According to Last.fm I’ve listened to 156k songs from 16k artists (35k albums) over a little less than 10 years. Last time I bought music it was on iTunes and the lowest price was €0.79 per song. That would be a total of €123k.

Over the same period, I gave exactly €1200.93 to Spotify [1].

[1] note: it’s a pure coincidence that this is ~ €10 * 12 months * 10 years; the price has not always been the same.

6500 different songs by 1650 artists last year for me. I wouldn't say I listen to that much music, but buying individual albums is completely unrealistic. I've bought some, mostly to support artists, but in the future I'd be more inclined to buy merch (which is often unfortunately hard to find.) Similar to Steam, pirating is so much worse that paying a little for quality streaming is acceptable. As for data, I'm practically giving that away with last.fm anyway.

It's a combination of Spotify's fantastic weekly playlists, keeping up with new releases, and exploring new genres.

How do you find so many different songs? Shuffle?

You are essentially listening to 40 new songs per day.

Can't say for them, but for me I have a single playlist 6,994 songs on shuffle. I try to add songs every week, haven't recently as I also should be moving off of Spotify.

To what alternative are you moving into?

I guess I will just move to Apple, because the moving should be relatively easy.

Spotify "radios" (playlists that are generated on-the-fly once the thing you were listening to ended), recommendations (Spotify’s weekly playlists) and top 50 <country> playlists, browsing the "similar artists" tab on artists I like, browsing the "discovered on" tab to find playlists. Then, when I like a song from an artist, I usually listen to at least their most recent album.

Last week I found a Russian artist in a playlist I follow and I listened to all their albums. I don’t know how to pronounce their name nor the title of any of their songs, but it was a nice background music for coding since I don’t understand a thing of the language.

You buy albums

You sound like a 'radio' person and I'm a 'record' person.

I don't want to have thousands of different songs floating through my ears. If I'm in the mood for something new, I'll get a recommendation from a friend or an online service, listen to a couple tracks then decide if I should invest more time in the band or just forget about them. Interestingly after a few streams of albums it on Bandcamp, they nag you to buy and it's usually about the time where "yeah, you know, I probably should add this to the collection". Unless finding new music, I always listen by whole albums as the bands decided was best to listen to the tracks, not individual songs--so the numbers you bring up just aren't something I care about. Whole albums are cheaper and if only one track is good on an album, that band not really something I'm interested in.

I'm 10 years ive spent 1000s on vinyl.

In 20 years spent even more on digital.

I have tons of things not available on streaming.

Regardless, the fact my listening gets to be an isolated activity, the fact no one can take it away? Priceless

Depends on your listening habits. If you listen to a few albums a lot, buying the albums absolutely makes sense to make sure you'll always have them.

But for example me, I grew up listing to mixtapes and as a child/teenager spent many weekends in front of my sisters programmable 5 disc CD player to record songs from CDs borrowed from friends to cassette tapes. I never got out of this habit. While some albums I prefer to listen as a whole, in general I favor playlists. Streaming is great for this. Also especially YouTube has a lot of live recordings that aren't released otherwise.

I do buy quite a bit of digital and physical records from independent artist but then listen to them on Spotify. Because the streaming platforms tend to have horrible payment models. This I find much worse, than DRM and lack of ownership.

Pretty much on the money. I'm not a 'playlist' kind of person so this doesn't interest me. I've been able to send a full OGG file to a friend as a recommendation though, which didn't involve sending someone to service.

I'd add versatility to that list too. With DRM free files you can edit songs, remix individual tracks, create mashups of multiple songs, create your own mix-tapes/compilations, use them in your own videos and projects, convert them unto whatever formats you want etc.

They're also amazing for portability. Every phone, desktop PC, laptop and tablet I have can play MP3s, and while most can also run spotify, the same can't be said for all the TVs, DVD/blu-ray players, CD players, ebook readers, and game consoles that support MP3. It must have been an easy bullet point to add to a feature list because I see MP3 and other music formats supported in a huge number of devices. I've seen it supported in GPS navigation devices, alarm clocks, children's toys, workout equipment, and toothbrushes

I'll admit Spotify (and other platforms in a smaller degree) aren't ideal and operate in an ethical gray spot the size of the moon, but the convenience is so hard to beat, it would literally take hours every week to make my music listening experience anywhere near enjoyable.

On the other hand I buy merch and go to concerts as much as I can, but at this point I could actually ditch Spotify and Deezer only if they confess to killing puppies, the difference is that big.

Anyone know of a self hosted audio streaming service that works reasonably well?

As well as some potentially really shady practices. https://youtu.be/whQ8UBoz-To

Is listenbrainz related to "Musicbrains Picard"?

Yes. MusicBrainz is the umbrella project. ListenBrainz is for "scrobbles" (is the name trademarked?) similar to Last.fm and Libre.fm. Because it's an open source and open data project, the broader community can build tools with the data rather than having it hoarded by a corporation to try to sell the data back to users.

Got a favorite source for same? I'm bewildered by too many options and not enough comparisons.

I get my music on Bandcamp, if the artist sells it there. They compensate artists far better than Spotify[1], and offer lossless, DRM-free downloads.

Some major labels don't sell on Bandcamp; for those I often buy the MP3s on Amazon. I don't love Amazon, but they do sell high quality, DRM-free music now.

[1] https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

I would also recommend checking Qobuz which is where I find most of my larger label FLAC files.

https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop

Not to mention you are not financing spreading lies about covid...

Are there alternatives to Spotify that can only provide me the right information so that I don't have to think by myself?