Honestly I'm looking forward to Spotify running out of money and shutting down so this generation will wake up that they need to start duplicating and archiving their media before they lose it.
Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's servers.
(I understand pirate bay is still kicking but its all certainly way more niche that it was 5-10 years ago)
I've gone the opposite route. After years of careful curating my music library, I started to feel chained to the past, listening to a handful of tracks over and over. Since music is connected to strong emotions, this would also bleed into other aspects of my life and cause me to be less forward-thinking.
I'm fully aware that Spotify and its competitors are deals with the Devil but if they allow me to feel less burdened, the price is worth it.
It's deeply hypocritical but I also secretly hope that at least a few people stick to archiving and curating just in case.
I trained a NI expert system on the kind of music I like, and turned it loose on the Internet, where it uses the Amazon wishlist API to make recommendations.
In other words, I had a kid, played my favorite music to the baby, and can now mooch off all the wonderful new CDs that show up in the house. All CDs get ripped and encoded as FLAC for the family media drive, and everyone transcodes their own lossy files for their own portable devices.
It's kind of an expensive solution, though, and occasionally fails to recommend music that I like.
It has been around forever, and sufficiently detailed practical demonstrations are all over the network--often flagged with the acronym NSFW, which stands for "Natural Sapience Field Work".~
The NI is loaded into a biomechanical interface that provides sensory inputs, locomotive actuators, and environmental manipulators. Typically, only one researcher builds the entire device, and collaboration is not useful for that part of the project. (Unfortunately, as the network heavily exploits subtle implementation details in the mechanicals, it is very difficult to perform upgrades after the first stages of training are completed.)
From there, the researcher has to continually upload conceptual primitives through the sensory apparatus, and the NI prunes and rebalances its own neural network to establish basic foundation concepts such as object permanence, the acceleration of gravity, thermodynamics, ballistic path prediction, etc. Eventually, when the network is sufficiently trained, researchers may begin to input additional data through a natural language interface. Due to variations in the biomechanical devices, it is currently impossible to use standard bootstrap code to accelerate that process.
In order for the NI to be useful as a music recommendations engine, it is essential to expose it to music that you already like through its audio sensors, during the initial training phases. After approximately 8 years, the NI will begin to autonomously seek out music samples in the wild and recommend that you purchase copies of promising collections. The system is not perfect. It will occasionally issue recommendations for music that was already present in the training corpus, or for maliciously-formed music files designed to hack uninoculated NIs into recommending them. And it should be noted that these NIs have been known to abruptly diverge from preferences implied by the training corpus, producing wildly inaccurate recommendations thereafter.
It's probably just cheaper and more reliable to use an AI, but as long as this thing still works okay, I'm going to keep refueling it.
I used to spend several hours per week on average looking for new music (new for me, might be old releases) and Spotify's AI basically does the job for me now. Well worth 10 bucks per month.
Also, the biggest factor in "sound quality" is the matching of the master and the device used to listen (most notably compression of the dynamic range, you want it strong on low-end speakers and/or noisy environments, and as dynamic as possible on high-end systems in good listening conditions). I'm very pleased with Spotify's masters, they're often equal or superior to the CD even, which is nice in an otherwise "loudness war" ("bricked") market (been that way sadly since the late 90's, which brings tears to many a sound engineer).
I can't speak for Apple Music (never tried it) but Google Play Music has absolutely terrible masters in many cases, way too compressed, sounding flat.
Note: I speak of dynamic range compression (audio technique), which has nothing to do with data compression (e.g. MP3). The actual end-user codec has actually little to nothing to do with it, it's all about mastering, i.e. targeted reproduction devices and listening conditions.
I still manage an mp3 library and use a (modded) iPod because network access is unreliable for me sometimes. It's a curated library that I spend time adding to and culling from; it's its own little hobby.
I also really like streaming services. I like to be able to press a couple buttons and get a non-stop stream of music that I don't have to worry about, and can often lead to new artists, etc.
They each have their pros and cons; I see no reason to be dogmatic about either. The separation also helps with curation; I can keep social and casual music to the streaming stuff, and keep the library focused on 'dedicated' listening.
Thank you - my thoughts exactly. As an avid music collector and listener I understand that my interest in this issue probably isn't comparable to most other people, but I think there's no doubt that licensing deals will change/end and music starts to disappear from streaming services.
There are already and always have been large gaps in the streaming catalogs but those are mostly releases that have never been there in the first place. I guess it will be different when John Doe sees his Spotify library shrinking and realizes that he was just renting all this music.
I'm the same as you, I like collecting and listening to music, and I was tired at how fragile playlists are. If you move some files or rename them, they break.
So, I wrote a spec for a new format, which is resilient to pretty much all operations:
I'm currently writing a plugin for beets, but if anyone wants to help out with implementing an import/export plugin for a music player with library functionality, I would love that. I'm basically trying to scratch my own itch here, and hopefully one that many other people have.
You're right. Migrating playlist from one platform, or just a player, to another is huge problem. Keeping them in sync seems impossible.
A universal cross-platform playlist format seems like a much needed feature, but I don't se ehow this could work without significant changes in every supported player/software.
Here's a very real playlist issue I'm facing right now: I use Roon as my main audio player / music management solution. Roon manages my library which is located on a NAS. I have a few playlists created there, but no way to sync them to my iPhone unless I manage a separate playlist in iTunes which has access to the very same NAS library. It's not a deal breaker since I'm used to playlists being software-specific.
Unfortunately I don't see that changing anytime since everyone's answer to this problem seems to be using one single streaming service - a solution which, frankly, handles this particular problem very well, but doesn't work for me due to disadvantages of streaming discussed earlier in this thread.
The solution for that is what I do now: You keep one canonical copy of your playlists in UPL and use that to export to PLS or copy files to a directory, as needed. Then you import that playlist/files to your devices.
"Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's servers."
That has already happened several times. Anyone remember silent films? Most of the scores were never archived, so most of the original music that went to those films is lost to history.
That was also because a lot of those scores were actually performed live, but yes, it has happened already and it keeps happening every day - tons of books, movies and cds are never reprinted because they are copyright-encumbered but not popular enough, and eventually their master documents are misplaced or lost... if it can happen to Kubrick, Dr. Who and Joy Division, it can happen to anything and anyone.
I'm a happy Spotify user, but for discovery, not the actual playback.
Discover Weekly is highly helpful, and the Release Radar is basically functioning like my music RSS feed. I also use Spotify's save option as basically bookmarks on which albums to download.
Therefore, Spotify is still more than relevant to me, even though I'm keeping local copies of music. I can't really discover new stuff in my own library.
I'm a happy user of Spotify, but I have kept all of my MP3's and such locally. I am also well aware that Spotify may shut down some day, and I'll simply gather local copies of everything I like, during the shutdown period. It's not like they're going to shut down instantly from one day to the next, there'll be a reasonable warning period.
As for music disappearing, I have only ever seen that on my ISP's own streaming service, I've never actually seen it happen on Spotify.
Tracks get pulled from spotify regularly as deals expire and aren't renewed. My fiveour hour piano playlist is missing a few, as is my 400 song revising playlist from university (its down to 394) - what they are I don't know, I just know they are less.
It may not always work but there is an option in settings that shows these so-called "unavailable" tracks. Not helpful but it will at least bring closure.
I find that feature very helpful. If a track I like is no longer available and I enjoy it enough to want to download it, I can always go somewhere where it is available and buy it/download it. Much better than it just randomly disappearing and then having to remember what track could possibly be missing out of my 100+ song playlist.
Do you really think they can just pull the plug instantly, on millions of paying subscribers? At the very least, there will be a 1-month warning period, to let paid subscriptions run out.
Besides that, I think it is in the best interest of the record labels to keep Spotify going. They're absolutely raking in the cash from streaming, and have just posted their largest industry revenue increase in 20 years. I think they would be willing to keep Spotify going on life support, as long as it makes them money.
> Do you really think they can just pull the plug instantly, on millions of paying subscribers?
Yes. Why not? There's no physical law forbidding it, and I'd wager their T&Cs contain a way to do so. They could even be magnanimous and refund the un-used portion of your last month, but you're still stuck without the music.
> I'll simply gather local copies of everything I like, during the shutdown period
Assuming their servers can handle millions of paying subscribes downloading all of their music all at once.
> Assuming their servers can handle millions of paying subscribes downloading all of their music all at once.
Not from Spotify, from other sources. A lot of stuff I listen to, I already have as CD rips. A lot of other stuff is available for sale on sites like Bandcamp.
I'm waiting for a mass movement of artists to offer direct sales at reasonable prices. I would love to own media files, but I currently don't even have the option of buying them in a sane (legal framework) and fair (to the artist) way at a reasonable price.
I buy vinyl only as a last resort if it's a vinyl-only release or rare classic I'm interested in (yes, there's lots of stuff only available on vinyl - old and new).
Then I just rip it and add the digital, lossless result to my collection.
The vinyl format itself is too inconvenient for my taste and the audio quality is too dependent on various factors like used equipment, condition of the media and quality of the pressing.
I like vinyl. But as a backup medium CDs are just as good if not more robust, I think. I have yet to experience a single CD failing. Even CD-Rs turned out to be pretty robust unless being handled with an utter lack of care.
I have never seen a professionally pressed CD fail. I have seen lots of self-burned CDs fail after about three years. Of course there are archive-quality CD-Rs with projected lifespans of 100 or 300 years (if burned really slowly), but that's not what most people use for backups.
I have a pressed CD that failed. It is a regular audio CD from 1993 or 1994, and it developed tiny black flecks all over the aluminium foil. I guess it is not perfectly sealed. I think I still have it somewhere, even if I just bought a replacement for some € during a sale... so yeah, it can happen, after a small amount of years.
Wrong on the CD-Rs: I've seen them fail before, due simply to age. It happens with the cheap ones; the "archival quality" ones really do seem to be much better, but I have some ~15 year old cheapies that are dead. You can even see on the disc that the dye has changed colors and is uneven.
I've never seen a mass-produced CD (the aluminum kind) fail due to age rather than physical damage. However I have read about it happening, where the aluminum layer wasn't properly sealed in the polycarbonate and over time got corroded.
Have a strong feeling there is going to be a cultural black hole where large segments of music etc lost in the post-naptster/post-piratebay world because it only existed on the artists machine, Spotify's servers and YouTube's servers.
(I understand pirate bay is still kicking but its all certainly way more niche that it was 5-10 years ago)