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.
One of the things I pay attention to from a UX standpoint is “Am I avoiding this function because I legitimately have no use for it? Or is it because there’s just enough friction that I’m avoiding it and not noticing?”
An example from my own audio life: I have airplay speakers and an IoT outlet for their power. When I watch video on my iPad I can get much better sound through the speakers, but because it involves pausing the video, pulling down the control centre, tapping the airplay icon, tapping the speakers as the output, then going in to Home and turning on the speakers, more than half the time I just skip the whole process and listen through the iPad.
It only takes 5-10 seconds total, but that’s still enough that I subconsciously avoid it. The subconscious part is that it just ‘slips my mind’ most of the time as opposed to consciously choosing.
