This post was originally written in February 2025 and last updated in January 2026 to reflect what I’ve learnt after a year of using my DIY music streaming service.

I wanted to move away from Spotify to have more control over my music and music-consumption experience. Without writing a line of code (I wouldn't know how anyway), I built a DIY music streaming services that anyone with a bit of tech savvy can build for their own personal use.

This post is a little long. If you want to go straight to the main takeaways, I suggest you scroll down and check out the following sections: Objectives and results; Cost; Get Started. But if you got time and are curious (hey fellow nerd 👋🏻), read away! Also, let me know if you have feedback on the streaming service I built—any suggestion to improve it is welcome!

Intro

I've been on Spotify since 2012. With Spotify, I've been able to easily discover new artists and tracks; keep my music at my fingertips whether I'm on my laptop, phone, or even someone else's device; and seamlessly share playlists with friends. Like most streaming services nowadays—Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer—Spotify is easy to use. It is seamless and extremely convenient.

But like most things in this world, when something is so convenient, there is a darker side to it. Spotify is a typical hyper-capitalist tech company: it barely compensates artists for their work; the money it makes goes to shareholders and executives, and gets reinvested in destructive companies and industries; and even for users who have become used to a convenient, seamless experience, the service is becoming increasingly enshittified with features we don't want and don't need.

Using a streaming service like Spotify also means we don't own our music: tracks we love at times become 'unavailable' due to copyright changes; we can't easily pack up our albums and playlists and move to a different service; and changes in the company's business priorities can just lock us out of a music library we've spent years building.

In general, I actually kinda like the idea of moving past ownership and instead sharing, borrowing, or renting the things we use (when it comes to physical goods, sharing, borrowing, or renting are the only ways we can meaningfully address the environmental crisis); but I'm not willing to rent my music when it is from a billion-dollar company that exploits those who make the music and reinvests in AI killing drones.

All of this to say: time to let go of our beloved streaming services.

It took me a few months of research and tweaking, but I managed to build my own music streaming service. This post describes the streaming service I built and explains the thinking behind the decisions I made. Hopefully, it can help others build their own streaming service without having to do all the research and testing I did. And to be clear, I don't code and I don't have the skills to manage servers. So the system I built should be accessible to anyone, even without technical skills. You just need to be comfortable with tech and be willing to put in a bit of time into it.

Alright, let's dive in.

Objectives and results

My objectives in building this music streaming service were to:

• Achieve more control and autonomy over the music I consume, including by owning the actual music files, so I'm not at the whims of the business models, copyrights battles, and algorithms of corporate streaming services.
• Support and compensate artists for their work—not with infinitesimal amounts paid out by corporate streaming services but with actual, tangible money.
• Be able to access my music from any of my devices, including without an internet connection, just like I've gotten used to with Spotify. I'm willing to lose some convenience, but accessing my entire library from any of my devices is the baseline requirement of the streaming services I wanted.
• Minimize my capitalist footprint and participation in surveillance capitalism by withdrawing my consent, personal data, and money from corporate music streaming services.

The solution I came up with:

• Accomplishes all four objectives outlined above.
• Requires a bit of time and energy to set up, and more generally a mindset shift in how we consume music. It's a bit less convenient than a corporate streaming service, but more importantly it is simply a different way of consuming music.
• Is only slightly more expensive than what I used to pay to corporate music streaming services. This slightly higher cost is acceptable to me because it means that artists and software developers get better compensated for their work, and that I get a lot more control and autonomy out of it.
• Only falls short in one way: it's harder to share music with friends and relatives, which used to be a breeze (tap the “share” button and send the link to whoever uses the same service as you).

The setup

Below is a description of the streaming services I built. The list of components may sound like a lot, and it is a lot, but once you set up the system and get used to it, it becomes fairly seamless to use.

Also, because every part of the system is open, replacing one component with something you like better is easy (using a different music server; buying your music from a different store; selecting a different mobile app to stream your music; etc).

Music server

This is where the music files are hosted and what the apps you use (whether on mobile or on your computer) will connect to in order to stream or download music from.

The solution I recommend is Navidrome. There are other good solutions out there (Jellyfin, Plex, etc), but Navidrome came on top for me because it focuses exclusively on music (other solutions often support all media types, including films and TV shows) and because it can be installed and managed without technical skills. Navidrome is open-source and is very actively being developed, so we see improvements released on a regular basis.

Navidrome is free and open-source, and can be supported with monthly donations.

Host

The beautiful thing about a music server like Navidrome is that you can install it anywhere: on your computer, on a server at home, or on a remote server.

To me, it is important to have uninterrupted access to my music: I want to be able to listen to it at any time and from any device. This is why I opted for installing Navidrome using a professional hosting service. This way, I don't have to worry about whether my home's internet connection is good enough or if the server is up and running. Using a professional service is also more energy-efficient than having a single server running from home.

This has some privacy drawback: people working for the host can access my music if they really want to; but it's just music so I don't mind. Plus, it's still a significant step up in terms of privacy, given that corporate streaming services like Spotify collect an enormous amount of data and sell it to advertisers, like most hyper-capitalist internet companies.

PikaPods is the best solution I found for this. In just a few clicks, without any coding, you can install Navidrome on a server. Every time Navidrome releases an update, PikaPods takes care of upgrading so you get access to the latest features. And if you want to get fancy, you can connect your own domain. My server is at https://music.raphmim.com.

PikaPods is cheap: I pay $4 per month for 50GB of storage (that’s about 20,000 songs in mp3). And PikaPods has a profit-sharing agreement with Navidrome, so part of what I pay goes to Navidrome developers!

Music stores

Buying actual music files (good'ol mp3!) hits two birds with one stone: it gets me the ownership over my music library, and it gets artists much higher compensation that from streaming services.

Any new song I discover and like, I buy from Bandcamp, which is a platform entirely dedicated to supporting artists. If I can't find a file on Bandcamp, I'll buy it from Qobuz's music store. Each track is anywhere between $1 and $2. Looking at my usage of Spotify over the past few years, I usually add to my library between 5 and 15 new songs per month. So with an average of 10 new songs per month at an average of $1.5 per song, that's just $15 per month.

The difference in artist compensation is drastic. If I stream a song 50 times on Spotify, the artist will get paid about $0.15. Yep, that's just 15 cents of a US dollar for 50 streams. And that's for songs I listen to a lot. Most songs I will never listen to 50 times in my entire life. By contrast, if I buy the file on Bandcamp for $1, the artist or label gets about 0.80 cents. Pretty good deal.

Personal music library

It's technically possible to store all music files directly on the music server, but I find it much easier to instead store my library on my computer and once in a while, sync my library with the server. This way, I only have to do any work on the server once every few weeks.

I simply have a library folder on my computer where I store all my music files. It is important to keep those files organized, or at least properly tagged. These tags (like artist , title , genre , album , etc) make it possible for an app to organize your files and make them easily findable. A well-tagged library is pretty important to make it easy and seamless to navigate your music.

• Tagging hundreds of songs or albums can be a time-consuming, but if you’re willing to do, Strawberry (for Linux, Mac, and Windows) is a good app to do it.
• If you want to automate the process, MusicBrainz Picard (for Linux, Mac, and Windows) is probably your best bet

And to sync your library from your computer to the music server, you will need an SFTP client (an app that transfers files using the SFTP protocol). There are dozens of SFTP clients out there, but as you explore, the main thing you should look for is an SFTP client that lets you sync your library with the server: rather than having to select specific files and folders to upload to the server, the SFTP client will scan your music library on your computer, detect any new files, and upload them to the server.

I initially used FileZilla Pro, which does the job very well; and later moved to S3Drive, which works just as well but is a lot more user-friendly.

So once it's set up, managing your library only means: 1. adding newly purchased files to your library folder 2. ensuring the new files are properly tagged 3. syncing the library from your computer to the music server

Clients

Now that we have a well-organized music library on our computer and that we can easily sync it with our music server, the only missing piece are the clients we'll need to actually listen to the music: mobile and desktop apps.

Because Navidrome is an open app that uses open standards (specifically the open Subsonic API), there are dozens of apps that can stream music from a Navidrome server. All you have to do is go through the list of compatible apps, test a few, and pick the one you like best.

After testing most apps, I settled for Symfonium as my Android app. It's a $5 one-time payment, but there is a trial period to see if it's a good fit for your need. Symfonium is lets you completely customize the app's interface, it’s very powerful and very stable.

And for desktop, I use Feishin (available for web, Linux, Mac, and Windows).

Discovering new music (optional)

One of the drawbacks of this setup is music discovery. Streaming music services make it easy to listen to new artists, albums, or tracks, and this has been a key way for me to discover new music. After moving to my DIY music streaming service, I now discover music through two channels:

1. Internet radios: because all the apps and tools outlined above are built to be part of an open ecosystem, many of them include the option to stream internet radios directly from inside their apps. So you can add the radio stations you like to your Navidrome server, and if your app supports it, you'll have access to these radio stations directly from your mobile or desktop app. That's a great way of discovering new music.

2. Ethical streaming: internet radios are great but they don't solve the “I wanna check out this artist's work before buying it” problem. So I signed up for Qobuz's basic streaming plan ($10/month). Qobuz pays artists four times what Spotify pays per stream, so it's an acceptable option, and it lets me do everything expected from a normal music streaming plan. I only use it to discover new music, and not to build playlists or listen to my library, because I still prefer owning my music and controlling my streaming service.

Cost

So looking back at the whole streaming service, the cost for each component is:

• Hosting the server (PikaPods): $4/month
• Music server (Navidrome): included in hosting
• Purchasing music files (from Bandcamp or Qobuz): $1.5 per song on average. In my case, that's $15/month.
• Tagging music files (MusicBrainz Picard): $2/month (optional donation)
• Syncing with the server (S3drive): $2/month (strongly recommended)
• Mobile app (Symfonium): $5 one-time payment (optional: other mobile apps available for free)
• Desktop app (Feishin): $2/month (optional donation)
• Discovering new music (Qobuz): $10/month (optional)

Total cost: $19 to $35/month

Getting started

If you're looking to build the system I described for your own usage, here is how to get started:

1. Create an account on PikaPods, add some money, and install Navidrome. If you have your own domain, you can even connect it

2. Create your library on your computer with music files you already own or by purchasing albums or songs on Bandcamp or Qobuz. If you want to transfer your library from a streaming service, it will take a bit of work but it's doable (you can use a service like Tune My Music to transfer your songs to YouTube Music, and then download from YouTube Music using yt-dlp; if you do that, consider buying some merch or albums from your favorite artists on Bandcamp).

3. Tag your library using an automatic tool like MusicBrainz Picard or manually using Strawberry.

4. Sync your library from your computer to the Navidrome server using an SFTP client like S3Drive or FileZilla.

5. Install a mobile or desktop app that supports the Subsonic API and connect it to your Navidrome server.

6. Enjoy your music, free from capitalist exploitation and algorithmic manipulation!

Concluding thoughts

• It took me a lot of time to research, test, and tweak things to build this. Hopefully this guide saves you all this time and you can move straight to the 'enjoying music' part.
• There are still gaps in the system. For example, I haven't found an easy way of sharing my music and playlists. Navidrome lets us make playlists public, which means anyone can listen to them from a URL; but your friends won’t be able to easily add those playlists to their personal music library. I'll continue thinking about this and looking for solutions, and update this guide if I find something.
• My hope is to iterate on this streaming service as new technologies become available and as this open ecosystem of apps and tools grows. I'm hoping this DIY streaming service becomes simple and accessible enough that it can be installed and managed by folks who aren't tech savvy.
• Let me know if you have some ideas on improving this streaming service! Anything to remove a component to make it simpler, or fill in a gap in the system, or use a more accessible or performant solution for any of the components.

I identified 6 behaviors when it comes to prejudiced humor, from most harmful to most disruptive, to help us know where we stand and explore where to go next.

Humor is one of the most powerful—and overlooked—ways that oppressive systems are maintained. Not just on TV or in stand-up comedy, but also in private spaces: at the dinner table, at the office, in group chats with friends, etc. Under the pretext of “just having fun” and “trolling”, people with toxic beliefs denigrate and belittle groups who are often already discriminated against. Prejudiced jokes have a very real impact, on both the person telling the joke and those listening.

First, it lets the person telling the joke express their prejudices—sometimes hatred—unchecked. Under the guise of “just kidding”, the person making the joke can evade criticism. In fact, if someone calls them out, it is generally that person who ends up being ridiculed for “taking everything so seriously” or “lacking a sense of humor”.

Second, the prejudiced jokes solidify stereotypes to the people hearing them. It doesn’t matter how educated you are or how much you know that those are just tropes; they can be internalized and, subconsciously or not, impact your behaviors around the people targeted by the jokes. If there are young people in the room, or people who haven’t been exposed to those tropes before, this may even give them a first introduction—which will, inevitably, get solidified over time by more jokes and more stereotypical representation in the media.

Finally, by making a punchline out of a marginalized group, the joke normalizes the abuse of that group. It makes it seem like denigrating them is not only acceptable, it is fun and trivial. And this inevitably bleeds over into real-life actions. Exposure to sexist jokes makes men more tolerant of gender harassment and, most disturbingly, more willing to rape a woman. Prejudiced humor fosters discrimination against groups who are already discriminated against.

But the responsibility for this harm doesn’t just fall on the person making the joke. People’s reception determine how damaging it is. I can think of 6 behaviors when it comes to prejudiced humor, ranging from most harmful to most disruptive—a toxic-humor continuum. It doesn’t really matter who the joke targets—women, queer people, black people, disabled people—the behaviors are largely the same:

• Initiating: you initiate the jokes without any prompt. Without you, the prejudiced jokes and conversations may not even happen. You express your prejudice, whether you are conscious you hold this prejudice or whether it is subconscious.
• Enabling: you laugh, respond, and at times add fuel to the fire with your own prejudiced jokes. You may not even realize that you’re doing it, but the social pressure to participate (to be “fun” and “cool”) is too great. While you don’t initiate the jokes, you encourage the abuse by making those who initiate the jokes feel funny and cool. Without you, they would likely stop making jokes for lack of reactions, or at least make them a lot less often.
• Disengaging: you don’t engage with the prejudiced humor. You ignore the jokes and remain silent because you realize that they are problematic (even if you can’t explain why that is) and you don’t want to reward the abuse. But while you stay out of those particular exchanges, you continue to engage with the prejudiced jokesters outside of those exchanges because you value your relationship with them too much. Despite a passive stance, you enable the prejudice: people in your life can engage in deeply problematic humor without ever feeling negative consequences for it.
• Withdrawing: prejudiced humor makes you too uncomfortable and the harm is evident to you. You are too principled to maintain close relationships with people who are so prejudiced. But you also don’t have the courage or the emotional capacity to intervene and challenge the jokes, so you withdraw. You slowly let the relationships fizzle out or ghost the abusers altogether. This position is active—you decide that you cannot maintain such relationships—which means you don’t enable the prejudice. But you don’t interrupt it, you let it live and potentially spread, but out of your sight.
• Indirect intervention: the prejudiced humor is too much for you to bear and you want to actively challenge it, but you don’t feel comfortable confronting the abusers directly—perhaps because you don’t have the emotional capacity, or because there isn’t enough intimacy and trust between you and those initiating the jokes. So you speak to others in the groups or circles you share with the jokesters to express your discomfort or how problematic you find the behaviors to be. This is a very active and important action: it may help other realize that there is a problem and push them rethink their response to the jokes—some may even confront the jokesters directly.
• Direct intervention: you have a trusted and intimate relationship with the one initiating the jokes and you want to maintain your relationship with them, and ideally help them grow out of the toxicity. Or you want to signal to other bystanders that those jokes are toxic and shouldn’t be tolerated. You are ready to invest the time, energy, and emotional labor to express your discomfort and help the jokester understand why their jokes are problematic. You also have the courage to come off as the “party pooper” or “PC police” and intervene publicly, even if it means losing some of your cool capital. This is the most important but also the hardest work one can do to address prejudiced humor.

The impact of prejudiced humor is real—even if it is done unconsciously, just to be funny and without meaning harm. A racist joke that goes unchecked at the dinner table normalizes racism—to both the person making the joke and those witnessing it. A sexist joke that is laughed off at the water cooler normalizes misogyny to everyone around. An ableist, homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic, or fatphobic joke in a chat group makes everyone in the group more likely to discriminate against these groups.

I hope the toxic-humor continuum can help us identify where each of us stands and explore where to go next.

#antioppression

Coming from Twitter or other centralized platforms, we are used to hierarchy, to spaces where we can voice complaints and even advocate for change, but where we ultimately expect a small number of individuals to make decisions and where we hold them responsible for both mishaps and successes. If we don’t like how the platform is being managed or those individuals at the top, we have only two options: accept the platform as it is or leave it.

But the Fediverse is much closer to an anarchy: we have a lot more freedom but it's also much more up to us to create the spaces we want to spend time in.

More freedom because we are free to join an instance that reflects our values, needs, and priorities, and free to move our account to a new instance if we're no longer happy with our instance. We're also free to run our own instance if we can't find one where we fit, or even to build a whole new server or client (of course, if we have the time, skills, and resources).

But in the Fediverse, there's not a single company or organization to look to when we have a complaint: there are the admins and moderators on our instance; the developers of the client; the developers of the servers; and the developers of the protocol—all spread among many different organizations, projects, or even contributing as individual engineers.

And because most people working on the Fediverse do it because they want to build an open and decentralized internet, rather than for money, most of those people are volunteers. So the speed of releasing new features (and the kind of features that get released), hiring moderators, or improving usability is always going to be very different from what we are used to on profit-driven, VC-funded platforms.

It is up to each of us to push the Fediverse forward: to take on moderation roles; to support (with actual $$$!) our admins and developers; to get together to build new tools; to come up with new mechanisms for governance or collective decision-making. It’s up to us to make it the space we want it to be.

Of course, it’s okay to be a more passive user; or for those without the privilege, time, and resources to suggest improvements or complain without doing the work themselves. But it still requires a major shift in mindset on what “success” means on the Fediverse. (if you’re curious about “success” on the Fediverse, check out this excellent blog post.) by @eloquence).

Perhaps that's why Signal has been so successful. The Signal app operates under different incentives than other messaging apps (privacy-first, no ads, etc), but Signal the organization, though a nonprofit, is just as hierarchical as private companies. Decision-making is restricted to a core team, there is no public roadmap, user input is limited to a community forum, and your main option if you don’t like the way Signal is being run is to leave the app and find another one. So transitioning from WhatsApp, Messenger, or Telegram to Signal only meant getting used to a slightly different UX and a few missing features, but didn’t require any shift in our relationship with the technology we used.

Moving to the Fediverse, however, is a whole other ball game, and people should know what to expect: it’s a work-in-progress, but one that is built, owned, and managed by us.

Both identify as communist. Both want revolution. They don't want one of those tyrannical “communist” regimes (they wouldn't be my friends if they did), but still some form of “we have to impose communism to build a just and equitable society”. They are wonderful, empathetic human beings, but the only way they can imagine revolution is taking over state power—via elections or otherwise.

I deeply disagreed with the idea that to build a just and equitable society, we need to aim to control the state. But then they described their workplace and it made me 🤯. Their company's CEO is incompetent: he does a poor job at managing people and running the company. He also doesn't understand the technology they build. And yet he takes a salary 20 times higher than some employees.

Everything they described was a deeply hierarchical and toxic workplace. And despite their ideal of revolution at the national level, they have never even considered the possibility of unionizing or organizing their workplace to make it a more just and equitable place.

How are we to make a national revolution and transform a society of 200 million people if we aren't able to make your 50-person workplace more transparent and democratic?

It's fine to be unfamiliar with the concept of prefigurative politics (it’s such a wonky and inaccessible concept, but I don't know a better way of calling it), but thinking that we can go from a deeply hierarchical, hyper capitalist society where political and business leaders are both corrupt and toxic, to an egalitarian, transparent, just, and democratic society overnight is just… delusional.

As I challenged them to take action in their workplace, they mentioned how difficult it would be because some of their friends are in leadership in the company and would be caught in the middle of the conflict.

But if we aren’t able to manage a small-scale conflict like this (where we have a trusted relationship with most people involved), how are we to manage conflict between entire swaths of the population we have no relationship with? How are we going to manage the relationship with family members who aren’t on board with the “revolution” (one of the two’s father is an ardent supporter of Bolsonaro), let alone strangers?

Revolution starts at home. If we are to build a society that is less hierarchical, more just, more egalitarian, we have to start by creating relationships today that are less hierarchical, more just, more egalitarian. We have to learn the skills to do that (nonviolent communication, empathy, mediation, consensus-building, co-governance, accountability, etc) & the culture that goes with them. Otherwise, we’ll just reproduce the same patterns of toxicity, but with different people at the top.