Open source alternatives to Spotify

What Spotify does

Spotify is a music and podcast streaming service with a licensed catalog and personalized recommendations. It has a free, ad-supported tier and paid Premium plans. Premium removes ads, lets you play in any order with unlimited skips, adds lossless FLAC streaming up to 24-bit/44.1 kHz and allows downloads of up to 10,000 tracks on each of up to five devices. The apps can also play audio files stored on the device itself through the Local Files feature.

Why people look for an alternative

• The catalog is rented, not owned. Spotify says it does not have all the world’s music, that what it offers varies over time and between countries, and that content can be removed by rights holders.
• Downloads are tied to the subscription. Downloaded music has to be refreshed by going online at least every 30 days, and downloads are removed if you reinstall the app or go beyond five devices. On the free tier only podcasts can be downloaded.
• Prices change. Spotify adjusts Premium prices from time to time, emailing subscribers and giving a one-month grace period before the new price applies.
• Your own files stay on each device. Rips, live recordings, DJ mixes and other music not in the catalog can only be played as Local Files on the device where they are stored, not streamed from one collection to all your devices.
• Limits on the free tier. Ad-free listening, any-order playback with unlimited skips and music downloads are listed as Premium benefits.

What to compare in an alternative

1. A collection to stream. A self-hosted server plays only music you own or have digitized. It has no catalog and no editorial playlists.
2. Clients. A good web player, and apps for Android, iOS and desktop. Servers that implement the Subsonic or OpenSubsonic API work with a large pool of third-party apps.
3. Offline listening. Whether the mobile apps can download music for offline use.
4. Transcoding. Converting lossless files to smaller formats on the fly saves mobile data.
5. Users and playlists. Separate accounts, smart playlists, and scrobbling to Last.fm or ListenBrainz for recommendation-style history.
6. Hardware. Some servers run on a Raspberry Pi; others need a PHP and MySQL stack.

Which one to choose

Navidrome is the most common starting point: a single Go program with a modern web player and the Subsonic/OpenSubsonic API, light enough for a Raspberry Pi Zero, provided your music is well tagged. gonic is even smaller and follows your folder structure, but has no player of its own, so you listen through Subsonic apps. Ampache is the long-running PHP option with the widest set of APIs, including Subsonic, DAAP and UPnP, and handles video too.

If you want the look of a commercial streaming app in the browser, Koel offers smart playlists, podcasts and radio, with some features in its paid Plus edition, and Swing Music adds listening statistics and album versions, with mixes and transcoding in a premium module. Black Candy ships its own iOS and Android apps in a single Docker image, and Polaris is a Rust server built for very large collections, with an official Android app. For audiobooks and podcasts, use Audiobookshelf. The media server guide explains how these tools differ.