ditching spotify
if you're on a certain side of the internet i suppose, maybe you've heard by now about the various recent issues with spotify. running ice ads, investing in ai military technology, underpaying artists, etc. and even if you hadn't heard of that, the choice between an endless swarm of ads or paying to get rid of them might be starting to get irritating. pretty much everyone i know is fairly reliant on it though. it is useful! streaming music and having all that right at your fingertips has become less of a convenience and more of a necessity for most people, so its kind of hard to break the habit. buttt there are plenty of options out there, depending on why you might want to switch, so i'm gonna go over a few. this is gonna be heavily focused on ditching streaming altogether though.
reason one: you want to stop using music streaming altogether
same! honestly, most streaming services weren't doing it for me during my research. i don't want to pay, and i don't want ads. this is fine and manageable on a laptop with an adblocker, but i take the train everyyy day. laptop + adblocker combo just isnt feasable for a lot of situations, ads are just painful, and who wants to pay money to get rid of them? so, the natural conclusion is switching to downloading your songs. there's a lot of ways you can actually do that. if you have a solid itunes library, you're already set. colbat is a good downloader tool if you don't have a huge ton of music. its not functional with youtube right now, so youll have to find your music on places like soundcloud. if you do have a lot of music, look into using two tools together like i did: spotify playlist to youtube convertors, and jdownloader. i used tunemymusic for the first part. be careful with jdownloader!!! you have to get the right downloader so it doesn't install adware. honestly, if you're gonna be doing shit like this, please just install malwarebytes as a solid antivirus. but when you're installing, don't just click through without making sure the right options are clicked, and when you're downloading the installer make sure its the adware free / 'optional software offers free' installer. i've personally had no issues. its a fantastic piece of software otherwise - after that, just make your youtube playlist unlisted and then paste the playlist link in. go to the sidebar, tick off all the options except audio, and the majority of songs will download. there might be some issues - the convertors arent perfect, and if a video is flagged 18+ then jdownloader cant access it. in that case, id look for your song on other sites, like soundcloud or bandcamp. do the same, just copy the link and paste into jdownloader.
after all thats done! you can download a software like mp3tag (good to learn to use if you have lots of music) or just use the editors in itunes if you have it to edit things like artist name / song name / album cover data. this stuff often doesnt carry over super well. if you dont mind that, just skip this step. after that, theres a few options for playing the music. i love old tech, so i bought an ipod nano from Cex. you can get mp3 players of other kinds too, just do your research so you arent buying some crap thats gonna break quick. you can also just continue using your phone - musicolet is a fantastic mp3 player app for android. im not sure if its available on ios. again, do your research, if theres certain features you want make sure you have them! and when youre on your laptop, use wacup as a music player. its a fork of an old winamp version - if you dont know what winamp is, its an old audio player for your computer. winamp itself is still available for download, but wacup is still being developed and fixes a ton of bugs. plus, you can use winamp skins with it anyway (check out internet archive for a cool collection of them).
ok, but what about finding new music? easy. youre probably still using social media, thats a good one. ive had fun scrolling through bandcamp. ask your friends. it probably depends on what music you like - if youre hardcore in a fandom or mostly like popular music, you wont have a huge problem. if youre into indie or alternative stuff, bandcamp is great, seriously. and you can support artists financially there in a way that actually matters, unlike spotify. cant say im doing that though, not gonna judge if you arent.
reason two: just don't want spotify, still need that streaming
whelp, theres plenty of options there. if you dont mind paying, the worlds your oyster. if you do mind paying