| I'm definitely the odd one out here. I hate any streaming service because the value of my music is being able to listen to that music whenever I want...including 20 years from now. I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art. I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band. Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire. Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify: beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify One Last Kiss - Utada Hikaru -> Yes follow slowly - Nekomata Master -> Nope Masada Gestalt - Zen Albatross -> Nope Yin-Yang - Victor Wooten -> Yes Zipangu - Wednesday Kanpanera -> Surprisingly, yes Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate. That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term. |
Plus I've also got loads of stuff that isn't on Spotify, Apple, and the rest.
And as for discovery, the free Spotify still gives me some of that (I also like a bit of Smooth Chill or similar running in the background on ye olde voice assistant speaker).