At least in the case of a music player, self-hosting simply isn't good enough for me. I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime because I don't have multimillion dollar server farms. The fact is that the vast majority of us don't have the resources to self-host a Jellyfin instance that can provide near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever made at 320kbps. And that's the bar for music. I can deal with a little added latency vs. Netflix on a Plex server or something. But I'm not willing to compromise with music.<p>This isn't even to mention the numerous features that Spotify has which are difficult or impossible to replicate on self-hosting. The "radio" feature, song recommendations, the DJ, AI playlists, stations, automatic playlist enhancement, social features, Canvas... the list goes on. And of course I never have to worry about managing a library of mp3 files. When an artist I like drops a new album, it'll be on Spotify at 12:00am exactly and work perfectly. This isn't possible with self-hosting.<p>When you look at it this way, the chance to pay 6 bucks a month to get all these extra features and ignore the headache of self-hosting is a no-brainer.