I have had YouTube Premium Music since it was launched. I uploaded nearly 15,000 MP3s at the time. Now that the family plan is $28 a month, what free alternatives are out there for music streaming?
jellyfin and tailscale
A library card, a CD reader for your PC and a chonky harddrive. Pirate hat optional but encouraged
Do you actually have to pay for YouTube Music? I can use it perfectly well in the browser with uBlock Origin. And on the Phone there is Metrolist (yes those client have the possibility to stop working, but for me at least everything works mostly smoothly, and if google manages to block them there is still Morphee using the official client)
I guess you cannot upload so many MP3s in the free tier? But if you have so many I would follow other peoples advice of self-hosting Jellyfin/Navdrone if you are able to. Or depending on your listening style maybe actually just copying them to your phone.
Go self hosted
Lidarr can get your Spotify playlist and download it, navidrome can me the music server. Works awesome
Check out your local terrestrial radio options. There are still good human-run, human-presented local stations out there which would love nothing more than to gain your listenership.
Where? Everything everywhere seems to be a mix of clear channel, church broadcasts, or the rare public radio station that isn’t classical music 24/7.
YouTube Music through the ReVanced app
Local library
SomaFM
Radio Paradise
Big Sonic Heaven
Insomniac Radio
Local library is underrated AF
Bandcamp lets you preview entire albums, several times, before deciding to support the artist. And it’s a firehose of fresh music.
Yes but 98% of the music is shit. Anybody with a ten year old laptop and a pirated copy of Cubase thinks theyre a music producer. Instead of listening to music you spend your time searching through garbage
Sturgeon’s Law 90% of everything is garbage. The last 10% is worth dying for.
I think Pandora still has a free tier.
I just use pirated YouTube Premium and have a playlist there.
Internet radio station with 30 channels, donation-supported Soma FM with player and desktop site
Groove Salad Classic channel is the shit!
Tuned in just yesterday after while, its so chill. Love SomaFM.
Love Soma FM!
If you go the route of downloading music or ripping from CDs, you absolutely do not need to stick with the over-inflated FLAC format. The files are absolutely massive, and you could easily convert them down to much smaller 192kbps MP3 (or AAC which is even better) and not notice any difference in sound quality. FLAC is for audio purists, and storage prices these days don’t really justify it in my opinion.
As to where to buy music, try DRM-free sources like Bandcamp or even Amazon MP3. If you don’t want to pay for it, learn to use BitTorrent or even Usenet…both while using a good VPN, natch! You can even download from YouTube Music if you have the right tool (though it’ll probably come in Opus format which is fine if your player can handle it).
When using lossy, use Opus.
I’m using Youtube Music right now (practically free, since I got Youtube Premium for the videos) - but I’ve also ripped my old CD collection and am slowly buying FLAC versions of what I listen to most.
I just sync the whole collection on to all my devices using Syncthing. No need to set up a home server or have access to the internet. Probably not for everyone, but it’s pretty flawless for me.
CDs - they are still commonly sold by artists and then you can do whatever. I rip them to .flac myself.
Right now I have them all on jellyfin, but I’ve been doing this for years and changed server programs many times (I’ve yet to find something I use at home). Originally I reencoded to .mp3 and put them on a CD for use in my cars now I reencode to .mp3 and put on a USB stick for my cars.
