[KingMachiavelli]

Embrace the rant. While I've made effort to reduce my usage of other Google products for privacy reasons, Google Play Music is literally the last Google service that I haven't removed since the alternative are not much better.

If you don't need the upload features are OK with the same level of privacy issues associated with streaming services, I'd have to image Spotify is the next best thing with Apple Music (really?) a close third.

However, the lost of GPM will most likely make me reconsider using streaming services completely. There seems to be a few options for self hosting a 'streaming' music platform. Just browsing F-droid (FOSS Android store), there are clients for connecting to Subsonic [1] servers which seem target for this use case. I'm not sure how it compares to the popular Plex software [2] (which I actually think is bloated & overkill but I guess it would also work).

[1] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp [2]https://www.plex.tv/watch-free/

A few other apps (personally I use my phone 90% of the time I'm listening to music so having a Android app is essential at least until I can migrate to a Pinephone).

1. MPDroid - says it can stream from a MPD instance which sounds very cool. 2. AMPlayer (outdated but might lead somewhere) - connects to an Ampcache instance which integrates with nextcloud/owncloud. This sounds pretty cool.

There are of course apps that will scrape music from YouTube but I have low expectations.