i refused to use streaming services at all for a long time because i wanted a sense of ownership over my music library (even if in a nebulous digital kinda way) & i would say it’s great for so many reasons , it’s slightly more inconvenient but it’s honestly pretty easy to just download music from bandcamp/rip from cds/torrenting sites & manually put it into your phone from itunes. you get to think a bit more about what you’re putting in your library (or from your library into your phone) but you also get to hold onto things in a certain version & protect your archive from the whims of streaming services & copyright claims .
i canceled my Spotify account over the summer and have spent the last few months rebuilding my digital music library on a refurbished iPod Touch. reading critiques of the app (and it’s enshittification), i realized i wasn’t even sure of my own musical tastes and preferences. i had stopped picking for myself, stopped seeking out new music, ceasing to know how to choose what i wanted or articulate what i like.
breaking free from the algorithm has been such a joy! i’m borrowing gobs of music from the library, rebuilding my old playlists, and consuming more music than i have in years. and better yet, my data isn’t being tracked by Spotify and i own what’s in my personal library. further, my receptors are more open when i’m out in the world exposed to music, searching for recommendations in an organic way.
gonna echo some other folks by saying local file storage is the best. you can go the soulseek or bandcamp route, but I'm also an advocate for ripping from soundcloud and other sites when necessary. having files to work with gives you so much more control over your library in terms of where you source music from (streaming platform exclusivity is the worst), how you sort it (METADATA RULES LET ME CHANGE THEM ID3S BAYBEE), and how you consume it.
my system is a master itunes library that i've maintained for like 15 years now that I prune every so often as my tastes change and I offload things I don't listen to anymore. I also don't have access to all of it all the time since I only sync certain playlists to my phone, which forces me to self curate and decide what to add to my library, what to sync and take with me for daily listening, and what to delete. I love moments where I can sit down, cash out on a bandcamp cart, arrange them in my library by genre and decade and such, and then serve it up for shuffling in the car later.
music consumption was at its peak when libraries were like spreadsheets, the only trappings i want with my music is itunes visualizer (RIP 😢)
Reading an entire book from the pov of the main subject in a science experiment is fun, but now make the subject go from forrest gump level of intelligence to surpassing college professors.