This started after I watched Drew Gooden’s video about the music industry, focusing on Spotify. It’s a good video, and like with many of his videos you’ll end up going “yeah, that is crappy!” every few minutes. I’ve been using Spotify continually since 2019; before then I’d moved between a few services (making the most of free trials while I was a student). Overall my attitude to Spotify was that it was fine. The app wasn’t great, but it wasn’t overly offensive. It would play music when you asked it to. Every streaming service effectively has “all the music”, so selection isn’t a differentiating factor. The price isn’t too bad, despite it increasing in price every year for the last four years.1 These were all just things you put up with to have the convenience of any music you want, for a flat monthly fee. Of course, I do have complaints. Spotify seemingly would rather I listen to podcasts or audiobooks instead of music, and would spend about a third of the main screen in the app with suggested podcasts that I had no interest in. I already listen to podcasts in another app. These suggestions couldn’t be disabled, and there’s always the looming threat of Spotify deciding that they need to become TikTok. A persistent issue that I’ve had with Spotify’s UI is browsing for music by a particular artist. When you view an artist’s page you’ll see a few of their recent or popular albums as cover art, but if you want to find something that’s not there, you get to a list of all songs grouped by album. This means you’ve got to scroll for ages to find what you’re looking for. It’s especially bad for electronic music artists that have lots of remixes released as singles, which makes the list really hard to navigate. Anyway, the app being fine is only a part of the story. The Economics I won’t rehash the content of the video, but I didn’t feel like I was getting value out of my Spotify subscription, since I don’t spend that much time listening to music. Because of the way the artists’ pay out is calculated, most of my subscription would be going to artists I don’t listen to. My understanding is that all the subscriptions are pooled, Spotify takes their cut, and then the rest is divvied up to artists based on what portion of the overall streaming time was for their music. So if you don’t listen very much, your streaming time won’t move the needle on how much your favourite bands contribute to the total listening time across all of Spotify. In 2021 I basically only listened to Typhoons by Royal Blood, but since I didn’t spend that much time listening to music overall, I doubt that they even got a dollar from me. Instead, I could have just bought their album for $16, they would hopefully get at least a dollar from that sale, and then I’d save paying $16 a month to stream it. Which of course leads to the economics portion of this post. If we assume I’ve paid $12 a month, (ignoring the fact the price has increased a few times) since 2019, I have paid just over $1000 on Spotify. For the next 7.5 years at the current price of $16 per month, it would be $1440. If for the last 7 years I’d taken that money and bought an album every month or so, I would probably own most of the music I like listening to. I might not have to spend anything going forward. If I continued to pay for music streaming, I’d have to pay almost 50% extra just to maintain access.2 Basically if most of your listening is repeat and casual, you’ll probably save money in the long term by buying the music up front. The best time to start a music library was before you started streaming, but the second best time is today. Buying Music in 2026 So what’s the best way to buy music in 2026? It’s iTunes. At least if you’re in Australia, for most music that’s released via major record labels. Qobuz is apparently another option, but for the albums I was looking at it was slightly more expensive, and the website works poorly. The other big player that I’ve seen referenced is Amazon Music, who seem to sell digital music cheaper than iTunes, but don’t operate in Australia so it’s not an option for me. Music bought through iTunes has no DRM, and so you can play it anywhere that supports M4A files. Actually buying the music isn’t particularly easy—the iTunes store is a forgotten section of the Apple Music app on MacOS, so finding music to buy rather than stream is clumsy. It does work, and after clicking “retry” on the download a few times, you get the files in ~/Music, ready for you to do whatever you want with them. I haven’t ended up buying a lot of music through iTunes—it’s mainly a fallback—but a “cheap” album there is $10, a more typical album is $16, and an “expensive” album is $24. So if you’re setting aside your music streaming money, you might have to pool two months together to get some albums. Buying everything through iTunes would be a slow and expensive way to build up a music library. Thankfully my tastes are mainstream enough that I could go retro: buying CDs. A few searches on Gumtree and I was able to pick up the entire Foo Fighters discography—ten full-length albums—for $42, shipped all the way from Perth. I also picked up a bundle of CDs from someone who must’ve had hundreds of listings for various albums. This wasn’t quite as good a deal since they wanted at least $30 worth before they’d bother shipping them. Each album was around $3-4, but I definitely padded it with some albums I wouldn’t buy otherwise. Top scores in this bundle were Franz Ferdinand and The Resistance by Muse. The best place to buy music—if it’s available—is Bandcamp. On Bandcamp Friday the platform fee is waived (aside from payment processing, I believe) and the artist gets the whole amount. This is the best way to get music and have your money go to the people that are making the music. You won’t find many big names on Bandcamp, but many of the smaller electronic artists that I like are there. I picked up some Ark Patrol, Glitch Mob, and Caravan Palace here. Naughty Music Something that I’d forgotten about after many years of streaming-only is naughty music. By “naughty” I mean mash-ups and albums released outside of normal record deals, and so aren’t available on streaming platforms. I hadn’t listened to Mouth Moods or All Day in ages because they weren’t available in Spotify with the rest of my music. If I’m managing my own library, I can just grab the MP3s and listen to them just like everything else. This also includes albums like My Name Is Skrillex, which was at one point available as a free download. I’ve got a copy from a backup of my old laptop, and so I could just scoop up those files into my library. Then there’s music from bands that are unpopular or went defunct before streaming took off. I’ve got a copy of Apollo Me by Rival State that I bought after seeing them play at a high school band competition.3 This is a great album that I would have listened to more if they’d been accessible. Thankfully I had a CD rip in my aforementioned laptop backup so I didn’t have to get the disk shipped over. Ripping CDs The cheat code to this whole process was my partner’s CD collection, which admittedly doesn’t have a huge overlap with what I want to listen to. However, it was a good way to bulk out my collection so it didn’t feel so empty. Over three evenings I sat on the couch with an external CD drive connected to my laptop, slowly ripping each CD. The easiest way to do this on MacOS was in iTunes/Apple Music. I left everything at the defaults and imported as M4A—I can always re-rip or transcode if this ends up being problematic. One disk (Songs for the Deaf by Queens of the Stone Age) just failed to rip in iTunes. It managed to lock my whole laptop up to the point that Finder couldn’t see new files being added (despite them being visible in the terminal). I rebooted and still wasn’t able to read the disk. I tried using Asunder on my Linux laptop4 and it worked fine. Not sure what was going wrong with iTunes here. Playing Music Acquiring music is only half the story. Actually listening to it is arguably more important. The easiest thing would probably be to copy the files across to my phone manually, and play them in Apple Music—which does still support local playback of your iTunes library, like an iPod. This would mean storing the whole library on my phone, and copying anything new as I acquired it. I’d also like to avoid using an app in a way it wasn’t intended. It’s fairly clear that the Music app is designed to be a client for the streaming service, not for playing your own local library. I didn’t spend very long looking at other local-first players, as I was already pretty set on hosting a streaming system. Unsurprisingly I landed on Navidrome, a self-hosted streaming service that supports standard APIs as well as its own API, allowing it to be used with a variety of client apps. It was almost hilariously simple for me to set it up. I just copied the Docker compose config and made the appropriate changes to make it work with Pod. Once it started up it got an automatically-assigned subdomain and reverse proxy config from endash, and I could access it in the browser. I made an account, and then I could sign in from a client app on my phone. The first iOS client I used was Shelv. It’s free, has a reasonable UI, and works fine. It let me test out the system without committing any money. I did find that whatever settings I had selected meant that it would eagerly try and load the whole song before actually playing anything. This added a 2-3 second delay before any song started, and would sometimes fail altogether. I don’t know if this is my fault for turning on some pathological combination of settings, or Shelv not anticipating the crappy upload speed from my home internet. I downloaded most of my library via Shelv to avoid this, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of streaming, and anything that’s not downloaded is still a poor experience. Instead, I’ve been using Nautiline which doesn’t have these issues. It’s paid—$15—but it has a generous 7-day free trial that only counts a day if you actually use the app. The UI structure is reasonably customisable, it even has options to appear more like a streaming app (showing a list of popular songs as the first element on an artist’s page) or a more traditional “MP3 player” interface that just shows albums. Whatever Nautiline does when streaming agrees with my server and network setup, as I’ve not run into any delays, drops, or stuttering so far. What’s Next I’ve spent more on music in the last three months than I would have if I’d just kept Spotify. A lot more. But I’ve also spent more time listing to music that I’ve really enjoyed. It’s been a fun project to collect my favourite music into one place. There’s a really healthy number of Navidrome clients, and I don’t lose anything by moving from Nautiline to a different one in the future. Or using two in parallel for different reasons. I could even stop using Navidrome altogether. Since I own the bytes of all this music, I’m not limited to just playing through a particular piece of software. As long as I can play audio files, I’ll have access to them.5 That’s in USD, not AUD. I couldn’t find a good reference with AUD prices. ↑ Ignoring inflation, because I don’t want to do maths here. ↑ The singer told me and my friend that he liked the fact we had a synth in our otherwise-rock band. I still remember that 13 years later. Maybe that’s why I went out and bought their album. ↑ A story for another time. ↑ This is partially enabled by my more robust backup system. The whole music library is 3-2-1 backed up. ↑ Permalink • September 28, 2026 • Send feedback via mastodon or email.