I recently lost my bank card and had to cancel it in order to get another one. This had the side-effect of all the services that use the card pinging me left, right and center that payments haven’t gone through. I thought I’d take this opportunity to see how long it took to get booted out of the service after failing to pay.

After being a customer for 5+ years and always paying on time, I was turfed out on my ass after 3 reminder emails and a handful of payment attempts. I didn’t pay on time and I was rightfully kicked out but other institutions granted me far more leniency.

Hurting more than being dumped by a text from a long term partner, this has made me rethink my relationship with media content and subscription based services in general. So I looked at my options.

As a side note, I also recently noticed that Spotify would push ads for new records or concerts covering the full screen and requiring closing before being able to use the app. WTF Spotify!? I thought paying meant ad free content but here we are back in pop-up city of the 90s.

It’s not me, it’s you

Out in the cold and with no music to listen to keep me warm, how should I replace Spotify? There’s a reason I had been a customer so long, the service is great, I can listen to anything I want, whenever I have an internet connection. Spotify is also great at recognizing your tastes thanks to the massive amounts of data being collected from users allowing them to make accurate recommendations on what you will like.

Music availability and recommendations are hard problems to solve but Spotify has not been around forever. MP3 players were at one point ubiquitous with the ability to store a lifetime of music. For new music we’d hear something we like on the radio, in public or from our friends.

The plan is to go back to something like this from the past but with a modern twist, manage my own Spotify.

Love At First Sight

I crunched the numbers and I pay £207 a year to Spotify so I set that as roughly the budget for any hardware. I ended up buying a Dell OptiPlex 3060 Micro i5-8500T at £250 (from this great retailer of second hand computers https://tier1online.com/) based on the recommendations I saw on Reddit’s r/selfhosted subreddit, which might be a bit overkill for listening to music but I might have ambitions to host more stuff on that server in the future.

The open source community never ceases to amaze me. Again from the same r/selfhosted subreddit, I found out about JellyFin, a free media server that looks unbelievably polished for something that is worked on by folks in their free time. So far no issues.

On the Dell box I swiftly installed Ubuntu Server with Docker and docker compose being the mechanism for hosting JellyFin. I paired this using envoy as a reverse proxy so that I have options for hosting further services in the future and auth. I gloss over the details of how to set this all up but it has proven relatively easy.

On the client side there is the also unbelievably elegant FinAmp iOS app which has a great feature for offline downloading for when my ISP decides it wants to reallocate my IP address.

The Awkward Silence

Nothing makes you aware of how little music you actually own when you start scratching your head as to what to put on your media server now you have it. I managed to dig up some old CDs but like many, I have discarded much of what I had owned over the years.

A discussion about piracy is something for another time but I have gone with the old fashioned way of simply buying it. Bandcamp offers high quality audio file downloads at decent prices which an average 82% of revenue goes to the artists. Another subject for another time is about how undervalued music and art has become in the digital age but It is important to me that I support the artists that bring joy to my life.

As for recommendations, I’m slowly building back into asking friends and colleagues if there’s anything they’d recommend. This is bringing back the social sharing side of music which gets lost so easily on Spotify.

Hope of a new beginning

Spotify broke my heart when they so swiftly cut off our long term relationship after such a short rocky patch but the joy of getting over them has been in falling for a new love, a romance of silicon, networks and binary data. Most of all a deeper appreciation for the many folks that have poured their own love into their work and made it freely available to all of us.