work for a day or two. It just refused to read or write anything to my NAS. Everything was configured properly on the surface, and it appeared to work… But then it would lose my added audiobooks every time it restarted. After throwing myself at it for about two days, I gave up and found Prologue.
Thank you, friend. I do have two different personal libraries, but was unaware of the “external” libraries option.
I would welcome sharing libraries with you, if you were into such things.