

I pay for Apple Music (well, technically I get it as part of Apple One) for one reason: the library matching function. I have half a gig of mp3s on my home computer, many of which are not on any streaming service, and apple makes them all available to every device I own.
For me, thats worth the monthly price.







I’ve used PlexAmp. It’s shit. It tries its best, but it can’t make up for the flaws in plex’s underlying library system. It also requires having a library host running all the time. Apple host the music for me and I can make library changes from any of my devices.
I’ve tried a number of other self host options, as well, and none of them come close to the feature set in Music. I even wrote my own web app to do it way back in the 2000s, just so I could implement my own UX. This is still better.