not to vague anyone but switching from spotify to youtube music is not raging against the machine <3
I saw the "youtube music is raging against the machine" post again so instead of ripping someone's throat out with my teeth here is Arthur's Official Media Privacy For Dummies Post <3
My credentials are that I have 700 songs I didn't pay for on a refurbished ipod from 2007 and it's AWESOME. (PS backmarket.com for refurbished tech they have lots of old ipods if you're into that. But also phones and laptops and shit for cheap.)
First off. Reddit.com/r/piracy forever and ever. Go through their masterpost they have literally anything you could ever want. You will never pay for media of any sort again. The people of reddit are smarter than me.
If you currently use Spotify and wish to stop, here is where I would start:
1. Bandcamp!! If you want to financially support your favorite artists it's Bandcamp.
Plug your playlists into merch table they will do the hard work for you here <3
2. Spotidownloader
Put your playlists in they will spit a download link out it's so easy. All the metadata is there and everything.
They can only do 100 songs at a time so it's not ideal for a bigger library but it works fine for what it is.
3. Lucida
Awesome for full albums or individual songs if you're just looking for a few things and not transferring a whole library.
3. Newpipe
https://spotalike.com/en
A handy youtube clone that's good for streaming or downloading music and videos.
And finally, this isn't piracy advice but you don't need daily curated playlists and you definitely don't need yearly listening stats. Listen to the bands your friends listen to. Keep a list of songs people recommend to you. Try to find a local radio show or a college radio channel. Go to local shows. Be curious about genres and new bands. Put effort into curating and owning your music library, it's worth it.
You can get the listening stats still very easily, as well as using those stats to get recommendations through last.fm. Their recommendation engine is still really good, good enough that i pay the tiny little 3 dollar subscription to support them. Here's my last.fm profile as an example. https://www.last.fm/user/RandyTheB I'm probably a massive outlier (188 days of listening time last year lol) but i've seamlessly integrated this into everything. My phone, computer, ipod, etc all sync plays, most of that in real time. My ipod runs rockbox and syncs my plays when i hook it to the computer to charge, i host music on a beater server i scraped from a refurb place (i engage in piracy but I'm the guy uploading stuff).
I usually just buy a bunch of CDs from places like Half Price Books, rip em using EAC (Guide here on setting up EAC for perfect(from a listening and archival perspective) CD rips: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/). I'll buy a CD, rip it, then sell it back. If it's a new release, bandcamp is the way to go. If it hasn't been uploaded online, I'll be the one to upload the magnet link for the torrent usually. Foobar2k is my music player of choice, and on the media server that's safely gapped from the rest of my network and the open internet, I connect to it via the android Foobar app. Streaming is set up as lossless, playlists work, album art is transmitted, etc. (Pls don't ask me how to set this up, i barely understand how i got it working and it's like a frightened horse whenever i look at the settings or even think about stuff like the reverse proxy). If you are really interested in the long term archival of quality recordings of music, you should look into joining a private music tracker through their interview process. Orpheus and RED are the two biggest players right now, both built on gazelle. They're invite only, but boast probably the single largest archives of music to ever exist in human history. You have to seed long term or spend your time hunting down CD's or recordings to get bounties and build your upload/download ratio. You're expected to be active participants one way or another on private trackers like RED, but the juice is 100% worth the squeeze. And since RED is invite only, concerns about DMCA notices disappear overnight, as music companies can't joint the swarm if they wanted to. Current RED site stats as of 11/3/25.
1.8 million unique releases. Not even spotify or youtube can boast that. 1.3 million artists. RED is pretty near user cap at the moment however, but you should still look into the interview process if you think it's the kind of thing you're into.
yayayayayaya i love music. This is probably the only thing i do that can be considered punk, but i think i go whole hog into it.
