Ubuntu 11.04 saw Unity as a default thing but I was still dual-booting (mea culpa) back then. Around 2013 Pithos really got going and I think it might have pushed me over the edge. There’s hope for you too!
I was insanely jealous; here was a native Linux program that offered the (cooler-back-then) Pandora client locally that consumed way less computing resources, was completely libre/free AND blocked stupid ads – but it was only on Linux.
Years later I’m still loving it considering Pithos auto runs at boot up in my home office. At times, I’ve been asked to install it on Windoze. Ugh. Yes, I have and I have the screenshots to prove it:
You can scour the Pithos change logs or simply visit The Cutest Hamster and read how to head-bash through it circa 2013. You’ll need gstreamer-sdk-x86-2013.6.msi, python-2.7.3.msi and Pithos_Installer-Version8.exe to make it work and it still does to this day on Windows 7 32-bit. But there’s an easier way for us dolts who begrudgingly and reluctantly have to use Microshaft products for one reason or the other...
Enter Elpis complete with single click .exe installer. 
You’ll get a similar UI to my beloved Pithos, song skipping, no ads and interestingly enough better random suggestions based upon your music tastes. It has refused connections more often than I’d like (a Pandora thing that is rare these days) and is a bit slower on startup/shutdown than Pithos.
So if you have a friend or grandma that walked by your Linux desktop and said, “Whoa what’s that?” you can probably entice them with a little sugar from the Pithos jar. Once they taste that sweet freedom they’ll become a libre-crazed addict like we have...and that’s a wonderful thing!
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Cool find. The downloading "feature" of songs you may not want seems like a huge problem unless you have an extremely long-standing curated playlist. Such a working playlist took us about a year to hone that sharp. Alas, we haven't personally used Pithos on Linux or on a Windows operating system for many years now. We switched over from Pithos to Spotify circa 2020 (?). You may want to check out Spotify-Adblock which has a similar feature set as the original Pithos. There are other tools that can help you download your playlists without the filler.
Here is my working version for anyone who wants to use pithos on windows now including a dark theme - https://github.com/CrypticNova/pithos-for-windows-nova
Cool, thanks for the update.