I have finally found a way to replace Spotify that satisfies my extremely niche requirements

The reasons Spotify are such a dickhead of a company have been repeated so frequently that I won't bother going over them here because I'd inevitably forget too many of them. I've wanted to switch from Spotify for a long while now, ever since they started diluting the core product with podcasts.

Something you should know about me is I'm not an audiophile. I'm not a Serious Music Listener. I never had it in me to craft beautiful mixtapes perfectly calibrated to a song or a mood. In this meme, I am the Chad Random Songs Enjoyer .

But I love listening to music. This year's Spotify Wrapped, which is the last one I'll look at, said I listened to 71,034 minutes of music this year, or 3.75 hours on average every single day. Most of this goes through my Sonos system. Most of this comes from what the girlfriend and I endearingly call Chaos Playlists. So if I started a Chaos Playlist from my laptop and it has a streak of mostly chill indie tunes, and shuffle suddenly blesses me with melodic death metal and it's not the right time for it, I need to be able to pick up my phone and press next to skip it, or to quickly adjust the volume so my neighbours don't hate me any further.

I've tried every single direct competitor out there: YouTube Music, Tidal, Apple Music, Deezer, something called "Qobuz". Qobuz literally has it. It's on Poob. However, none of them had the smooth device handover functionality that Spotify Connect had in addition to also supporting Sonos. I have four Sonos devices so I can have music in every room when I'm home, and while I have sadly realised in hindsight that Sonos also sucks, these devices were expensive and for the most part work okay, even if it's patchier than a few years back, I didn't want to just replace them all just so I could switch music streaming services.

It turns out what I needed wasn't a new streaming service

My salvation from having to give money to Daniel Ek's drone company and Joe fucking Rogan for the time being has come in the form of Roon (not an affiliate link). This is not a streaming service in and by itself, but the core product is linking a streaming service (Tidal and "Qobuz" are supported) seamlessly with a local music library, and also allowing you to stream your local library to your phone outside your home.

Roon requires you to run a local server of some sort to make this happen, and has a desktop app for this, but since I have a home server I was able to quicly whack a Docker image on there and have it up and running quickly and reliably 24/7. I signed up for Tidal again and used a playlist transferring service to transfer all my chaos playlists to Tidal, and transferred the albums I've bought from Bandcamp onto my home server. The setup's been pretty smooth and it works pretty well.

So technically I've switched streaming services, but I'm also paying for Roon on top of this. This doubles my streaming costs per month, but I run on spite ( and sweet revenge ) so fuck it.

Some concerns about discovery

Spotify, for its hundreds of flaws, had an exceptional discovery and recommendations algorithm. As previously described, my musical taste is as chaotic as a London fox's foray into the juiciest rubbish bin in the city. Until I went on Spotify, I didn't really discover much music that wasn't entirely mainstream, but when Discover Weekly was good, I found so many new artists there who I adore and have since seen play live many, many times. Spotify was good at finding exactly what makes me tick. Roon has 21 top-level categories for music and apparently 90% of what I listen to is compressed under "Pop/Rock", which includes my silliest synthpop bops and ridiculous a n g e r y speed metal.

It's still far too early for me to judge how Roon will handle recommendations for me, on its own or via my linked Tidal account. So far it's not been very inspired; but I know doing this well takes a large amount of data and I'm willing to give it time.

For now, I'm just happy that I finally managed to quit Spotify. If you're one of the three people in the world who also had my exact same niche requirements for a streaming setup, I hope this has been useful for you. 😌