Music Un-streaming

25 Feb, 2026

One of my biggest undertakings so far in self-hosting and remodeling my consumption habits has been music. Music has always been a big part of my life. When I got my first mini-disc player, then Zune (brown duh), then iPod my music world really changed. I became obsessed with curating my collection and asked for nothing but iTunes gift cards and music money for a large chunk of my teens. I would poke around purevolume.com ¹ during the peak of the scene finding as much new music and band gossip as possible. I would endlessly scroll through Pitchfork reviews for hours. My taste, my band knowledge, my collection were a central part of me. Music was something I did actively. Music culture and curation was also a hobby and beast of its own.

Then my freshman year of college whispers of this new service called Spotify were floating around. I never was a pirate. Always being drawn to creativity and the arts personally made me feel weird about taking money from the hands of the bands I spent so much time learning every intimate detail about. So when I found out there was a startup in the UK that let you listen to anything you wanted for free.. and legally? You bet your ass I downloaded a vpn for the first time. I never looked back. Friction was gone. The second I heard about a new band I'd have them on my phone in seconds and my week of listening would be set. I don't even have access to the iTunes account that I spent countless birthday gift cards on anymore.

I know many are starting to leave Spotify these days due to them shoving AI music down everyone's throats. Extremely valid. But I think for me the sheen started to fade even before the gen ai wave tickled the shores of the web. There's something to the act of curating your own taste and experience through some sort of labor of love. Even if it's just moving 1s and 0s from your laptop to an iPod. Having whatever I wanted the second I wanted it was actually starting to make me listen less. Pay attention less. Learn less. Feel less. I was listening to a podcast recently where someone said music streaming has taken music from being a focus/hobby/art to being background dressing. Just something that's there to fill in the backdrop of our days.

So I've been moving off music streaming to ownership again. iPod and self-hosted streaming in hand. My library is still tiny but for now I'm focusing on finding all my essentials and favorites. I'm not going to pretend it isn't significantly more expensive if you go about it legally. But making myself choose wisely what to add next has actually dramatically increased my enjoyment of what I do have. I actually look forward to buying an album like I'm 16 again.

Right now I'm rocking an iPod running Rockbox (you could totally just get a cheap music player) and then running Navidrome on my home server for streaming on my laptop, phone, etc. I don't want to moralize how people choose to listen, and I understand that from a money perspective Spotify or the like might just make way more sense for some. For me though, owning my collection again and reinstating some of that friction has made that spark come back again. Maybe it will for you too.

Oh shit yeah I almost forgot. Evidently last.fm is basically dead now. Or least it's a shell of what I remember it being from my scrobbling days. I did some digging and found ListenBrainz. I've been using MusicBrainz Picard for getting metadata sorted on my collection so I was stoked there's a scrobbler built right into their open source ecosystem that easily integrates with Navidrome. So if you want to see what I'm spinning ever give me a follow over there.

#selfhosting #theaudiofiles