>I'm not willing to accept a single second of added latency or buffering or downtime...
>... near-instantaneous access anywhere in the world to every song ever...
Nobody needs this. You think you do, but nobody needs everything everywhere all at once. If being wholly unwilling to wait "a single second" isn't sarcasm, then... yeesh.
Fair. I was exaggerating a little.
My point is this: I spend over 100,000 minutes per year listening to music. Any unnecessary friction in the experience is therefore extremely frustrating and has a disproportionate effect on my life. In all my experience self-hosting, it adds a certain level of friction that just isn't worth it considering how much time I spend listening.
I am not hostile to self-hosting in other cases. I am very satisfied with my self-hosted Plex server, for example. But I don't spend 30% of my waking hours watching TV.