[abbub]

Is this really still an issue? I have a feeling that 'collecting music' (with the intent to listen to it) is probably something that only Boomers, Gen-Xers (myself), and older millenials still do.

(The (strange) exception being vinyl, and I suspect that a fair amount of the albums that get purchased don't actually get played. The records are really more 'collectables' than an actual means to listen to music for many people...audio funko pops, if you will...)

I've got a hard drive full of FLAC rips of my CD collection, which I listen to when I'm at the computer working. (I think I have about 600 discs.) I have plex serving the FLAC files, so I can listen to my music collection on my devices, but other than at the computer while working, I never do.

In the car and away from the computer listening is almost entirely music streaming services, with titles downloaded to my phone when I know I'm going to be somewhere with spotty internet.

My wife is 100% Spotify. My daughter (12) uses streaming services or youtube (!) to listen to music.

[weare138]

Streaming music services like Spotify are a little different. The issue is really with services like Amazon Prime and Apple Music where you're paying for each song but don't really 'own' it. With the older paid music services when I bought a song I got a regular .mp3 that I could use anywhere I wanted and owned for life. With these new services we're not buying a song, we're just renting it for the same price.

[pornel]

Songs quietly disappear from Spotify and YouTube all the time. I guess it's "solved" by never owning the songs in the first place, and accepting they're ephemeral.

[ASalazarMX]

This. If you have a long playlist on Spotify, check out how many of your favorite songs are gray because reasons. I don't understand why they can't sell rights globally to every streamer and be done with it.

[abbub]

Hrm. We have Apple Music and Spotify. As I mentioned, my wife and kiddo use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.

I use Apple Music and only have about five playlists which are sizable. I haven't seen any music go 'grey' in any of them (I just checked). Some of that might be that my music tastes arent' particularly obscure, some of it might be Apple Music's licensing relationships with the record labels.

CDs are currently the best bargain in music at the moment. I can hit a thrift store and find about 10 discs that I'm interested in. Of those, about 5 are usually in mint condition, which I buy for $1-2 a piece. If there's a disc that I'm really* interested in, I can usually pick it up on eBay or Discogs for $3-5, shipped. It's almost always me looking through the discs which tend to be about 10% CCM, 15% country, 15% classical, and about 60% rock. There's always at least one other guy sifting through the Lenny Dee, Herb Albert, and Lawrence Welk records that are all that remains of a thrift store vinyl section these days (though I think Herb Albert is becoming harder and harder to find... :P ).

* We get Spotify for free with our phone contract, but I prefer the interface / integration of Apple Music on my phone.

[bingbingbong]

I've had songs disappear/reappear and I don't notice until it comes up on a discover/radio and I realize it isn't marked as liked anymore.

I imagine it's due to licensing fuckery, but you'd think they'd keep track of the song in your favourites and reinstate it later.. infuriating. I got part way through writing a script to periodically check what has disappeared earlier this year, maybe I should go dust it off

[neurostimulant]

> As I mentioned, my wife and kiddo use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.

Probably depends on the region. There are plenty of japanese songs suddenly gone from my spotify playlist, probably because the labels decided to pull out from spotify. I never see that happen on western songs on my playlist.

[Redoubts]

Well Donda just disappeared from a lot of people's libraries:

https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2021/10/05/donda-not-on-apple-mus...

I know I had to manually replace tracks in my playlists because of this.

[pornel]

Spotify by default does not show unavailable songs. Unless you've enabled the gray-out option and you make your own playlists, it's easy to live blissfully unaware.

[MikeDelta]

I regularly listened to Whitesnake's The Purple Album on Spotify, until one day it was mysteriously gone.

[mpalmer]

When it comes to media especially, I don't really like the idea of depending on a company that serves me at their pleasure.