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use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.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use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.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