at the start of this year i started looking for a way to listen to music off spotify and i actually went through a lot of methods, here is a non exhaustive list
just store music locally on your phone
i have a completely terrible old android phone i got used, and it has 256 gigabytes of space, plus a micro sd card holder which i put a 256 gb card in. thats so much fucking space. i think i have around 10.000 songs on my phone and it's not even a third full. i use foobar2000 for playing music but whatever native music player you have will definitely work. or vlc media player my best friend vlc
i think one of my mutuals recommended ibroadcast but i dont remember who, sorry! what ibroadcast does basically, is that it has a webplayer you can upload music to from your laptop, and an associated app you can use to listen to that same music on your phone. i would still recommend storing your music locally on your laptop or something but it's good for syncing your devices and stuff. the free version only lets you stream at 128kpbs which hasnt been an issue for me
is what youre supposed to call mp3 players now, since they can play a lot more types of formats than just mp3. i got a snowsky echo mini for my birthday in may, and it is cheap and cute but it has absolutely fuck all going for it otherwise. honestly there are way better ones on the market but im kind of fond of how bad it is. if the file has any metadata it doesnt recognize (like a composer listed for example) it chucks the thing in the unknown folder, so whenever i download any music i have to spend an hour editing the tags
this is the option for the nerds who like to fiddle with things, i would recommend going on r/DAP to look at people's reviews and maybe get a better one than mine
cracked version of youtube music
sure, you could do this. metrolist is a pretty good client i would recommend but it is the boring option for the coward
a lot of people's issue with leaving spotify is that they havent developed a sense for discovering new music. bandcamp is great for this. it has an album of the day, the discover feed has genres youve never heard of, and you can stalk the profiles of people who bought music you like. plus youre supporting artists directly, and you can play your music in the bandcamp app and download it to then play it using any of the above options
is a peer 2 peer filesharing platforms where people will come into your dms and call you a cunt for downloading their publicly available files that they chose to share on purpose. aside from this its great. use nicotine+ if youre on linux. "but i dont know how piracy works" its ridiculously easy. i really do believe in your ability to figure it out
cobalt might still be having issues downloading from youtube but if it isnt, its a great tool for doing that.
i personally use yt-dlp but i understand that command line tools are scary for most people. it does have a number of GUIs people made for it (for example this i got off reddit by googling yt-dlp gui)
i dont actually like downloading off youtube because im in the habit of chucking a playlist in yt-dlp and leaving it to run in the background, only to discover that whoever put the playlist together only included the music video versions of the songs not the album versions and i have to start again. shit sucks
How to find new music to listen to
I worried about this when i first deleted spotify, but the thing is, people are constantly talking about music around you. I got in the habit of googling any songs or artists people mentioned around me that i havent listened to, or im not as familiar with as id like to be. i found a lot of terrible music like this, and also a lot of music ive come to really love.
the other great avenue for finding new music is the various mixes people put on youtube. this is one i just found that seems fun
you could also get really into internet radio.
you can listen to podcasts fucking anywhere. come on. i cant hold your hand forever
I haven't completely been able to escape online music streaming, obviously i rely on youtube for looking up songs and stuff like that, but to be honest since i deleted spotify i haven't even noticed it was gone. all spotify really does is make you pay like 8 dollars per month for the privilege of getting an ai generated daily playlist thats called something like "cunty beehive sodapop vibes"
janainaart
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