Maybe its a generational thing but I prefer having a Plex / Plexamp serveur with all my music as FLAC on my home server. I can better curate my collection and it’s available everywhere.

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Mixing and matching is the best option, mostly.

I like to have my personal favorite albums and non-streaming albums in my drive, but if i download something new, most of the time it will just stay there and i’ll never listen to it.

Streaming is wayyy better for discovering music (and also not making your hard drive full). If for every album you want to listen to you need to download, it sometimes lets you out of great music because of simple lazyness lol

I have a library of albums that I like and that I want to support the artists. It’s all uploaded to YouTube Music (CD rips and purchased files) so I can stream if I want to but for listening at home it’s all local.

Spotify to find artists

Plex/VLC/winamp to continue listening after discovering them.

I stream because I like discovering new artists that I don’t know about. Otherwise keeping everything on a drive is probably better considering that you have full control over it.

i use spotify premium (on someone else’s family account). it’s… a close thing really. i definitely wouldn’t pay for it if i weren’t getting it for free

for:

• it’s the best option for music discovery
  • out of
    • youtube music
    • deezer
    • local music
  • i have so many songs in my library i never would have heard without spotify, and when i stopped using it for a while my intake decreased drastically
  • this is due to
    • being able to follow artists, and get notified of new releases
    • their "enhance your playlist feature (and the ai dj i guess, but it’s shit)
    • quickly adding songs to a playlist i can listen to later, if i get recommendations off a friend
• handy if using a friends phone, i can just open my playlist and add stuff to a queue
  • it’s also easy for friends to send me links to songs
• quick and easy to add new or remove old songs, if you have a high library turnover
  • (i probably add ~30 songs / month)
• easy to sync library between devices
• very easy to add a song that isn’t in your library to the queue
• most songs have time-synced lyrics, if you’re a karaoke fan
• songs come with correct id3 tags, if you care about that
  • although this means there’s no way to edit them yourself

against:

• the app is really, really bad, and spotify doesn’t allow 3rd party clients
  • it often stops playing when not connected to internet
  • it’s very laggy and slow to load
  • i can’t reorder the queue when listening to their suggestions
  • can’t select multiple songs on mobile (to add to playlists
  • only just got a sleep timer, and doesn’t support “wait until end of track”
  • has unnecessary data wasting, like canvas and “explore your genres”
  • seems to use some weird custom ver. of the android music api, often doesn’t display correct information on speakers with a display, and doesn’t play nicely with klwp
• the desktop client is better, but still worse than any other music player i’ve used
  • it’s an electron app as well (possibly the android one is as well, judging by performance)
• limited library. it has more than one might expect, but not everything
  • songs are often removed from my library, or replaced with inferior versions (e.g. british way of life)
• you can sync your local music to it, but only using the desktop client and it then doesn’t work if you use any spotify features (e.g. playlist blend, spotify connect, remote queue, etc.)

i’ll edit with more if i think of anything else

Local library. I don’t want to pay for things I don’t own. Streaming services also can remove/ disable music any time. I also don’t need recommendation algorithms I think they are biased. I can easily discover new artists on blogs

Support your favourite artists by buying their merchandise and going to shows.

I’ve got a local library that I stream with using Subsonic/Airsonic-compatible APIs.

This totally depends on YOU and how you consume music. I am an analog collector who has a small collection of cassette tapes and vinyl to play at home for gatherings. But then I have spotify for the car and for showering lol.

I have a smart TV with ReVanced so I don’t get commercials/ads on YouTube and can play music there too.

I agree with OP that it is best to have DRM free files. For music recommendations, I use a Scrobber plugin for Last.fm.

Not being an avid consumer of music, I only use Spotify.

Specifically to listen in my car or at home. I don’t use it anywhere else, so I don’t need to keep a offline library.

I have Ampache running on a self hosted server, which has desktop and mobile apps.

Give ViMusic (for Android) a try. It’s free in F-Droid. It’s like Spotify but uses Youtube Music for the backend.

I have a Spotify account and never use it anymore. ViMusic is great.