Personally, I've recently tried ditching Spotify and revitalizing my MP3 and FLAC collection because of the oft-cited problem that a lot of the music I want to listen to simply isn't available there. Much of that music I expect never to be added, for various reasons. I've also experienced several cases of favorited songs and albums later being removed.
If you curate your own music collection, why and how do you do it? What methods of acquisition, storage, organization, and playback do you use?
- I don't use mobile internet on my phone, so having the music files at hand is quite natural. Wouldn't be able to listen to the music on the go otherwise
- Recommendation algorithms of streaming services like Spotify weren't good enough for me, so I couldn't simply start the player and do my thang without skipping the tracks I don't like
- Streaming services often don't have many obscure tracks
Ended up realizing that, for me, using streaming services as a daily-driver is mostly like fighting windmills. But I still use them as a discovery tool.
Now, the issue with local files was, I had to manually syncronize any modifications among devices. So I installed Syncthing [0] to sync my audio folder between myphone, PC and NAS. Syncthing can do online syncs via their relay servers, but I set the clients to only listen on local addresses, and disabled all the over-the-internet stuff. I'm quite happy with this setup.
Even audio apps play games with how they function now in order to encourage paid upgrades to where simple "randomize", "skip", and playlist creaton no longer work as expected... I miss winamp on android more than words can say... Google's music player even stealthily deleted my purchased mp3s off my device at points, I am lucky to keep non-cloud (unplugged) SD backups of my music library ritually up to date. I will never give up keeping my own collection as long as I can... The Algorithms serve advertised music, not really the music you want to hear, and it's only gonna get worse over time.
Nothing beats my music collection, it spans across multiple genres that no algo could ever emulate, and that no single site would ever be able to clear, and I don't believe I should ever have to pay a monthly subscription for music, let alone music that I already have, I guess It's not popular opinion any more.
Music streaming sites do nothing to earn the money they make and that people give them, and they don't pay artists fairly at all... I write this as an artist myself.
... and also operate two businesses for it: bliss (the above site) and Astiga - https://asti.ga (this is a streaming service for your own collection).
You might be interested in https://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder/
I have learned not to invest anymore time in organizing files (structure...) and files metadata (correction....). I just leave it as it is. it is not "pretty". But my UI is my DB so who cares. I just do a simple folder search [1] or take out that vinyl, when I need to.
I store all my digital playlists in the same text files: M3U, Spotify URIs, YouTube URLs, it does not matter. I guess you could call it an agnostic system.
It works for desktop. Mobile is trickier.
Quite a few people do. Some even have a self hosted web catalog of their collection and a sub-set of them link their instances together. [1][2] Linking to the software, not peoples collections. Most are in private circles.
I've had a music collection for decades, and never seen the point of getting rid of it. A little while ago I refreshed my music delivery system. I landed on using Roon with a Tidal connection.
I have the ability to listen to all my music with Roon's fantastic curating. Tidal allow me to listen to albums and artists I don't have. I haven't bought any new music lately, but I am working on a beets configuration that works for me & I'll purchase some of the music I've discovered.