Switching from Spotify to Local Music
As I mentioned in one of my posts before, I like listening to music. Who doesn’t? I have it in the background while working on a project, I jam to it while bored or just have it playing so my environment won’t be completely silent. Except when you get interrupted by an ad.
Spotify, and others like YouTube Music or Deezer are all pretty cool, but they have ads (besides YT) unless you pay for a monthly subscription service. Now, I don’t feel like paying for Spotify premium just to not have ads, so I stopped using it!
For music that I like (which is mostly what I listen to) I downloaded and properly
tagged all of them (some manually). The perks of this is no ads (obviously) and
offline listening. I can also sync this between my phone easily, as my music is just
on my Google Drive. As I’m not an audiophile and don’t want music taking that much
storage, I have them in 124kbps MP3 or M4A.
A con to this is having to host all of this. Going my route with the quality and format, it’ll take a LOT of music to reach Google Drive’s free tier of 15GB storage.
I’ve always downloaded my favourites, which is mostly kpop but I decided to take a pretty much full time switch away from Spotify. A question you may ask is about music discovery. If you only have a local library, how do you find new music to listen to? To answer that question, YouTube and osu are the ways of how I get new music.
YouTube is definitely a great place to get a very wide variety of music, as there is independent artists, meme songs and whatever that aren’t on services like Spotify. A good example is Maid with Dragons, the season 2 opening song of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. Of course, I can download this from YouTube instead with youtube-dl. The reason I also mentioned osu is that because it’s a rhythm game, and I find a lot of random but good maps (and therefore songs) and I can definitely say that it has helped in finding a lot of good music. This is how I discovered Ashnikko, currently a personal favourite with her type of music.
If you only really listen to music once in a while, and/or just the stuff you like, I recommend going the local approach or using YouTube, and if you need a rich presence kinda like Spotify’s, Clematis has you covered.