there's this really cool alternative to streaming, called you buy their shit directly. Or if you like me, don't really care, just finding a way to throw money at them, in their general direction sometimes works. Spotify actually works so little, that the only party that makes money, is the music publishers that spotify allows on their platform, the artists and spotify generally don't make much money, or make very little money. Gotta love capitalism.

If you're a music artist, please allow people to just give you money directly, in some way. It'll incentivize people who don't pay for it to send you a few dollary doos.

Reminds me how librivox and others publish their audiobooks as podcasts. I guess artists could upload their albums like this?

I use Ymusic it is android, but shouldn't be hard to run on Linux

For desktop there's ncspot, which is a Spotify TUI client written in Rust. Not exactly what you were asking for, but it does work well

I use spicetify just to get an improved shuffle function.

There seems like a lot of potential for an app like this with the mixture of decentralization/encryption/verification/blockchain/etc. Easily verify artists, get the artists paid with a determined currency or by merch and donations, have it federated or decentralized so artists have more control and a company can’t take percentages.. I don’t know. There has to be something there. It seems possible and almost a necessity in the future for artists to make money and corporations to not enshittify each app that is released. For example, spotify adding features to try to be like TikTok, or recently they were trying to add “educational courses” to the app