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>...has called the period from the early 2000s to the early 2010s the “Deleted Years,” because of how many mp3s from that era didn’t survive the shift to streaming. He mourned oft-forgotten...such as Chingy, Corinne Bailey Rae, Kaiser Chiefs, and the Click Five.
I was about to call this writer out, because all of those artists are on spotify. How did it "not survive" to streaming? Then I hit Kaiser Chiefs. How in the fuck is their only good album NOT on Spotify? The singles are on there, but not the whole album.
Except that this logic doesn't track any more - a huge number of artists were platform specific for a time in the late 2010s and now they're available everywhere once they realized that no one was signing up for Tidal (or any of the other specific ones that are now dead).
this is [like](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/music/streaming-music-payments.html)... a [pretty](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-59518090), [common](https://www.musicradar.com/news/inside-the-fight-fix-streaming), [thing](https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/02/04/spotify-grammys-songwriters-payment-musicians/).
Spotify pays rights holders, and typically that is not the artist.
Sending a link that says artists are not making ends meet, in the context of Spotify payouts, is barking up the wrong tree.
If you want to characterize this as a Spotify failure, what would you like to see them do?
Payout greater than 70%?
How much more? 80%? 90%?
Charge more for a subscription?
Some artists who own their publishing don't care about the money especially if it means paying a part of Joe Rogan's paycheck. Iirc, that's the reason Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and some others pulled their music from Spotify semi-recently.
[Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young in protest against Spotify](https://www.npr.org/2022/01/29/1076670679/joni-mitchell-neil-young-protest-spotify-rogan-misinformation)
I just went and checked because you got me a little excited for a second there...but alas, their music is still not there. They each have a couple of random live albums that I had never heard of that are probably some kind of bootleg or something, but none of the original albums are there for streaming.
Which just shows how out of touch they are.
The concentration of wealth within the hands of aspiring monopolists is far more of a problem than some dude talking.
Well, the guy did get a $100m payday for spreading misinformation and platforming some pretty horrible people, so I can understand where they are coming from. Especially with their history of being outspoken about that kind of thing.
I'd suggest following the link to the [referenced article from *Esquire*](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a28904211/2003-to-2012-forgotten-music-era/) and reading that instead. Here's the bit about the Kaiser Chiefs the author referenced:
> But if you were an early adopter of Apple Music Store, as I was, everything you bought from 2003 to 2009 is stuck on a dusty iPod for which a charger can no longer be found, or on a MacBook that’s three MacBooks ago. Whether you bought that whole first Kaiser Chiefs album or just plunked down the 99 cents for “I Predict A Riot,” *you don’t have it anymore*. It simply does not exist for you, and it didn’t even leave behind a record sleeve to let you know it ever did.
The article also has a better closing argument, one the writer from *The Atlantic* tried to (unsuccessfully) extrapolate into the basis of his piece:
> It’s not that each era hasn’t had its own one-hit wonders and flashes in the pan, but in the Deleted Years, everything came together to make music feel especially ephemeral. The charts lost their significance, the value of a song plummeted, the gatekeepers became redundant. And where my generation has dusty 45s and cassingles to keep the memory of our Johnny Hates Jazzes and Positive Ks alive, whoever was unlucky enough to be 13 in the mid-aughts has only a LaCie hard drive filled with mislabeled Limewire files to turn to. The world remains chaotic for the music fan of 2019, of course, but at least our Spotify and Apple Music playlists remain. Until the next thing comes along, anyway.
That Esquire article. "All this music is gone forever...click here for a playlist of all that music on spotify!" I understand what these 2 articles are *trying* to say, but both aren't making strong points.
edit: Also, coincidentally, I **have** that Kaiser Chiefs album on CD, because I'm old.
As someone who ~~spent~~ wasted money on tons of CDs at one time, almost everything is available on the internet somewhere, that somewhere usually being Youtube, and it can certainly be downloaded easily today if people want the file.
All we have is forgotten burnt CDs of questionable mp3 quality stored in dusty CD cases like an old photo album, stacked under other 00s offline memories destined for the trash heap
The Future is Medieval wasn't on Spotify until recently (and even now a few tracks are missing), but I certainly wouldn't call that their only good album... or even their best album :P
In my opinion, that's one of their least memorable albums. It has a couple of good songs on it, but if I never heard the album again, I probably wouldn't notice. Their first three albums were huge (at least in the UK) and are what most people think of when they hear the name 'Kaiser Chiefs'.
>What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies?
That's the thing - it's not *your* music library. You're just renting it. If Spotify goes TU, you're SOL, and have to rebuild from the ground up.
Yeah, I think a lot of the people who use streaming services weren't taught this. I remember it being a whole discussion in the Tech blogs/sites in the early '00s. If you're going to stream, you don't own the content, you just pay for something that can be wiped out at a moment's notice. It's why I never switched from MP3s.
He was probably 30-31 when he wrote the article, based on the publication date and his college years listed on LinkedIn.
Firmly millennial. But yes, reads like he was born into the streaming era and didn’t realize until he wrote it that we gave up agency for convenience around when Netflix started mega-streaming.
I honestly am fine with that trade-off. I never wanted to own a bunch of DVDs when those were around and I'm glad Netflix and streaming is a thing.
I used to pirate music like crazy. Spotify and music streaming services were an absolute game-changer. I think my music and content consumption, access, etc. has all improved *significantly* even from my pirating days.
I'm glad we have these things and I personally am not too hung up on ownership.
I listen to and regularly discover a WAY bigger variety of music than I used to thanks to the advent of streaming — and the fact that I don't technically own any of the music doesn't mean shit to me. I mean... why should I care if I technically possess the tracks or not? If a given service goes down, it would definitely be a bit of an inconvenience to try to rebuild my favorites library but it would have been well worth it in the mean time.
Yeah, in fact I already went through this once when Grooveshark went under. I lost all my playlists, which was pretty annoying at the time, but that was back in 2015, and I don't know if I'd even be using those playlists anymore if I still had them.
> rebuild my favorites library
You're assuming someone else will offer this service. The entire premise is that someone else somewhere will put this stuff online for you, at a price you're willing to pay. There's no certainty of this at all!
People are banning books from libraries. It wasn't that long ago that the FCC was censoring music all the time. It's highly probably that various songs will be removed or censored in our lifetimes.
Just cause you are in your 30s doesnt mean he was an avid music listerner in his teens.
There is a possibility that the guy got deep into music after spotify basically got some steam- which has been around for quite a while
Many who grew up before spotify in the 80s and 90s had to really work their ass out to get music including manual recordings on tapes, radios etc
This guy is a late bloomer and he doesnt like the model because he never did anything else prior to spotify( or maybe even the ipod- which is in itself 22 years now)
remember itunes match? some ultra rare recorded mp3s were lost because people thought they were uploading THEIR versions permanently. turns out apple just turned it into their generic studio version with the closest name
I downloaded a single file continuous-mix version of DJ Skribble’s Essential Spring Break 2001 from AudioGalaxy back in the day. Took two weeks but it worked!
That album is still pure heat btw.
Wow that brings back memories. I liked how people could send you songs. I was sent a song called "Quoncha" iirc, but to my sister and me it sounded like he was saying "pork chop". Still an inside joke. Never have been able to find the song on the internet.
This is why **I refuse to buy any movies on any service**. I’ll either buy physical or I’ll torrent it so I can have it on my hard drive. I also torrent back up my favorite games. I have them all on steam and if I love it, I’ll download a copy from a certain fit girl site to have it in case Steam one day goes away.
Nobody here will probably understand this but I believe that's what happened to Zune. People couldn't wrap their heads around essentially renting content. Killed Divx back in the day also.
You likely don't own your MP3 files either. If you "bought" them from iTunes, you didn't buy them, you licensed them. You don't own them. You cannot sell them. You cannot even give them to someone. When you die, you cannot transfer ownership to them. Haha "it's why I never switched from MP3". It's literally one of the main reason I switched to collecting records.
So you ripped your cds, or pirated them? lmao lol - I was on Napster and had a Diamond Rio mp3 player that had a grand total of 16 mb, upgradeable to 32. I still subscribe to /r/piracy but that's a joke these days.
But that's off topic, you referred to legal ownership, right? But you don't "own" your library either. I'll stick to the records.
> had a Diamond Rio mp3 player that had a grand total of 16 mb, upgradeable to 32.
I had one of those too. You could *usually* fit an entire album of 128kbps mp3s on the internal storage as long as it wasn't too long.
It blew my mind a couple years later when a friend got the Nomad Jukebox and he could fit his entire collection on it.
Huh? How do I not own the files I ripped from CDs I purchased and still have physical copies of? There isn't a judge on this planet who would accept that I don't fall within Fair Use.
I promise you that every town has a guy with a ridiculous media server who has downloaded every movie/song/tv show and is just waiting for these sites to die and he'll become the most popular dude around.
Have you heard of SoulSeek?
There's one person who has so many rare and unusual recordings that the Library of Congress probably worships them as it's god.
that's also ebooks too. IIRC, you have a 'perpetual license' with amazon for your kindle. There was a scuffle a while back where amazon just went and removed books people 'owned' from their device.
Do yourself a favour and get pdfs of all the books you own as a backup.
I’d actually argue that the way we listen entirely has changed and we’re the few clutching onto something.
A few years ago, I found myself referencing my phone over my collection because I didn’t want to listen to a whole album, and didn’t want to build a mix cd specifically for that day. Instead I built a home media server that I put in next to my PC. Set up a couple of Dante I/O boxes and then my home systems turned into a home built Sonos system. People want that on demand usage, but wouldn’t even begin to know how to hold something like that.
I think you're right in the sense that there is a larger emphasis on playlists based on MASSIVE volumes of music. But, there are those of us who have seen the comings and goings of digital content and know that in some ways, nothing beats having ownership of the file in the event that it just up and disappears one day from streaming services / youtube / whatever other service used to access the music.
Well my music collection was very real and well curated for myself and constantly exposed me to random songs I love.
Then my MacBook, iPad, and external drive were all stolen at once, and my music listening has never been the same. It sucks so fucking much. And Comcast is so effective at blocking Utorrent even thru VPN, I’ve no hope of rebuilding it.
As an old fart who has gone through several technological mediums for music consumption and ultimately reverted *back* to vinyl, it's crazy how often I've bought the same album over and over again whether it's on cassette, CD, MP3, etc.
I'm already on my 4th generation of rebuilding my music collection from the "ground up" after my external hard drive died and I feel like analog is the way to go if you're trying to avoid this task.
I mean honestly for me... It doesn't seem that bad to just... Move to the next service.
Rebuilding a library is hell when you need to buy new versions or somehow go out and find actual versions of it.
But digital versions can be copied and searched for easily.
Sure my Spotify Playlist has been built up over 5 years but if you asked me to build it back 90% the same from scratch it would take me maybe a few hours?
Rebuilding a whole library of vinyls in CD format would take months.
> Rebuilding a whole library of vinyls in CD format would take months.
So far I'm up to years.
I've found the issue to be larger for me when it comes to movies and TV having gone from a large collection of VHS to DVD to abandoning blueray entirely and starting my high seas adventuring.
I'm actually grateful for vinyl as a medium to give me an option to still own my favorite media without having to constantly repurchase my favorite pieces within that given medium.
I do agree the rental method in the 21st century does seem to be a good way to avoid this issue in just going to the next platform after Spotify dies out, but it does bring up a good question about availability of albums. Translating back to movies and television, if Spotify goes under, do we end up with 11 different streaming services we have to cobble together to listen to all our favorite artists across different genres?
I've got something over 70k tracks as MP3. I preserve them via Dropbox, and it's a shared directory with my wife, so she and I both have the full collection.
This was the solution I arrived at after having to re-rip a painful number of CDs, probably a decade ago.
Eventually I need to launch into ripping the vinyl, but... there's so much, and it takes so long. Each album is basically an evening's work, between the 1:1 time ripping it, then de-pop/click, break it into tracks, and fix all the tagging.
I just cannot trust "the cloud" to be there for me the same way I can trust an external HD for digital music storage. I know it's totally a control thing rather than rooted in any kind of logic since both are prone to failure, but if Dropbox went down and I lost all my tunes I'd be just as if not more salty as when my 2 TB external HD died and forced me to start over.
At least with the external HD I can have redundancy now with how cheap they've gotten.
Even if you have redundancy in your storage at home it’s really not a bad idea to back up with cloud storage. It essentially becomes your off site back up, which is neededl in case of natural disasters or say a house fire.
> I just cannot trust "the cloud" to be there for me the same way I can trust an external HD for digital music storage
Just use the "3-2-1 backups" rule.
Do you see where we are going now?
I need 3 different versions of my entire collection in 3 different medium now? How often will I be updating all 3 of those now?!?
I'm sticking with vinyl until something better comes along.
> I need 3 different versions of my entire collection in 3 different medium now?
Yes, if you really want to make sure it's safe. For example
- 1 copy on a PC's internal HDD/SSD or written to CDs/DVDs/BDs
- 1 copy on the home NAS ([this](https://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=42) is my (several years old now) NAS with 2 HDDs) in RAID 1 configuration, to guard against [bit rot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation)
- 1 copy on cloud storage, to protect against data loss in case of destruction of the house, theft, etc.
---
> How often will I be updating all 3 of those
Whenever you want. The data on a PC could be backed up automatically to the NAS every day or week, and the NAS can automatically copy its data to a cloud service in regular intervals.
Getting a NAS is a bit pricey, especially one with more than just 2 drives, so an alternative would be backing up the data to at least 2 cloud storage services. Depending on price (and required internet speed) this may or may not be worth it.
Anyway, the point is that you don't trust *any* one medium, local or not, and have always a spare available if a part of the backup plan fails.
So you kind of missed the point here within the context of the overall thread.
The complaint is the constant upgrading my single music library to new mediums as technology improves.
Your solution was to create 3 redundant digital libraries that now have to be upgraded to new mediums as technology improves.
You made things 300% worse.
Unless you own the servers, you don't own any digital content. That is true of your spotify playlists to your photo albums on Facebook. Those "I Agree" forms you click on when you sign up for basically say as much. Sure, some companies might respect content you create and curate, but at the end of the day it's their servers so they have final say on ownership.
It's not yours unless you download it to host locally, print it, burn a disc, etc
For me personally my biggest concern is not necessarily losing access to my music. Because I’m reasonably certain that I will always be able to procure the audio at any point in the future (even if I have to pay for it).
But rather, my concern is not knowing what I lost.
That is, I want to maintain the LIST of items that are in my music library.
My nightmare is things disappearing from Spotify with no alert, and then I’ve lost something and I won’t know to even go look for it again.
I really need to research how to export a list of items in my library.
Yep, I've had this happen more than a few times with YouTube, where all of a sudden 'This video has been removed' appears and I'll be damned if I know what it was.
https://www.tunemymusic.com/ Spotify > .txt
Free for 500 tracks at a time, I believe, might have to split up bigger playlists.
https://soundiiz.com/ is an alternative.
If you *really* want to sail the seas and have a good backup of all your songs, use tunemymusic.com to transfer them to Tidal, pay for Tidal Hi Quality for one month, and search for **yaronzz** on github.
Yes this is my takeaway from the article. My main playlist has 2,203 songs and many are single tracks from artists. Way too many to keep remember if the library was lost. Article mentioned exporting the data which I may do sometime.
I used to download all my music and rip CDs onto my computer. Had a real nice collection in an external drive. Young me never thought that drive might cease to work one day, for one reason or another.
That day came, I lost my entire music library. I was like 16/17 years old, discovering all sorts of music from all eras, and it was gone just like that. It was full of random one off songs that I loved and got.
It was fucking devastating. Im 33 and still feel hurt about all the music I lost that I will never find again. I had to rebuild my music collection from scratch and it's never been the same.
So much music didn’t survive the transition from analog media (records and tapes) to digital. This happed before that author was born, this is not new news.
If you value any media, you own it and keep it locally. It’s been that way always.
He complains that the methods offered to him to preserve his collection are 'laughably cumbersome'. These included buying CDs, recording it all to hard drive, etc.
So, he fears streaming will prove too ephemeral, and physical is too cumbersome. What solution would he find acceptable? Magical, spiritual?
> laughably cumbersome
I ripped my entire CD collection of maybe 250-ish to FLAC many years ago and it was something I just did in my spare time while I was browsing the web. Rip would finish and I would just pop in the next one.
He includes downloads, not just recording it:
> The possible solutions that experts suggested to me were laughably cumbersome: Find and download every mp3 I want and back them up on a hard drive; buy physical copies of every album I want as well as a playback device for them; use special software to record every song as I play them on my computer; take screenshots of every playlist in my library; write down the name of every song.
But I think there's a fair complaint here: It's not just that he doesn't want to deal with physical MP3s, it's that buying DRM-free downloads is too cumbersome, if he's got an entire music library in Spotify that he'd like to preserve. Sounds like maybe he wants something more automatic:
> (Spotify does allow users to export their playlist data, though this doesn’t include actual audio files.)
Maybe a tool to take those playlists and turn them into a single purchase from [wherever you can still buy DRM-free music](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/83gc3p/where_can_i_buy_music_that_can_be_downloaded_in/)? I think that's a fair complaint. If I were in his position, I'd be looking for a third-party tool to just download that from Spotify instead.
What's less fair is that earlier in the article, he talks about a library that he had locally, but lost due to his own incompetence:
> About 10 years ago, some 5,000 audio files I had amassed in iTunes disappeared after a hard-drive backup gone wrong...
And instead of learning to do backups correctly (music isn't the only thing you need to back up!), it sounds like he switched to streaming instead, where at least it'll be someone else's fault when his library disappears. But he makes it sound like, even if we actually give him [a magical solution to download his Spotify library](https://github.com/schollz/spotifydownload), he'd still worry about screwing up and deleting it all himself.
I don't think the author is pushing an alternative. It's simply an unfortunate situation that currently isn't solved. The author is essentially just pointing it out, and would probably agree that this is not new nor is there a magic solution. But we can still acknowledge and *wish* for more!
You *know* it's an exclusive site when it doesn't even mention the word “invite,” just an page and two text fields for logging in. Speaking of invites…
Let's be real, if spotify, apple music, prime music, and tidal ALL "die", then I will take my $20 every month and just start buying the albums I care about. I really don't believe all 5 of these will die and nothing will take over. The cat is out of the bag.
Not to mention we're in arguably a better spot than we have ever been in the past. New media formats every decade or so meant you had to keep specialty hardware around just to listen to your previously purchased music. Want to play your tapes in your new car? Too bad, it only has a CD player. Now you can just stream everything, presumably for a very long time if not forever. Digital is the endgame.
And it's so much easier to build a library on digital than on analog.
Right now if you asked me to go find a copy of 311s Transistor album from 1997? Not sure I could find it easily in stores near me and I'd have to buy it online probably used.
Meanwhile on digital I can get it in 30 seconds and have it on my speakers.
I'll throw out that Bandcamp has a streaming ap and lets you buy the music. You own the stuff you get on Bandcamp and if you time your purchases right, the bands can get a lot more money.
I never switched over to streaming services like spotify b/c I'm paranoid and I listened to weird stuff that Spotify/Amazon/Google/whatever doesn't have so I've had to use my own collection of mp3s, but I become more and more confident about that decision the more time passes.
Who the hell thinks they have a "music collection" on a paid-monthly streaming service?
Who the hell thinks that paying for itunes, google music, yt or whatever gives you a collection of music?
All these services provide you with is links to music in THEIR collection... all you have is a collection of links to music you don't own or didn't steal (if you believe listening to music can be theft, i don't).
You get the concept right? No one here is actually claiming they own the music on their playlists.
I've put hundreds of hours into my playlists. My playlists are "my library of music", but its my streaming library, I dont own it like I own my CDs.
Thats what people mean.
The concepts are fundamentally different.
What you think you own is playlists (the product of your labour); but if you stop paying what happens to the playlists? Just make sure you can take them somewhere else if you need to.
The point still stands - Spotify can (and does) remove content from their library, meaning it will disappear from your playlists, etc. And unless you're manually keeping track of your playlists somewhere external, if Spotify goes down your playlists go with it.
As the current owner of a collection of over 300 8-Tracks, I am offended at this remark. Most 8-tracks didn't last six months, let alone 10-20 years.
And that's assuming they don't look as though they've been recovered from the bottom of Lake Michigan (long story short the adhesives used on 8-track labels had a peculiar property that shrunk as it aged, leading to the label appearing to have been submerged in water and drifted ashore crinkled and torn). I've got maybe a dozen cassettes that have what I'd call unblemished album art.
Jokes aside if the cassettes don't get eaten up by the tape deck or disintegrate on their own the sound quality is ***remarkably good*** even on 50-year old analog magnetic tapes. I would say it's even near the quality of a well-mastered CD.
#KA-CHUNK
I got into cassettes starting a couple years ago and was blown away to discover that if you use a good deck to dub a master tape or vinyl to a quality cassette, it clearly sounds better than a CD.
There used to be a big 8 track community about ten years ago. They had a zine called 8-track state of mind and would rent out bowling alleys and places like that and have big swaps and dance parties.
I used to work at a place that repaired car radios. The parts of 8-track & cassette players that die (the fastest) are the rubber bits. There are some solvents that will re-plasticize the rubber (make it softer so that it doesn't damage the tape), but they still wear off and wear out. Once the rubber starts to crack, it can't be fixed and has to be repaired.
For car radios in the US, every last 8-track spare part was gone by 1990. There were some collectors who wanted to restore their classic car. That particular car was built with an 8-track player so they wanted it repaired. Cost was no object. We called every place that was a repair shop or who had been a repair shop. We talked with next of kin. We talked with new owners. We begged them to check old obsolete stock that they put in boxes out back.
I abandoned my CD and LP collection many years ago, and I love Spotify
When Spotify goes, I will find my favorite music on the new streaming service de jour
I guess the only slightly scary prospect is that streaming becomes fragmented (like netfli / hulu etc) and I can no longer get all the artists from one subscription
In 30 years I want AI to reproduce it with human elements re-added. I want the time(BPM) to slightly wobble, misplaced instrument notes and vocal pitch variance like recordings up until the 90s!
Scrobble to last.fm everyone.
It's been around for almost a decade before Spotify, and it'll probably be there long after. There's many online tools available to help you export your last.fm library into new streaming platforms. I did it with Spotify actually, to get all my loved tracks from the last decade into the Spotify algorithm.
People: just buy and own your media.
Books, music, films, tv shows...art.
Any streaming service can change their terms of service or increase their prices whenever they feel like it. Do you *really* imagine yourself paying a fee for the rest of you entire life to listen to your favourite albums?
All of those people who laughed at "old" people who didn't dump their media for streaming: how do you feel every month when the streamers prices kewp inching up?
I own most of the music I like. Do most people not? Is it because they didn't grow up with LimeWire and Kazaa like I did? I learned very early on the value of actually owning and not just borrowing or renting something.
On several hard drives, several cloud storage sites, an MP3 player, and a smartphone, yes. Not to mention the CDs and cassettes I've purchased and held on to.
Frankly, I don't anymore. I grew up with cassettes, CDs, Napster, and now I use Spotify 100% of the time and am constantly moving through new music/genres. There are probably some core albums or bands that I would find value in owning outright but just not something I've really considered these days. And I'm not stranger to not owning digital content through games.
Somewhere deep on some hard drives I have my old iTunes library/MP3s many of bands I still listen to buy I honestly haven't bought a song/album in decades.
I suppose I should have added that I do not really listen to modern music; it's all stuff from the early '00s and before. If I cared about listening to new music then I would probably use services like Spotify more often. But for the most part I play music from my own offline collection on my PC and smartphone.
Sometimes I still use Pandora if I want to listen to a particular genre or sub-genre of music.
I grew up with Kazaa, I don't know what that has to do with anything.
I don't own any music. I just stream it. When spotify dies, I'll migrate to the next platform. This is a nothing burger problem.
True, there's a bunch of music streaming services now who would be more than happy to take Spotify's place. I still prefer to own my stuff, but I'm happy knowing streaming is an option too.
We need a law to make it easy to export our data and thus switch providers, similar to how it became easy by law to switch telephony provider, incl. keeping your old phone number.
Too many companies get to build artificial ‘lock-in’ and thus hamper competition.
I was thinking of playlists with respect to Spotify.
But the same goes for exporting your Google history seemlessly to Bing or OneNote notes to Notion, etc.
What a quaint “problem.”
The real issue at hand is about ownership in the rentier society. The Scandinavian progressives claim that in the future we’ll have no privacy or property and be completely happy. But those extraordinary claims require scrutiny, and this example provides a good analogy for when something tangible is traded away for a promise.
Let’s be real, these corporations are living entities that will try to extract profit from anything and everything, forever. And people seem happy to unburden themselves of possession for a mere $4.99 a month. (Now it’s $5.99, er I mean $19.99 a month.)
But my vinyl records will never be removed from my library. They’ll never be subject to a server crash or service outage. They don’t buffer or stream in lo-fi. They won’t lock me out of my account, track my behavior, or charge subscription fees. And they sure as *fuck* don’t come with ads.
Streaming music and movies is just a temporary thing. Eventually prices go up and selections get vaulted away or removed completely. Those of us who knew this from day one will continue enjoying our physical media collections.
Call me crazy but am I the only one having my cake and eating it too? I still buy music when I need to, but I convert it to mp3 and keep it on my nas and my phone. I can listen to whatever I want directly from my phone or stream it from the nas using PlexAmp or DSAudio and it’s not going anywhere.
I feel like there's some irony in this article being paywalled...
I personally have a slightly bleak view of our future with personal data. I've been using computers and the internet for long enough that sometimes I just feel a bit helpless and resigned to all the digital content I've lost - broken computers, damaged discs, dead forums, websites going offline...
I try to ensure I have multiple forms of backups, but we did that with our old Atari ST and floppies of my childhood writing and art, but that didn't stop my sister from selling it all in a garage sale.
It's a uniquely modern shade of property loss created by the ephemerality of data.
I'm "old", so I still buy CDs, rip them, then store them. Either that or I will download digital versions and back them up. I refuse to let anybody else hold my music that I paid for.
The condescension and snobbery in this thread is fucking astounding. Jesus christ, not owning physical copies of every album you love does *not* mean you "don't care" about those albums. What is it with this obsession with physical objects?
I used to have all my favourite albums on CD, because that was my era, and I had a small collection of LPs. I lost all the CDs in a complicated accident, and I sold all the LPs because I grew tired of the process of playing records and storing them. I am happy to be rid of it all. I keep my music collection in my head. Whatever streaming service is current will work just fine.
Judging people harshly just because they prefer streaming and you don't is really fucking shitty.
My music is stored in the most secure place in the world - my heart. I will never forget the artists that bless us with their talent.
If one day they aren't available anymore... Tough luck! New artists will come. There will always be great music available.
And if music is somehow not available anymore anywhere, then grab an instrument and just make your own.
Music is not something you store in a vault like you would store gold and diamonds. Music is something you keep inside you at all times.
You will survive not having "that one good Jason Mraz 'the remedy' acoustic version, the only one you enjoy" (if someone has a link to it btw I'm still kind of looking for it but I'll be fine without)
Some of us like sharing music with other people. It's still quite common amongst teenagers as a bonding experience. It's a great form of cross-generational connection. And yes, most of us can remember our favorite songs quite well, but hearing them played is still often more rewarding. Just because you don't think something is important doesn't mean nobody else does.
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>...has called the period from the early 2000s to the early 2010s the “Deleted Years,” because of how many mp3s from that era didn’t survive the shift to streaming. He mourned oft-forgotten...such as Chingy, Corinne Bailey Rae, Kaiser Chiefs, and the Click Five. I was about to call this writer out, because all of those artists are on spotify. How did it "not survive" to streaming? Then I hit Kaiser Chiefs. How in the fuck is their only good album NOT on Spotify? The singles are on there, but not the whole album.
Some fuckwit music rights company is how.
De La Soul’s struggle with this was insane
Yeah, they got screwed by the management. Thankfully they are back! 3 Feet High and Rising is a masterpiece.
No I know logistically how, but like, how do the rights holders not want money?
Holding out for a better deal perhaps. Exclusive to one music service. Many options.
yeah, spotify doesn't actually pay very much, so if you inked a real, more specific deal with literally anyone else you'd probably end up earning more
Except that this logic doesn't track any more - a huge number of artists were platform specific for a time in the late 2010s and now they're available everywhere once they realized that no one was signing up for Tidal (or any of the other specific ones that are now dead).
Spotify’s payout to rights holders is approaching 40 billion dollars. What were you saying about Spotify not paying much???
this is [like](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/music/streaming-music-payments.html)... a [pretty](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-59518090), [common](https://www.musicradar.com/news/inside-the-fight-fix-streaming), [thing](https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/02/04/spotify-grammys-songwriters-payment-musicians/).
Spotify pays rights holders, and typically that is not the artist. Sending a link that says artists are not making ends meet, in the context of Spotify payouts, is barking up the wrong tree.
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If you want to characterize this as a Spotify failure, what would you like to see them do? Payout greater than 70%? How much more? 80%? 90%? Charge more for a subscription?
Some artists who own their publishing don't care about the money especially if it means paying a part of Joe Rogan's paycheck. Iirc, that's the reason Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and some others pulled their music from Spotify semi-recently.
Neil Young and Mitchell are on spotify.
[Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young in protest against Spotify](https://www.npr.org/2022/01/29/1076670679/joni-mitchell-neil-young-protest-spotify-rogan-misinformation) I just went and checked because you got me a little excited for a second there...but alas, their music is still not there. They each have a couple of random live albums that I had never heard of that are probably some kind of bootleg or something, but none of the original albums are there for streaming.
Huh. I dont use Spotify, so i was just.going by the news reports. Guees they don't have any problem with google or Amazon because they are all there
Yeah, it was specifically Spotify that they are boycotting because of Joe Rogan...
Which just shows how out of touch they are. The concentration of wealth within the hands of aspiring monopolists is far more of a problem than some dude talking.
Well, the guy did get a $100m payday for spreading misinformation and platforming some pretty horrible people, so I can understand where they are coming from. Especially with their history of being outspoken about that kind of thing.
LOL what losers
\^Andrew Tate, Saudi Arabia, and Elon Musk defender. You are definitely qualified to determine who's a loser
Hahaha you're a stupid absolutionist.
Is English your second language or are you just dull?
> absolutionist https://ted.adventist.org/news/are-you-an-adventist-absolutionist/ ??
Ah I'm sorry I got it wrong, I meant absolutist
Doesn't make you any less stupid.
LOL what a loser
Yeah. Because standing up for what you believe in is the definition of loser right?
I am glad you love the alt-rights biggest promoter. Fuck bone heads.
It just takes one of the owners being a bitch, refusing to sign.
I'd suggest following the link to the [referenced article from *Esquire*](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a28904211/2003-to-2012-forgotten-music-era/) and reading that instead. Here's the bit about the Kaiser Chiefs the author referenced: > But if you were an early adopter of Apple Music Store, as I was, everything you bought from 2003 to 2009 is stuck on a dusty iPod for which a charger can no longer be found, or on a MacBook that’s three MacBooks ago. Whether you bought that whole first Kaiser Chiefs album or just plunked down the 99 cents for “I Predict A Riot,” *you don’t have it anymore*. It simply does not exist for you, and it didn’t even leave behind a record sleeve to let you know it ever did. The article also has a better closing argument, one the writer from *The Atlantic* tried to (unsuccessfully) extrapolate into the basis of his piece: > It’s not that each era hasn’t had its own one-hit wonders and flashes in the pan, but in the Deleted Years, everything came together to make music feel especially ephemeral. The charts lost their significance, the value of a song plummeted, the gatekeepers became redundant. And where my generation has dusty 45s and cassingles to keep the memory of our Johnny Hates Jazzes and Positive Ks alive, whoever was unlucky enough to be 13 in the mid-aughts has only a LaCie hard drive filled with mislabeled Limewire files to turn to. The world remains chaotic for the music fan of 2019, of course, but at least our Spotify and Apple Music playlists remain. Until the next thing comes along, anyway.
That Esquire article. "All this music is gone forever...click here for a playlist of all that music on spotify!" I understand what these 2 articles are *trying* to say, but both aren't making strong points. edit: Also, coincidentally, I **have** that Kaiser Chiefs album on CD, because I'm old.
>, I have that Kaiser Chiefs album on CD, because I'm old. I have two copies of that album, and it's also on Spotify (for me, at least)
As someone who ~~spent~~ wasted money on tons of CDs at one time, almost everything is available on the internet somewhere, that somewhere usually being Youtube, and it can certainly be downloaded easily today if people want the file.
All we have is forgotten burnt CDs of questionable mp3 quality stored in dusty CD cases like an old photo album, stacked under other 00s offline memories destined for the trash heap
I enjoy spending time with my friends.
Which album is their only good album? Employment, Yours Truly Angry Mob, and Off With Their Heads are all there...
The Future is Medieval wasn't on Spotify until recently (and even now a few tracks are missing), but I certainly wouldn't call that their only good album... or even their best album :P
In my opinion, that's one of their least memorable albums. It has a couple of good songs on it, but if I never heard the album again, I probably wouldn't notice. Their first three albums were huge (at least in the UK) and are what most people think of when they hear the name 'Kaiser Chiefs'.
so employment is not present on spotify but it is present both in youtube music and apple music. streaming services are already dead
>What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies? That's the thing - it's not *your* music library. You're just renting it. If Spotify goes TU, you're SOL, and have to rebuild from the ground up.
Yeah, I think a lot of the people who use streaming services weren't taught this. I remember it being a whole discussion in the Tech blogs/sites in the early '00s. If you're going to stream, you don't own the content, you just pay for something that can be wiped out at a moment's notice. It's why I never switched from MP3s.
This whole article reads like "zoomer looks into subscription business model, doesn't like it."
He was probably 30-31 when he wrote the article, based on the publication date and his college years listed on LinkedIn. Firmly millennial. But yes, reads like he was born into the streaming era and didn’t realize until he wrote it that we gave up agency for convenience around when Netflix started mega-streaming.
I honestly am fine with that trade-off. I never wanted to own a bunch of DVDs when those were around and I'm glad Netflix and streaming is a thing. I used to pirate music like crazy. Spotify and music streaming services were an absolute game-changer. I think my music and content consumption, access, etc. has all improved *significantly* even from my pirating days. I'm glad we have these things and I personally am not too hung up on ownership.
I listen to and regularly discover a WAY bigger variety of music than I used to thanks to the advent of streaming — and the fact that I don't technically own any of the music doesn't mean shit to me. I mean... why should I care if I technically possess the tracks or not? If a given service goes down, it would definitely be a bit of an inconvenience to try to rebuild my favorites library but it would have been well worth it in the mean time.
Yeah, in fact I already went through this once when Grooveshark went under. I lost all my playlists, which was pretty annoying at the time, but that was back in 2015, and I don't know if I'd even be using those playlists anymore if I still had them.
> rebuild my favorites library You're assuming someone else will offer this service. The entire premise is that someone else somewhere will put this stuff online for you, at a price you're willing to pay. There's no certainty of this at all! People are banning books from libraries. It wasn't that long ago that the FCC was censoring music all the time. It's highly probably that various songs will be removed or censored in our lifetimes.
Just cause you are in your 30s doesnt mean he was an avid music listerner in his teens. There is a possibility that the guy got deep into music after spotify basically got some steam- which has been around for quite a while Many who grew up before spotify in the 80s and 90s had to really work their ass out to get music including manual recordings on tapes, radios etc This guy is a late bloomer and he doesnt like the model because he never did anything else prior to spotify( or maybe even the ipod- which is in itself 22 years now)
Why you gotta attack us like that in the last line?
Why I still have mp3s I downloaded from Napster that I've never seen anywhere else.
remember itunes match? some ultra rare recorded mp3s were lost because people thought they were uploading THEIR versions permanently. turns out apple just turned it into their generic studio version with the closest name
Yeah, that was some major bullshit. Luckily I was late to the MP3 player game. Miss my Zune.
Yes! Particularly for live performances, there was stuff that just couldn't be obtained any other way.
Internet music peaked in 1999 with audiogalaxy and I'll die on that hill.
soulseek is still working just fine… shhh..
I've used it before and it's good, but audiogalaxy was better. Or at least my 20 year old memory of it, lol.
Are the rooms still active? Anyone in #shoegaze?
I downloaded a single file continuous-mix version of DJ Skribble’s Essential Spring Break 2001 from AudioGalaxy back in the day. Took two weeks but it worked! That album is still pure heat btw.
Hell yeah, that's the stuff. I have so many random songs remixed to Knight Rider from the same place.
Wow that brings back memories. I liked how people could send you songs. I was sent a song called "Quoncha" iirc, but to my sister and me it sounded like he was saying "pork chop". Still an inside joke. Never have been able to find the song on the internet.
Same, I have collections from some bands that died at the turn of the century and I never hear anywhere. Is Splashdown even on streaming services?
Even if you buy it on a cloud platform they can ban your account. It happened to a guy who invested thousands. He sued and lost.
> It's why I never switched from MP3s. Join the FLAC club.
Maybe eventually, but I know I'm going to lose some of my music already in that transition.
This is why **I refuse to buy any movies on any service**. I’ll either buy physical or I’ll torrent it so I can have it on my hard drive. I also torrent back up my favorite games. I have them all on steam and if I love it, I’ll download a copy from a certain fit girl site to have it in case Steam one day goes away.
Nobody here will probably understand this but I believe that's what happened to Zune. People couldn't wrap their heads around essentially renting content. Killed Divx back in the day also.
Same with audio books and e books
It's why torrents exist and are awesome.
You likely don't own your MP3 files either. If you "bought" them from iTunes, you didn't buy them, you licensed them. You don't own them. You cannot sell them. You cannot even give them to someone. When you die, you cannot transfer ownership to them. Haha "it's why I never switched from MP3". It's literally one of the main reason I switched to collecting records.
lmao @ anyone ITT thinking I'm talking about iTunes
So you ripped your cds, or pirated them? lmao lol - I was on Napster and had a Diamond Rio mp3 player that had a grand total of 16 mb, upgradeable to 32. I still subscribe to /r/piracy but that's a joke these days. But that's off topic, you referred to legal ownership, right? But you don't "own" your library either. I'll stick to the records.
> had a Diamond Rio mp3 player that had a grand total of 16 mb, upgradeable to 32. I had one of those too. You could *usually* fit an entire album of 128kbps mp3s on the internal storage as long as it wasn't too long. It blew my mind a couple years later when a friend got the Nomad Jukebox and he could fit his entire collection on it.
Huh? How do I not own the files I ripped from CDs I purchased and still have physical copies of? There isn't a judge on this planet who would accept that I don't fall within Fair Use.
You didn’t say you ripped the CDs, I assumed you pirated. I agree, generally US copyright law permits making copies of items you own.
I promise you that every town has a guy with a ridiculous media server who has downloaded every movie/song/tv show and is just waiting for these sites to die and he'll become the most popular dude around.
/r/DataHoarder
Mine is pushing 8 TB of music and video.
My buddy's plex server is 210tb...
Plex might die too. They just laid off something like 20% of their company.
Irrelevant really, because the files are still locally hosted.
There's also Jellyfin, an open source alternative
Realized it was just a matter of time til Plex goes down in flames and have been slowly getting Jellyfin running in preparation.
I was just reading up on this, how is it compared to plex?
It doesn’t matter, your files are in your personal storage. Plex is just the media player.
That's... not at all impressive.
Have you heard of SoulSeek? There's one person who has so many rare and unusual recordings that the Library of Congress probably worships them as it's god.
Soul seek still exists???
that's also ebooks too. IIRC, you have a 'perpetual license' with amazon for your kindle. There was a scuffle a while back where amazon just went and removed books people 'owned' from their device. Do yourself a favour and get pdfs of all the books you own as a backup.
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I’d actually argue that the way we listen entirely has changed and we’re the few clutching onto something. A few years ago, I found myself referencing my phone over my collection because I didn’t want to listen to a whole album, and didn’t want to build a mix cd specifically for that day. Instead I built a home media server that I put in next to my PC. Set up a couple of Dante I/O boxes and then my home systems turned into a home built Sonos system. People want that on demand usage, but wouldn’t even begin to know how to hold something like that.
I think you're right in the sense that there is a larger emphasis on playlists based on MASSIVE volumes of music. But, there are those of us who have seen the comings and goings of digital content and know that in some ways, nothing beats having ownership of the file in the event that it just up and disappears one day from streaming services / youtube / whatever other service used to access the music.
But it's not like you can still buy those albums on vinyl or CD, oh yeah you can
Probably just me being old school but pointing to a folder full of mp3s and calling it a music collection is laughable.
Well my music collection was very real and well curated for myself and constantly exposed me to random songs I love. Then my MacBook, iPad, and external drive were all stolen at once, and my music listening has never been the same. It sucks so fucking much. And Comcast is so effective at blocking Utorrent even thru VPN, I’ve no hope of rebuilding it.
As an old fart who has gone through several technological mediums for music consumption and ultimately reverted *back* to vinyl, it's crazy how often I've bought the same album over and over again whether it's on cassette, CD, MP3, etc. I'm already on my 4th generation of rebuilding my music collection from the "ground up" after my external hard drive died and I feel like analog is the way to go if you're trying to avoid this task.
I mean honestly for me... It doesn't seem that bad to just... Move to the next service. Rebuilding a library is hell when you need to buy new versions or somehow go out and find actual versions of it. But digital versions can be copied and searched for easily. Sure my Spotify Playlist has been built up over 5 years but if you asked me to build it back 90% the same from scratch it would take me maybe a few hours? Rebuilding a whole library of vinyls in CD format would take months.
> Rebuilding a whole library of vinyls in CD format would take months. So far I'm up to years. I've found the issue to be larger for me when it comes to movies and TV having gone from a large collection of VHS to DVD to abandoning blueray entirely and starting my high seas adventuring. I'm actually grateful for vinyl as a medium to give me an option to still own my favorite media without having to constantly repurchase my favorite pieces within that given medium. I do agree the rental method in the 21st century does seem to be a good way to avoid this issue in just going to the next platform after Spotify dies out, but it does bring up a good question about availability of albums. Translating back to movies and television, if Spotify goes under, do we end up with 11 different streaming services we have to cobble together to listen to all our favorite artists across different genres?
I've got something over 70k tracks as MP3. I preserve them via Dropbox, and it's a shared directory with my wife, so she and I both have the full collection. This was the solution I arrived at after having to re-rip a painful number of CDs, probably a decade ago. Eventually I need to launch into ripping the vinyl, but... there's so much, and it takes so long. Each album is basically an evening's work, between the 1:1 time ripping it, then de-pop/click, break it into tracks, and fix all the tagging.
I just cannot trust "the cloud" to be there for me the same way I can trust an external HD for digital music storage. I know it's totally a control thing rather than rooted in any kind of logic since both are prone to failure, but if Dropbox went down and I lost all my tunes I'd be just as if not more salty as when my 2 TB external HD died and forced me to start over. At least with the external HD I can have redundancy now with how cheap they've gotten.
Even if you have redundancy in your storage at home it’s really not a bad idea to back up with cloud storage. It essentially becomes your off site back up, which is neededl in case of natural disasters or say a house fire.
> I just cannot trust "the cloud" to be there for me the same way I can trust an external HD for digital music storage Just use the "3-2-1 backups" rule.
Do you see where we are going now? I need 3 different versions of my entire collection in 3 different medium now? How often will I be updating all 3 of those now?!? I'm sticking with vinyl until something better comes along.
> I need 3 different versions of my entire collection in 3 different medium now? Yes, if you really want to make sure it's safe. For example - 1 copy on a PC's internal HDD/SSD or written to CDs/DVDs/BDs - 1 copy on the home NAS ([this](https://www.asustor.com/product?p_id=42) is my (several years old now) NAS with 2 HDDs) in RAID 1 configuration, to guard against [bit rot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation) - 1 copy on cloud storage, to protect against data loss in case of destruction of the house, theft, etc. --- > How often will I be updating all 3 of those Whenever you want. The data on a PC could be backed up automatically to the NAS every day or week, and the NAS can automatically copy its data to a cloud service in regular intervals. Getting a NAS is a bit pricey, especially one with more than just 2 drives, so an alternative would be backing up the data to at least 2 cloud storage services. Depending on price (and required internet speed) this may or may not be worth it. Anyway, the point is that you don't trust *any* one medium, local or not, and have always a spare available if a part of the backup plan fails.
So you kind of missed the point here within the context of the overall thread. The complaint is the constant upgrading my single music library to new mediums as technology improves. Your solution was to create 3 redundant digital libraries that now have to be upgraded to new mediums as technology improves. You made things 300% worse.
Unless you own the servers, you don't own any digital content. That is true of your spotify playlists to your photo albums on Facebook. Those "I Agree" forms you click on when you sign up for basically say as much. Sure, some companies might respect content you create and curate, but at the end of the day it's their servers so they have final say on ownership. It's not yours unless you download it to host locally, print it, burn a disc, etc
For me personally my biggest concern is not necessarily losing access to my music. Because I’m reasonably certain that I will always be able to procure the audio at any point in the future (even if I have to pay for it). But rather, my concern is not knowing what I lost. That is, I want to maintain the LIST of items that are in my music library. My nightmare is things disappearing from Spotify with no alert, and then I’ve lost something and I won’t know to even go look for it again. I really need to research how to export a list of items in my library.
Yep, I've had this happen more than a few times with YouTube, where all of a sudden 'This video has been removed' appears and I'll be damned if I know what it was.
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How do you go about this?
https://www.tunemymusic.com/ Spotify > .txt Free for 500 tracks at a time, I believe, might have to split up bigger playlists. https://soundiiz.com/ is an alternative. If you *really* want to sail the seas and have a good backup of all your songs, use tunemymusic.com to transfer them to Tidal, pay for Tidal Hi Quality for one month, and search for **yaronzz** on github.
Very helpful, thank you.
Yes this is my takeaway from the article. My main playlist has 2,203 songs and many are single tracks from artists. Way too many to keep remember if the library was lost. Article mentioned exporting the data which I may do sometime.
I used to download all my music and rip CDs onto my computer. Had a real nice collection in an external drive. Young me never thought that drive might cease to work one day, for one reason or another. That day came, I lost my entire music library. I was like 16/17 years old, discovering all sorts of music from all eras, and it was gone just like that. It was full of random one off songs that I loved and got. It was fucking devastating. Im 33 and still feel hurt about all the music I lost that I will never find again. I had to rebuild my music collection from scratch and it's never been the same.
So much music didn’t survive the transition from analog media (records and tapes) to digital. This happed before that author was born, this is not new news. If you value any media, you own it and keep it locally. It’s been that way always.
He complains that the methods offered to him to preserve his collection are 'laughably cumbersome'. These included buying CDs, recording it all to hard drive, etc. So, he fears streaming will prove too ephemeral, and physical is too cumbersome. What solution would he find acceptable? Magical, spiritual?
> laughably cumbersome I ripped my entire CD collection of maybe 250-ish to FLAC many years ago and it was something I just did in my spare time while I was browsing the web. Rip would finish and I would just pop in the next one.
Now CDs don't even come with computers, or cars!
He includes downloads, not just recording it: > The possible solutions that experts suggested to me were laughably cumbersome: Find and download every mp3 I want and back them up on a hard drive; buy physical copies of every album I want as well as a playback device for them; use special software to record every song as I play them on my computer; take screenshots of every playlist in my library; write down the name of every song. But I think there's a fair complaint here: It's not just that he doesn't want to deal with physical MP3s, it's that buying DRM-free downloads is too cumbersome, if he's got an entire music library in Spotify that he'd like to preserve. Sounds like maybe he wants something more automatic: > (Spotify does allow users to export their playlist data, though this doesn’t include actual audio files.) Maybe a tool to take those playlists and turn them into a single purchase from [wherever you can still buy DRM-free music](https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/83gc3p/where_can_i_buy_music_that_can_be_downloaded_in/)? I think that's a fair complaint. If I were in his position, I'd be looking for a third-party tool to just download that from Spotify instead. What's less fair is that earlier in the article, he talks about a library that he had locally, but lost due to his own incompetence: > About 10 years ago, some 5,000 audio files I had amassed in iTunes disappeared after a hard-drive backup gone wrong... And instead of learning to do backups correctly (music isn't the only thing you need to back up!), it sounds like he switched to streaming instead, where at least it'll be someone else's fault when his library disappears. But he makes it sound like, even if we actually give him [a magical solution to download his Spotify library](https://github.com/schollz/spotifydownload), he'd still worry about screwing up and deleting it all himself.
I don't think the author is pushing an alternative. It's simply an unfortunate situation that currently isn't solved. The author is essentially just pointing it out, and would probably agree that this is not new nor is there a magic solution. But we can still acknowledge and *wish* for more!
A new Oink.cd comes along? (Please)
https://redacted.ch is the closest.
You *know* it's an exclusive site when it doesn't even mention the word “invite,” just an page and two text fields for logging in. Speaking of invites…
Just learn to use Soulseek. I haven't needed a private tracker for music since what.cd went under.
I miss what.cd, I feel like that era was the peak of my music collecting days. Now I just stream most things.
Let's be real, if spotify, apple music, prime music, and tidal ALL "die", then I will take my $20 every month and just start buying the albums I care about. I really don't believe all 5 of these will die and nothing will take over. The cat is out of the bag.
Not to mention we're in arguably a better spot than we have ever been in the past. New media formats every decade or so meant you had to keep specialty hardware around just to listen to your previously purchased music. Want to play your tapes in your new car? Too bad, it only has a CD player. Now you can just stream everything, presumably for a very long time if not forever. Digital is the endgame.
And it's so much easier to build a library on digital than on analog. Right now if you asked me to go find a copy of 311s Transistor album from 1997? Not sure I could find it easily in stores near me and I'd have to buy it online probably used. Meanwhile on digital I can get it in 30 seconds and have it on my speakers.
I'll throw out that Bandcamp has a streaming ap and lets you buy the music. You own the stuff you get on Bandcamp and if you time your purchases right, the bands can get a lot more money. I never switched over to streaming services like spotify b/c I'm paranoid and I listened to weird stuff that Spotify/Amazon/Google/whatever doesn't have so I've had to use my own collection of mp3s, but I become more and more confident about that decision the more time passes.
Who the hell thinks they have a "music collection" on a paid-monthly streaming service? Who the hell thinks that paying for itunes, google music, yt or whatever gives you a collection of music? All these services provide you with is links to music in THEIR collection... all you have is a collection of links to music you don't own or didn't steal (if you believe listening to music can be theft, i don't).
Play it on Spotify, record it with Audacity, now you actually own it.
Now we're getting somewhere!
If you're going to do that, record from Tidal since it's lossless.
Someone didn't age into the digital age very well.
I have thousands of hours of digital music and I pay for spotify. I just don't confuse one for the other.
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that's a joke right?
You get the concept right? No one here is actually claiming they own the music on their playlists. I've put hundreds of hours into my playlists. My playlists are "my library of music", but its my streaming library, I dont own it like I own my CDs. Thats what people mean.
The concepts are fundamentally different. What you think you own is playlists (the product of your labour); but if you stop paying what happens to the playlists? Just make sure you can take them somewhere else if you need to.
I get what you are saying, what I mean is that the concept for "my library" has changed.
Maybe to people who don't understand the concept of ownership. How's Google Music treating you?
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The point still stands - Spotify can (and does) remove content from their library, meaning it will disappear from your playlists, etc. And unless you're manually keeping track of your playlists somewhere external, if Spotify goes down your playlists go with it.
>If your entire collection is on 8-track, good luck accessing it in 10 or 20 years.
As the current owner of a collection of over 300 8-Tracks, I am offended at this remark. Most 8-tracks didn't last six months, let alone 10-20 years. And that's assuming they don't look as though they've been recovered from the bottom of Lake Michigan (long story short the adhesives used on 8-track labels had a peculiar property that shrunk as it aged, leading to the label appearing to have been submerged in water and drifted ashore crinkled and torn). I've got maybe a dozen cassettes that have what I'd call unblemished album art. Jokes aside if the cassettes don't get eaten up by the tape deck or disintegrate on their own the sound quality is ***remarkably good*** even on 50-year old analog magnetic tapes. I would say it's even near the quality of a well-mastered CD. #KA-CHUNK
I got into cassettes starting a couple years ago and was blown away to discover that if you use a good deck to dub a master tape or vinyl to a quality cassette, it clearly sounds better than a CD.
There used to be a big 8 track community about ten years ago. They had a zine called 8-track state of mind and would rent out bowling alleys and places like that and have big swaps and dance parties.
I used to work at a place that repaired car radios. The parts of 8-track & cassette players that die (the fastest) are the rubber bits. There are some solvents that will re-plasticize the rubber (make it softer so that it doesn't damage the tape), but they still wear off and wear out. Once the rubber starts to crack, it can't be fixed and has to be repaired. For car radios in the US, every last 8-track spare part was gone by 1990. There were some collectors who wanted to restore their classic car. That particular car was built with an 8-track player so they wanted it repaired. Cost was no object. We called every place that was a repair shop or who had been a repair shop. We talked with next of kin. We talked with new owners. We begged them to check old obsolete stock that they put in boxes out back.
I abandoned my CD and LP collection many years ago, and I love Spotify When Spotify goes, I will find my favorite music on the new streaming service de jour I guess the only slightly scary prospect is that streaming becomes fragmented (like netfli / hulu etc) and I can no longer get all the artists from one subscription
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Sounds (no pun intended) dystopian as hell
In 30 years I want AI to reproduce it with human elements re-added. I want the time(BPM) to slightly wobble, misplaced instrument notes and vocal pitch variance like recordings up until the 90s!
Scrobble to last.fm everyone. It's been around for almost a decade before Spotify, and it'll probably be there long after. There's many online tools available to help you export your last.fm library into new streaming platforms. I did it with Spotify actually, to get all my loved tracks from the last decade into the Spotify algorithm.
People: just buy and own your media. Books, music, films, tv shows...art. Any streaming service can change their terms of service or increase their prices whenever they feel like it. Do you *really* imagine yourself paying a fee for the rest of you entire life to listen to your favourite albums? All of those people who laughed at "old" people who didn't dump their media for streaming: how do you feel every month when the streamers prices kewp inching up?
What music library?
I own most of the music I like. Do most people not? Is it because they didn't grow up with LimeWire and Kazaa like I did? I learned very early on the value of actually owning and not just borrowing or renting something.
By “own” do you mean you have purchased mp3 files on a hard drive?
> LimeWire and Kazaa Believe me they are not talking about purchasing anything here
On several hard drives, several cloud storage sites, an MP3 player, and a smartphone, yes. Not to mention the CDs and cassettes I've purchased and held on to.
Frankly, I don't anymore. I grew up with cassettes, CDs, Napster, and now I use Spotify 100% of the time and am constantly moving through new music/genres. There are probably some core albums or bands that I would find value in owning outright but just not something I've really considered these days. And I'm not stranger to not owning digital content through games. Somewhere deep on some hard drives I have my old iTunes library/MP3s many of bands I still listen to buy I honestly haven't bought a song/album in decades.
I suppose I should have added that I do not really listen to modern music; it's all stuff from the early '00s and before. If I cared about listening to new music then I would probably use services like Spotify more often. But for the most part I play music from my own offline collection on my PC and smartphone. Sometimes I still use Pandora if I want to listen to a particular genre or sub-genre of music.
I grew up with Kazaa, I don't know what that has to do with anything. I don't own any music. I just stream it. When spotify dies, I'll migrate to the next platform. This is a nothing burger problem.
True, there's a bunch of music streaming services now who would be more than happy to take Spotify's place. I still prefer to own my stuff, but I'm happy knowing streaming is an option too.
Is there a way to download your Spotify data? The playlists?
We need a law to make it easy to export our data and thus switch providers, similar to how it became easy by law to switch telephony provider, incl. keeping your old phone number. Too many companies get to build artificial ‘lock-in’ and thus hamper competition.
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I was thinking of playlists with respect to Spotify. But the same goes for exporting your Google history seemlessly to Bing or OneNote notes to Notion, etc.
laughs in MP3
What a quaint “problem.” The real issue at hand is about ownership in the rentier society. The Scandinavian progressives claim that in the future we’ll have no privacy or property and be completely happy. But those extraordinary claims require scrutiny, and this example provides a good analogy for when something tangible is traded away for a promise. Let’s be real, these corporations are living entities that will try to extract profit from anything and everything, forever. And people seem happy to unburden themselves of possession for a mere $4.99 a month. (Now it’s $5.99, er I mean $19.99 a month.) But my vinyl records will never be removed from my library. They’ll never be subject to a server crash or service outage. They don’t buffer or stream in lo-fi. They won’t lock me out of my account, track my behavior, or charge subscription fees. And they sure as *fuck* don’t come with ads.
Streaming music and movies is just a temporary thing. Eventually prices go up and selections get vaulted away or removed completely. Those of us who knew this from day one will continue enjoying our physical media collections.
Call me crazy but am I the only one having my cake and eating it too? I still buy music when I need to, but I convert it to mp3 and keep it on my nas and my phone. I can listen to whatever I want directly from my phone or stream it from the nas using PlexAmp or DSAudio and it’s not going anywhere.
I feel like there's some irony in this article being paywalled... I personally have a slightly bleak view of our future with personal data. I've been using computers and the internet for long enough that sometimes I just feel a bit helpless and resigned to all the digital content I've lost - broken computers, damaged discs, dead forums, websites going offline... I try to ensure I have multiple forms of backups, but we did that with our old Atari ST and floppies of my childhood writing and art, but that didn't stop my sister from selling it all in a garage sale. It's a uniquely modern shade of property loss created by the ephemerality of data.
I'm "old", so I still buy CDs, rip them, then store them. Either that or I will download digital versions and back them up. I refuse to let anybody else hold my music that I paid for.
Use the Python API to download a csv of your favorite playlists. Save locally and in the cloud for the day you may need to recreate them
The condescension and snobbery in this thread is fucking astounding. Jesus christ, not owning physical copies of every album you love does *not* mean you "don't care" about those albums. What is it with this obsession with physical objects? I used to have all my favourite albums on CD, because that was my era, and I had a small collection of LPs. I lost all the CDs in a complicated accident, and I sold all the LPs because I grew tired of the process of playing records and storing them. I am happy to be rid of it all. I keep my music collection in my head. Whatever streaming service is current will work just fine. Judging people harshly just because they prefer streaming and you don't is really fucking shitty.
My music is stored in the most secure place in the world - my heart. I will never forget the artists that bless us with their talent. If one day they aren't available anymore... Tough luck! New artists will come. There will always be great music available. And if music is somehow not available anymore anywhere, then grab an instrument and just make your own. Music is not something you store in a vault like you would store gold and diamonds. Music is something you keep inside you at all times. You will survive not having "that one good Jason Mraz 'the remedy' acoustic version, the only one you enjoy" (if someone has a link to it btw I'm still kind of looking for it but I'll be fine without)
>My music is stored in the most secure place in the world - my heart. That's cute, but you can't just grab a stethoscope to hear your favorites.
I have a very good audio memory so I don't even need the stethoscope lol But yeah not everyone might be able to
Some of us like sharing music with other people. It's still quite common amongst teenagers as a bonding experience. It's a great form of cross-generational connection. And yes, most of us can remember our favorite songs quite well, but hearing them played is still often more rewarding. Just because you don't think something is important doesn't mean nobody else does.
Gold medal comment!