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.

Maybe its a generational thing but I prefer having a Plex / Plexamp serveur with all my music as FLAC on my home server. I can better curate my collection and it’s available everywhere.

Local library. I don’t want to pay for things I don’t own. Streaming services also can remove/ disable music any time. I also don’t need recommendation algorithms I think they are biased. I can easily discover new artists on blogs

I’ve got a local library that I stream with using Subsonic/Airsonic-compatible APIs.

Streaming for discovery, private tracker to get it in FLAC.

i use spotify premium (on someone else’s family account). it’s… a close thing really. i definitely wouldn’t pay for it if i weren’t getting it for free

for:

• it’s the best option for music discovery, out of
  • youtube music
  • deezer
  • local music
  • this is due to
    • being able to follow artists, and get notified of new releases
    • their "enhance your playlist feature (and the ai dj i guess, but it’s shit
    • quickly adding songs to a playlist i can listen to later, if i get recommendations off a friend
• handy if using a friends phone, i can just open my playlist and add stuff to a queue
  • it’s also easy for friends to send me links to songs
• quick and easy to add new or remove old songs, if you have a high library turnover
  • (i probably add ~30 songs / month)
• easy to sync library between devices
• very easy to add a song that isn’t in your library to the queue
• most songs have time-synced lyrics, if you’re a karaoke fan
• songs come with correct id3 tags, if you care about that
  • although this means there’s no way to edit them yourself

against:

• the app is really, really bad, and spotify doesn’t allow 3rd party clients
  • it often stops playing when not connected to internet
  • it’s very laggy and slow to load
  • i can’t reorder the queue when listening to their suggestions
  • can’t select multiple songs on mobile (to add to playlists
  • only just got a sleep timer, and doesn’t support “wait until end of track”
  • has unnecessary data wasting, like canvas and “explore your genres”
  • seems to use some weird custom ver. of the android music api, often doesn’t display correct information on speakers with a display, and doesn’t play nicely with klwp
• the desktop client is better, but still worse than any other music player i’ve used
  • it’s an electron app as well (possibly the android one is as well, judging by performance)
• limited library. it has more than one might expect, but not everything
  • songs are often removed from my library, or replaced with inferior versions (e.g. british way of life)
• you can sync your local music to it, but only using the desktop client and it then doesn’t work if you use any spotify features (e.g. playlist blend, spotify connect, remote queue, etc.)

i’ll edit with more if i think of anything else

I agree with OP that it is best to have DRM free files. For music recommendations, I use a Scrobber plugin for Last.fm.

Support your favourite artists by buying their merchandise and going to shows.

I use streaming for music these days. For one, I’m able to get either cheap or free premium services via some tricks (Apple Music currently has an exploitable, constant free trial through Shazam). I’d still consider paying for a service, though, if I had to.

For me, I consume music much differently than other media. For shows, movies, and literature, I typically only watch or read something once ever, at the most once every year. This means I don’t feel the need to retain or backup most things. I still keep what I acquire while I have space on my NAS, but there are no backups and if I ever need to free up space, I know the first volume to clean up.

Music I constantly listen to over and over. If I go through the effort of acquiring something, I’ll need to make sure the metadata is consistent. When I had my old collection, I’d have to make sure it was backed up to cloud storage because I couldn’t risk losing all that music I had found and curated. I found I was approaching the point where my monthly costs of backing up to Glacier-like services was beginning to approach the monthly cost of streaming. Plus, despite some of the discovery algorithms being terrible, it’s still been a useful tool for discovering new music. I’m also able to take streaming on the go, I cannot take the entire library I curated. I’m not someone who knows ahead of time what I’ll want to listen to.

I suppose this was all a long-winded way to say the cost-benefit analysis no longer made sense for keeping local music files for me. Part of it is streaming music services roughly have everything I want to listen to. I don’t need to subscribe to 5 different services like video platforms. Music streaming services, at least now, mostly understand that they need to be more convenient that pirating.

Local library for me for sure!

I discover new music through friends, Shazam, and browsing Youtube Music.

With ~6k songs I don’t get bored that fast.

Give ViMusic (for Android) a try. It’s free in F-Droid. It’s like Spotify but uses Youtube Music for the backend.

I have a Spotify account and never use it anymore. ViMusic is great.

This totally depends on YOU and how you consume music. I am an analog collector who has a small collection of cassette tapes and vinyl to play at home for gatherings. But then I have spotify for the car and for showering lol.

I have a smart TV with ReVanced so I don’t get commercials/ads on YouTube and can play music there too.

I stream because I like discovering new artists that I don’t know about. Otherwise keeping everything on a drive is probably better considering that you have full control over it.

Spotify to find artists

Plex/VLC/winamp to continue listening after discovering them.

I have Ampache running on a self hosted server, which has desktop and mobile apps.