Never paid for streaming. Usually buy music and download the files to play on my computer or stream them from the computer to my phone or wherever. Mainly have been buying lossless .flac music files from Bandcamp.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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I like to air fry mine, gives it a nice crunchy sound ππ»
I use a dedicated MP3 player and a large FLAC library.
I use MusicBee, running on Wine, to listen and synchronize automatically.
I don't believe in subscriptions, and therefore won't pay for one: no music streaming, no Netflix, no Game Pass, no Adobe.
You're still streaming music?
Me who pirates all his music:
Well of course not. I don't have physical discs or a steamer so steaming them is a bit difficult
Jokes aside, I have literally never used music streaming... First of all I don't listen to that much music. Even when I did, I tried Soundcloud for a bit but then quickly switched over to Bandcamp. I'm not that big on having to listen to the latest music and I don't like mainstream stuff, so YouTube is sufficient for discovery for now
I'm not very big on audio quality so I mostly just do yt-dlp these days on songs that I listen a lot... I could go back to Bandcamp (or pirate and leave personal donations) if I ever become an audiophile, but realistically a lot of musicians I listen to are financially stable if not wealthier than me (most of them probably have stable contracts from large gaming companies) so I don't see a lot of point...
I feel like streaming music isnβt that expensive. Wasnβt music like $1-1.3 before streaming services? If you listen to one new album a month youβve basically broken even. Tv streaming is a different story
Yet another Bandcamp shopper here. I stream from their site to preview albums but then buy my favorites later. DRM-free FLAC files are the best.
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just to let you know Lemmy is NOT the place to get unbiased results, esp on piracy.
if you really want an answer from the people who pay for a subscription go to a university and walk around with a microphone and iPhone, people will spill their guts out lol
I'm old enough to remember buying physical media. I still do that from time to time. For daily use I have a large library of digital copies of music I bought at various stages of my life. Listening to them costs me nothing and I can listen to them as often as I like for the rest of my life. Technology permitting, even my children may continue listening to what I bought last century. Ownership is a great thing.
Saying "old enough to remember buying physical media" makes me feel like one of the ancients.
I don't stream music. Mostly listen to rips of all the CDs I collected over the decades plus stuff I saved over the years in the spirit of recording music off the radio, which is perfectly legal.
It means I don't really have much new music, but never was super excited about music when it is new. The benefit of being behind the curve is the crap gets filtered out!
I stream from my own library hosted on my fileserver.
I use a random playlist that increases the delay for track repeat plays proportionally to their play count. Albums are added as I find artists or themes I find interesting, movie and game scores are great for adding incidental randomness.
Iβve never payed or had an account on any streaming βserviceβ.
Get a load of this guy. He still listens to music. π
Oddly, I've just returned to FM radio. I do have a large collection of songs stored locally, but I want to hear new recommendations (and not from an algorithm but from free public radio).
Same but with internet radio. Most big public universities have a radio station, and mirror it on an internet radio stream. I've just looked up various universities across the continent and found ones that actually have good human DJs.
Great time to plug Radio Garden.
IDK how, but just about every radio station you could ask for is on that app - across the globe. Super cool stuff!
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I'm streaming, but not paying monthly for it. Look into self hosting. Jellyfin, Navidrome or Plex. The first two are free and open source, but don't have remote access built in.
I do not stream. I have over 6K in my MP3 collection. I've never used a music streaming service.
I have a bunch of stuff DRM-free and ripped from CDs I've bought. I've been against drm for a while, just takes practice to maintain the habit
Cheaper than buying for me, I on avarage would spend up to 6-7 times more on physical a month.
All my music lives in a folder called music that gets synced to all my devices. ~~Don't ask me how I sync the folder across all my devices though~~
A while ago I got tired of tracks going missing from my playlists because of stuff being removed from Spotify so I started buying everything on Bandcamp and then playing it from my jellyfin using finamp.
I have mp3s and an 800 KB binary that can play them. That's it.
People massively overcomplicate this.
If by streaming, you mean using a client-server architecture to get a sound signal to the aux port, then yes, I use mpv with pipewire.
Oh and I buy music from GoG and Steam.
My Compact Discs (CDs) and my compact disc players both still work fine.
Occasional visits to thrift shops have expanded my collection at very affordable prices.
The variety of music I enjoy is unimpressive but steady.
But the load times are very nice, and the network resilience is unmatched.
Kinda like that other guy, once I ripped my cd collection to digital, just didn't even get into streaming.
Still make mixtapes the old fashioned way for my partner (corny lol I know) and I buy the occasional remaster at a local thrift shop, or the old baked out hippie running a music / instrument shop.
It's an honest joy.
I stream, but I don't pay.
I have never used any streaming.
Bandcamp
Don't be ridiculous. Why would I pay for streaming, when there are endless ways to get it for free, without ads?
Yeah I had a carefully curated collection back in the 90s and 2000s, but I don't see the point of meticulously building playlists anymore when an algorithm can do it for me in an instant.
Only reason why I even still have music on my PC is because I'm a DJ. So I maintain a rotating collection of about 500 tunes in lossless quality, and only because you can't always rely on streaming for a mobile gig, since wifi and/or cell data isn't always available. If I could I would just clear up the hard drive space, and only keep the tunes that I absolutely must have in high quality. (And for nostalgia'a sake I still keep a copy of the first two songs I ever downloaded from Napster back in 2000.)
As a teen I used to pirate it and supplement with the very occasional cd purchase. I felt justified at the time given I did still pay at least sometimes and I couldn't afford to otherwise. These days, it became so ubiquitous on YouTube that I just never felt the need to buy it or torrent it and the filesharing networks all kinda disappeared anyway.
It's not exactly ethical since I use adblockers but it's just there, always instantly available and at zero cost. I'd never use a subscription service, I have no idea how much, if any music I would consume over a fixed period so paying a fixed monthly quantity makes no sense at all.
I guess the issue with this is that it's hard to discover new music. I guess it's a little sad but really but truth be told the rate of discovery for me has been significantly curtailed since high school, I guess I was never a connoisseur or great appreciator of music so my imagination in the space was pretty limited to just whatever my friends were listening to.
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Probably.
Streaming services are very useful and a good model in general. Unfortunately, the leading companies do not yet sufficiently understand how to distribute the monetary gains properly.
For some reason, people still think having a big number on your bank account is a good thing. Money should stream as well.