What percentage of those are bots?

You’ll never get away from maintenance for ant service you host, and you need a VPS at a minimum to handle mail unless your ISP allows it (which they probably don’t). There’s going to be front loading needed in order to make sure the IP you’re given isn’t on blocklists, and you’ll need to take appropriate measures with Apple, M$, Google, Yahoo, etc in order to send email to their domains. The good thing is that I’ve you do that, you’ll never need to touch it again.

I personally use iRedMail because of the breadth of documentation, but mailcow and others like that are allegedly nice. I prefer the omnibus solutions because I don’t care to do manual service configuration if it’s not necessary.

Been doing email hosting for my domain for 25 years, 12 years with iRedMail.

Metallica, Dr Dre, et al were not wrong in suing Napster. We’re seeing the fruits of the evolution of that format. I guess at least people aren’t downloading “Get Back ft Stevie Wonder - Oasis.wma” anymore, and somebody is making money off of it. Just (mostly) not the artists that make the music.

Low cost, distributed digital distribution is absolutely a thing. Phones have enormous storage anymore, so much so most people could have their entire music collections available on their phones or tablets - not everyone - but most people.

A distributed streaming platform would really be the way to do this and make it cost effective for everybody. An app that could stream from a list of sources (remember playlists? M3U files that could play from multiple Internet locations - yeah, that already exists and has since before 2000) would enable people to stream the music they haven’t found yet or are searching for.

Seems like an interesting open source software project, to be honest. Funkwhale is probably a good basis for extension, and could be run by the artists (or provided to then via a simple click to setup platform) for low overhead.

Chromaprint Discogs Acoustibrainz submit Replaygain

I think that’s it off the top of my head. I also keep my albums separated by release, as there’s multiple releases of albums and I didn’t like mixing that stuff up.