That's a widely different experience I'm getting from it, discovery is really bad in my opinion. "hearing a new song I like" is usually in a completely different place than Apple Music... I don't know if I'm an outlier, but recommendations are absolute rubbish on the home page. Same goes for Netflix actually.

In my experience you almost entirely lose the human experience of sharing playlists, talking about new discoveries, getting together with people to listen to new music.

For each individual it is probably a better experience, but there is something lost still. I don't know if it's fair to lay blame for that on Apple though, it seems like that's where things are going anyway in some many dimensions of life.

Disagree. My kids play stuff on the HomePod on the kitchen, or I do - we chat - ‘what’s that?’ If I like it I add to my library. We hear a tune on TV or a movie sound track, find out what it is and research the rest if the bands stuff. I muck about with the Discovery station, discover bands I never otherwise would, add them to playlist that get played in the car. Etc etc.

Just the other day, I discovered a rather incredible ambient/drone album using a nonstandard tuning [1] via Spotify's Discover Weekly, and excitedly pinged all my art-music-liking friends about it.

[1] Trances by Jules Reidy: https://juliareidy.bandcamp.com/album/trances

After using Spotify for over a decade I moved to Qobuz, mostly on principle. Most of my library was transferred.

The one thing I miss is the recommendations, especially as I like music that isn’t very mainstream. It might be that Spotify’s algorithm is better than Qobuz, or it has a huge amount more data.

I've tried several other music platforms, but nothing has really expanded my musical horizons like Spotify's Discover Weekly. Even 5-6 years ago, most of the electronic music I listened to was relatively mainstream like Boards of Canada (BoC is great music, don't get me wrong). Last year, the album I listened to the most was Se Ve Desde Aquí by Mabe Fratti [1].

[1] https://tinangelrecords.bandcamp.com/album/se-ve-desde-aqu

I looked for it on YouTube (via Invidious) and found it. Not my kind of music but that's not the point.

The point is that if somebody likes to keep a copy of some songs discovered during a day of autoplaying through YouTube, downloading them is very easy for anybody that wants to. Maybe it's easy to do it also from Spotify but I don't use it so I have no idea.

I'm not actually sure how to do that on Spotify. But for albums I like, especially lesser-known artists making music of various kinds (I tend to lean heavily towards electronic music), I generally just buy them on Bandcamp and put a copy on my NAS.

If you pay for Spotify, you can download songs/albums/playlists in the app if you want them offline for a flight or somewhere else you won't have access to internet. It's a single tap. (And you save songs you like with a single tap too -- and even if they lose rights, which is extremely rare but happens, you still have a record of liking it.)

Obviously that's not giving you a local .mp3 file, but that's because it's streaming, not buying.

Related isn't it just the absolute worst when you find a song you love by an artist you've never listened to, and subsequently going to all the rest of their discography, liking absolutely none of it and it turns out the song you loved was just kind of a one-off thing from them?

Not saying every musician has the obligation to chase my personal tastes of course but it never fails to get a sigh out of me, haha.

Spotify is great for discovery. There's nothing saying you can't also collect music.

If you've ever saved a song to your library or favorites, you're "collecting", just with less freedom