There is a part of me that wants to abandon streaming services and just buy a couple of albums per month based on what I think might be cool. I find myself enjoying music significantly less now I have unlimited access to everything I could ever want. It’s become disposable; just background noise rather than something I’m actively experiencing.
There is also a part of me that wants to take those albums and keep them on an old click-wheel iPod. I always thought the early iPod nanos were among the best consumer hardware devices ever made. Just the right mix of boxy and round; small enough to be novel (at least at the time), but large enough to still be perfectly usable. Unfortunately, finding one that both holds a charge and isn’t battered to all hell is quite difficult these days, and even so, it’s much harder to justify a single use device for music when I literally always have my phone with me.
As someone who was a teen when the iPod really started taking off, it was a constant presence during the time music was starting to become an important part of my life. Sad to see it go, even though really it’s been gone since the iPhone launched.
There's a middle ground, too -- you can host music streaming for your own library through [Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/) (or Plex, or a few other alternatives) for the backend and something like [FinAmp](https://github.com/UnicornsOnLSD/finamp) on the frontend. Easy to curate your own library, and you can avoid the "sync problem" when you download a new album.
There are some bugs to iron out in the setup, but my raspberry pi home server has been running this great for 5 months now, and offline media served me very well through a cross-country move. It's a great opportunity to take back some agency from Spotify, start contributing to artists on bandcamp or similar, and cut another annoying monthly subscription from your life.
When someone hands me their phone to play music on Spotify at this point, I find the front page absolutely overwhelming. It's sort of like going back to cable after streaming for years, and seeing your first ad. You wonder how you ever put up with it.