Full disclosure, I’m pretty new to selfhosting myself, and I haven’t written a guide like this before, but hopefully this scatterbrained writeup is enough for someone out there lmao
This is just what works for me and how I set it up. Always open to ideas for improvement as well.
If you use Plex it’s an absolute cinch to host your own music. Even if you don’t use Plex already it takes 5 mins to setup and you’re streaming your music to your hearts content.
And where do I get the music? Every time I want to listen to something I’m spending 20 minutes searching for it on some forsaken pirate websites? I’m way too old and not poor enough for this.
Lidarr (well it’s broken currently, but it used to work well) and Headphones automate it all just like Sonarr and Radarr.
I have spotify premium too btw. I love it, and I feel it’s absolutely amazing for discovering new bands and songs that I like but would never hear otherwise - and when I find those bands, I want to get all their stuff and have it for a rainy day - which is where Plex comes in.
It’s not as hard as you’re making it out to be, but then again, the assumption that the barrier to entry is high is what keeps piracy niche, and as long as it’s niche copyright enforcement doesn’t notice as much… so I guess it all works out.
But there are sites that you can visit that use rotating family accounts to download music straight from qobuz and the like. Theres nothing sketchy there, it just violates the ToS to use accounts like that.
Ive been a pirate since the late 90s and it’s a service problem for the most part. So saying a song name on Spotify and getting what you want 99.9% of the time is an unbeatable experience. Not to mention curated and generate playlists. No piracy setup matches this that I’ve seen.