I’m in a dilemma, I think ownership of media is important, but the convenience of Spotify and the algorithm of new music that it suggests has helped me find amazing artists that I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise.
Fellow sailors, what are your thoughts, and how do you personally listen to music?
I recently went through this decision. Firstly because I was getting saturated with so many services asking for subscriptions, secondly because I’m increasingly seeing songs I like becoming unavailable due to licensing on platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify.
And finally, when I gave YouTube Music a try, I had 500 songs downloaded for offline listening, but had an issue with my carrier in the middle of a work day which left me without an internet connection… And this freaking app didn’t let me listen to the songs I already had downloaded. Noped right out of there.
So here’s my solution: I created a free trial account on Deezer. I used SongShift to migrate all my songs from my previous streaming apps to a Deezer playlist. I then used deemix-gui to download the entire playlist of off Deezer, at FLAC quality, with lyrics, tags and album art built in.
I now use this library of FLAC files on Music Bee, a free software that looks awesome. When I connect my phone to my PC, Music Bee converts all songs to high bitrate MP3 and syncs with the phone - I then use an open source music player to listen to them.
I get lyrics, high quality audio, albums, artists, playlists… But zero issues with connectivity, streaming, songs losing licenses, subscriptions, and so on.
Dude that sucks! This is one of my greatest concerns as we enter web 3.0 and give control over to companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
It must be a nice feeling having high quality flac files that you can play without any DRM nonsense when you want and how you want. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!