Was also doing this for ages but eventually caved since spotify is so so much easier. The DRM on spotify is really stupid since every single track on spotify is trivial to find a torrent for yet no one bothers torrenting since spotify is cheap and very convenient.

That’s the only way to combat piracy, sadly Spotify is becoming worse and worse, they ruined radio a few years back and over the past year they’ve also ruined discover weekly and your daily mixes it’s the same songs on repeat now, and the mixes are just becoming weirder and weirder they seem to broken down genre barriers completely I have Weird Al, Rammstein and MCR popping up in the same daily mix.

They’ve stopped rotating their curated playlists and made discovering playlists more and more annoying.

I’ve stopped paying for Spotify because of that and now primarily use Amazon Music Unlimited for music on the go but it also now started to have issues with too tracks becoming unavailable day in and day out.

I wish Pandora would become available outside of the US or Spotify Stations (I don’t know if it’s good, I’ve used Pandora back when they didn’t geoblock their services) because I want to be able to discover music.

Since the lockdown in the UK I’ve went back to using Internet Radio, my Yamaha Music Cast receiver has a good directory and it’s so far been a much better daily listening experience than Spotify.

I might give Napster and Deezer a try since they are supported by my main music setup at home too.

Actually dont forget Apple music, AI still aren't as good as actual DJs and curated lists

I found Apple Music just as bad for discovery as Spotify in fact I was surprised that when I did the trial last year when I would start a station from an artist or a song I would get pretty much identical tracks to Spotify it was so weird that I am almost sure Apple had access to my listening history from using Spotify on my iPhone.

Amazon seems to work right now and I was pleasantly surprised that Spotify et al hasn’t killed internet radio yet.

How would you get Apple Music playback on such a device? I've looked and I can't find anything for my phone, much less a non-mainstream client.

They have a web client. On Linux, I've used it within an Electron wrapper.

Their API (MusicKit) is decent, but the rate limiting is fairly onerous.

This reminds me of how much I miss GrooveShark... ):

> every single track on spotify is trivial to find a torrent for yet no one bothers torrenting since spotify is cheap and very convenient

The bit about "every single track" isn't true. It's hard to find torrents for older, more obscure things.

Your general take is right, though. It's easier to pay Spotify $10 per month than to go to the effort of torrenting, cataloging, transferring to your device, etc.

> It's hard to find torrents for older, more obscure things.

Maybe this falls in to the hard category but once you make it in to the private music tracker, you have everything trivially accessible. I still have an account on the tracker but I just don't bother using it since spotify is so cheap and useful. It just makes no sense that they would implement DRM since it does basically nothing since no one was prevented from piracy through DRM.

Which is a fine solution for you, but not a majority of people