Oh, that isn't what I meant. I meant in contrast to hunting around for new music more directly. I used to spend entire weekend afternoons looking for music--reading forum threads, browsing weird labels, going down related-artist rabbit holes in new genres. Lots of this was on OiNK and What.cd, which had tremendous forums and metadata. There are modern replacements, but they aren't equivalent. Lots of this is the diffusion of music lovers in general.
Spotify is reliably a B- source of music, once you've used it for awhile. My Daily Mixes are...fine. Never great, but never awful. So I fall back to it as background music.
But because it isn't awful, I'm not motivated to put in heaps of extra effort to move from B-grade to A-grade. Moving up that curve is diminishing returns.
On the technical front, it'd be quite easy to play your own files through snapcast, in a variety of ways.
Yes I’m picking up what you’re putting down. I really wish What.cd had been able to continue as a metadata service if nothing else: the discoverability of music was at a level I have not seen anywhere else.
Spotify is reliably a B- source of music, once you've used it for awhile. My Daily Mixes are...fine. Never great, but never awful. So I fall back to it as background music.
But because it isn't awful, I'm not motivated to put in heaps of extra effort to move from B-grade to A-grade. Moving up that curve is diminishing returns.
On the technical front, it'd be quite easy to play your own files through snapcast, in a variety of ways.