Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
- Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks.
- Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way.
- Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way.
Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers".
Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars.
I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.
By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.
There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".
And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.
Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one.
But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.
It's just getting started.
We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again.
The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable.
We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.
It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted.
This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore.
I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in.
It's like Christmas every day now.
Are you so sure of that?
One of my projects is at $5M ARR in just six months. I passed $400k in sales this month. It's an open source project.
I'm teaching my wife to code and we're going to make a video game together. Surely you can see the value in that bonding experience? She never would have been interested prior to Claude Code.
I've been writing my own SRS software for drilling typing in Japanese. It's pretty fantastic. Nothing like that existed before I made it. So many needs that went unmet are just being filled.
That's just top of mind. I've been doing a ton.
Nobody likes to tag music the way I like to (multiple scalar quantified dimensions with clustering), so there's literally no music player on the planet in the shape that I want. If I'd wanted to build that before, I'd have to spend opportunity cost over several weekends to start building, plus the ongoing burden of maintenance. That's likely a few months burnt plus fixing things when API integrations break down. Now it's a few hours plus a bug fix here and there.
This is 3D printing for software.
I don't get the negativity. This is all so magical.