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.