Not the one who mentioned it but I was curious about this as well and found this;

1. Spotify boycott: Artists leave ‘garbage hole’ platform after CEO invests in AI weapons.

2. Spotify CEO investments $700m in AI drone weapons company, as artists call for boycott.

Tidal is pretty harsh on vpns and my whole network is behind something most of the time

Personally I could never get into the whole Spotify and Pandora thing. I want to listen to what I want to listen to and when I want to listen to it, without ridiculous restrictions and rules. YouTube has honestly been the far better choice for music for me.

I'm having a pretty good time with Qobuz. Their curated collections are actually really good and I've found a lot of new stuff in there; it's not the "here's what the record label is shoveling this week" like on Spotify. Also, the high bitrate stuff... I hate to admit it, but it really does sound better.

I heartily recommend the last two.

Is there rippers for Spotify?

That I don't know. I mean you could always just use something to record the sound played by your PC, but at that point A) You're not getting as good of quality as you would from an actual download of the source material and you'd have to manually assign metadata, make sure no notifications or other sounds played, make sure your recording settings were optimum, etc. It's easier, right now at least, to just buy what you want on CD or from a store that sells digital downloads legitimately.

Having a collection of music in files that I own has been my go-to for years. Currently VLC says I have 701 hours of music in files on my phone. That's only 29.2 days worth.

I used to do that and I do still have a lot of music from that time on my computer, but somewhere along the line I stopped downloading music and just started listening to it on YouTube whenever I thought of something in particular.

Seriously, fuck Spotify and anyone else using that error-prone, intrusive, insecure bullshit.

Yeah, they want to be able to 'People that look like This listen to This' so that advertisers have more options when they are locking down commercials.

Man, I had around 10 gigs of vintage mp3s that is created since the days of Limewire/Napster. Uploaded it all to Google Music and lost track of the external I'd had the collection stored on. Whatever, it's all in the cloud now.

Then it wasn't.

I really, Really, need to back up all of my Gdocs, just in case that service ceases to be.

(I wonder if ancient crunchy low bitrate mp3s will be an aesthetic, the way that dusty vinyl or worn out tapes are?)

As much as I'd like to do that, I have listened to over 7000 artists on Spotify.
I simply don't have the time (or money) to look those up individually.
So I can either choose to have worse experience, or stick with Spotify for now.

Libraries can have pretty good CD collections too

what are "spotify fans"? Spotify paid 150k $ for Trump's inauguration party, f them. They do not deserve my money

doesn't make them fans of spotify though

do they have a lot of german music too, or are they focused on american / french music?

abcde for Linux. It's in your repositories. Set it up once the way you want, then it's just: insert CD, enter abcde, repeat ad nauseam. You could even tell your system to auto-trigger it on every CD insert.

Considering how much Spotify pays artists per listens, piracy is barely any different in that regard.

That is of course even better. Just wish any band I'm interested in would ever come to play this quiet corner *sigh*