I recently did this, so here’s a tutorial on how to get the music and playlists you like with unlimited listening/downloads. This is the completely free way I found to do it that worked best for me as a balance between cost, time, and pros & cons:
If you have the CDs, it will be easier to rip them. Most music managers include this feature and you will have all the track information loaded into the file. There are also pirate websites where you can download entire albums with their metadata attached, but I wasn’t comfortable using one personally. Deciding a method for acquiring/listening to music is a balance of the required time, the alternative costs, and other pros/cons like supporting the artist or taking the risk of pirating sites.
1. Find the song on Youtube. YT has pretty much every song at this point, usually in comparable quality to what you would get on a streaming service.
I was cancelling YT Red rather than Spotify, so I already had every song on YT playlists. There might be a better method for going direct from Spotify, but this will work either way. The main downside to this method is that official music (and even lyric) videos sometimes have non-music portions so you might have to listen to it to be sure. SponsorBlock will highlight non-music sections for most artists, so if you have it installed you can tell at a glance if this is the case.
2. Download the audio from YT. There are many ways to download YT videos completely for free. It’s probably against the YT terms of service, but you’re not going to get sued.
I personally used y2mate‘s mp3 downloader because it’s a simple, ad-free website. You just paste in the URL for the video you want to download. Sometimes it’s laggy and you have to come back later, but usually after a few moments the video loads, you can select your download quality (the highest), and then save it. I download everything in folders for the Artist, and then sub folders for the Album, and name the MP3 file the “song name”.mp3 just because it makes management easiest.
3. Upload to your music player/manager of choice. The file will currently be lacking metadata (Artist, Album, track number, etc) and will be added to the library as a song with its title set as the file name minus its .mp3 extension. Various music players/managers have different ways to add metadata (usually accessed by right-clicking the song) with varying ease.
I started with iTunes since it’s free and I have an iPhone, but now I use that in combination with MusicBee for its playlist features and to make initial management faster. You can set it to scan the folders you download music to so it will automatically load things into your library. Once loaded into MusicBee, you can batch edit an entire album’s metadata at once easily. It will fetch the details from the internet and fill in genre, artist, track numbers, album artwork, etc and save that information to the file (like it would be if you had actually purchased it). You can edit this manually if needed too. After I edit the metadata of the new songs I’ve downloaded, I just select the folders in my file explorer and drop them into iTunes so I can select which ones I want to download and play on my phone with all their data loaded in.
4. Now you can use the player of your choice to listen endlessly, form playlists, etc. Some free music managers also have music discovery/recommendation features for expanding your collection.
MusicBee allows you to create playlists with folders, subfolders, and dynamic features. You can export these playlists for cross-platform play on other computers with MusicBee installed. It takes me a minute or two to recreate the playlist on iTunes and add in all the same songs, so this way I get songs and playlists on my various devices without having to pay a cent. I find the playlist features on MusicBee to be better than what I had on streaming services.
There are many music managers/players, including cross-platform ones with streaming, but they usually have fees for streaming, so this is my free workaround. Because you aren’t streaming the music and rather storing it, you’ll need space on each device you want to play the music on, but luckily memory is cheap these days (and costs less than a single year of one streaming service).
I bought a 2TB external harddrive for less than Spotify or Youtube Premium costs for six months, so the fact that I have to store the songs isn’t a downside. Plus, the song will never “leave the service”, I can listen to it offline, etc. I highly encourage everyone to download digital copies of songs, movies, books, etc that they like and never rely on services to get access to things temporarily! I actually keep two copies of all my digital media on two different external drives, plus on my current desktop.
I encourage people to actually pay for art from small artists, especially independent ones. You have to pay for art if you want to keep it alive, but I don’t consider Spotify “paying the artist”. You can also go for things like merch sales to support them better!
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