Ditching Spotify

I've been wanting to stop using spotify for a long time now. I've always prefered owning my media to renting or subscibing to it, but spotify was always so convient for me. Being able to have any music I wanted at the tips of my fingers was always so nice, even if it went against my values.

This choice felt logical, but after learning about how much spotify and other streaming platforms screw over creators I love a year back, I decided enough was enough, and that I'd begin searching for an alternative. Knowing that I wanted to move away from sreaming as a whole, I began collecting albums here and there. I bought (and still buy) smaller artist's work through Bandcamp where availible, and I download larger musician's music through less-legitimate ways. (I'm a broke college student and they'll make plenty enough off streaming anyways.)

But, physically owning these albums doesn't completely replace streaming for me. One of the biggest benifiets I saw was that streaming allowed me to bypass the limited storage on my phone while out and about. If only there were a way I could stream my music without relying on one of these services...

That's when I began looking at self-hosting my own media server, to stream the music I had off of. After messing around with a few different options, I ended up settling on Jellyfin as my media server of choice. This also allowed me to steam more than just music, notably movies, TV and anything else I could throw at it. As a bonus, Jellyfin handled all of the metadata itself and gave a nice, user-friendly interface to work with.

Sadly, I really wasn't a fan of Jellyfin's user experience when it came to music. It lacked way too many features for it to feel comfortable to me, and this problem put me off from cancelling my spotify subsciption for several months. That was when I discovered Symfonium for Android, which gave a MUCH better UI for naviagting my music library, as well as transcoding and automatic download managment to better-utlize my limited storage. Symphonium is fantastic app, I highly recommend it for listening to music on mobile, it cleanly integrates with other media servers, as well as operates amazing as just a standalone music player.

So, today, after amassing a collection and building the infastrucute myself, I've fully tansitioned off of spotify onto my own streaming setup. Hopefully this gives you motivation or insight to move off spotify and support the creators you love directly!