An Inconvenient Truth: Music Deep Dive ⭐

I still pay for two music services, but I've spent a lot of time over the past few months with a local music collection too. You can go in either direction, of course, and if you use the right music streaming service, you can even combine them. I'm still looking for the right balance here, I guess. What else is new? But this is fascinating to me.
Two services to rule them all
I've used YouTube Music since it was called Google Play Music. Among the many things I really like about this service is that you can incorporate music from the vast and exclusive library of YouTube videos into your library and playlists, where they can be accessed as audio-only songs. This works in both directions, too, since your YouTube Music library is available on YouTube, the video service, where you can play music playlists that display as music videos (assuming you saved the right version of the songs).

Living without this benefit isn't catastrophic per se; I haven't tried to count how many music videos that are exclusive to YouTube that I've added to music playlists in YouTube Music, but I suspect it's a small number. And though I've worked to minimize my subscription services, I am sticking with both YouTube Music and Apple Music for the foreseeable future.

Ideally, I would have just a single music service and cut yet another subscription. But there are reasons I'm not doing that. YouTube Music and YouTube Premium are tied up in the same subscription, and the latter makes YouTube, the video service I watch the most by far, watchable (there are no ads). And Apple Music is part of a broader Apple One subscription that everyone in my family uses. So neither is going away any time soon. And there are things I like about both, so I go back and forth. Yes, it's messy.
A local music wrench in the streaming music plan
Tied to this and to my broad desire to add a bit of friction or inconvenience to my interactions with content of all kinds, I have been experimenting with what it looks like to mix a local digital music collection with subscription services. There are so many buzz words and terms when you get into this and I react very poorly to that. For example, many refer to maintaining a local music collection as "self-hosting," which feels like an overinflated name for what used to be a very common activity. But it gets worse.

If you think about what it means to be a bit more intentional--another crappy buzz word--when it comes to listening to music, there is a wide spectrum, I think, between old-school physical media and a pure streaming experience like Spotify or the services I use. And, as is often the case, I find myself somewhere in the middle. But maybe I'm drifting a bit more towards one end of that spectrum than has been the case so far in this streaming era.

At one extreme end of that spectrum is an embrace of physical media, especially vinyl, the idea being that you can--and to some, should--listen to music the way the artist intended...