i know this question has been asked before but: spotify sucks and we all know this, so what's people's preferred options for playing music?
to describe my specific use case, i'm in the apple system (iphone, macbook, the works) and currently use spotify as my paid music streaming service. i don't use music apps for music discovery all that often, and most of what i use them for is to play songs or albums or artists i already know i like. included among these are artists or music that aren't or can't go on spotify, such as my dad's old low-fi casette recordings, or neil cicierega's mouth albums. in other words, i have a library that i frequently revisit and go back to, and could make it pretty far just downloading those files onto my phone directly to listen "offline", but there are occasions where i dig deeper in my library and want to be able to have that library available to stream or download to my phone when and if that urge strikes so "just download it all to your phone" is probably not the best fit to my particular situation
on the occasion that i do music exploration it's usually the "my friend recommended i listen to this band" than "da algorithm said that this song is like the one you put on loop for a month to wring all the dopamine out of it so maybe you'll like it too", and very frequently that music exploration is done while i'm at home and/or in range of a wifi network. occasionally i'll listen to a shared playlist on spotify but i definitely don't use them on a daily basis or anything close to it
from what i can tell it might make sense to quit paid spotify and use it ad-supported for the social functions that it has, and just go back to itunes as a music file organizing system and pay for their music streaming service if it turns out that i stream music i don't own the files for more often than i think i do? but i wanted to see if there was anyone else who uses their music apps similarly so i can draw on their experiences :P
