It's nice of Spotify to at least leave the names of the songs.

Years ago I had several huge music video playlists which today stand at 80% of what they previously were.

YES! It's so unbelievably annoying when websites just remove stuff from your playlists / bookmarks / whatever without telling you what was removed.

For anyone stuck in this situation and willing to spend a few (many) hours to recover the titles of their YouTube playlist: On the playlist page, in the (...) menu there is a "Show unavailable videos" button. After clicking that, you can right-click all the unavailable videos and copy their URLs. Then you can either try the wayback machine, or google the video ID. Usually you will find some forum posts talking about the video and mentioning the title.

Of course, it's not guaranteed that you'll find anything this way. But I have recovered multiple playlists this way.

I've experienced this for over a decade. If I like the music I'm renting, I buy the CD and rip it to FLAC.

This is even easier if it's on Bandcamp :)

This and also the increasing number of adverts/sponsored recommendations and annoying notification for stuff I don't follow.

How do you discover new music? That's been an issue for me, considering how I don't use Spotify.

You read forums, buy magazines, or, just buy an album because it has some badass cover. At least that's how I did it back in the days. ;)

Sure while Spotify can be nice with that, I am an old boomer that mostly sticks to what I grew up with and I just look for new albums of known artists every now and then, but I find the real gems in things like mountainbike movies. Also gameplay movies back in the day.

But yeah that ease to find new things is one positive aspect of Spotify. Also to have it everywhere available. So maybe going both ways would be the solution. Using Spotify while buying/ripping/whatever the music that I really deeply value

last.fm

Bandcamp.com

[redacted]'s daily and weekly top10. Last.fm, reddit, Apple Music.

I think it depends how obscure your taste is. If more open and obscure, the best way I found is to listen to streaming college radio stations and find some DJs you like on those stations.

There is an effort that it takes to get on the airwaves that is not there if just anyone can play music online. The effort acts as a quality filter on the person's taste and passion.

Beyond that, I always check out what Pitchfork thinks is good new music.

The youtube algorithm has also recommended me some of my favorite, more obscure artists but that happens like once every 2-3 years.

Sound cloud, youtube

Read MA or RYM reviews and append all the names I don't already know to a big backlog.

Could you expand the MA and RYM acronyms for those of us less in the know?

I believe RYM is referring to Rate Your Music here.

Metal Archives and Rate Your Music.

I use Spotify for music discovery, but buy downloads (or rip CDs, or if the band only has streaming available I rip the stream since they don't want my money) and use stored music from local devices for my everyday use. Streaming services are nice for recommendations, but not great for actual listening.

pitchfork.com has RSS feeds of best new albums and best new songs