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Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streamin

Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project that this and most third party Spotify players are built on. I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. I’ve migrated to a self hosted library with streaming and radio for discovery. I hope we’ll see many projects in the space flourish. Many, like Navidrome and the whole OpenSubsonic ecosystem, seem to be doing quite well.

nan60 16d ago
> radio for discovery Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.
- dylan604 16d ago
  > radio for discovery was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
  - BLKNSLVR 16d ago
    This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well. https://threedradio.com/ https://threedradio.com/ I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way. Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
    - BLKNSLVR 10d ago
      This may be long dead, but a relatively recent musical discovery I've come across is Nando's. They play some great Southern American music, with real nice vibes and beats. My Shazam usage is about 75% Nando's. And I don't mean Southern United States, I mean real, geographical definition South American. There's even a pretty long playlist someone has curated, specifically called Nando's Music: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kgcsnicEnZYjaU3zoGbU5?si=Off72d9LQ1qHnSQm--ev-g https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kgcsnicEnZYjaU3zoGbU5?si=...
  - mcmcmc 16d ago
    Public radio is great, NPR and the member stations have some great streaming channels. KEXP and KCRW are two favs
  - wilted-iris 16d ago
    I believe there are! I consistently hear good things about KEXP and FIP but I haven’t listened to either extensively. I listen to a lot of SomaFM (free, https://somafm.com/ https://somafm.com/) and the Flow State radio-podcast (paid, https://www.flowstate.fm/ https://www.flowstate.fm/).
    - GaProgMan 16d ago
      I would always recommend KEXP. They have a really varied set of shows and setlists, don't seem to be swayed by "we must play the top 40", genuinely care about music, and are super nice if you head into the building in Seattle (which has a public access space, coffee shop, bathrooms, and a SubPop store). I've had three tours around the place just by telling the folks there that Im there from out of town. To be fair, I might have gotten the tours because I came all the way over from England the times, but it's my favourite place to hang out when I'm in Seattle. Also Ken is the nicest guy ever, and he introduced me to Larry Mizzel Jr while he was broadcasting live. Get the app, or use the player on their website, and hive then a try for an hour or do. The app has the ability to "heart" a track while it's playing live, which helps with discovery.
  - keyringlight 16d ago
    Internet radio is still going strong: https://www.radio-browser.info/ https://www.radio-browser.info/
    - l72 16d ago
      Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup! There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!
    - mrguyorama 15d ago
      Technobase.fm was my gateway drug to EDM when all I otherwise had access to was rock and roll and country. There used to be Neradio as well, but they died like a decade ago.
  - frogulis 16d ago
    RRR and PBS in Melbourne both stream online and are both fantastic for music discovery. Go the former if you lean indie and the latter if you lean international.
- bubblemoth 16d ago
  I left spotify around two years ago for a self hosted option (I mostly use navidrome+feishin). Music discovery was a concern for me as well, but then I realized that I didn't like the idea of spotify curating which music I discovered. So far, this is what has worked for me: - Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks. - Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way. - Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
  - pixelatedindex 16d ago
    Epic bought bandcamp many moons ago. Did they enshittify it or is it still going strong?
    - stijnveken 16d ago
      Epic actually sold Bandcamp 3 years ago. I only started using it lately so I can't say how it was before, but I think it's still good. https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-layoffs/ https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
      - deleted 16d ago
        [deleted]
      - kennywinker 16d ago
        Unfortunately bandcamp laid off virtually all of their engineers a month or so back: https://www.hypebot.com/new-bandcamp-layoffs-why-artists-are-worried-and-where-to-turn/ https://www.hypebot.com/new-bandcamp-layoffs-why-artists-are... So, not enshittified, but either abandoned or headed for ensloppification.
        nsteel 16d ago
- msmagh 16d ago
  using nts.live and and fip radio -> https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip at the moment for same purpose. Radio France allows to save liked track names in profile to look up later.
  - lolive 16d ago
    In addition to those two bangers, BBC6 and RNE also have shows to discover new musics. PS: RadioParadise is also a safe place for good music.
- hyperadvanced 16d ago
  Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.
- hillbillydilly 16d ago
  I don't know about you but spotify discovery feels like the least organic discovery possible. Its so homogeneous and predictable and corporate slop adjacent it makes me cringe just thinking about it.
  - refactor_master 16d ago
    I've discovered so many great artists through Spotify, and been to many of their shows (which Spotify also helps surface with their "Live Events" feature). I regularly get artists with less than 100k listeners in my Discover Weekly, which I then look up, and find that they did a concert on KEXP, and the comments all proclaiming "I knew good music wasn't dead!". So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers". Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars. I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
- cmoski 16d ago
  Hype machine used to be so good for this. I haven't used it for a long time but it looks like it is still going in some fashion.
  - gnarlynarwhal42 16d ago
    I used to use hypem soo much during the music blog days and had a subscription etc but it seemed to stop working or something so after a while I stopped using it. I will have to check it out again
- wilted-iris 16d ago
  I listen to Flow State, SomaFM, and aggregate from local shows and a few people I follow on social media among other discovery platforms. (I don’t have a favorite yet.) I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
  - bityard 16d ago
    I stopped listening to Pandora well over a decade ago because its algorithm eventually decided that I only liked 12 songs in the whole world.
- kachnuv_ocasek 16d ago
  I just listen to NTS most of the time.
  - SSLy 16d ago
    nts is all fire until a dj plays mp3 bitcrunched track that just hurts your ears
- ivh 16d ago
  I use https://radioparadise.com https://radioparadise.com for this, since more than 20 years.
- twilo 16d ago
  There is nothing better plexamp but unfortunately after plex raised their prices it might not be worth it for most
- thesuitonym 16d ago
  > its almost impossible to find new music otherwise I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.
pbasista 16d ago
> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.
- TingPing 16d ago
  Depends on how much they care. They can take down repos containing any keys, or use heuristics to block clients.
- hahn-kev 16d ago
  Technically no, but they can just ban you. It would not be impossible to detect.
- egeozcan 16d ago
  Anthropic can prevent people from using their models with the subscription plan outside Claude Code, why couldn't Spotify?
  - sbinder 16d ago
    Because millions of Spotify-compatible speakers are sold with firmware that will never be upgraded, so they can't ever change the Spotify connect protocol without breaking those devices.
    - epihelix 16d ago
      ... and no company ever broke backwards-compatible support.
      - LollipopYakuza 16d ago
        I'd say it's a good thing they are not (?)
- baggachipz 16d ago
  DMCA has entered the chat.
protocolture 16d ago
>I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one. But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.
jarym 16d ago
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.
- selcuka 16d ago
  > There was a world before Spotify There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".
echelon 16d ago
> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. It's just getting started. We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again. The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable. We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.
- nalekberov 16d ago
  > We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again. It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
  - mixedCase 16d ago
    Garbage being created at unprecedented rates does not diminish the fact that LLMs are acting as a positive multiplier for useful tools; this very item being one. No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
  - echelon 16d ago
    You can look at the glass half full all you want, my glass is overflowing. This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted. This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore. I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in. It's like Christmas every day now.
    - nalekberov 16d ago
colordrops 16d ago
Why are they killing librespot?
- HaloZero 16d ago
  Probably for the same reason Twitter killed their API, more control over the experience and to serve ads/cross-promote. More cross-promote for Spotify.
wahnfrieden 16d ago
CIUT has some great shows and most are available online. University of Toronto.
HaloZero 16d ago
What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")
- wilted-iris 16d ago
  Librespot no longer works for new accounts. APIs are being gated off and they’re applying legal pressure to dissuade projects from reverse engineering anything new. At the end of the day, they can turn the tap off anytime they want, whether by technical or legal means. I tired of having so much of my music experience at risk and chose to migrate on my own terms.
  - inigyou 16d ago
    They can only turn the tap off because those projects operated in ways that required them to leave it on. Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.
    - port11 16d ago
      Bit of an unfair take. You propose the open-source community operates behind closed doors like the very software they aim to replace? I’d argue Spotify has so little to gain by being hostile, that perhaps the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects (which would never gain mass adoption).
      - selfhoster1312 16d ago
        > the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects The lawyers are more expensive than happy customers staying customers because they can enjoy the client they prefer, that's for sure.
nickysielicki 16d ago
Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.
- paweladamczuk 16d ago
  How would the plausible deniability piece work? If you stream some bytes to someone else, you can't deny doing it. Unless you imagine this working over Tor, idk what the performance of Tor is these days but I never thought it could support such an application.
  - nickysielicki 16d ago
    Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way. By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
    - joshschreuder 16d ago
      Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though. Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
- Gander5739 16d ago
  Have you heard of Soulseek? It's an active p2p music sharing platform.
  - lukeasch21 16d ago
righthand 16d ago
Spoiler: Spotify has always been terrible. The golden age of music streaming was Zune pass where you could stream and download 10 songs/mo. And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.
- pjerem 16d ago
  The first Spotify client, the one in Qt was actually really good. Things started going downhill slowly when they integrated Facebook then very fast when they threw everything through the window to rewrite everything in electron.
  - zokier 15d ago
    the first spotify client was plain win32
- szszrk 16d ago
  > Spotify has always been terrible. It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly). Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine. It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately. But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago. We had a lot of decent options back then.
  - righthand 16d ago
    Scrobbling to Last.fm isn’t music streaming.
kombine 16d ago
I've also canceled my Spotify sub three weeks ago and migrated to Navidrome. I'm still not quite satisfied with the available clients, I'm using Feishin. Fastpotift looks like a nice candidate to extend to support Navidrome.
devindotcom 16d ago
I'm glad they're doing well but I would guess only a tiny fraction of the people who use Spotify would be capable of setting up Navidrome. I tried and went back to Plex. I wish it were otherwise but if something takes more than a few clicks to go from zero to music that leaves 95% of users out! I hope these projects get more accessible though.
jorisw 16d ago
> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project Source?
- the_mitsuhiko 16d ago
  https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1649 https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1649
  - jorisw 16d ago
    Thanks, but don't see how this Issue backs that up.
    - the_mitsuhiko 16d ago
      Not sure what you call it, but new accounts are no longer able to use librespot.
  - nsteel 15d ago
    Also, https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1737 https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1737 We are seeing a slow but steady stream of small breaking changes, designed to gradually piss off everyone involved. While avoiding a large breaking change that attracts a load of bad publicity. Sadly this strategy is the only good idea they've had in years.
azalemeth 16d ago
If anyone other than me really likes classical music, I thoroughly recommend Hyperion Records. DRM free downloads in your choice of codec, one to two free CDs worth of sampler per month to download (with a jewel case PDF!) and some truly excellent world leading groups and beautiful new music.
- 10729287 16d ago
  Thanks for sharing. I loved buying then downloading cheap samplers from punk and hardcore labels when I was younger. That was part of the culture and that really helped me discover new music and shaping my tastes. This is something that doesn't exist that much anymore and I'm glad to find this initiative. I try to listen to classical music but that's a very difficult world to discover, this will probably help by helping me to focus on few titles instead of jumping in the gigantic and maze-ish pool !
  - azalemeth 16d ago
    I really enjoyed this comment – thank you. One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy: (1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful. (2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed. [1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B – track 6 (the whole lot is free!) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezYjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezY... – this was a sampler from hyperion too and I have the whole lot legally as flac.
scrollop 16d ago
What do you use to stream your local content? Using plex at the moment.
Shorel 16d ago
I feel I am in the golden age of music streaming right now. Just use Deezer instead of Spotify. Perfect quality and it great selection.
- BoingBoomTschak 16d ago
  I have a free Deezer account from my family. Shit is extremely barren. Some examples: 1. (already posted on HN) Wanted to try Midori's early stuff, but no "1st" EP nor "2nd" LP. Not on Spotify nor Apple Music either. Only yesterday: 2. Looking at Bleach (the Japanese hardcore punk/noise rock band): nothing and they aren't extremely obscure or anything (https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4 https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4). They're on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC) but missing two LPs; on Apple Music too (https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682 https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682) and one more LP available. 3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music. 4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere"). So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.
  - Shorel 16d ago
    This is actually informative, thanks. In my case, some music I want is unavailable, some releases from Discos Fuentes of Salsa Brava from the 1970s. But, in this case, they are also unavailable from Tidal, Spotify, etc...
- draven 16d ago
  I use Deezer (in a browser tab, and on my iphone.) It's good, but far from great. If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases. The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album. Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries. etc.
echoangle 16d ago
It seems like there's an official alternative to librespot now: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-spotify-soloist https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-sp...
- wilted-iris 16d ago
  Yes! This launched after I left Spotify but I agree it looks neat. I find the three month build expiration concerning, but I also have a low risk tolerance for my music experience.

nan60 16d ago

> radio for discovery Would you be willing to share a bit more about this setup? The only thing keeping my on streaming is the fact that its almost impossible to find new music otherwise. I know LastFM exists but it just doesn't click for me the way that streaming does. I like discovering music organically.

dylan604 16d ago
> radio for discovery was a big question mark I had as well. The Clear Channel and iHeart stations are not known for discovery. Now if you find a college station or by some miracle an independent station you can get some new stuff. My favorite local college station is also ad free. They also have an app which I lean on as it's not the strongest transmitter so their coverage is spotty. Maybe there's other indy stations with apps as well??
- BLKNSLVR 16d ago
  This radio station is local to the city I live in, and they've been great for music discovery for me, although heavy focus on local artists, but they've put me onto a few international artists as well. https://threedradio.com/ https://threedradio.com/ I subscribe to them, have done so for ~10 years I reckon. I don't listen as much as I used to, but I want them to continue existing either way. Be aware, the quality of their playlists is incredibly variable, but that's part of the charm. I guarantee you'll hear something you haven't heard before... for better or worse. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHR0HMFY60 (with 2 minutes of silence at the start to, presumably, avoid auto-copyright claims).
  - BLKNSLVR 10d ago
    This may be long dead, but a relatively recent musical discovery I've come across is Nando's. They play some great Southern American music, with real nice vibes and beats. My Shazam usage is about 75% Nando's. And I don't mean Southern United States, I mean real, geographical definition South American. There's even a pretty long playlist someone has curated, specifically called Nando's Music: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kgcsnicEnZYjaU3zoGbU5?si=Off72d9LQ1qHnSQm--ev-g https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kgcsnicEnZYjaU3zoGbU5?si=...
- mcmcmc 16d ago
  Public radio is great, NPR and the member stations have some great streaming channels. KEXP and KCRW are two favs
- wilted-iris 16d ago
  I believe there are! I consistently hear good things about KEXP and FIP but I haven’t listened to either extensively. I listen to a lot of SomaFM (free, https://somafm.com/ https://somafm.com/) and the Flow State radio-podcast (paid, https://www.flowstate.fm/ https://www.flowstate.fm/).
  - GaProgMan 16d ago
    I would always recommend KEXP. They have a really varied set of shows and setlists, don't seem to be swayed by "we must play the top 40", genuinely care about music, and are super nice if you head into the building in Seattle (which has a public access space, coffee shop, bathrooms, and a SubPop store). I've had three tours around the place just by telling the folks there that Im there from out of town. To be fair, I might have gotten the tours because I came all the way over from England the times, but it's my favourite place to hang out when I'm in Seattle. Also Ken is the nicest guy ever, and he introduced me to Larry Mizzel Jr while he was broadcasting live. Get the app, or use the player on their website, and hive then a try for an hour or do. The app has the ability to "heart" a track while it's playing live, which helps with discovery.
- keyringlight 16d ago
  Internet radio is still going strong: https://www.radio-browser.info/ https://www.radio-browser.info/
  - l72 16d ago
    Wow this is amazing. I can't believe shoutcast still exists too!! I have fond memories of hosting a shoutcast stream at very low bandwidth over dialup! There seems to be a few decent apps in F-droid and lots of stations with no ads and very specific genres like just depressive black metal!
  - mrguyorama 15d ago
    Technobase.fm was my gateway drug to EDM when all I otherwise had access to was rock and roll and country. There used to be Neradio as well, but they died like a decade ago.
- frogulis 16d ago
  RRR and PBS in Melbourne both stream online and are both fantastic for music discovery. Go the former if you lean indie and the latter if you lean international.
bubblemoth 16d ago
I left spotify around two years ago for a self hosted option (I mostly use navidrome+feishin). Music discovery was a concern for me as well, but then I realized that I didn't like the idea of spotify curating which music I discovered. So far, this is what has worked for me: - Actually listening to the music I have now. I think the art of listening through full albums has slowly died, but there is so much music we're ignoring because we just listen to Artist's top tracks. - Word of mouth. Asking my friends what they listen to. This is a way that people used to discover music and I've found so much good music this way. - Bandcamp. Bandcamp is SUCH a good way to discover new music. You can listen to the music in app, there are great articles and you can actually support the artists!
- pixelatedindex 16d ago
  Epic bought bandcamp many moons ago. Did they enshittify it or is it still going strong?
  - stijnveken 16d ago
    Epic actually sold Bandcamp 3 years ago. I only started using it lately so I can't say how it was before, but I think it's still good. https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-layoffs/ https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-la...
    - deleted 16d ago
      [deleted]
    - kennywinker 16d ago
      Unfortunately bandcamp laid off virtually all of their engineers a month or so back: https://www.hypebot.com/new-bandcamp-layoffs-why-artists-are-worried-and-where-to-turn/ https://www.hypebot.com/new-bandcamp-layoffs-why-artists-are... So, not enshittified, but either abandoned or headed for ensloppification.
      - nsteel 16d ago
msmagh 16d ago
using nts.live and and fip radio -> https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip at the moment for same purpose. Radio France allows to save liked track names in profile to look up later.
- lolive 16d ago
  In addition to those two bangers, BBC6 and RNE also have shows to discover new musics. PS: RadioParadise is also a safe place for good music.
hyperadvanced 16d ago
Call me a boomer but I’ve had a ton of fun with XM radio. I can find new music on Bandcamp but nothing compares to hearing some classic from the 80’s that you would have never thought to put on when you’re driving home after work on a Friday.
hillbillydilly 16d ago
I don't know about you but spotify discovery feels like the least organic discovery possible. Its so homogeneous and predictable and corporate slop adjacent it makes me cringe just thinking about it.
- refactor_master 16d ago
  I've discovered so many great artists through Spotify, and been to many of their shows (which Spotify also helps surface with their "Live Events" feature). I regularly get artists with less than 100k listeners in my Discover Weekly, which I then look up, and find that they did a concert on KEXP, and the comments all proclaiming "I knew good music wasn't dead!". So I can say for sure that I don't share the slop sentiment. Sure, there's some generic filler every now and then, but any non-cohesive mix, as opposed to a carefully curated album is going to have songs that naturally become "fillers". Just now, I discovered that Spotify snuck in "The Juan Maclean - Running Back To You (2014)", which is a cover of "Brian Bennet - Solstice (1978)". Neither songs are completely unknown, but they're also not exactly Bruno Mars. I don't know if this is pure luck or algorithmic rhythm analysis, but for me it's working.
cmoski 16d ago
Hype machine used to be so good for this. I haven't used it for a long time but it looks like it is still going in some fashion.
- gnarlynarwhal42 16d ago
  I used to use hypem soo much during the music blog days and had a subscription etc but it seemed to stop working or something so after a while I stopped using it. I will have to check it out again
wilted-iris 16d ago
I listen to Flow State, SomaFM, and aggregate from local shows and a few people I follow on social media among other discovery platforms. (I don’t have a favorite yet.) I found that Spotify was increasingly recommending AI artists and songs I already knew. It surfaced very little outside of my comfort zone and effectively nothing that wasn’t new. There’s a whole world of music out there that Spotify wasn’t showing me.
- bityard 16d ago
  I stopped listening to Pandora well over a decade ago because its algorithm eventually decided that I only liked 12 songs in the whole world.
kachnuv_ocasek 16d ago
I just listen to NTS most of the time.
- SSLy 16d ago
  nts is all fire until a dj plays mp3 bitcrunched track that just hurts your ears
ivh 16d ago
I use https://radioparadise.com https://radioparadise.com for this, since more than 20 years.
twilo 16d ago
There is nothing better plexamp but unfortunately after plex raised their prices it might not be worth it for most
thesuitonym 16d ago
> its almost impossible to find new music otherwise I don't know where this opinion came from (Probably Spotify's PR department) but it's just so weird to me. Do you think people didn't find new music before streaming? It's not impossible, you just have to talk to people.

pbasista 16d ago

> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project How could they possibly do that? They cannot prevent people or AI from reverse engineering their APIs.

TingPing 16d ago
Depends on how much they care. They can take down repos containing any keys, or use heuristics to block clients.
hahn-kev 16d ago
Technically no, but they can just ban you. It would not be impossible to detect.
egeozcan 16d ago
Anthropic can prevent people from using their models with the subscription plan outside Claude Code, why couldn't Spotify?
- sbinder 16d ago
  Because millions of Spotify-compatible speakers are sold with firmware that will never be upgraded, so they can't ever change the Spotify connect protocol without breaking those devices.
  - epihelix 16d ago
    ... and no company ever broke backwards-compatible support.
    - LollipopYakuza 16d ago
      I'd say it's a good thing they are not (?)
baggachipz 16d ago
DMCA has entered the chat.

protocolture 16d ago

>I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. Already ended for me. They killed the plan I was on, and then started sending me begging emails to sign up for a new, more expensive one. But once I experienced their platform with ads, I just stopped using it entirely.

jarym 16d ago

> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end There was a world before Spotify. Though the music labels didn’t much like that world we can easily go back to it.

selcuka 16d ago
> There was a world before Spotify There was, and it was definitely not "the golden age of music streaming".

echelon 16d ago

> I think the golden age of music streaming is coming to an end. It's just getting started. We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again. The dream of the 90's and 00's is alive again. The indie web is going to become unstoppable. We can build anything of size and scale with the limited spare energy we have now. Every product will be reborn without big tech tendrils.

nalekberov 16d ago
> We're going to vibe code the entire enshittified internet to be ours once again. It’s such a wishful thinking, but no it doesn’t and won’t work this way. Code != useful product. Plus today’s web is all about fabricated content, AI bots, cloudflare challenge walls and all other annoying stuff. The very idea of being able to create something in seconds is already killing internet.
- mixedCase 16d ago
  Garbage being created at unprecedented rates does not diminish the fact that LLMs are acting as a positive multiplier for useful tools; this very item being one. No one in all these years had gone through the effort of replicating the Spotify client with a snappy fast interface for a reason. Everything had been an integration into already existing software, or simpler interfaces, because the effort was not worth it. The equation has changed.
- echelon 16d ago
  You can look at the glass half full all you want, my glass is overflowing. This is the best year in all of my 20 years in tech. I'm creating so much stuff and it's all I've ever wanted. This is the dream of the 2000's, and big tech can't stop us anymore. I think I'm going to write my own music player soon that behaves exactly like I want it to. Maybe this weekend. Or maybe right after my home automation project. But I can probably squeeze them both in. It's like Christmas every day now.
  - nalekberov 16d ago

colordrops 16d ago

Why are they killing librespot?

HaloZero 16d ago
Probably for the same reason Twitter killed their API, more control over the experience and to serve ads/cross-promote. More cross-promote for Spotify.

wahnfrieden 16d ago

CIUT has some great shows and most are available online. University of Toronto.

HaloZero 16d ago

What makes you think Spotify is killing it? I know they aren't supporting FLAC but otherwise I don't think they're actively trying to stop it as opposed to not really caring if they support it (which is more "We don't care" as opposed to "We have to stop this")

wilted-iris 16d ago
Librespot no longer works for new accounts. APIs are being gated off and they’re applying legal pressure to dissuade projects from reverse engineering anything new. At the end of the day, they can turn the tap off anytime they want, whether by technical or legal means. I tired of having so much of my music experience at risk and chose to migrate on my own terms.
- inigyou 16d ago
  They can only turn the tap off because those projects operated in ways that required them to leave it on. Biggest mistake most librefication projects make is to do their project out in the open where they can easily be subject to legal pressure, then fall into complete disarray the moment that pressure appears. They can't move underground once pressure starts, because everyone already knows who they are.
  - port11 16d ago
    Bit of an unfair take. You propose the open-source community operates behind closed doors like the very software they aim to replace? I’d argue Spotify has so little to gain by being hostile, that perhaps the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects (which would never gain mass adoption).
    - selfhoster1312 16d ago
      > the lawyers are more expensive than just ignoring these pet projects The lawyers are more expensive than happy customers staying customers because they can enjoy the client they prefer, that's for sure.

nickysielicki 16d ago

Tools for piracy are much better today than they were back in the Napster or grooveshark days. It’s actually kind of shocking to me that we haven’t had a popcorntime moment for music again. Nothing technical is preventing the creation of a perfect decentralized anonymous p2p FLAC streaming platform with plausible deniability.

paweladamczuk 16d ago
How would the plausible deniability piece work? If you stream some bytes to someone else, you can't deny doing it. Unless you imagine this working over Tor, idk what the performance of Tor is these days but I never thought it could support such an application.
- nickysielicki 16d ago
  Music is relatively small. Tor is totally capable of hosting zlibrary without bandwidth restrictions getting in the way. By plausible deniability I simply meant adopting a similar approach that Stremio has, to keep it on the good side of App Store approval processes. The app itself only allows for creative commons content by default, but with the right incantations it can host anything.
  - joshschreuder 16d ago
    Stremio and other apps like Fusion have gone up and been (reasonably quickly) taken down off the App Store though. Not really "on the good side" when your main distribution method is "add this app to your account within the first 1-2 weeks of it being in the App Store or never again", or sideloading.
Gander5739 16d ago
Have you heard of Soulseek? It's an active p2p music sharing platform.
- lukeasch21 16d ago

righthand 16d ago

Spoiler: Spotify has always been terrible. The golden age of music streaming was Zune pass where you could stream and download 10 songs/mo. And arguably Pandora always had a better radio algorithm than Spotify.

pjerem 16d ago
The first Spotify client, the one in Qt was actually really good. Things started going downhill slowly when they integrated Facebook then very fast when they threw everything through the window to rewrite everything in electron.
- zokier 15d ago
  the first spotify client was plain win32
szszrk 16d ago
> Spotify has always been terrible. It wasn't, really. At least not completely. I fully agree on the algorithm - I miss times of scrobbling to Last.fm, which was much better at this. (Spotify always supported scrobbling to Last.fm from their client, surprisingly). Spotify used to be snappy and worked really well on Linux. I even used it for local libraries, as it was one of the few options that didn't crash on mine. It was at the beautiful time when we realized web apps can have local storage, Google released that experiment called Chrome to "show public how modern browser can evolve and inspire other browser makers how to progress". We know it ended up in "extinguish the market with it", unfortunately. But Spotify chose native app approach - they distributed it as packages. Deezer on the other hand, back then (I don't know now) had just native web app that could pull music locally. I think it was an extension of Chrome (?). It also worked perfectly fine on Linux, almost two decades ago. We had a lot of decent options back then.
- righthand 16d ago
  Scrobbling to Last.fm isn’t music streaming.

kombine 16d ago

I've also canceled my Spotify sub three weeks ago and migrated to Navidrome. I'm still not quite satisfied with the available clients, I'm using Feishin. Fastpotift looks like a nice candidate to extend to support Navidrome.

devindotcom 16d ago

I'm glad they're doing well but I would guess only a tiny fraction of the people who use Spotify would be capable of setting up Navidrome. I tried and went back to Plex. I wish it were otherwise but if something takes more than a few clicks to go from zero to music that leaves 95% of users out! I hope these projects get more accessible though.

jorisw 16d ago

> Spotify is in the process of killing the librespot project Source?

the_mitsuhiko 16d ago
https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1649 https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1649
- jorisw 16d ago
  Thanks, but don't see how this Issue backs that up.
  - the_mitsuhiko 16d ago
    Not sure what you call it, but new accounts are no longer able to use librespot.
- nsteel 15d ago
  Also, https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1737 https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot/issues/1737 We are seeing a slow but steady stream of small breaking changes, designed to gradually piss off everyone involved. While avoiding a large breaking change that attracts a load of bad publicity. Sadly this strategy is the only good idea they've had in years.

azalemeth 16d ago

If anyone other than me really likes classical music, I thoroughly recommend Hyperion Records. DRM free downloads in your choice of codec, one to two free CDs worth of sampler per month to download (with a jewel case PDF!) and some truly excellent world leading groups and beautiful new music.

10729287 16d ago
Thanks for sharing. I loved buying then downloading cheap samplers from punk and hardcore labels when I was younger. That was part of the culture and that really helped me discover new music and shaping my tastes. This is something that doesn't exist that much anymore and I'm glad to find this initiative. I try to listen to classical music but that's a very difficult world to discover, this will probably help by helping me to focus on few titles instead of jumping in the gigantic and maze-ish pool !
- azalemeth 16d ago
  I really enjoyed this comment – thank you. One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy: (1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful. (2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed. [1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B – track 6 (the whole lot is free!) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezYjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezY... – this was a sampler from hyperion too and I have the whole lot legally as flac.

scrollop 16d ago

What do you use to stream your local content? Using plex at the moment.

Shorel 16d ago

I feel I am in the golden age of music streaming right now. Just use Deezer instead of Spotify. Perfect quality and it great selection.

BoingBoomTschak 16d ago
I have a free Deezer account from my family. Shit is extremely barren. Some examples: 1. (already posted on HN) Wanted to try Midori's early stuff, but no "1st" EP nor "2nd" LP. Not on Spotify nor Apple Music either. Only yesterday: 2. Looking at Bleach (the Japanese hardcore punk/noise rock band): nothing and they aren't extremely obscure or anything (https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4 https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bleach-4). They're on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC https://open.spotify.com/artist/5gRsPZZNgrkagQnDlyFZUC) but missing two LPs; on Apple Music too (https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682 https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bleach/74570682) and one more LP available. 3. Okay, let's try Meat Puppets' lauded second LP from my backlog... artist is there, but four first LPs aren't. On Spotify and Apple Music. 4. For fun, let's try to find that very obscure kote kei demo, (螺旋 (Rasen) - Hysterical Noi「z」e / Like「M」(1997)). Nothing, of course, but well, I can't even find it on private trackers or SoulSeek (got some mystery mp3s "somewhere"). So, if I were to stoop down to streaming, looks like Spotify/Apple are less worse here.
- Shorel 16d ago
  This is actually informative, thanks. In my case, some music I want is unavailable, some releases from Discos Fuentes of Salsa Brava from the 1970s. But, in this case, they are also unavailable from Tidal, Spotify, etc...
draven 16d ago
I use Deezer (in a browser tab, and on my iphone.) It's good, but far from great. If several artists / bands share the same name, there will be one artist page with all of the artists/bands releases. The queue management sucks, I can add stuff to the queue, move / remove individual entries. That's it. If I added an album to the queue and want to remove it, I have to click a little cross one time for each track of the album. Notifications about new releases: great. Except the UI is a tiny dropdown, and hovering over an item removes the little marker signaling it's a new one. It's really difficult to catch up when there are more than 5 new entries. etc.

echoangle 16d ago

It seems like there's an official alternative to librespot now: https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-spotify-soloist https://developer.spotify.com/blog/2026-08-13-introducing-sp...

wilted-iris 16d ago
Yes! This launched after I left Spotify but I agree it looks neat. I find the three month build expiration concerning, but I also have a low risk tolerance for my music experience.