I'll be honest, the only way to listen to music privately is to download it. (And using an opensource music player)

There are Github repositories with CLI programs to download complete Spotify playlists with Youtube and also download their metadata.

Yeah. Buy it directly from the artist then throw it all into a self hosted service like plex or jellyfin.

I use a jellyfin server plus finamp for ios plus totally legal downloaded music that was 100% legally obtained.

Do people not just download music anymore?

I still buy CDs. And back then up to play in my truck. And rip them.

I still think OWNING media is a good idea. No privacy issues at all.

I don't think you should expect any privacy on an Apple device

Yarrr harrr didgeridoo

Have you considered Funk Whale, the Spotify of the Fediverse?

https://funkwhale.audio/

Self-host your library? I don't know why that seems so hard, going by your phrasing.

If you absolutely must listen to music online (I empathise, I need to do so to find new music), here's what I do: Librewolf with Ublock Origin, Cookie Manager, Dark Reader, NoScript + music.youtube.com.

No advertisements, minimal tracking (because you will explicitly disable every other script than the one(s) required to stream music). Use a VPN and fake your user-agent/browser fingerprint for more privacy (haven't done it since I can't figure out how to do so for Firefox).

Cheers

If you want something on Android, check out ViMusic. It uses YouTube Music as a back-end and can recommend stuff based on what you listen. It also supports offline playback. On desktop, you can use Hyperpipe. It also uses YouTube Music as its back-end.

If you want ultimate privacy, then download your favorite songs and use VLC or self host them and stream it from there.

I download the music from YouTube (through front-end services like Piped) and play it locally through a music player.

I don't know how it works on iPhone (I have an Android phone), but I can use NewPipe and LibreTube and Seal to download the music. If I'm on the go that is. Otherwise I download the music through ytdlp and transfer the files to my smartphone.

Apple really restrict their users to their own ecosystem.

an MP3 player like foobar2000 ...?

You could get Spotify and switch it to private.

I don’t really care about other knowing what music I listen to and even use the “AI" to give me songs that I might like. Most of them are not my type but there is 1 or maybe 2 every week that are good that I’d‘ve never searched for.

Classic iPod or mp3 player? Also, the “Music” app on iOS still works like iTunes. You can load albums directly from your computer, even without an Apple Music subscription. Or you could get a Walkman.

I'm using Qobuz. Since it is a rather small service, I just hope it is more private than the "big players" like Spotify/Apple Music. But the main benefits of Qobuz are the audio quality and the (afaik) highest payment per streamed song for artists.

If anyone is interested, i recently developed my own system of defining my music library declaratively in the Nix programming language and started switching to it. It creates folders as playlists and can automatically download the music from YouTube or SoundCloud. I plan to expand and improve this further.

I doubt this will work on IOS tho, sorry OP.

https://codeberg.org/quantenzitrone/declarative-music.nix

If you don't want to go local or want a streaming service : qobuz is the less shitty of all options regarding privacy.

Local with Plex and Plex amp was my best experience. It’s really well done.

Have a copy of all your music and use syncthing if apple allows it that is. Otherwise get a deegoogled android running grapheneOS

Setup your own subsonic or ampache server. nextcloud has an app for that.

If you want a streaming service, you could try HyperPipe. It's an alternative frontend to YT Music. There's also BeatBump, but it doesn't really work.

If you wanted to go local (which I recommend), have you tried foobar2000? It's proprietary, but I trust it and it does its job very well. No ads, no data collection at all, and it plays just about every audio format you'll normally come across (apart from MIDI files). You can also customise it with skins, sync over FTP, and play internet radio streams.

Setup a Koel instance at a host of your choice. Upload your music to it and stream from that. See https://koel.dev/

Jellyfin.

I self host Ampache and have Sublime Music on my desktop and Substreamer on my Android device.

For Android- Blackhole | web - beatbumb and hyperpipe