I hosted my own music streaming service

My Spotify subscription is years old, I think it might easily be my oldest online service. I've been generally happy with it, save for the regular, unexpected changes to user interface. If Spotify was a person, it would be a roommate who studies interior design and randomly re-arranges your furniture ("this way is better, you'll see!")

However, things have been getting worse: I hear more and more often about Spotify offering bad deals to niche, emerging artists. Possibly for this reason, my favourite songs tend to disappear. When the Iconoclasts soundtrack vanished from Spotify, leaving a big hole in my favourite Indie OST playlist, I decided it's time to take matters into my own hands...

Turns out it's extremely simple to host your own music streaming service! Follow along to find out what setup I ended up with.

Tools

Here's the tools I've picked:

  • Software: Navidrome. Indexes music from a folder and offers it through an accessible web-UI. Allows setting up multiple user profiles; each user sees the same music but can create personal playlists.
  • Hosting: Pikapods. I don't run a homelab (yet) so a hosting service like this is a perfect match for me, I can set up the app in a few clicks and I don't have to worry at all about administration. I estimate I'll pay around $31/year for Navidrome. Pikapods shares some hosting profits with Navidrome developers.
  • Mobile app: Youamp. I didn't do any research here; I know Navidrome speaks the subsonic protocol and there's multiple apps that support it, I picked the first one on F-Droid that worked for me.
  • Music: I upload music to my Navidrome using SFTP. I bought some amazing albums like this one on Bandcamp. I got some more from Patreon. I also had some game soundtracks bought on Steam, I added these too. Later I'm also going to rip some CDs that I recently bought off a friend who was tidying up his collection.

Reflections

It feels very refreshing to buy DRM-free music again like it's the 90's -- especially when I still have all the convenience of using a streaming service. I'm hoping that this time the money I paid will support the artists more directly.

Now that I went through the above steps, I'm hoping I can get my friends to also participate: we can all use the same Navidrome instance and we can share our music with each other. Check your local law; many countries allow sharing media with family and friends.

I don't expect this solution will 100% replace Spotify for me, but it already brought me a lot of joy. It is however very likely that I'll spend more time looking at (and directly supporting!) emerging indie artists, now that the technical barrier is gone.