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!

I have pretty much the same setup. The only thing that bothers me with navidrome+feishin is that gapless playback is not working perfectly.

Also, a great resource for discovering new music is the public library. They often have a curated CD section that I then rip into FLAC. I've had great chats with the people in my town's library, and I often pick a totally random CD off the shelves and discover some amazing artists.

Regarding Bandcamp, I find following small labels to be a great way to find new music. Small labels tend to release music of similar style and quality. They often also have deals on bandcamp where you can buy an entire label's discography for crazy cheap, like a hundred or so albums for $50!

Mostly I listen to web radios, not always in a language that I master (hello Japanese). And Shazam plus Spotify is still a killing combo, for me.

While moving from spotify to youtube music a few years ago I bought a vinyl player to listen to full albums and fell for it. Then when I moved to curate and self host my collection with Plex and Plexamp I realized I'm not using the player anymore since I'm using Plexamp to listen to albums. Plexamp is not perfect and not open source unfortunately, but it's a really good non-enshitified product.

I had to migrate away from youtube music since the experience was infuriating me every time. I love making playlists on the go. In youtube music after adding 30 tracks to the play queue, tapping 1 track accidentally deletes the play queue and plays this track. This made me feel bad every time it happened.

I don't see how it is just accepted to lose progress in 2026 as if we're using win95. It feels like 80% of the sw I use provides a caveman UX, not leveraging the tech, leaking implementation details and being constrained by technical reasons. On the other hand, working on Prepbook[0], I realized how hard it is to create the perfect experience and how it's even harder to justify it financially.

I'm doing discovery by talking to people, I love it. Every time I listen to Monolink I recall my co worker that just said "check out monolink" when he heard I love Ott. I love that it makes the experience about connection to people as well.

[0] https://prepbook.app

Epic bought bandcamp many moons ago. Did they enshittify it or is it still going strong?