memes

Your only hope of getting even a comparable experience is to be tech savvy and patient enough to set up a home streaming server, manually tag all your music, and find an audio app with an interface/features that you like that also supports streaming. Oh and then your home computer needs to be on all the time, and your Internet has to be great, and you must not care about your energy bill that much, and … I’m just gonna stop.

It's a bit spam-like, but I'm going to write something about this separately despite having replied about a different item previously.

I'm technical so it has to be taken with a grain of salt but umm:

1. Home streaming software is not really that difficult to setup and run.

2. Search beats tagging for me, which is embedded as part of point #1.

3. There are an abundance of options for streaming music, it's (almost of course) easier and with more available choice than running your own Plex server which millions of people do. Hell, if you like plex you can just use its music app.

4. Of course you have to have a computer on in order to stream to yourself. I have a NUC (to counterpoint your "large energy bill" point) I use for the purpose of Plex and music streaming. But at least the music you like will stay there even as artists fight with various streaming services or try to start their own to get market share via exclusivity. It's all still there, because in a very real way you actually have the music.

5. Your Internet does not have to be great to stream music. Some of us older fucks remember RealAudio. We literally streamed audio via dial-up modem. Aside from that, many streaming software packages including the one I use have an ability to locally cache what you're listening to. I can listen to anything I've recently listened to on an airplane without preparing because it has an offline mode.

To each their own, but Spotify isn't for me for a large number of reasons.