I ditched Spotify and set up my own music stack
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If I used an open source app or my own app I could fix this stupid bug but I don't have any control. :(
Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.
If you mean the inaccuracies of the metadata, again, you just peck at it as it bothers you. You don't have to fix it all at once. Any decent MP3 player can do searches for specific songs. Nor do you have to do a hard cut from streaming services.
I do have it all hooked up on Syncthing so my changes stay in sync but that's not exactly a hard thing. It's only marginally harder than a straight copy, and sometimes honestly even a bit easier given how dodgy phones can be about large normal copies.
If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.
https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en
InnerTune: https://github.com/z-huang/InnerTune
In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.
The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.
I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'
Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?
I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.
The people making the art, should be paid the most.
Why? There's a fair market value for the art. There's also a fair real world cost* for distributing and advertising, set by the market (the people working those positions need to eat too). It's trivially easy to go negative, if you try to market something that isn't popular.
If it weren't a net benefit for the artist, they wouldn't go under a label, or stream on a certain platform. They're not being forced to. They do it because it results in more money in their pocket.
more than zero can still be too little money in exchange for the labor provided and the profit produced.
There's a team that maintains the internet connection so the author can upload. * maintains a storage array/metadata catalog to hold the song. * creates the algorithm to recommend the music to people. * creates ads to recommend the service to people. * ...etc
If any part of this chain finds their effort not worth the value they receive, the whole chain stops. The point before it stops is the market value of that service. Someone charges more than the market value? Then someone else, who finds the effort worth the cheaper pay, will do it (ok, besides monopolies that have captured the government, but they're not really relevant in this case).
If you think it's possible to do what you want, then put the effort into starting a service! You don't want to? Well, nobody else does either, because what they get in return will not be worth the effort.
We live in a society.
Fair ain't got nothing to do with it. Markets don't give a shit about 'fair'.
If they didn't find the compensation fair, for their effort, they wouldn't do the work, and would do something else instead. You want to see positions that that are at the boundary of "fair"? They have incredibly high turnover rates, because people think "this isn't worth it" and quit. Where I am, fast food is a great example of this, where the companies weren't paying wages people wanted to work for, leading to unsustainable turnover, labor shortages, then pay increases.
No one needs to sign a record deal. Or take an advance (which is a loan).
It’s like VC money. There are plenty of threads here which recommend not taking VC money and bootstrapping instead.
And yes, some artists self fund, self publish and self-upload. I’m not defending Spotify or streaming rates, just saying platitudes don’t seem sufficiently nuanced or informed.
I went to a show recently and the band was performing old material and they stopped to make a big deal about how they finally won back their music after 10 years. Famously Prince and Taylor Swift also went public with their disputes.
Good for them, but they signed the contract that locked up their rights for a decade. It seems weird to get too upset at the label for what you thought was a good deal at the time.
Would it be different if we started over? Maybe.
Could it be that the streaming platform pays 0.005 which then gets divided amongst the whole band, and then the label takes their cut for producing and marketing it?
Whereas before, the label was simply giving 10%?
I'd say overall though, streaming can be good for artists. It helps keep them fresh in fans ears (via auto-generated & editorial playlists) and provides a revenue stream for the older stuff that would never be selling in stores or iTunes now.
"Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by:
Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales Buying physical media from official stores Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists Attending concerts and buying merchandise Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further.
My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."
Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.
It does musicbrains matching, fixes the metadata based on that, fetches pretty pictures of the artist etc.
There are other tools for it, but Lidarr is what works for me.
Since when do sites like band camp etc expose your bought library over usenet?
Live performances also have the added benefit of shielding artists from AI music.
Think about a ~$15/hour job. A solo artist would need ~500k streams per month to hit that. Only the top fraction of a percentage of artists on Spotify hit that.
Music has always been a tough business with middle men taking the lion's share of the upside. Streaming services just add another layer of middlemen.
How many hours did it take to create the songs? You can write a song and then keep making money off it for years. There are also other revenue streams, with live performances and merchandise, etc.
I don’t think you can really compare music streaming to a full time job unless someone is ONLY making music for streaming and doing it 40 hours a week.
Those are two different things. Recording artist does not always equal songwriter. So how much should the songwriter make? The recording studio? The audio engineer? All the other people involved in creating the recorded song? Now that it's made, how do you get people to know the song exists and want to listen to it, much less purchase it?
The reason compensation isn't a settled thing is it's a very complex thing to answer.
The simplest possible answer is "the artist sets their own price" - assuming they just DIY'd the entire production, advertising, distribution, etc themselves. But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all, not to mention all the non-music skills if they're not paying professionals to do the rest.
If they're not just going to play at the local coffee shop, or bus from city to city barely making enough for gas and beer, they need some way to professionally produce, mass-market, and mass-distribute their songs. It's not feasible for most musicians to do this themselves, so there exists a music industry to do it... which gives them all the cards... letting them set the price, and contract terms... which are often unfair. That's what happens when an industry is given the power to exploit people: they do.
Why are any of these the distribution medium's (or better, listener's) problem? The songwriter, recording studio, audio engineer, marketing firm, etc should be paid for their services at their standard rates at the time the service is performed. The artist is the one who should accept this risk. Just like.. basically everything else in the world. The plumber who installed an office sink is not entitled to some fraction of the occupying organization's revenue, right?
> But that is so much work that they would need to already have an income stream to give them the time to do it all
Which is why labels exist. They take the risk on, and pre-pay for (everything), in exchange for the lion's share of potential revenue. Artists are, of course, welcome to stay unsigned and handle all the risk and rewards themselves, but that typically isn't a good value prop.
IMO everything here is working as designed, including Spotify. The author just doesn't understand that "artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream" is exactly what should happen.
Because by and large they don't want that. They are creatives who would prefer to be invested in their work: Charge less now, putting more into their work in the hope and belief that it will pay off over time. Sometimes it does.
Renting a house is rent-seeking too, for example.
Switching Adobe to a subscription service, on the other hand...
they actually contribute to the song.
But the industry moved another direction, and they want ultimate control over everything: not just the songs themselves, but the clients to play them and everything in between. And the tragedy is they screw the artists just as much as customers. Copyright has been captured by the middlemen at the expense of the artists and audiences: that's the real reason people have no respect for the industry, and why copyright is so reviled.
I pay Spotify $20. They take their cut (say, 50%) and there's $10 left for the artists. I've only listened to one small artist throughout the entire month. The artist does not get $10 but much less despite Spotify knowing precisely which artists I listened to.
I'm reminded of an effort a few years ago to legislate the creators getting 50% - which of course meant the "platforms" and the "labels" would collectively share only the other 50%. Which is presumably why the initiative failed.
> The three major labels - Sony, Universal and Warner Music - faced some of the toughest questioning of the inquiry, and were accused of a "lack of clarity" by MPs.
> They largely argued to maintain the status quo, saying any disruption could damage investment in new music, and resisted the idea that streaming was comparable to radio - where artists receive a 50/50 royalty split.
> "It is a narrow-margin business, so it wouldn't actually take that much to upset the so-called apple cart," said Apple Music's Elena Segal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473
These days Spotify has hundreds of millions for Joe Rogan and podcast investments, and Apple reports a 75% profit margin on services, so I guess it is quite profitable for everyone except the actual artists.
So $5.20/mo per head and you get TV, games and storage with it.
Or Spotify Family Plan - 6 Premium accounts for family members under one roof. $11.49/month
So family plans seem to discount unlimited music streaming down to $2/mo per head.
$24/year or what a single CD used to cost, before even doubling it for inflation..
So it doesn’t matter if Spotify passes on 70%, most artists aren’t going to see any substantial portion of that, label or not.
SoundCloud implements a "fan powered royalties" model, so that $10 in your example goes to those who artists who you stream
It isn’t fair that someone who listens to a ton of things has a much greater say in how the money is distributed even though they pay the same as someone who only listens to one artist.
For example, let’s imagine a subscription service with just two users, paying $10 a month and each only listens to a single artist. The first user listens to their favorite album once a day, while the second user listens to their favorite album 9 times a day.
Would it be fair for the artist the first person listens to to only earn $2 while the other artist earns $18? Why should the money spent by the fan of Artist A be used to subsidize the support of artist B, even though they never listen to their stream?
This quirk of “divide by total streams” instead of “divide each users subscription by their particular stream” has lead to a type of fraud where someone will submit a song to Spotify, then create thousands of accounts that just listen to that song 24/7. Those 24/7 listening accounts have unfair say in who gets paid, so much so that you can make more than the subscription price just by having that user stream your songs.
There is always this challenge for creating a business model around digital goods; there is a non-zero cost to create the good, but there is a near zero cost per unit of the good.
No one is going to want a pay per listen model. The heaviest users aren’t going to want to pay that much and will likely turn to piracy, and the lightest users don’t have that strong a desire to listen to music (as demonstrated by their light usage) to want to pay for each stream.
The advantage of a single price, all you can stream, model is that it generates revenue for artists AND it properly recognizes the fact that each stream has a near zero unit cost.
In my model, each listener generates a fixed revenue that is divided up amongst all the artists who create something that user listens to in the same proportion that they listen to it.
This is a popular HN suggestion for disbursement but it makes the math super weird.
Spotify would never forgo current profits from flat monthly plans, but then why shouldn't artists be granted the same advantages in royalties proportional to a subscriber's ratio of playtime if the subscribers are charged a flat rate any how?
> We have clarified that you may only access the version of the Spotify service available where you live at the applicable price set for that version of the service.
> We have clarified how we bill you for subscriptions and how subscriptions may be canceled.
> We have provided more information about different ways in which content may be posted or shared on the platform.
> We have also provided more information about our content policies and practices, and our personalized recommendations.
> We have included links to important user policies and guidelines for your ease of reference.
> We are making some updates to the arbitration agreement.
Found some more discussion of pricing issues:
https://old.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/1n4x58f/spoti...
And this change was not called out in the email, but seems interesting to note:
https://musictechpolicy.com/2025/09/02/ai-implications-of-sp...
> We are updating the Terms of Service for YouTube Premium, YouTube Music Premium and YouTube Premium Lite subscriptions ('Terms'). These new Terms will be included in the YouTube Paid Service Terms of Service and will come into effect on September 26, 2025.
> We are making these changes to improve clarity and transparency regarding your subscription, including:
Clarifying our plan types.
Explaining our policies on promotional offers and accepted payment methods.
Clarifying that your subscription access should be predominantly from the country where you signed up.
Providing additional explanations and clarifications on our subscription policies.This floods the market with many, many independent musicians trying to get heard. And the only way to get heard today is to make it onto curated Spotify playlists, build a following, and hope that someone at a record company somewhere hears you and takes interest. Not only is Spotify a tool for consuming music by the public, it is also the main way that musicians have to promote themselves anymore.
As a musician (who gave up the dream of making this a job long ago), it really sucks. There is infinitely more competition out there now, and when you factor in all the AI crap making it on to Spotify (some of which they are responsible for), it is even worse.
Having to self-promote is the main struggle, and that's the only way to "make it" anymore. Similar with the book publishing industry. My wife spent a year writing an amazing book, paying an editor, but when shopping it around to publishers, none of them would bite because she didn't already have a social media following. They expect you to have 20k followers knowing that X percent of those will buy the product.
What hasn't changed is the fact that vertically integrated distribution-and-promotion with large market share has all the leverage, all the information, and all the legislative influence. In any time period where that exists, the same result plays out through different media.
That is to say, in terms of negotiating power, free market economics, and political influence the artist is not just strongly disadvantaged, but artificially so. It's not a David and Goliath, it's more like David and the Death Star.
When Roger Fischer, Adam Smith, and Jack Abramoff would all agree that one side probably needs some extra support, it's a good bet that "fair" lies so far on the other side of the scale that we don't have to worry about precision or philosophy of "fairness" to make a big improvement.
What's a Blu-ray DVD disk then?
If there still was a mass market for music on physical media, CDs would have been superseded, either by an optical disk or some kind of SD card.
But there isn't. so it hasn't.
The format and equipment exists, it's called "blu ray audio"
The fact that it's not in widespread use is my point exactly: the mass market isn't there any more.
> Every car has a CD tray,
I think that will go the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. Cars have bluetooth.
> my laptop has one,
CD players on laptops literally have gone the way of a headphone jack on a iPhone. They're rare to non-existent on new models.
> I have several players at home.
So do I - they're in a box somewhere.
You're not refuting my point at all - there's not successor to CDs, not because it's a perfect, modern medium for physical music. But just because there is no longer a mass market for music on any physical media.
Their might not be a mass market for neither, but these are not available in the same scale at all. You maybe can find blu ray audio somewhere on the internet, but I've never seen them, while the the music store has hundreds of CDs and every street musician and band sells CDs.
I honestly do not know what the selling point of a Blu-ray disk is. The form factor is exactly the same and nobody needs the capacity. The capacity of a DVD is already too large, why should anyone use a Blue-ray disk? Neither want the musicians produce and sell more than some hours of music, nor do consumers need music for days without interruption. There simply is no kind of music which takes more than a few hours.
So the only difference is that the disk is more expensive and the player is likely incompatible, so hardly a benefit.
> So do I - they're in a box somewhere.
I was only talking about players in use.
But a) there is no mass market for any physical format any more. It's driven by nostalgia. And b) There's more nostalgia for Vinyl than for CDs simply because they were the main medium for much longer. Of course CDs are less fragile and bulky than Vinyl, just like SD cards are less fragile and bulky than CDs, and streaming on existing devices is even more convenient. But that's not the driving factor. It's all fun until someone leaves their Vinyl record collection in a hot car for a few hours.
Setting a market price means a band in really high demand can charge X dollars but a new band, that isn’t well known and doesn’t have high demand could charge X/4 dollars.
Spotify OTOH, charges exactly the same price to the user no matter what song they listen to, and the price is “Monthly cost/number of songs listened to”. Unsurprisingly, instead of leading to the promotion and creation of a whole new set of bands, which is what the democratization of tools and knowledge of music through the internet should have led to, this has instead led to consolidation because the removal of the market price and setting a flat structure means people continue to flock towards the songs that are perceived to be the highest value, ie the most popular stuff.
The amount they'd get for royalties if you couldn't pirate but had to buy their album/single to hear it. So similar to what they got at the pre-mp3/pre-Napster era. Remove a little for the (non existing) physical costs.
(Whether they'd actually get 100% or 0.5% of those royalties would be between them and their record company contract).
"But this is streaming"
And my argument still is: you should pay the amount analogous to buying it once, and then stream it forever or zero times. Streaming should just add the convenience, not change the pricing.
Not saying it's perfect, but Qobuz is paying[1] ~3.5x that.
I've been trying it out as a Spotify alternative, fairly pleased so far, though the "radio" feature in Spotify is better at finding new tracks I like.
That said I buy albums on Bandcamp for stuff I really enjoy.
[1]: https://community.qobuz.com/press-en/qobuz-unveils-its-avera...
I wonder what forms our perception of what activity should be able to earn money from and what should not. I know that me being a professional nap taker should not be able to earn money from it, but when does one activity turn into ‘should be able to earn money from’?
That's not enforcable or anything, but it is why I think artist are paid too little while also thinking the subscription is expensive.
> Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.
From here: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/understanding...
Fundamentally, inflation-adjusted there are 1/2 as many dollars coming in the front end to the US music industry in the 2020s as there were in the 90s peak, per most sources... even though population is 30% higher. So per-capita music spend in inflation adjusted dollars is down like 60-65%. And there's probably far more artists to spread that around to now with the long tail of bedroom producers / part timers / etc all the way up to Swift.
So surely artists are making less than they used to, regardless of how the pie is sliced up because there is a smaller pie. Given the trend in everything else in our economy, I am dubious that the newer streaming arrangements are incrementally more artist-friendly than the old physical media music industry.
If I only listen to one song or rather one artist. They get all the money (minus the fees for running the service).
If I listen to 100 songs by 100 artists, each gets only 10 cents (minus the blablabla).
That's how it should be, really.
The value of recorded music is now zero.
Recorded music having A value was a result of markup on distribution profits. There is now no money in distribution. (There are a lot of parallels between how globalization works and how the record industry worked but thats another conversation).
ML, generative music is coming for the music industry.
Its not hopeless but your Spotify is just a loss leader. It's a gateway to your social media, to your (paid) endorsements and to your shows (another problematic facet of the industry) and merch. There are plenty of ways people with talent and a "voice" can profit. But you better be consistent and authentic.
- I listen to Y 10% of my total listening minutes this month, so they get 1€
I think this would be fair, because I kinda listen the same minutes every month, and most people with a fixed daily schedule probably do it too.
I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void.
I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice.
It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming.
From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to.
The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.
All of the music I purchased from bleep and bandcamp is still available to download again, and the CDs I rip from the used book stores are in a box to be ripped again if I ever need it.
so yes
I also recognised different features I would miss. After an initial bump, the discoverability benefits declined to negligible. What I did greatly value was the unified interface. For that reason, the winner for me is to use plex as the media server, giving plexamp for all clients.
The web interface also runs pretty flawlessly on mobile browser. I was actually shocked at how responsive it was.
It was fun to go back through the collection of music I've been accumulating since high school and moving from hard drive to hard drive: mostly ripped off CDs from the library or purchased in used bookstores, later purchased from iTunes, Amazon, and BandCamp once DRM-free downloads became the norm. Updating album art and re-curating the collection has been a walk down memory lane --- I'd (back then) embedded most of it at 200x200 to fit on a tiny Sony MP3 player, and then an iPod, without wasting space. The music library holds up better than either my old DVDs or the rips I made of them... Even lossy MP3s don't sound as rough as 480p looks on a large display today.
If you're looking to update the metadata in your own music collection, I can happily recommend:
* https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/ for searching for album art.
* https://picard.musicbrainz.org/ for editing music metadata in files.
If you're wanting to replace Spotify or other music subscription services on the go (i.e. from a phone) with something like Jellyfin, Funkwhale, or Navidrome running at home, I've tried and had some success with both tailscale and netbird (though these both require some networking knowledge).
For anyone considering it, I found Tailscale + Jellyfin work a charm. There aren't great docs for doing so, and I beat my head against it for a little bit, but all you need to do really is to add both your local IP range and the Tailscale IP range to the allowed ranges for Jellyfin.
With that, any device on your tailnet can access it. I went further and set up a cloud VM with a public web address behind an auth, installed Tailscale on the VM, and set it up to reverse proxy port 443 to the Jellyfin tailscaleIP:port on my tailnet. So now I can get to it through any web browser or Jellyfin app on devices that aren't on my tailnet.
I'm extremely happy with the results, and the nice thing is that unlike Plex this setup is never subject to forced changes in the future.
If you want to stream from outside your local network you need to pay. Hardware transcoding is also paywalled now, along with a bunch of other things.
If you're asking why I bother to use tailscale on my phone to connect Jellyfin that way instead of just using the reverse proxy, I guess it saves me a little in bandwidth costs and it pings faster.
I have a dynamic IP in theory, but if I keep the router plugged in with less than 30 minutes downtime, I can keep the same IP for years.
As for mobile, while Symphonium supports Jellyfin, I prefer Finamp as it maintains the split from multiple music libraries.
It would cost way more than $11 a month to buy all of the music I listen to.
I just transferred my library from Spotify to Apple Music (with the new built in tool!): 13k liked songs.
I started using paid Spotify from invite, before public release in the US, so 15 years.
Lets go very conservative (for me) and say every 3 songs is from the same album, at $12/album (LOL!): $52k, or $288/month.
Spotify cost: $2.1k, or $12/month
If I had to pay for albums, I would definitely be listening to less varied music.
> It all comes down to one's listening habits.
Yes, I'm aware. I was clearly giving you a somewhat extreme example to support your statement. But, it appears it was interpreted as some sort of a personal attack for some reason. I can't comprehend the modern internet.
> My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased.
Sure. I believe you.
Apple actually used to have a platform that was decent at providing legitimate music at reasonable pricing and convenient means to play it with iTunes. I wonder if Apple Music can become that again.
There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate.
It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough!
> several issues became impossible to ignore: artists getting paid fractions of pennies per stream
and later:
> My setup uses sabnzbd
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