Image comes from the monstrous work the Asahi Linux team did to get Netflix working on Linux on ARM Macbooks: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/
I find this to be an option with Movies/TV Shows but a struggle with Music. At least once my kids were older and listening to stuff. They were constantly asking for stuff to be downloaded, my mom and wife were asking for stuff, my brother, etc. Had a subsonic server set up and just got tired of actively managing it. Spotify isn’t great but it works and it saves a headache. I just wish there was better options because I don’t like the Spotify app. YouTube Music is even worse, especially since it subscribes to everything on YouTube too so all my subscriptions got jacked up.
Give them a search tool as a web app (for said music server and scraper setup) and allow them to ask it for the music. When they’re over their limit, have it return a temp unspec error. Dust your hands and walk away proud.
I don’t have access to my music torrent site anymore due to the first one shutting down (W.CD) and then going idle on the other one for years. Don’t feel like re-downloading everything either since I lost all my music in a hard drive crash. Could probably recover it from my Cowon X7 but don’t know where the cable is for that anymore.
https://bestforandroid.com/apk/spotify-premium-mod-apk/
Just create a fake account with 10 minute mail or something similar. On my desktop i use the web-app with ad muting extension. Works rather well.
if you want DRM-free, bandcamp is the best way, but for “exploring” subscribing to spotify is the best way in terms of quantity, and it doesn’t pay much less than other DRMs even if it has a monopoly, and is not from the USA or China
Here you can compare other services if you are interested in how much money goes to the creators: https://streamingcalculator.com/ or https://www.musicgateway.com/royalties-calculator
otherwise if you don’t want to pay, youtube + soundcloud with adblock is the best solution. or if you really have a lot of time you can make your own self-hosted pod on funkwhale: https://docs.funkwhale.audio/administrator/index.html