> It's wild to me that people just accept albums being removed and think "oh well, guess I just can't listen to that any more." Not to mention I have a decent chunk of music I listen to that just isn't available on any streaming services.

I think the average Spotify customer might have a different listening behavior than you. From my personal experience, I have never had an album I listen to regularly be removed. I'm not saying it doesn't happen I'm just saying I bet it doesn't impact many people. And I don't know anyone who has a lot of music they listen to that's not on Spotify, if any. Again, not saying what you're saying isn't true, just that I think you're not the average Spotify customer.

As a datapoint, my “bookmarked songs” playlist that I’ve been adding to for about 10 years is ~600 tracks, roughly 10 of which are greyed out, having been removed from Spotify.

Neil Young took all his music off Spotify because he was mad about Joe Rogan. I wouldn't be surprised if services started pulling Kanye's stuff in light of his new bit.

I just don't want my music library to be beholden to musicians or labels or tech companies trying to disassociate with the bad guy of the month. Obviously it's not a perfectly independent solution to upload to Apple's servers, but the system is working as it is.

I've been a Spotify user since 2009 and I've never seen something I used to listen to removed from the Spotify library.

That's just a "works on my machine" type of comment. Or anecdata etc. pp.

A hipster might tell you, that the songs that got removed and you didn't notice or knew where by bands that you never even have heard of. But wait, maybe you have heard of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell ..nah

Regarding your last point, there's a way to add your PC's local files to your Spotify account so you can listen to them anywhere. Though it's a bit of a pain, I've found it handy.

Not that I expect this to convince you to use Spotify, just that this info may help others.

Yeah I'm aware, but I want a proper cloud locker where I can upload once, set my metadata, album art, etc and then stream it from any device.

Roon Arc sounds like it ticks a lot of the boxes for you.

https://roonlabs.com/arc

That seems to be only for streaming your own files and doesn't have an existing library. That's the benefit of Apple Music to me, I don't really have a full local library of all my music. I stream what they have, and then if I find something missing I'll source it from somewhere, upload it, and then forget about it.

I don't really want to give up the built-in music library cause there's a lot of benefit to that too.

It's a little bit more nuanced. It allows you to merge both cloud services like Qobuz/Tidal with your "local" music which could be on a NAS or even Dropbox. Not exactly what you're asking for, however, it's close.