Leaving Spotify for Self-Hosted Audio

I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for years. It’s convenient, the catalogue is vast, and the recommendations used to be genuinely useful. But lately, I’ve found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the platform is heading.

The Spotify problem

It’s hard to pin down exactly when Spotify stopped feeling like a music service and started feeling like something else entirely. A few things have been gnawing at me:

Artist compensation is broken. The per-stream payout is famously tiny, and the model actively discourages the kind of music I actually want to support. Albums that reward repeated listening lose out to background playlist fodder designed to rack up streams. In 2024, Spotify stopped paying royalties entirely for any track under 1,000 streams, demonetising an estimated 86% of music on the platform.

The interface is hostile. Every update seems to prioritise podcasts, audiobooks, and algorithmically-generated content over letting me play my own playlists. The homepage is a mess of things I didn’t ask for.

AI-generated music is creeping in. There’s been a wave of low-effort AI tracks flooding the platform, often mimicking real artists or filling ambient playlists. Spotify removed over 75 million spam tracks in 2024 alone. It feels like the beginning of a race to the bottom, where quantity beats quality and genuine artists get drowned out.

I don’t own anything. After years of subscription payments, I have nothing to show for it. If Spotify disappears tomorrow, or removes an album I love, it’s just gone.

The company’s direction feels off. Beyond the platform itself, there’s the question of what Spotify’s leadership prioritises. CEO Daniel Ek has been investing heavily in European defense technology. That’s his prerogative, of course, but it underlines that my subscription money flows to a company whose priorities don’t align with mine.

Spotify Wrapped was a wake-up call. In previous years, Wrapped felt like a fun novelty. This year it was a reminder that I don’t actually listen to that many artists. The ones I enjoy, I play on repeat. So why am I paying a monthly subscription to listen to the same songs over and over? The artists I love aren’t seeing much from those streams, and I’m essentially renting music at an increasingly high cost. The family plan price keeps creeping up, and for what? The privilege of temporarily accessing albums I could just buy outright?

The alternatives aren’t much better

The obvious response is “just switch to another service.” But the alternatives have their own problems.

YouTube Music / Google shares many of Spotify’s issues, with the added concern that both platforms profit from advertising revenue that flows from some less than savoury sources. When your business model depends on engagement at any cost, the incentives get murky fast.

Apple Music locks you further into an ecosystem and has its own history of prioritising platform control over user freedom.

Tidal is perhaps the current outlier. Better artist payouts, lossless audio as standard, and seemingly fewer of the dark patterns plaguing the others. But streaming services have a habit of starting idealistic and drifting toward the mean once growth becomes the priority. How long until Tidal follows the same path? I’d rather not find out by having my library disappear when they pivot.

The fundamental problem isn’t any single company. It’s the streaming model itself. When you rent access instead of owning files, you’re always at the mercy of corporate decisions you have no control over.

What I actually want

When I thought about what I wanted from music, the list was simple:

1. Ownership - Files that live on my hardware, that I control
2. Quality - Lossless audio, not compressed streams
3. No algorithms - I’ll decide what to listen to, thanks
4. Supporting artists - Buying albums directly puts more money in their pockets than years of streaming

The setup

I’ve landed on a self-hosted Plex library for my music collection, served up with Plexamp on all my devices.

Plexamp is genuinely excellent. It’s a dedicated music player built by Plex, and it feels like it was designed by people who actually care about listening to music rather than optimising engagement metrics. Clean interface, proper gapless playback, and features like sonic exploration that help with discovery without feeling algorithmic.

The client availability sealed the deal. Plexamp runs on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux. The only gap is native car integration, but Bluetooth fills that role with minimal friction. Connect, play, done.

The server side is just Plex running on my existing home server. Music files live on local storage, backed up properly, under my control. No subscription required for basic playback, though Plex Pass unlocks some Plexamp features.

What the FLAC is lossless?

One of the benefits of owning your music files is choosing the quality. My entire library is FLAC: lossless audio that preserves every detail from the original recording.

To be honest, I can’t reliably tell the difference between Spotify’s high-quality streams and lossless audio on my current setup. Most people can’t. But that’s not really the point.

Audio technology keeps improving. Better headphones, better DACs, better speakers. The music I’m collecting now might be played on equipment that doesn’t exist yet. By storing everything in lossless, I’m preserving the highest possible quality for whatever the future brings. I’d rather have more data than I need today than wish I’d kept it later.

With streaming, you get whatever quality the service decides to give you. With my own files, the choice is mine.

Where to get music

Bandcamp is the obvious choice for buying digital music directly. Artists get a better cut, you get lossless files, and there’s a strong community around it. In theory, it’s perfect.

In practice, I find the search experience frustrating. Getting to the specific artist and album I want feels slower than it should. Maybe I’m spoiled by years of Spotify’s instant search, but the friction is noticeable. For now, I’m putting up with it because the alternatives are worse, but I’m constantly searching for something better.

If you know of a good source for purchasing lossless music with a decent search experience, I’d love to hear about it.

What I’ll miss

I won’t pretend this is all upside. Spotify’s discovery features, when they worked, introduced me to artists I genuinely love. The convenience of having everything available instantly is hard to replicate. And sharing music with friends becomes more complicated when you can’t just send a link.

But those trade-offs feel worth it. I’d rather have a smaller collection of music I actually own than endless access to a library that’s increasingly polluted with content designed to game the algorithm rather than move the listener.

The transition

I won’t sugarcoat it: the friction to switch has been fairly high.

Ripping, cataloguing, and transferring content is one thing. The curated playlists from years gone by are another. Those playlists represent hours of listening, discovering, and refining. Losing them felt like losing a part of my music history.

Soundiiz came in handy here, automatically copying playlists across to Plex. It worked well for most of the heavy lifting. But invariably there’s a song on a crucial playlist that I just don’t own yet, leaving a gap. Until I fill those gaps, the migration doesn’t feel complete.

It’s a slow process. Every missing track is a reminder that I’m rebuilding something that took years to accumulate. But each album I add is mine now, permanently, and that makes the effort feel worthwhile.