Welcome to my personal page!

29/03/2026

Switching to a self curated music library made me rethink my way of consuming music and it's all for the better.

Four months ago, we've set up a shared jellyfin server with friends. Quickly I completely stopped using Spotify and now use entirely Jellyfin to listen to music.
Here's what changed in my music listening habits :

First of all obviously I now get no ads and every Spotify premium feature entirely for free. Also since this is entirely self hosted our privacy as users is respected and we become independent from big corporations. But the obvious advantages stop here. Now the main disadvantage is the limited access to music. Every music has to be present on our hard drive so we need to get in possession of a audio file of a music if we want to listen to it. It can be done legally by scanning CDs we have at our homes or by buying digital albums on distribution websites. I'll be honest ... we rip them from YouTube most of the time. I do get guilty about it sometimes but then I remember how much Spotify pays real artists and my hatred of capitalism makes everything justified.

Our jellyfin doesn't have any music recommendation algorithm and at first it felt weird. Back in the days I would open Spotify, look at the recommended daily playlist and roll with it. Actually having to choose and look for the artists/albums/tracks I want to listen to during the day stunned me like a writer in front of a blank page. So in the beginning I rolled for a while with the "random" function of Jellyfin that generates playlists by choosing tracks at random in the whole library (around a thousand tracks at the time) but it quickly showed its limitations since nothing was matching and I would often end up enduring songs uploaded by my friends that weren't genres I enjoy (yes Awing I'm talking about your christmas playlist). It took me a lot of time to adapt but now I can manage my music choices and I also found that I greatly prefer listening to albums rather than playlists, even when the playlist was created by me. Being able to choose for myself without having to depend on an algorithm feels liberating.

Now people may be thinking "But Mouton how do you discover new artists if you only listen to stuff that you downloaded ?" well I have a secret to tell you ... I talk to people. As simple as that ! You can just go around and ask people about their music taste. But if you're too scared of talking to people you can also go on the web, look at people's blogs (like mine), watch documentaries about music and read music magazines. You can follow your favorite artists online and see if they mention other artists you might like. If you live in a city look for small concerts in bars, you might discover really good niche bands (I really recommend Lost Road btw, I met them that way). Also bonus point, by actually looking for music instead of waiting for an algorithm (Spotify, Deezer ...) to recommend them to you, you are far less likely to fall for AI-slop artists.


PS : Literally the day after I wrote this blog post I stumbled upon this video on youtube from Notes From The Archives on a similar subject which was very interesting and made by someone who is way better than me at expressing their arguments lol. If you want to dig a bit deeper into this subject i really recommend watching it.