Buy music and then upload it to your phone. Thats what I do. You can get 10-15 albums for the cost of 1 year of YouTube Music. You could have 30 albums in just 2 years. Music that won't go away increase in price, and the Apps you can use to play them won't show you ads even after you pay for your music
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Privacy
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youtube-dl your songs.
Plexamp with music stored on my homelab
Not sure why nobody mentioned it yet, but I switched to Metrolist a while back when RiMusic/ViMusic stopped working. Never had to look back and never had issues so far.
RiMusic is still working fine for me
For real? ViMusic is archived since October '24... same goes for RiMusic which was archived.... yesterday? Ok, I wasn't even aware of that - last I knew was that it became a local-only client when the dev gave up fighting against the constant api changes on youtube side.
Anyhow, glad it somehow still works for you - it's been a great app.
Hmm, OK. Guess I'll probably have to switch soon then
Looks good 👍
bandcamp.com
I love bandcamp. I wish I could put more music i bought into my collections though.
🏴☠️
CDs + locally saved files. Like with movies, we have quit using all streaming services and we own the media we watch... or we don't watch them.
I've been loving Qobuz so far. Migrating our family was easier than I thought.
Plus it comes with a free music migration tool.
Qobuz distributed royalties due to labels and publishers corresponding to an average amount of US$0.01873 per stream
This means that Qobuz generates on average five times more revenue per user than the market average,
How much does Spotify pay per stream?
Spotify pays artists between $0.003 - $0.005 per stream on average.
That works out as an approx revenue split of 70/30 - so that’s 70% to the artist/rights holders and 30% to Spotify.
I use Musify from F-droid for what your describing.
To be honest though I only really listen to my offline collection and radio/internet radio for discovering new music.
Check out The Indie Beat. It's an internet radio station playing music from artists on the Fediverse, like Radio Free Fedi used to. All my favourite discoveries from the last couple of years have been by or via Fedi artists.
Qobuz (pronounced Co-buzz). Based out of France.
Qobuz also has some of the highest royalty payments for artists.
Sadly trash privacy guidelines, same for every other streaming service. Privacy comes with piracy, no way around that.
Worth noting however that you can also buy the music DRM free and then stream from a local solution like jellyfin.
Is your music listening a privacy concern?
If you have a NextCloud instance with NextCloud Music app installed you can use its Ampache or Subsonic API implementation with a client in your devices (I recommend Ampache as the implementation is a literal server clone).
If not, as other people suggested Funkwhale.
If you still depend on YT Music, there is RiMusic as a client but prolly will give you errors too after some time if your network is denylisted.
Could you please elaborate on your last sentence? What do you mean with "errors [...] after some time if your network is denylisted"? I am using RiMusic and I indeed run into weird errors where the music stops in the middle.
Google adds extra safe-checks to networks which they consider suspicious automatically so you cannot scrape their websites that easy.
Funkwhale may worth a look: https://www.funkwhale.audio/ I used for quite some time and was nice, the main issue was the unmaintained Android app.
I'll get downvoted but to find music and have a tiny hair of privacy Apple Music may be efficient for the mainstream audience.
I download the audio that I like and store in a local server but I can't expect every person in the world doing the same.
Purchase DRM free music to have locally. HDTracks and 7Digital are two great resources
I’ve done this for decades. While everyone else switched to streaming music, I keep my entire collection on my phone. It’s only 40GB, but it makes up the majority of my music listening, with streaming radio supplementing it to find new stuff… which I then purchase and download if I like it.
Same here. I started buying CDs in 2015, and I haven't been back to streaming since.
I'm using SoundCloud via the browser. I enjoy the suggestions, keeping things fresh.
For offline on mobile I use their app which does have an offline mode for your "Liked" songs and specific playlists.
If I wanted an offline library proper, I'd sail the high seas but I personally do not feel the need for it for now.
Lidarr + Deemix + Navidrome + Tailscale + Symfonium
Absolutely flawless and beautifully automated.
Let me add that my favourite albums / artists will usually be bought on vinyl records as well for some neat displays and to throw some support their way.
1 physical purchase is worth a million streams (I imagine compared to spotify anyway)
Lidarr working again?
Not yet but they are alpha testing the fix as of the 25th
I do this, but just torrent music.
Apps that depend on ytmusic (like OuterTune) are not reliable, but you can try RiMusic, it works for me currently.
I have had some issues with OuterTune (expected for this type of app) but not to the extent you're describing. The current version works for me. Have you tried other open source YoiTube Music clients too? There are loads out there.
If that YSK post about Deezer's main shareholder CEO wouldn't have come out, then I would have suggested that, since that's what me and my friends are using in the family plan after being disappointed with Tidal as a Spotify alternative.
I have been googling my life for a few years.
🫠
What are you using?
I "steal" the music and either have it locally on my devices or stream it through VPN from my home server.
Coincidentally, I use PipePipe to download the audio from YouTube music videos. Been using it more than torrents for quite some time.
Is PipePipe still working for you? I've been having issues with yt-dlp since YT released an update a few months ago
Sure, the only times I get issues is when using a blocked VPN node.
it works for me after app restart and vpn connection change.
I use InnerTune with proton VPN (though I had to exclude it in the split tunneling setting) and all works just fine.
do you know the difference between Innertune and Outertune?
No idea unfortunately. But it looks to be a fork. Not sure if I tried it or not before I ended up using Innertune.
But I know these alternative Youtube frontends gave me issues with the VPN, had to exclude also Tubular in the split tunneling for it to work for me.
I buy music from Amazon music, hd tracks or band camp it's all drm free and put it on my server behind a subsonic based server . That'll give you the closest to a streaming service. Otherwise just sync music on your phone old school.
How does subsonic compare against tools like jellyfin in your experience?
Jellyfin doesn't seem to be as oriented towards music but will also work and many people use it for music
I mean, if you are into Metal, https://en.metal-tracker.com/ and an airsonic server will get you pretty far. anarcho-punk.net can help suppliment that. If you like other forms of music, it can be harder. I often have to resort to using a downloader to get files from youtube. Sometimes you can find things on the postman tracker using i2p. The current state of torrenting is pretty much shit compared to what it used to be, but that is because most people settled for spotify. If you value quality music, from quality artists, you should pay them for their work. If that means buying a record or a tape from somebody, then you should consider investing in that sort of media. If it means downloading, you can always look on bandcamp or the many alternatives that now exist both on and off the fediverse (bandwagon is a cool new fediverse option). There are a lot of great bands just giving away their music online. Maybe consider sometimes paying them for what they do if you are like me and you can't afford to always pay everybody all the time. Spotify makes things cheap and easy and thats why you are getting massive amounts of AI slop music being uploaded now. It just isn't worth it as a real musician to put your music on there anymore. So until we as music lovers decide that it's worth supporting artists in some new way, things are only going to get worse and we are going to have to put up with a lot of shitty platforms making shitty choices for shitty reasons. The first step is having this realization that spotify and youtube are shitty... not just to artists but to users. But if you want to really be able to enjoy music again, it probably involves finding a way to directly pay artists for their work while cutting out as many middlemen as possible. I highly suggest building a library of your own. It isn't the cheapest thing in the world. You might have to buy a few hard drives to make sure things are backed-up, maybe a raspberry pi to run it all on and depending on how technical you are, you might have to learn some new skills in order to run it all, but with that setup running an airsonic server and the subsonic app on your phone, you can listen to your own music(and podcast) collection from anywhere. It's worth the effort in my opinion. You could even run airsonic as a tor hidden service if you want (then you don't have to even punch any holes in your routers firewall).
Spotdl
Sabnzb + lidarr + jellyfin/finamp?