So ive been on the Spotify train since pretty early on in its existence. I used to pirate a lot of music, but I also used to buy a lot of albums too, but once Spotify came along that was it, the rest sort of fell away.
I was listening to a band called Funkyverse on Spotify and it wasn’t bad but there was something off about it. Something didn’t feel right. It was too safe or something, and psychedelic music isnt usually particularly safe.
I investigate a bit, first thing that caught my eye was on Spotify the attribution was something like, “music by funkverse, arranged by [Redacted Name]”. Note it was a real name on Spotify. No mention of AI anywhere but the arranged by thing set alarm bells ringing in my head.
Noticed then they were suspiciously prolific, with countless albums released since 2022. No mention of AI anywhere except one of (if not) their oldest youtube videos with something saying “i know its AI but its pretty good”. I presume the references to AI were removed as the music started making money and sentiment turned.
Sorry that was a long preamble, but basically this whole thing has left me feeling a little violated by Spotify. They were feeding me slop, thank fuck my brain recognised its wrongness.
So how do I de-spotify? Last time I was in this position burning CD-ROMs and using slsk was the top of the musical tech stack.
I am happy to pay for music, in fact im happy to pay a lot more than I was paying Spotify. An order of magnitude more, but I will definitely miss Spotifys recommendations and radios etc.
How do I fill that gap? Give me the low down on the 2026 “fuck spotify” train.
Thanks in advance!
To find new music I mostly look up charts at rateyourmusic.com and tops on bandcamp. To listen to more popular staff i use YT music because i share family yt subscription (you cannot say yt is ethical, but services like deezer or qobuz are better and also have popular stuff in their catalogue). To support smaller artists i buy their stuff on bandcamp, but actually you can listen to couple of times to an album before the website asks you to buy it. Some artists like King Gizzard and The Lizzard Wizzard have all their music there for free tho! Also, bandcamp disallow all AI music on the platform so exploring is safe. And i heard deezer marks AI content explicitly
I started listening to local independent radio instead (collected some stations here). Mostly human curated, mostly the stuff I like and new releases as well. For the bands I like, I bought CDs.
Ethical issues aside, Spotify’s “suggestion” and “discovery” sucks. It would just regurgitate the same 50 songs that it thinks I like across a dozen or so playlists. It got to the point that my “favorite song of the year” is a song I never played intentionally.
I know that my flow will not be for everyone.
I have a very similar experience to OP, but I quit Spotify more than three years ago.
For music “acquisition”, I use bandcamp, qobuz and soulseek. Then stream it using Navidrome.
For music discovery, Bandcamp has weekly shows and I listen a couple of them. I listen to online radio during work, mainly NTS, KEXP, FluxFM, and SomaFM. I’m also subscribed to the KEXP channel on YouTube for live performances.I was in a similar place about a year ago. I set up a Navidrome server, ripped all the CDs I own, figured out what I had bought digitally over the years and acquired those, worked hard on tagging and organizing.
I’m making a conscious effort to buy either direct from artists (Bandcamp and such) or from my locally owned music store. Do I still download some things? Noooo, of course not!
Discovery is slower and more organic. I check out new releases every week (and I do still use YT Music to listen to those), I dig into Wiki pages and such, listen to the local college radio station, word of mouth… Pretty much just going back to the old ways.
It has been great. 10/10 highly recommend.
Good news for you, soulseek is still the best place to pirate music outside of private trackers so at least you will be familiar with what is going on!
If you want to pay then I suggest bandcamp.
In terms of discovery I follow certain tags on bandcamp which can help but the problem with that is the artists do not accurately tag their music at all and so therefore you inevitably get things that don’t fall under that tag at all
I switched to Tidal from Spotify. Pretty comparable overall ig, but Tidal recently published a moderately aggressive ai policy
AI content is allowed, but tagged and unmonetizable. Maybe that just serves as a perverse incentive to lie about AI-ness.
edit: They also allegedly give higher royalties to artists, though idk if that’s been independently verified.
Their app has some jank to it. If you hit a network hiccup while travelling quickly, your song will stop and not restart. I have at least a couple of songs on my playlist that are only playable depending on which country I’m VPNing into. If I hit that song in the wrong country, Tidal will pause instead of skipping. Unfortunate and annoying, but maybe mostly a nitpick
Their app isn’t available in a bunch of countries (officially), might have to install it from forums and shit.
Try bandcamp.com
Self host your music (plex or navidrome). Was the first and best thing i ever bought homelab equipment to do. Get used to smart playlists.
For recommendations, I had to code up my own app to close the gap. Nothing out there really put new stuff on a platter in my face and made it easy to grab the way I wanted it. Im a busy bee so we’ll see if i ever refactor it for general use beyond just exactly what I need it to be.
Never really used true radio features. I mainly lean on tags, ratings, and smart playlists, so not too much of a help there. I think Plex has some sonic analysis and radio bits, but YMMV
I de-spotified when they would not remove that stupid notification that always popped up that said “Listen on your speaker”. Bitch you are a music player, of course I’m going to listen to it on my speaker because you’re renting me some sounds to send into my ears.
Seriously though I know they were pushing using some kind of smart speaker like a Sonos or something, but they just NEVER STOPPED showing that little blue tooltip. Drove me nuts but I’m glad it happened though because I don’t think about them too much anymore. Kind of like quitting smoking.
I was similar to you, pirated back in the day, gave it up when Spotify came around, then needed to find out how to leave it. For me the answer was to go back to the old ways. Lidarr manages finding and organizing the music, and the downloads come from Usenet, torrents, and slsk (yes it’s still around and better than ever)
For artists I want to support I try to buy merch or downloads or stuff like that directly from them.
Buy songs/albums in whatever format you wish as directly from the artist as possible.
Transfer to device and listen.
Search online discussion forums for ‘other bands like xxxxx’ and check those songs out. If you like them, repeat all these steps.
there should be sites that will do playlist transfers if youre looking for another streaming service and want to keep your playlists
I don’t know of any streaming service that isn’t going to allow AI music into it’s platform. Is there any desire on your part to host your own library? If it’s of any interest to you, Look into Navidrome and Musicbrainz.
https://chhs1.github.io/blog/2026/01/22/self-hosted-discovery-playlists.html
