Taking back control of the music I listen to

January 29, 2026

A brief history

After 15 years of streaming, I made the decision in 2025 to switch back to a system where I listen to music I own again.

Like for many people, the arrival of legal music streaming was a game-changer for me. Access to the entire catalog for a few bucks per month was the dream.
I started like many with Spotify in 2010, long before they supported the orange dic-tator, funded the manufacturing of military drones, and flooded their catalog with AI-generated slop. In France, we also had Deezer, which came out around the same time, but their app's UI just didn't work for me back then. In 2019, I switched to Apple Music, mainly because it integrated better into my ecosystem at the time.

But over the years, with the arrival of the enshittification phenomenon, the negative aspects became more and more apparent.

The problems

Tracks or entire albums that disappear

What's more frustrating than having an album you love disappear (or be replaced by an alternate version) overnight?
I'm glad I own certain CDs that are now completely unavailable, either on streaming or for digital purchase.

The prices that go up

Less aggressive than video streaming (for now), prices have still increased noticeably.

Algorithms that no longer serve the user

In the beginning, the promise of personalized radio was to help us discover new artists based on our tastes. Over time, these algorithms have evolved to serve their owners.

I've discovered 10 times more artists in the last 6 months using last.fm, Bandcamp, or other means than I did in the last 6 years through Apple Music's recommendations.

Also, albums that were in my music library were never pushed to my personal radio stations. I realized I hadn't listened to certain artists since I switched to streaming (thanks last.fm stats! 🤓).

The subscription model

The advantage of this model is having access to everything, as long as you pay.

The disadvantage is that if you want to stop paying for a month or two, you have nothing left at all. For someone who rarely goes more than 24 hours without listening to music, this simply translates to being chained for life to a monthly payment.

If I had invested the amount of my music subscription from the last 15 years into albums, I would have something like 200+ albums that I could listen to whenever I want without spending another cent.

My setup today

Where I get my music

After a few tests, here is the list of places where I get new albums, in order of priority:

Bandcamp: indie music, better pay for artists, allows for full previews (instead of the 30 to 90 seconds elsewhere), but you won't find big labels;
7digital: better purchasing experience, but a slightly less complete catalog than Qobuz;
Qobuz: the most complete catalog, but I had a technical issue with a purchase, and it took support over 15 days just to give me the first response.

In all three cases, the purchased files are in lossless FLAC format.

File organization

After purchase, the files are stored on my NAS, which is backed up daily (make backups!).
But I don't just dump the downloaded files into my Music directory. I use a magic application to organize my files for me: Beets.

It does several things for me:

normalizes artist, album, and track names: correct capitalization, no typos, consistent naming, etc.
avoids duplicates: if I try to import an album I already have, the script warns me
properly tags the files: who's old enough to remember the Winamp days when we manually added ID3 tags?

Beets does a lot of other things that I haven't explored yet; there's a whole list of plugins to test. Huge thanks to the community for keeping this software alive all these years!

It has only one drawback if you are not a developer: it's entirely command-line based (for me, it's a big plus 😁). But it's super easy to use, all you have to do is read the documentation. There's a really good guide with real-life examples.

There is an alternative, MusicBrainz Picard. I haven't tried it, but I've seen feedback from several people who say they very are satisfied with it.

It's worth noting that Beets uses data from MusicBrainz. And it can happen that the album you're importing doesn't exist there yet; feel free to create an account to enrich the database. It's a community-based system, like Wikipedia (⚠️ but be sure to read the guidelines before any contribution).

My music app

As a long-time Plex user for videos, adding a music library was quick and easy.
I use Plex Media Server, coupled with Plexamp on desktop and mobile (which include CarPlay support). There is also a Web interface.

Feedback on Plex

I'll take this opportunity to give a little feedback on Plex.

What could be improved

Open-source alternative: As a matter of principle, I would prefer an open-source application over Plex, which would have less risk of becoming enshittified in the future (it has already started...). A long, long time ago, I was a user of Ampache and then Subsonic. I also know about Navidrome. When I get a chance, I'll do another round of testing of everything available to look for something that meets all my requirements.
Data export: for now, there are two things that are not backed up: my playlists (static and dynamic) and my ratings for each artist, album, and track. That data is stored only in Plex. I still need to dig around to find out how to extract it for backups (given the time I've spent building this data, I'd be very, very upset if I lost it).
Multi-scrobbling: I'd like to be able to scrobble (for those who don't know the term, it means "tracking the music you listen to") to other services in addition to last.fm. I need to test Multi-scrobbler.
Genre browsing: probably not entirely Plex's fault, but when I go to "Albums by Genre," I have 19 genres and 75% of the albums are in "Pop & Rock," which is a bit too generic for my taste to be useful...
Lyrics: the feature is there, but few tracks are supported, even among the most popular artists. I don't know if it's a rights issue or something else, but it's a real shame...

The little details I love in Plex

Being able to insert one or more tracks after the current song, or after the current play queue;
Perfect crossfade management between two tracks: disabled when listening to a full album (because that's how the album was designed by the artist), but enabled when listening to a radio station or a custom playlist;
The graphical representation of the track's waveform in the progress bar;
The integrated "similar artists" feature;
The grouping on the artist's page of albums, singles & EPs, and compilations;
Also on the artist's page: popular tracks, my most-played tracks, my top-rated tracks, and recently played tracks;
The interface color that adapts to the colors of the album currently playing;
The variety of entry points on the app's homepage, which is great for discovering and re-discovering your library and avoiding the "I don't know what to listen to and I'll just listen to the same thing over and over" effect, with a random assortment of:
- recently added;
- recent playlists;
- top albums in [insert a year];
- most played in [insert a month];
- plus the ability to create custom ones!

What has changed in how I listen to music

It's been over 9 months now since I quit streaming, and I've noticed a few changes in how I listen to music:

I listen to full albums again. Even though this is technically just as possible on streaming platforms, they heavily push auto-generated playlists and very few full albums.
This is somewhat a consequence of the previous point: I'm back to listening to music "actively," compared to before when it had mostly become simple background noise.
I was afraid I would discover fewer new tracks, but the exact opposite happened. My main sources for discovery: Last.fm, Bandcamp (with related artists and albums), CrucialTracks, Stereogum, etc.

To finish, I'll share a few articles from other people who are on the same journey, if the topic interests you: